The hill of Capitol Hill rises in the center of the nation’s capital and flows eastward. It was this protruberance, called Jenkins Heights in 1790, upon which Pierre L’Enfant decided to place “Congress House,” a site which the French planner described as a “pedestal waiting for a superstructure.” Stretching easterly behind the Capitol Building along wide avenues lies the residential area known as Capitol Hill, one of the oldest residential communities in Washington. Once an enclave of boarding houses for members of Congress who hated the idea of establishing permanent residency in Washington, it is now the town’s largest residential historic district.
Nothing remains of this community today, having been razed to house the Capitol support buildings.Those support buildings are indicative how the government has ballooned in recent times. For more than 100 years the business of Washington was conducted almost exclusively inside the Capitol Building itself. The Supreme Court? Go to the Capitol. The Congressional library? Inside the Capitol. Your representative’s office? Inside the Capitol. Today there are a half-dozen major office buildings and a few satellites for the Congress alone. The Supreme Court and library have their own buildings on the site of many of those early boarding houses.
Today’s streetscape is a pastiche of rowhouses in a cornucopia of styles standing shoulder-to-shoulder withearly 19th century Federal townhouses mingling with ornate mid-1800s Italianate bracketed houses and then stylish Victorian residences from a few decades later. The street pattern in Capitol Hill is still one L’Enfant would recognize from his original 1791 Plan for the Federal City, a vision of grand diagonals superimposed over a standard grid pattern. To take a look, our walking tour will begin at the top of old Jenkins Hill...
Geographically, downtown Washington is broadly considered to be anything north of Constitution Avenue - this tour takes in the part of downtown between Pennsylvania Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue between the Capitol and the White House. It is a land of office buildings and hotels, Chinatown and the Verizon Center, home of Washington’s professional indoor sports teams.
Unlike other large cities in America, Washington’s downtown has a low skyline. In 1899, Congress passed the Heights of Buildings Act in response to the 14-story Cairo apartment tower, which at the time was reviled as a monstrosity overshadowing its Dupont Circle neighborhood. (It is now admired as one of Washington’s most beautiful residential buildings.) The original law limited buildings to the height of the Capitol, but was amended in 1910 to the width of the adjacent street plus 20 feet, so a building facing a 90-foot-wide street could be only 110 feet tall. The basic intent was the same: No skyscrapers.
The result is a boxy appearance to the streetscape - as you walk around you can see older buildings that had extra floors built on their roofs to maximize the space allotted to them by law. The tallest commercial building in Washington DC is at One Franklin Square, only 210 feet high.
Our walking tour will begin at its northernmost point, in Mount Vernon Square...
It was the Board of Public works under the leadership of Alexander Shepherd that spearheaded the way for the development of Dupont Circle. Nevada Senator William Morris Stewart led the “California Syndicate” which bought up tracts of undeveloped land and the style of the neighborhood was set when Stewart erected his mansion (now demolished) in the 1870s. By the late 1880s the Dupont neighborhood was an affluent and vibrant residential enclave.
Two types of housing predominate in the historic district: palatial mansions and freestanding residences built in the styles popular between 1895 and 1910; and three-and-four-story rowhouses, many of which are variations on the Queen Anne and Richardsonian Romanesque Revival styles, built primarily before the turn of the century. The mansions line the broad, tree-lined diagonal avenues that intersect the circle and the rowhouses line the grid streets of the historic district. This juxtaposition of house types and street pattern gives the area a unique character.
The majority of the houses in the Dupont Circle Historic District are not mansions, however. The blocks along the grid streets are lined with rowhouses that were occupied by middle-class professionals and official Washingtonians. In recent years, pressure for large-scale commercial office development on Connecticut Avenue has been intense. A number of new office buildings, some unsympathetic to the historic district line the northern and southern fringes of Connecticut Avenue. Dupont Circle Historic District is roughly bounded by Rhode Island Avenue, NW; M and N streets, NW, on the south; Florida Avenue, NW, on the west; Swann Street, NW, on the north; and the 16th Street Historic District on the east. Our walking tour will start in the circle itself...
In the 1900s, as the American government grew well beyond anything the Founding Fathers ever imagined, it became necessary to leave rented private offices and find permanent homes for workers. It was decided to fill the space created between Constitution Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue as the two thoroughfares fanned out to the west from their meeting point at 6th Street with a unified group of important and prominent Federal office buildings.
The result was the 1926 Public Buildings Act, launching the largest public building construction program yet seen in America in a 70-acre swath of capital city ground now know as the Federal Triangle. Secretary of Treasury Andrew W. Mellon and a Board of Architectural Consultants set down guidelines with each board member designing one of the office buildings that would line Pennsylvania Avenue, “America’s Main Street.”
Begun in 1792 on the plan of Pierre L’Enfant as a “Grand Avenue” connecting both the “President’s Palace” and the “Federal House,” Pennsylvania Avenue was a long time coming. Until 1871 when wooden blocks were laid down it was either dusty or muddy as the season demanded. Asphalt did not arrive until 1907 when Theodore Roosevelt was in office.
