Posts about Pierre L'Enfant
Public Spaces
DC's odd-shaped public spaces needn't be awkward or neglected
Washington, DC's height limit, monumental core, and grand avenues make it unique among American cities. DC's plan, civic spaces, and prominent monuments befit a great national capital. L'Enfant designed his grand plan not just for the nation, but for the local community as well. Too often, however, many of the interesting local spaces created by that grand plan have been taken over by cars, fallen into neglect, or both.
Longfellow Monument. Photo by NCinDC.
Despite its grandeur, the L'Enfant plan isn't universally loved. Matt Yglesias takes issues with DC's "triangles of doom," while citing Bostonian Noah Kazis' learned love for DC's grid and avenues over Boston's colonial mishmash of streets. Yglesias notes:
I think there's definitely something charming about metro Boston's tangled web of streets. And there's clearly also something good and practical about a regular grid. But I really don't think there's any case at all for what we've done in DC in terms of super-imposing diagonal boulevards on a basically rectilinear grid.Yglesias touches on three major aspects of city design: the "organic" pattern, the grid, and the diagonal. "Organic" networks, such as Boston, are really not organic so much as they are unplanned. This is not always the case, as there are plenty of planned cities designed to look like "organic" street networks.
DC, on the other hand, is clearly a planned city, at least within the confines of the L'Enfant Plan. Outside of the L'Enfant city, Adams Morgan exhibits plenty of "organic" patterns, but the iconic streetscape for Washington is definitely L'Enfant's radial avenues superimposed on a rectilinear grid.
Yeglesias misses one clear case for DC's avenues. We can never forget that Washington, DC is not just a city, but the capital of the United States, and the urban design of the city reflects that fact. Spiro Kostof, in his book The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History, calls this kind of capital monumentality, "The Grand Manner." The Grand Manner, Kostof writes, "is not the currency of little towns." Indeed, in his chapter on the Grand Manner, an aerial photo of Washington, DC occupies the entire initial page. These are not supposed to be purely functional streets, though Daniel Burnham and other practitioners of the City Beautiful would argue they are helpful.
DC's diagonal avenues are an important element of this grand aesthetic. They provide vistas to key buildings and monuments, and though geometric in plan, they also respond to key travel patterns in the region, such as Connecticut Avenue and New York Avenue. These diagonal streets are also not unique to Washington. Chicago, Detroit, and others superimpose important diagonal streets across urban grids. In modern function, streets such as Broadway in New York predate the grids they bisect, but nevertheless function similarly today.
Creating small triangles, nooks, and crannies within the grid is a beneficial consequence of diagonal avenues. From the national perspective, these spaces filled a need for locations for monuments. From the local perspective, L'Enfant (and later Ellicott) placed a public circle or square to serve as the focus for each section of the city. Likewise, the radial avenues connect these parts of the city to each other with both direct lines of communication and transportation.
However, Yglesias isn't convinced. He notes this kind of planning "leads to lots of very weird intersections." As an example, he cites the intersection of New York Avenue, H St, and 13th Street NW as a confusing intersection for drivers and pedestrians alike. Tellingly, Yglesias uses a Google Maps image to illustrate this.
Left: Yglesias' Google Map. Right: L'Enfant Plan detail. Note the lack of street design within the squares and public spaces. Image from NCPC.
The Google map, however, focuses on the auto circulation routes, not the public space. Neither the L'Enfant Plan nor the Ellicott Plan delineates traffic lanes or vehicular circulation. Instead, those plans focus on defining the street as a public space. Likewise, most of DC's circles and squares draw their definition not from the traffic patterns of the streets, but from the blocks that surround them.
The awkward intersections of auto traffic are a relatively recent occurrence, not a hallmark of the plan. Yglesias understands this, at least at an intuitive level, since he made a great suggestion several days later about improving traffic and pedestrian space within one of L'Enfant's many squares. These kind of discussions are not new to DC, as many squares from L'Enfant's plan do not function as squares at all. Traffic bisects them at Eastern Market and Potomac Avenue, for example, and proposed changes would open up these spaces.
