TIDAL BASIN HALS DC-59 National Mall & Memorial Parks HALS DC-59 Roughly bounded by Independence Avenue, Fourteenth Street, East Basin Drive, and Ohio Drive, Southwest Washington District of Columbia PHOTOGRAPHS COLOR TRANSPARENCIES WRITTEN HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE DATA REDUCED COPIES OF MEASURED DRAWINGS FIELD RECORDS HISTORIC AMERICAN LANDSCAPES SURVEY National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street NW Washington, DC 20240 HISTORIC AMERICAN LANDSCAPES SURVEY TIDAL BASIN HALS DC-59 Location: Roughly bounded by Independence Avenue, Fourteenth Street, East Basin Drive, and Ohio Drive, SW, Washington, D.C. The Tidal Basin is located at latitude: 38.884593, longitude: -77.039208. The point represents the center of the Tidal Basin. It was obtained from Google Earth on January 2, 2018, and there is no restriction on its release to the public. Present Owner: National Park Service Present Occupant: National Park Service Present Use: Memorial and recreational landscape for public use Significance: The Tidal Basin and surrounding landscape are the result of an extensive Potomac River improvement project started by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the late nineteenth century to address the sedimentary flats that had been deposited in the river from the White House to the Long Bridge. As part of a large-scale effort to improve the river’s navigability, the Army Corps of Engineers intermittently dredged the waterway after the Civil War. More comprehensive plans were also developed, such as Maj. W.J. Twining’s 1879 proposal to create flushing basins equipped with automatic gates. Water from the Potomac River would fill the basins, which would then discharge into the Washington Channel. The reclaimed land would be divided into three sections with dredged material being used as the fill to build up the flats and create parkland. By 1882, Congress had appropriated money for the improvement project, with Maj. Peter Conover Hains overseeing the work. Under his direction, an intensive dredging and filling operation took place, with one tidal reservoir created in the flats to flush the Washington Channel. Construction of a sea wall starting in 1890 prevented erosion of the newly reclaimed land. In 1897, Congress designated the 621 acres of reclaimed land and the 118 acres of the Tidal Basin as “Potomac Park” to be used for the “recreation and pleasure of the people.” The Army Corps of Engineers transferred parcels of the land that would eventually become West Potomac Park to the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds from 1901 to 1909. The newly created parkland was initially developed for recreation, featuring drives and bridle paths, swimming and boating facilities, and a bandstand near the Tidal Basin inlet. Most significantly, First Lady Helen Taft facilitated the planting of thousands of donated flowering cherry trees from Japan in 1912. These flowering cherry trees became the predominant visual element of the Tidal Basin landscape and one of its most significant features. When the National Park Service assumed authority of the park in 1933, stands of American hollies were added to complement the flowering cherries and provide winter interest. TIDAL BASIN HALS DC-59 (Page 2) The construction of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, designed by John Russell Pope and his successors Daniel P. Higgins and Otto R. Eggers, in the early 1940s resulted in alterations to the eastern shore of the Tidal Basin as well as a shift in the character and use of the park from a recreational to a memorial landscape. Due to its siting south of the National Mall and on the south axis of the White House, the Tidal Basin represented one of the significant cardinal points identified in the L’Enfant Plan and was within the kite-shaped area comprising the monumental core in the 1902 McMillan Plan. Locating the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the east side of the Tidal Basin restored a cross axis with the White House that had been identified in the L’Enfant Plan but not been initially realized because of the off- center placement of the Washington Monument. Further additions to the Tidal Basin landscape included the construction of the Kutz Bridge (Paul Philippe Cret, designer) across the north end of the basin as part of changes to Independence Avenue in 1943, which also resulted in the creation of a lagoon. The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial (Lawrence Halprin, designer) was completed in 1997, followed by the George Mason Memorial (Faye Harwell, designer) in 2002. The last memorial built on the shore of the Tidal Basin was the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial (ROMA Design Group, designer) in 2011, located directly across from the Thomas Jefferson Memorial. The creation of Potomac Park and the Tidal Basin was a significant engineering feat that utilized the most sophisticated technologies available at the turn of the twentieth century. The importance of this newly-created land, located as it was