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Chapter One
(Thomas Moore, âTo Thomas Hume, from the City of Washington,â
1804, in The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore, 1853, vol. II, p. 296)1
The shrouding mists have gone, and with them the frogs and the mud turtles, yet their presence still lives on in the name. Foggy Bottom is the area where the western reaches of Washington, D.C., used to meet with the Potomac River to the southeast of Rock Creek. In modern times, it includes the once-infamous Watergate Complex, and its evocative name has survived in a Metro station, south of Washington Circle.2
If you were to walk or drive from this Metro, down to the Watergate Complex and on to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, even as far as the western edge of Constitution Avenue, you would be unlikely to discover the reason for the name Foggy Bottom. The drainage engineers, the landfill experts and the architects of the late 19th century have done their work well, turning pestilential mudflats into habitable land.3
Foggy Bottom was originally called Hamburg by a Dutch gunmaker named Jacob Funk, who had settled the area in the mid-18th century with grandiose plans for its development.4 However, Nature proved intractable, and the plans he had drawn up for a township came to nothing of real substance. The place remained almost uninhabited because of its deafening frog choruses and cough-inducing mists: settlers were deterred, and only duck hunters and fishermen found the mudflats of use.5 Incredibly, when, almost 100 years later, in 1859, a gasworks was built in the area, the few householders of Foggy Bottom were delighted: they imagined that the gas fumes would disinfect the muddy land, and somehow make the fogs kinder on their throats.
Although officially Hamburg, it was called Funkstown by the early residents for a considerable time, yet it was scarcely even a village, and certainly not a town. Only a few wood-frame buildings and even fewer brick houses are recorded at Foggy Bottom, as late as 1800. Surprisingly, a pair of red-brick, two-story houses have survived from this time, to the southwest of George Washington University. These were built originally by John Lenthall (who was in charge of the construction of the U.S. Capitol) on 19th Street. At that time, they must have been near the northern edge of the ancient Foggy Bottom. In the 1970s they were moved, brick by brick, to their present location on 21st Street, and in spite of this enforced reconstruction are sometimes said to be among the oldest surviving dwellings in Washington, D.C.
About 1800, a large glassmaking factoryâessentially for the windows of the new city buildingsâwas constructed on the southern edge of Foggy Bottom from bricks kilned in Holland. This factory was located on the square sold as lot 89 in the sales map of 1792 (I have marked this position in black on the map below) which had been drawn up at the behest of George Washington to attract capital and speculators to the new federal district. For a while, the site proved to be an excellent one for a factory, as it faced directly on the Potomac and offered useful wharfage for unloading glassmaking materials.
By one of those curious coincidences with which the history of Washington, D.C., is punctuated, this is exactly the site where, nearly 200 years later, a bronze statue of the mathematical genius Einstein was erected, outside the National Academy of Sciences (plate 1). The great man is shown contemplating a star-spangled marble horoscope for April 22, 1979, which is spread out at his feet: he is casually resting his right foot on the stars of two cosmic giantsâBoötes and Hercules. As we shall see, this is probably the largest marble horoscope in the world.
The surprising link forged between Foggy Bottom and the stars does not end with Einstein. Behind his statue, in the National Academy of Sciences building, are 12 signs of the zodiac, along with their corresponding symbols, which have been built into the structure of the metal doors (plate 2). In the adjacent building to the eastâthe Federal Reserve Board Buildingâare two other zodiacs, cut by the great glass designers Steuben, as decorative flanges for lightbulbs (plate 3 and figure 12). These zodiacsâthe marble floor of the Einstein statue, the metal doors of the Academy and the glass light fixtures of the Federal Reserveâare just 4 of the 20 or so zodiacs in central Washington, D.C.6
At a later point, I shall examine each of these zodiacs more closely, but even at this stage we must stop and ask the obvious question: why do we find zodiacs in the formerly unhealthy stretches of Foggy Bottom, where frogs croaked night and day, and where young boys would hunt for mud turtles?
Today, the air around Einstein is fresh and wholesome, and even the River Potomac has disappeared. The silting of the waters, and the extensive landfills of the late 19th century, explain why the Potomac wharfage has been moved, and why, from the windows of the Academy, one looks onto a greensward extension of the Mall, landscaped with trees and dotted with a variety of war memorials, including that of the Vietnam Veterans. In many ways, this extension of Foggy Bottom, born of the waters of the Potomac, has witnessed greater change than almost any other part of Washington, D.C.
It would be pleasant to think that Einstein would know that behind him there had once been a site called Observatory Hill. Had perhaps the earlier inhabitantsâfirst the Algonquins, and later the early settlers from Elizabethan Englandâstudied the stars from this rise?7 The reality is probably more prosaic, for in 1843 the site had been taken over by the U.S. Naval Observatory (next page), and an enormous viewing-dome was constructed with a movable frame that swung easily on bearings of huge cannonballs, mounted on greased cast-iron grooves.
Fifty years later this same site, which had been earmarked by George Washington not for an observatory but for a university, would be proposed for an extraordinary museum by a scarce-remembered architect named Franklin W. Smith, whose highly original architectural ideas would help revolutionize the appearance of the city.8
If one of the night-shift workers in the glass factory had chosen to step out to look into the clear night skies in wintertime, he would have seen much the same stellar pattern in the skies as Einstein now contemplates on the marble at his feetâin the skies on Christmas Eve, 1800, at about 7:30 in the evening, he would have seen the gibbous Moon almost overhead, with bright Venus setting over the Potomac, in the west.
