Introduction 1
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Notes Introduction 1. See, for example, Kip Lornell and Charles C. Stephenson, The Beat! Go-Go from Washington, D.C. (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 2. 2. Howard Gillette, Jr., for instance, argues that national politics (namely, national urban policy) affected local urban planning, with both advantages and disadvan- tages for the city, including its prominent black population. Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), x–xi. We argue, however, that these three features of the city extend beyond urban policy to other spheres as well. 3. Alan Lessoff,The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption,” and Progress in Wash- ington, D.C., 1861–1902 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 1; James H. S. McGregor, Washington: From the Ground Up (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 297. 4. Carl Abbott perhaps puts it best when he writes that Washington has had both a vertical dimension (its national and international identity) and a horizontal dimension (its regional identity). Carl Abbott, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 6. 5. Mary Meade Coates, quoted in Jill Connors, ed., Growing Up in Washington, D.C.: An Oral History (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2001), 34. 6. Margaret Farrar, Building the Body Politic: Power and Urban Space in Washington, D.C. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 13. 7. Abbott 1999, 65–66, quotes pp. 7–8. 8. Our thanks to Tim Meagher for his conceptualization of Washington as a set of “cities.” 9. Abbott (1999), for instance, writes extensively about how the city’s recreational history has stemmed from its regional identity. 10. For a recent review of these schools of urban theory, see Dennis R. Judd, “Theo- rizing the City,” in The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, eds. Dennis R. Judd and Dick Simpson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 178 ● Notes 11. Kevin Starr, Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America’s Greatest Bridge (New York: Bloomsbury Press., 2010), 29. 12. In addition, the university has played an important role in charitable work in the city. See, for example, Jenell Williams Paris, “Fides Means Faith: A Catho- lic Neighborhood House in Lower Northwest Washington, D.C.,” Washington History 11:2 (Fall/Winter 1999–2000). Chapter 1 1. Technically, an avenue is a street “starting and ending at terminated vistas.” Some avenues in Washington (most obviously Pennsylvania Avenue) fit this descrip- tion, but most others (e.g., Hawaii) do not. Dhiru A. Thadani,The Language of Towns and Cities: A Visual Dictionary (New York: Rizzoli, 2010), 49. 2. Defined roughly as the area bounded on the northwest, north, and northeast by Florida Avenue; the east by Nineteenth Street NE/SE; the south by the Anacostia River; and the west by the Potomac River and Rock Creek. 3. Kostof, The City Shaped, 211. 4. These include Anglo Palladianism, Palladianism, Neo-Palladianism, Roman Revival, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts Classicism, and Stripped Classicism. William Pierson offers an alternative categorization, with four distinct eras of neoclassi- cism in the pre–Civil War United States (Traditional, Idealistic, Rational, and National phases); see Pierson, American Buildings, 211. 5. Sources: Adam, Classical Architecture; Doreen Yarwood, Encyclopedia of Architec- ture (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1986), 128–142. 6. Mark Gelernter, A History of American Architecture: Buildings in Their Cultural and Technological Context (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 14; Ann Sutherland Harris, Seventeenth Century Art & Architecture (Lon- don: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), 244–46; Spiro Kostof, The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993), 52, 214; John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 108–114, 128–130, 157–174, 183–192, 205–207. Examples of planned American cities include Williamsburg, New Haven, Philadelphia, and Savannah; see Vincent Scully, American Architecture and Urbanism, revised edition (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988), 30–34. 7. Kenneth R. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1991). In a later essay, Bowling notes that the phrase seat of government was preferred over the word capital because the latter implied the centrality of the national govern- ment; it did not gain popularity until after the Civil War. Kenneth R. Bowling, “A Capital before a Capitol: Republican Visions,” in A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic, ed. Donald R. Kennon (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 37. 8. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C., 29–34; J. L. Sibley Jennings, Jr., “Artistry as Design, L’Enfant’s Extraordinary City,” The Quarterly Journal of the Notes ● 179 Library of Congress (1979): 230. For more on the prejudice of Founding Fathers and other Americans against large commercial cities as a home for government, see James M. Banner, Jr., “The Capital and the State: Washington, D.C., and the Nature of American Government.,” in A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic, ed. Donald R. Kennon (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Bowling, “A Capital before a Capitol.” 9. Carl Abbott, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C. from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 29, 34–35; Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C., 4, 44, 123, 212–214; Elbert Peets, On the Art of Designing Cities: Selected Essays of Elbert Peets, ed. Paul D. Spreiregen (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1968), 5. George Wash- ington also had personal reasons for making this choice: his Mt. Vernon home was on the Potomac, he believed deeply in the river’s economic potential, and he was president of a company seeking to connect the upper Potomac to the Ohio. See Scott W. Berg, Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 97–101; Bowl- ing, The Creation of Washington, D.C., 118–121. Abbott also notes that the border between North and South was not firm at the time. See Abbott, Political Terrain, 33. 10. Berg, Grand Avenues, 78–79, 84; Kostof, The City Shaped; Pamela Scott, “‘This Vast Empire’: The Iconography of the Mall, 1791–1848,” inThe Mall in Washington, 1791–1991, ed. Richard Longstreth (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 39. L’Enfant had access to, and possibly consulted, plans of other cities in Europe and the United States and had previously lived in Versailles and Paris, which both had baroque elements of design. Comparisons have also been made between L’Enfant’s plan and the post-sixteenth-century redevelopment of Rome, Paris (both as it looked and its proposed redevelop- ment), Karlsruhe, Versailles, a plan for rebuilding London after the 1666 fire, the design of a royal chateau in Marly (France), St. Petersburg, and Madrid. Earlier American cities, such as New Haven, Philadelphia, Annapolis, and Williamsburg, had certain features found in L’Enfant’s proposal, as did early plans of the city drawn by Thomas Jefferson. Berg,Grand Avenues, 87–88, 106–112; Jennings, “Artistry as Design,” 271–272; Kostof, The City Shaped, 211, 216; Iris Miller, Washington in Maps: 1606–2000 (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2002), 42; Peets, On the Art of Designing Cities, 13, 20–24; Reps, The Making of Urban America, 22, 130, 172, 174; John W. Reps, Monumental Washington: The Planning and Development of the Capital Center (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 4–5, 8, 10, 15; and Scott, “This Vast Empire,” 43–45. 11. Peets, On the Art of Designing Cities, 14, 43; Reps, Monumental Washington, 20. 12. Berg, Grand Avenues, 80, 103–104; Donald E. Jackson, “L’Enfant’s Washing- ton: An Architect’s View,” Washington History (1978): 403–405; Kostof, The City Shaped, 209–210; Peets, On the Art of Designing Cities, 32; Reps, Monumental Washington, 20, 22; Richard W. Stephenson, A Plan Wholly New: Pierre Charles 180 ● Notes L'Enfant's Plan of the City of Washington (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1993), 28–29, 52. 13. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C., 6; Jennings, “Artistry as Design,” 266; Lewis Mumford, The City in History (San Diego: Harcourt, 1961), 403; Reps, Monumental Washington, 19–20; and Stephenson, A Plan Wholly New, 54–58. Others also called for Washington to echo the great cities of the past; see, e.g., Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C., 220. 14. Berg, Grand Avenues, 78–79; Jackson, “L’Enfant’s Washington,” 398, 409; Jen- nings, “Artistry as Design,” 263–267; Reps, Monumental Washington, 18–20; and Stephenson, A Plan Wholly New, 59; see also excerpt from L’Enfant’s description of the plan in Frederick Gutheim and Antoinette J. Lee, Worthy of the Nation: Washington, D.C., from L'Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission, 2nd Edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 23; see also chapter 9. 15. Vitruvius, On Architecture, trans. Richard Schofield (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 19; see also Wayne Attoe, “Theory, Criticism, and History of Architec- ture,” in Introduction to Architecture, eds. James C. Snyder and Anthony J. Cat- anese. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), p. 32. 16. Mumford, The City in History, 404–406; Peets, On the Art of Designing Cities, 15, 38–39; Reps, Monumental Washington, 22.