just south of the White House and the Washington Monument and on the banks of the Potomac River, was immediately recognized and care was taken to develop it appropriately. The Tidal Basin is world renowned for its cultural landscape comprised of thousands of flowering cherry trees and for the monuments to significant American leaders now located on its shores. Historians: Justine Christianson and Mattea Sanders, 2017 TIDAL BASIN HALS DC-59 (Page 3) PART I. HISTORICAL INFORMATION A. Physical History 1. Date of establishment: The reclamation project that would result in the creation of the Tidal Basin and Potomac Park began in earnest in 1882. By 1909, the Army Corps of Engineers had turned over all the park land comprising West Potomac Park, including the Tidal Basin, to the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds for development. 2. Landscape architect, designer, shaper, creator: Several individuals and agencies were involved in the development of the Tidal Basin and surrounding landscape and memorials. The main agencies included the Army Corps of Engineers, who undertook the reclamation work. By 1909, the Tidal Basin and surrounding parkland had been transferred to the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, which was subsumed into the National Park Service in 1933. The park was developed in accordance with the McMillan Plan of 1902 with guidance initially provided by the McMillan Park Commission. The later design and development of the park and the establishment of the various memorials have been undertaken by the National Park Service and the various memorial commissions in collaboration with the Commission of Fine Arts (established in 1910) and the National Capital Planning Commission (established in 1924 as the National Capital Park Commission and later renamed the National Capital Park and Planning Commission before its current name was assigned in a 1952 act). First Lady Helen Taft also influenced the park’s development by facilitating the planting of the cherry trees that would come to define the cultural landscape of the Tidal Basin. The memorial commissions awarded the designs of the memorials to various individuals and firms. Architect John Russell Pope designed the Thomas Jefferson Memorial while Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. served as the landscape architect for the memorial grounds. Paul Philippe Cret designed the Kutz Bridge. Lawrence Halprin was responsible for the overall design of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. Faye Harwell developed the George Mason Memorial plans. ROMA Design Group won the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial design competition with Ed Jackson serving as Executive Architect. Additional information on significant individuals participating in the development of the Tidal Basin follows in chronological order. Army Corps of Engineers Maj. Nathaniel Michler (1827-1881) attended Lafayette College before his appointment to the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, where he graduated seventh in his class in 1848. He served as the Officer in Charge of the Reclamation of the Potomac Flats from 1867 to 1870, proposing a major dredging and reclamation project as a permanent solution to the problem of maintaining the depth of the river channel. Michler also identified the Long Bridge as an obstacle to navigation and advocated for its removal.1 Sylvanus Thayer Abert (1828-1903), a Princeton graduate, began his career as a surveyor, first working on the James River and Kanawha Canal extension. Abert’s other surveys included the Potomac River, 1 George W. Cullum, Biographical Register of the Officers and Graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1891), 415. TIDAL BASIN HALS DC-59 (Page 4) Cape Vincent Harbor in New York, the Tar River and New River Inlet in North Carolina, the Arkansas River from Fort Gibson to its mouth, and the Cumberland River from Kentucky to Tennessee. Abert served as Assistant Engineer during the construction of Fort Delaware on the Delaware River and was in charge of the buildings, works, and grounds at the Warrenton Navy Yard in Florida. During his tenure from 1874 to 1882 as Officer in Charge of Reclamation of the Potomac Flats, he recommended that the reclaimed flats curve to the Long Bridge causeway.2 Maj. W.J. Twining (1840-1882) attended the United States Military Academy, graduating fourth in his class in 1863 and commissioning into the Army Corps of Engineers. Twining served as Commissioner of the District of Columbia beginning in 1878. He developed a plan for the Potomac Flats in 1879 that included the creation of a set of ornamental sluicing basins equipped with inlet and outlet gates to flush the parallel Washington Channel. This would later be manifested as the Tidal Basin with its Inlet and Outlet bridges.3 Maj. Peter Conover Hains (1840-1921), an 1861 graduate of the United States Military Academy, commissioned into the 2nd Artillery and transferred into the Topographical Engineers in 1862 and then the Army Corps of Engineers the following year.