Likewise, there are many triangles and small parks at the intersections of DC's radial avenues and the grid. Some house interesting public spaces, while others are substantially underutilized. Since we have them, it's up to DC to make use of these small spaces. Yglesias notes:
But worst of all they create these horrible dead spaces when the wedges between the various streets are too small to put a city block on. Every once in a while this process results in a "triangle park" that's actually nice and used for something (the part at 1st, R, and Florida has nice synergy with Big Bear Cafe and the Bloomingdale Farmer's Market) but the typical triangle park isn't really used for anything and many of them scarcely deserve to be called parks.Indeed, many of these triangles are underutilized. However, this is a problem of programming, not of design. Kostof notes in a video of a 1991 lecture series accompanying his book that L'Enfant's plan specifically avoided those cast-off spaces Yglesias worries about. Instead, each public square was to be programmed as a focus for a neighborhood. They were not just used to fill in the gaps of the street grid, and they need not be treated as such today.Green space and public space are good things, but they're really only good if the spaces are usable and used in practice by the people who live and work in the area. That requires them to be located and sized for real reasons ("this would be a good place for a park") and not just used to fill up awkward gaps in a street grid.
Instead, the challenge is to re-program these spaces, as exemplified by the Bloomingdale Farmers' Market. Not every space needs to be active or monumental, but there are plenty of opportunities to improve these spaces and enhance DC's public spaces.
Cross-posted at City Block.
Politics
Breakfast links: Thinking backward edition
Don Alexander Hawkins' topographic map of Washington, 1791.
Uphill both ways: Combine new technology and dusty old archives, and you can see what Washington looked like in 1791, when L'Enfant first started designing a capital city.
Get a ride (and a human interaction designer): COG recently (re)launched Commuter Connections, a resource site for commuters. The new site features a carpool-matching service to match up those driving in similar directions, and Guaranteed Ride Home, which gives carpoolers a backup option for emergencies.
The program is a great one; the site itself a little more attractive than the typical governmental Web site, but similarly hard to navigate, with enormous numbers of links all the same size and many clicks required to get to anything useful. And the exciting heart of the site, the ride-matching, requires you to fill out forms and wade through legalese just to see it. Via We Love DC.
End Republican welfare: The City Paper criticizes the set-aside for non-Democrats in the Home Rule charter, where only one of the two at-large Councilmembers each year may come from the same party. The provision was originally included to appease Congressional Republicans, but even Carol Schwartz opposes it (at least publicly).
Parking
Roll Call covers parking reform
Roll Call, one of Capitol Hill's newspapers, ventured beyond the federal realm to cover DC's parking reform proposals. The lede:
Who is really preserving L'Enfant's legacy?
Walkability, transit-oriented development and smart growth are buzz words of modern urban development. But for more than half a century, D.C. zoning rules have supported automobiles as the main method of transportation in the city.The rest of the article is only accessible to subscribers and Hill staff. It gives a good overview of the issue and liberally quotes Cheryl Cort of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. I also spoke with the reporter, Melissa Giaimo, at length to provide her with a general understanding of the issue; she also used the statistics on car ownership and non-automobile commuting.
Supporters of the new parking plan believe that rejecting 1950s zoning rules is a return to the thinking of Washington's original city planner, Pierre L'Enfant.Opponents of parking reform often claim to be defending L'Enfant's legacy, but (the fact that we didn't really implement L'Enfant's plan aside), defense of high parking minimums is instead promoting the legacy of Robert Moses or his DC counterpart, the author of our 1958 zoning code, New York consultant Harold Lewis.The proposal, Cort said, is "with the great tradition of the L'Enfant plan
— revolving around walkability and streetcars."
@ggwash
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Greater Washington
District of Columbia