The constellation of Canis Major, the Greater Dog, would have risen over Jenkins Heights, where the north wing of the Capitol was almost completed. Dominating this part of the skies would be the scorching dog star,
Sirius, a brilliant white and yellow star. In 1800, this was the only star known to have been represented in the Egyptian hieroglyphics. Some modern scholars trace the name of the star in the hieroglyphic of a dog, evoking the god Anubis; however, the ancient Egyptians tended to call Sirius
Spdt, and represented it with hieroglyphics that resembled an obelisk and a five-pointed star
.
9 The ancient Greeks, who took over so much of the Egyptian Wisdom, called
Spdt by the name
Sothis, yet it remained the dog star in their calendars, and it was used by both Greeks and Egyptians in the orientation of important temples.
10 I pay attention to the five-pointed hieroglyphic here because, as we shall see, it seems to have been the source of the five-pointed star adopted for the American flag.
Sirius is 23 times as luminous as our own Sun, and even though its distance from the Earth of eight and a half light-years dims this luminosity, it is still the brightest star in the sky. The ancient Egyptians may have known that it was a doubleâa two-star systemâyet this was forgotten for centuries, until the invention of powerful telescopes. Its companion, known as Sirius B, seems to have a density more than 90,000 times greater than our own Sun, and has become one of the great mysteries of modern occult literature.11
To the northwest the cross-stars of the constellation of the Swan, the Cygnus12 of the ancients, would be visible, seeming to mark Masons Island (which is now called Theodore Roosevelt Island) with the sign of the cross.13 The two great stars Castor and Pollux, distinguishing the constellation Gemini, would have been rising over Jenkins Heights, where the new Capitol building was still being erected. A little higher, the mighty constellation of giant Orion would be hovering in the southeastern skiesâmarked by that tight triple belt of stars to which the ancient Egyptians are supposed to have oriented their pyramids. Its orange star Betelgeuse, which marks the armpit of the giant, has a diameter about 400 times larger than our own Sun, yet because it is 470 light-years from our Earth, it seems to be no larger than a red pinprick in the skies. It is moving away from Earth at the rate of over 10 miles per second, yet so illusory is the cosmos that the ancients wisely called it âfixed,â and the star seems scarcely to have moved since Babylonian astrologers named it Gula, about 4,000 years ago.
Two hundred years separate the marble chart of Einstein from the night sky of the glassworker, yet it would seem as though nothing had changed in the heavens in a period which man must measure in less than a dozen generations.14 It was this promise of stellar immutability which had first led the ancient Egyptian priests, and their pupils the Greek architects, to orientate their temples to the stars. It was this same promise which led the designers of Washington, D.C., to ensure that their own new city was also laid out in accordance with a geometry which reflected the wisdom of the stellar lore.
Had you stood on this water-edge of Foggy Bottom on April 3, 1791, before the glass factory was built, you would have witnessed a most remarkable eventâone which seems to have been involved in the magic of the building of Washington, D.C. On the morning of that day, an âAfric-Americanâ astronomer named Benjamin Banneker was making observations not very far from this spot. Wherever he stood, he would have been looking directly to the east, watching the sunrise, knowing full well that within a few minutes there would be an eclipse, when the Sun, newly risen over the hill which was then called Jenkins Heights, would be blacked out by the body of the Moon.15
This is not poetic fantasy: Banneker was a historic personage (in modern Washingon, D.C., he has a city park named after him) and did record that eclipse in his own notebooks.16 He was working on this land with the surveyor Andrew Ellicott, making the preliminary observations so essential to laying out the boundaries for the new federal district. Ellicott was following the instructions of George Washington himself, and Banneker was his temporary assistant: the two were taking the first giant steps towards designing the city which would be named after the most famous man in America.
Banneker worked on the project for only a few months: it seems that his age told against him in such a strenuous and demanding enterprise.
Besides knowing a little about surveying, Banneker was a self-taught mathematician and astronomer, with some knowledge of astrology: indeed, in the following year he published an almanac, containing planetary positions, and observations on lunar and solar eclipses for the year to come.
In one of his ephemerides, Banneker published a crude woodcut of a zodiacal man (see opposite)âan image depicting the cosmic human being marked with the 12 signs of the zodiac that rule parts of the body. This woodcut (from the almanac for 1795) was borrowed by Bannekerâs printers from a design used by the almanac maker Benjamin Franklin.17 The image displays one item which relates it to a symbolism that still proliferates in Washington, D.C. The flower in the hand of Virgo (on the right of the image) has five petals, or leaves. This may not sound very important at this stage, but as our investigation of Washington, D.C., proceeds, the implications will become very clear. It is entirely fitting that, at the end of the 18th century, an American image of the ancient zodiacal sign of the Virgin should hold a five-petaled flower.
As Banneker witnessed the predicted eclipse, he would have known full well that the ancients had always insisted that such a cosmic event would have a profound influence upon earthly events. He would have known, too, that the nature of that influence would depend upon the planetary patterns in the skies at the time when the eclipse took place.18 The eclipse of 1791 was in Ariesâa certain portent that the destiny of Washington, D.C., would be filled with pioneering endeavor and excessive (not to say belligerent) enthusiasms. Aries had been the golden Ram of the ancient mythologiesâthe Argonauts of myth and poetry were the ancient Greeks who chose to face the savagery of the guardian dragon, in an attempt to steal the magical golden fleece of this celestial Ram. The Latin word Aries means Ramâyet, for astrologers, it is the courage of the Argonauts which is signified by the word.19
In fact, the augury on that morning of April 3, 1791, was remarkable. The Sun and Moon were not the only pair in Aries at that time: no fewer than five of the known planets were in that zodiacal Ramâthe sign which favors brave undertakings.20
Such cosmic curiosities are a sign that the city had begun in a kind of dreamâas a vision. Some historians will tell you that it began as a dream in the mind of George Washington.
When George Washington first rode over the woody site he had visualized as the future federal capital, the highest hill was owned by Daniel Carroll. In his youth, Washington had trained as a surveyor,...
