Posts about Potomac River

Someone riding south on the 15th Street lane has to merge into busy traffic and then cross the Mall either by riding on the sidewalk, which is often quite crowded with tourists and joggers, or in the road, where cars expect to drive fast and not encounter cyclists. The last time David rode there, a DC taxi pulled up right behind and started honking, even though there was another, mostly empty lane it could switch into. It eventually did, honking even more.

It gets worse around Maine Avenue and Ohio Drive, near the Tidal Basin. Not only is the pavement in this area in horrible condition, but those roads are configured like highways with cars speeding along the winding curves. The sidewalks are extremely narrow and packed with pedestrians, especially during warm, sunny weather and in Cherry Blossom season.

The pedestrians deserve to use that space, but what do cyclists do? Riding in the road is only an option for southbound bicyclists, and it's a harrowing experience with the curved yet high-speed roads and drivers traveling very fast.

Bicycle issues near the bridge. Image from Google Maps.

In the other direction, there isn't really a choice. From the path over the Mason Bridge, a cyclist has to ride on the sidewalks around the Tidal Basin, go the long way around west of the Tidal Basin toward the Lincoln Memorial, or take a long detour through East Potomac Park to get to the eastern side Ohio Drive and then head back up through the Maine Avenue area.

From Southwest DC, there's a path along the Case Bridge, which carries I-395 over the Washington Channel, but to get to it you have to navigate across and around highway-style ramps in Banneker Park, then 2 narrow switchbacks which force dismounting.

On the East Potomac Park side, the path turns into a narrow sidewalk along the on-ramp from the Park Police headquarters. Riders have to travel though the NPS parking lot (or go farther out of the way), then ride along the western Ohio Drive past the George Mason Memorial to get to the path.

On the Virginia side, the Mount Vernon Trail connects to many trails, but has no direct connection from the 14th Street bridge area to Pentagon City right across the freeways. Someone riding there has to either head north through Lady Bird Johnson Park and then wind around the Pentagon parking lots, or go south to the airport and then backtrack through Crystal City.

Alternatives improve Virginia connections

The Draft Environmental Impact Statement suggests 3 alternatives. The most ambitious, Alternative 2, proposes a new bridge from western Ohio Drive across the Potomac along side the Long Bridge (the CSX and VRE tracks) and then over the GW Parkway, with access to both the Mount Vernon Trail and Long Bridge Park.

The connection in Virginia seems great, but dumping cyclists in East Potomac Park isn't that useful. It's a little closer to the Case Bridge path, but not much, and getting to downtown or the Mall is worse than today's existing bridge.

The DEIS also contains 2 other, smaller bicycle proposals. Alternative 1 slightly widens and makes some changes to the approaches to the Mason Bridge path on each side, connecting to the Mount Vernon Trail and to the Jefferson Memorial. An earlier version also proposed widening the bike/ped path on the George Mason Bridge, but this bridge widening was removed from the alternative for "technical complexity." The final EIS ought to reconsider this option.

Alternative 3 has two parts. One would create better and more consistent wayfinding signage on both sides of the river. The second part proposes new trail connections to the Pentagon and in Pentagon City.

Around the Pentagon, a new connection would extend the half-built trail under the Humpback Bridge over to Boundary Channel Drive, providing a more direct connection between the 14th Street Bridge and the Pentagon. In Pentagon City, it would create a better bike connection from the north end of Crystal City (12th and Clark) west along Army-Navy Drive, under I-395, and along the south edge of the Pentagon Reservation to Columbia Pike and the Washington Blvd trail.

Proposed trail connections in Virginia. Labels added to base image from the EIS.

DC needs better bike connections as well

The Virginia connections would significantly improve access to the bridges, but there are no comparable bike connections proposed on the DC side of the river. This is the most glaring missing piece in the DEIS. The team should study and propose a better connection to 15th Street.

Drivers have direct connections in all directions here, even having too many ramps to too many roads. Cyclists, meanwhile, have one bad connection southbound from downtown and none at all northbound, and poor and winding connections to other directions.

This isn't just a recreational amenity. Many already use the bridge for commuting. Many more likely would for both commuting and general transportation if there were a clear, direct, and safe connection.

Ideally, we could find a way to extend the 15th Street cycle track from Pennsylvania down through the Mall, then past or through the Maine Avenue/Ohio Drive/East Basin Drive area up to either the Mason Bridge path or a new bridge.

