II
A GENIUS FROM FRANCE
Among the pathetic figures of the early days of the Capitol City is that of Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who was selected by Washington to draft plans for the new city.
L’Enfant was a skilful engineer who had come to America with Lafayette in 1777. He did not go back to France with his countrymen in 1783, but remained in this country, and was employed by Washington as an engineer in several places.
He devoted the summer of 1791 to planning, not the capital of a small nation, but a city which could be sufficiently enlarged should this continent be densely populated from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
There was no other man in this country at that time who had such knowledge of art and engineering as Major L’Enfant. Plans of Frankfort-on-the-Main, Carlsruhe, Amsterdam, Paris, Orleans, Turin, Milan, and other European cities were sent to him from Philadelphia by Washington, who had obtained the plan of each of these cities by his own personal effort.
Photo by Clinedinst
BIRD’S-EYE VIEW OF WASHINGTON, LOOKING EAST FROM THE MONUMENT
Washington himself desired the new city planned somewhat like Philadelphia, a plain checkerboard, but L’Enfant, while making the checkerboard style the basis, diversified, beautified, and complicated the whole by a system of avenues radiating from the Capitol as the centre and starting-point of the whole system. The streets running east and west are designated by letters. They are divided into two classes or sets—those north of the Capitol and those south of it. Thus, the first street north of the Capitol is A Street North, and the first street south of it is A Street South, the next is B Street, North or South, as the case may be, and so on. These distinctions of North, South, East, and West are most important, as forgetfulness of them is apt to lead to very great inconvenience.
The streets are laid off at regular distances from each other, but for convenience other thoroughfares not laid down in the original plan have been cut through some of the blocks. These are called “half streets,” as they occur between, and are parallel with, the numbered streets. Thus, Four-and-a-half Street is between Fourth and Fifth streets, and runs parallel with them.