2 2 • Landscape History The Grand Avenue Legacy L’Enfant’s grand design Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant planned the major thoroughfares of the new nation’s capital to be grand avenues His 1791 plan laid out the streets as a grid, so the city would be more orderly than Philadelphia or Boston, which had expanded chaotically from ports Slicing across the grid, L’Enfant drew wide, straight avenues radiating from and linking the higher points of ground His vision was of a rational capital of large views, where people could venture into public space and experience not just any city, but a great one 3 For the avenues, L’Enfant was influenced by the radiating allées of the palace of Versailles, designed by André Le Nôtre A key example was Berlin’s Unter den Linden, a very wide, straight boulevard lined with double rows of linden and nut trees L’Enfant planned Mass Ave to be the premier residential avenue, while Pennsylvania Avenue would be the main government thoroughfare, connecting the Capitol and the White House Mass Ave would start at the waterfront of the Eastern Branch (now the Anacostia River); it would be the longest transverse avenue, running 4 6 miles to the western edge along Boundary Street (now Florida Avenue) and 160-foot-wide Near what is now Dupont Circle, he intended Mass Ave to intersect two other avenues (Connecticut and New Hampshire avenues) But as late as 1860, this part of town had yet to be laid out on the ground At the end of the Civil War, the area’s fields and swamps drained to a creek that was an open sewer 4 Fig. 1 L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for the city of Washington, on Ellicott’s map. Mass Ave connects the city east to west (red line added).
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