WashCycle suggests extending the new bridge along the railroad tracks across East Potomac Park to the east side, where it's a lot closer to the mainland. Another option is to convert 1 lane on East Basin Drive (the 2-lane road from Maine Avenue to I-395 South and the Jefferson Memorial) into a 2-way bicycle facility up to Maine Avenue, and eventually connect through the Mall to the 15th Street lanes.

What do you think is the best way to create a connection between the Mall and downtown across the Potomac?

Constitution Avenue was once a river

Back when DC was born, water was integral to the development of commerce. Roads were unreliable, and other technologies didn't yet exist. Why else would the city's founders have placed it at the intersection of two swampy, humid, mosquito-filled waterways, the Potomac and the Eastern Branch (now called the Anacostia)?

In fact, Pierre L'Enfant's original 1792 plan for DC shows us that their city was far more watery than the one we know today. If the Washington Monument had been built then, it would have sat on the shores of the Potomac, and the Lincoln Memorial would be underwater. From the foot of Capitol Hill out to the Potomac, there ran a body of water called Tiber Creek (whose name had been changed from Goose Creek when it was decided that DC would become America's capital, because they were emulating Rome).

L'Enfant Plan. Image from Wikipedia.

DC's founders and business leaders believed that the city's economic development would be vastly enhanced if only there was a canal connecting the Anacostia River (navigable to Maryland) to the Potomac (the gateway to the west) through the city. The Washington City Canal, completed in 1815, flowed up north from the Anacostia, passed west of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, and then headed due west along the Tiber River whose path is today's Constitution Ave. In other words, Constitution Avenue was once a river.

The Tiber Creek/Washington City Canal is visible to the north. Photo by Civil-War-Photos.com.

Ever wonder what that random tiny stone house is on the Mall?

In 1828, construction began on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, another dream waterway which would connect commerce up to Pittsburgh and through all areas in between. In the original plans, the C&O system was supposed to end in Georgetown, but that idea made DC leaders nervous. They imagined that the canal would help Georgetown outshine the capital, so they ransomed their $1M investment in the project and had that changed. The C&O would now end at the Washington City Canal.

Thus completed in 1833 and known as the C&O Branch Extension, DC's canal connection into the C&O began at the Rock Creek Basin and followed 27th Street down until it connected into the Washington City Canal at 17th and Constitution Avenues.

Image from the National Park Service.

A small federal style house built of fieldstone and measuring 30 feet wide and 18 feet deep, the Lockkeeper's House originally sat 40 feet west and 10 feet north of its current location, but was moved in the 1930′s to widen 17th Street.

According to some reports, the lockkeeper and his 13 children lived in the building. Otho Swain, a man born on a canal boat in 1901, whose father was a boatman and locktender and whose grandfather helped build the C&O, related this story:

My grandfather, he had boated coal down Constitution Avenue. There used to be a canal that crossed the Potomac there, and there's a little stone house still standing on the corner of 17th and Constitution Avenue. It was a lock house. My grandmother lived in that lock house, and that's where my grandfather met her.

The Lockkeeper's House was given to the National Park Service at the beginning of the 20th century during the construction of Potomac Park. For a time it was used as a "public comfort station", but today NPS uses it as storage.

Decline to slime

Although DC's founders believed that waterways would bring commerce, we know better today—railroads were the technology of the future. As the rail was developed, the canal system fell into disuse. (Plus, the Washington City Canal had always been a bit of a mess. The water was shallow and so could only handle boats drawing less than 3 feet of water.)

The canal system was completely abandoned by the end of the 1850′s. The C&O Canal only made it as far as Cumberland, MD before it went under. What did DC's residents do with this body of water running through its middle? Throughout the Civil War and after, they turned the Washington City Canal into an open sewer.

Drawing of the sewer in 1894 from SewerHistory.org via the Affordable Housing Institute.

Luckily, when Boss Shepard came into power in the 1870′s, he added this smelly problem to his list of public improvements. A young German immigrant engineer, Adolph Cluss, was enlisted to move the body of water underground. He apparently built a tunnel from Capitol Hill down to the Potomac that is "wide enough for a bus to drive through to put Tiber Creek underground."

