Washington: city and symbol--or neither?

• Author: Ringle, Kenneth
• Position: Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. - Book review

Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed

Washington, D.C.

by Scott W. Berg (NY, Pantheon, 336 pages, and in paperback from Vintage)

All it takes is being stuck in one really good Washington traffic jam to find oneself cursing the name of Pierre L'Enfant, the French-born architect who drew up the street plan for the place that would become the U.S. capital. His concept--diagonal avenues superimposed over a grid system--ensured that Washington would look, as intended, totally different than the old capitals of Europe. If Washington seems disappointing as a modern urban center (and perhaps to some European visitors as a national capital), it is not all L'Enfant's fault. In his fascinatingly vivid account of the city's first planner and his modern legacy, Scott Berg, a Pulitzer prize-winning biographer and historian of the American heritage, shows that L'Enfant designed a substantially more livable national capital than the one the nation has ended up with. Whether it would have survived the automobile may be debatable, but the genius of his vision is certainly not. As Berg repeatedly makes clear, the struggle over that vision, indeed the clashes between the talented, temperamental Frenchman and his sponsors in the newly-born United States, amounted to a microcosm of the enduring cultural collision between the Franco-European view of urban gloire and the eminently American hustle for the quick buck. Developers, it seems, we have always had with us.

Actually, we're fortunate to have as much of L'Enfant's plan as we do, for the doughty little Frenchman somehow managed to talk himself into the job of designing "the federal city" despite a tendency to artistic tantrums and a lifelong failure to truly master the English language. His talent for urban design was all the more remarkable because the Paris of his birth was perilously far from the City of Light it would one day become. The broad boulevards and mansard roofs of Baron Haussmann were a half-century in the future. The 18th-century Paris of L'Enfant's youth was largely an open cesspool of reeking alleyways and sagging slums.

L'Enfant's father, a tapestry designer who specialized in battle scenes, got his son a place at France's Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris: founded by the great centralizer Colbert, it taught urban design and military engineering. He frequently accompanied his father to the palace at Versailles, where young L'Enfant absorbed the concept of ordering both unruly nature and the activities of unruly man via elaborate geometric design. In Paris itself he watched the construction of the future Place de la Concorde and wondered at the elegant swath of the Champs-Elysees punching westward over the horizon--a noble avenue whose 160-foot width L'Enfant would later mimic...