Join Us Greening the Great Grand Avenue

Today the wide straight road of Embassy Row in Washington DC seems lined with trees. Each day about a thousand people walk or run along its smooth sidewalks. This famous street is a busy commuter route that runs for two miles from Wisconsin Avenue to Dupont Circle and on to downtown. By one official count 40,000 vehicles travel on it each weekday.

The hot air over Washington has warmed; the city’s “heat island” will get hotter. But for 18 years our little group has tried to keep the Embassy Row corridor cool; our mission is to re-grow the Avenue’s former canopy of big trees.

L: Sidewalk by 2226-2230 Mass Ave in 2008. R: The tree allée in 2026 seen from 2234 Mass.

A legacy abandoned

Our city’s great avenues of formal design are the brainchild of Maj. Charles P. L’Enfant. His 1791 plan for the new city envisioned Massachusetts Avenue as the city’s longest cross-town thoroughfare. In the 1880s and 1890s, the city engineers planted rows of same-type trees in the “parking” between sidewalk and homes. Then, along the western extension, about 1900, came the mansions designed by top architects for their top-hat clients. By 1974 the National Park Service designated Mass Ave’s western extension “unique in the city and perhaps in the nation.”

But decline hit the landscape and buildings by the 1990s. It could hit again – so our little group needs your help! Join us! Learn how busy streets can be kept green and cool.

Canopy grew a lot

From 2006 we showed people on the route the amazing photo of the sidewalk in 1913 (see right). We pulled wagons of tools and hoses for weekend tree rescue. Our hyperlocal activism engaged residents diplomats, city and federal officials, and arborists. They still help our Board and volunteers.

The trees you see now are survivors of two years of roadbuilding; some are compromised.  The oldest trees that defined the street’s grandeur are dying off. The ‘NextGen’ trees we got planted in the past 18 years have issues. The very newest trees need local care.

If Restore Mass Ave’s work of strategic planting and local owner care for trees and greenspace can be pursued, the green community here might sustain the avenue’s green legacy for a long time. Another century?