A river runs under it

Filling in the canal created B Street, which was subsequently renamed Constitution Avenue. Although the massive undertaking solved public health problems, the federal government apparently did not contemplate the potential engineering dilemmas that might result from building on top of an underground creek/sewer From Wikipedia:

Many of the buildings on the north side of Constitution apparently are built on top of the creek, including the Internal Revenue Service Building, part of which is built on wooden piers sunk into the wet ground along the creek course. The low-lying topography there contributed to the flooding of the National Archives Building (Archives I in Washington, DC), IRS, and Ariel Rios buildings that forced their temporary closure beginning in late June 2006.

In fact, until the mid 1990s, that part of Washington around the intersection of 14th Street and Constitution was an open parking lot because the underground water was too difficult to deal with. During construction of the Ronald Reagan Building (1990—98), the engineers figured out how to divert the water. But that dewatering then reduced the water level underneath the IRS building which caused the wooden piers to lose stability and part of the IRS building foundation to sink.

Maybe DC doesn't have real ghosts flowing under our feet, but that doesn't mean we aren't haunted by underground things from the city's past.

Cross-posted at The Location.

The distance between the park and the island is just over 100 yards. It would be possible to build a small pedestrian ferry to shuttle small groups of people back and forth from the waterfront park amphitheater to the island. All that would be needed would be a small dock at either end. The ferry could be wire-guided or simply be a small independent boat.

Illustration by the author.

Connected this way, the two parks would truly complement each other. The waterfront park is beautifully landscaped and sunny, but it doesn't provide that much in the way of footpaths. To walk a mile, you'd probably have to walk in a circle a couple times. Roosevelt Island, on the other hand, is almost nothing but paths and wild nature. With an easy connection, visitors could come to the waterfront park, have a picnic, and then make their way over to the island for a hike.

An even better (albeit much more expensive) option would be a bridge:

Illustration by the author.

This would allow a steady flow of visitors to move between the island and the park. Just imagine the beautiful vista that would be created by a sweeping bridge like London's Millennium Bridge going from the base of Wisconsin Ave. over to the island.

Roosevelt Island is in the District of Columbia, yet DC residents have to travel through Virginia via or along a highway to get to this fantastic and wild resource. The new waterfront park is a perfect new gateway to the island. Now it's time to build the threshold.

Crossposted at the Georgetown Metropolitan.

The first line, to the Russell Building, opened in 1909, with lines going to the Hart, Dirksen, and Rayburn buildings opening between 1960 and 1982. The secret subway isn't really a secret, and although it's not open to the public, visitors can catch a ride if they arrange one with their Congressperson.

The Aqueduct Bridge: Non sequitur though it may be, there was indeed once a bridge that carried boats over the Potomac.

It opened in 1843 and was called the Aqueduct Bridge. It ran from the C&O Canal in Georgetown across the river to Rosslyn, where it met a canal going from there to Alexandria. Canal boats of the day were too fragile to survive the river, so a bridge was needed.

Photo by NCinDC on Flickr.

Although the main span of the aqueduct was torn down when the Key Bridge was built in 1923, the old abutments remain on both the DC and Virginia sides. In fact, visitors to Georgetown can walk right up onto the ruins, to be greeted by some of the city's loveliest views.

The Montgomery/Loudoun ferry: Since 1817 there has been ferry service across the Potomac between Montgomery and Loudoun Counties. White's Ferry, as it is currently known, is a floating slab of concrete that runs along a cable connected to both sides of the river. It carries cars, pedestrians and bicyclists commuting between Maryland and Northern Virginia every day of the week.

Photo by chriggy1 on Flickr.

Trolley remnants: Trolleys were once the bread and butter of urban transportation. As whole towns are now built around cars, whole towns were once built around streetcars. Although it's been 49 years since the last trolley rolled down a Washington street, there remains a plenitude of vintage trolley infrastructure.

The most famous cases are the abandoned trolley subway station under Dupont Circle and the trolley tracks visible on P Street in Georgetown, but those examples aren't alone. There are least four old trolley station depots still standing, at Glen Echo Park in Maryland, on Colorado Avenue, on Calvert Street, and on Connecticut Avenue (though that last may have only served buses).

From left to right, the Connecticut Avenue terminal in Chevy Chase,
the 14th & Colorodo NW terminal, the Calvert Street terminal.

Car barns, where trolley vehicles were stored when not in use, remain standing and converted to other purposes in several neighborhoods across the city. Even the light poles on the Klingle Valley Bridge are remnants of trolleys; they're twice as tall as the lights they hold because decades ago they also strung trolley wires.

Washington is a fascinating city a long and diverse history. What other little-known pieces of the city can you name?