In the next three chapters, we consider Washington, D.C., as a symbolic city. We look first to the city’s architecture, especially its neoclassical public buildings and its highly geometric baroque street design. Both styles lend themselves to various interpretations of their “true” meaning, especially because together they give Washington an appearance unique among American cities. But in fact, what people think they stand for—democracy, power, religious (or religious-like) faith—were far from the minds of those who first brought those styles to the capital.

In chapter 2 we examine the preponderance of monuments and memorials in Washington. Taken collectively, they suggest that the city represents the nation at large and that it serves as a place of national remembrance. Yet there is considerable diversity in the style and structure of the city’s memorials, due not only to changing architectural tastes but to significant shifts in who Americans believe should be remembered and how. Even the same memorial can come to symbolize different values over time.

Chapter 3 explores another feature of Washington that distinguishes it from most other American cities: the presence of many, often world-class, museums. Like its monuments and memorials, Washington’s museums encourage a perception of the city as a national urban place in which America’s historic and cultural treasures are kept and displayed with pride. As we shall see, the multifaceted task of the city’s museums—to remember, to educate, to attract visitors, to preserve national identity—has sometimes led to controversy and conflict.

Washington actually features a diversity of building styles, and not all of its streets are broad, straight avenues.1 But two architectural features in particular distinguish the city’s central core2 from the urban centers of other American cities. First, the layout of central Washington is baroque: broad, diagonal avenues cut across a traditional street grid, with important structures, monuments, and squares located where multiple streets intersect (see textbox 1). Second, its public buildings, particularly those located on or near the National Mall, are mostly neoclassical in design, featuring columns, white or grey stone surfaces, and other elements from the great buildings of Ancient Greece and Rome (see textbox 2).

To many visitors, Washington’s Old World look symbolizes power, fitting for a city founded as a political capital. In fact, both neoclassicism and the baroque style were primarily introduced for other reasons, not least for their intrinsic elegance and beauty and their popularity at the time the city was established. One of the great strengths of both architectural styles, however, is their symbolic flexibility, which allows successive generations to find new meanings—such as political authority—in Washington’s physical appearance. That flexibility, along with political and artistic leadership by individuals and institutions at key moments in the city’s history, encouraged others to adopt or maintain neoclassicism and a baroque layout as the capital grew.

In this chapter we discuss the introduction of both styles to Washington, due largely to the leadership and vision of two individuals: Pierre L’Enfant and Thomas Jefferson. We then explore the varying associations that people have with neoclassicism and baroque architecture, illustrating how those styles can take on multiple symbolic meanings. Finally, we briefly review the waxing and waning of public support for the baroque and neoclassical styles throughout the city’s history, with particular attention to how the influential McMillan Plan of 1901 reinforced both at a critical historical moment.

The city of Washington was planned because it was new, but creating a capital from scratch was not foreordained. Several existing towns and cities were contemplated as the seat of the federal government.7 However, George Washington was one of many former colonists who was suspicious of placing the capital in an existing urban place; as he put it, “The tumultuous populace of large cities are ever to be dreaded.” In 1783, a near rebellion of disgruntled former soldiers in Philadelphia, Congress’s temporary meeting place and a leading contender for the country’s capital, did little to counter this sentiment.8

Residents of Southern states wanted a more southerly location for the capital, so that “southern views on any issue—including slavery—would be more readily heard than northern ones.” They won, and, in 1790, after years of debate, Congress authorized a square, ten-by-ten mile territory of fixed boundaries to be created on the Potomac River. The territory’s exact location, determined by George Washington himself, had political, economic, and military advantages. It was midway between the North and South, along an important highway connecting both regions, bisected by a potential commercial waterway with two important riverside towns (Georgetown and Alexandria), and far enough from the ocean to be deemed safe from naval attack.9

For the city’s designer, Washington selected Pierre L’Enfant, a former Revolutionary Army soldier and practiced architect. It was a fateful choice. A man of “grand visions,” L’Enfant described the ubiquitous grid pattern of the typical city as “tiresome and insipid” and believed the new country deserved something more creative. His proposed city encompassed over 5,000 acres, as much territory as was then covered by Philadelphia, New York, and Boston put together. It embodied numerous features of baroque city design, including broad and straight streets, major squares and plazas, and avenues that connect important monuments or buildings (see figure 1.1). The intended effect was to join multiple distant points together and create impressive views of particular objects or scenes. Though L’Enfant insisted his plan was, as he put it, “wholly new,” it had some obvious parallels with, and may have borrowed from, several European cities (both actual and proposed) and settlements in North America.10

The plan featured two main axes. A primary axis ran from Capitol Hill to a point just south of the president’s residence, close to where the Washington Monument stands today, and a promenade (now the National Mall) followed this line. The second axis was a major avenue connecting the Capitol to the home of the president (today’s Pennsylvania Avenue). The result would be a “sense of order in, and of tactile command over, a large organism of space and solid,” and by overlaying diagonal avenues on a traditional Cartesian grid, distant places would be joined to create what L’Enfant called “a reciprocity of sight.”11