Streetcars were still running down Pennsylvania Avenue when ground was broken on the Federal Triangle and the promenade was transformed into what George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had in mind 150 years earlier. Our walking tour of the “Pathway of Presidents” will start at a remembrance of the man who kickstarted the whole thing...
Georgetown was formally established in 1751 when the Maryland Assembly authorized a town on the Potomac River on 60 acres of land belonging to George Beall and George Gordon; hence Georgetown. Tobacco was the lifeblood of the community and Georgetown soon prospered as a shipping center with a profitable European and West Indian trade. Commerce and industry developed along the waterfront, where wharves and flour mills were constructed. During the American Revolution, Georgetown served as a great depot for the collection and shipment of military supplies.
The town was finally incorporated in 1789 but only two years later it was included in the new Federal District with the establishment of the nation’s capital to the east. Georgetown retained its own character, however, and rapidly gained a reputation as the fashionable quarter of the new capital, drawing high-profile residents to its leafy streets.
The economic engine for Georgetown was provided by the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal which aimed for western Pennsylvania but petered out in western Maryland. Still, the waterfront prospered until a flood in the 1890s swamped the waterway and the Canal Company went bankrupt. Georgetown spiraled into decline and gained an unsavory reputation as one of Washington’s worst slums. New Deal stimulus money from the 1930s helped break the fall and the cachet returned in the 1950s when a junior senator from Massachusetts named John Fitzgerald Kennedy moved into the neighborhood.
Although there are some pre-Revolutionary buildings in the district, most of the housing stock dates from the period after 1800 when brick replaced stone in construction of both residential and commercial buildings. The mansions of wealthy shipowners, merchants and land speculators were built above the harbor on Prospect and N Streets. Hotels, taverns, banks and other commercial buildings were constructed along M Street and in the waterfront area. There are 58 Georgetown houses that have been recognized as landmarks of pre-Civil War importance.
The Georgetown Historic District is roughly bounded by Reservoir Rd., NW, and Dumbarton Oaks Park on the north; Rock Creek Park on the east; the Potomac River on the south; and Glover-Archbold Parkway on the west. Our walking tour will start on the campus of Georgetown University on the western fringe of the old town...
Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who laid out the street plan for the District of Columbia, had a grand vision for the National Mall, the so-called “Grand Avenue.” It was to run west from the Capitol to a point directly south of the President’s House where its terminus would be crowned by an equestrian statue of George Washington. According to L’Enfant’s plan, the Mall was to be “four hundred feet in breadth, and about a mile in length, bordered by gardens, ending in a slope from the houses on each side.”
To realize L’Enfant’s dream things started slowly and then petered out completely. Then the Civil War came and the Mall grounds were used for military purposes, such as bivouacking and parading troops, slaughtering cattle and producing arms. In 1872, at 6th and B streets, a 14-acre tract was given to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad for construction of a depot; the railroad was also granted permission to lay tracks across the Mall.
The National Mall was on the verge of disappearing altogether when, in 1902, Senator James McMillan of Michigan opened hearings to revisit L’Enfant’s original ideas. The first thing to do was tear down therailroad station and pull up the tracks. The swamps were drained and canals filled. Grass was planted and four rows of majestic American elm trees installed on the edges the entire length of the Mall. It was decided that all public buildings to be constructed would be created in the image of ancient Rome and Athens.
Today there are nine museums on the Mall, two entrances for underground museums, and the Department of Agriculture. Our walking tour begins at the east end in the shadow of the United States Capitol, following along the southern edge and returning along the northern side...
Lafayette Square is a seven-acre public park located directly north of the White House on H Street between 15th and 17th Streets, NW. The Square and the surrounding structures were designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1970. Originally planned as part of the pleasure grounds surrounding the Executive Mansion, the area was called “President’s Park.” The Square was separated from the White House grounds in 1804 when President Jefferson had Pennsylvania Avenue cut through. In 1824, the Square was officially named in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette of France.
Lafayette Square has been used as a race track, a graveyard, a zoo, a slave market, an encampment for soldiers during the War of 1812, and scores of political protests and celebrations. The surrounding neighborhood became the city’s most fashionable 18th century residential area - home to a number of Washington honchoes including Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Henry Seward and South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun.
Andrew Jackson Downing landscaped Lafayette Square in 1851 in the picturesque style. Today’s plan with its five large statues dates from the 1930s. In the center stands Clark Mills’ equestrian statue of President Andrew Jackson, erected in 1853; in the four corners are statues of Revolutionary War heroes: France’s General Marquis Gilbert de Lafayette and Major General Comte Jean de Rochambeau; Poland’s General Thaddeus Kosciuszko; Prussia’s Major General Baron Frederich Wilhelm von Steuben.
This walking tour will explore Lafayette Square to the north of the White House and the buildings bordering the Ellipse to the south of the White House. We will start in the center of the square...