Status Updates From Grand Avenues: The Story of...

“He was an impatient and impolite man who refused to surrender even the smallest detail
Of his grand design—qualities that resulted in his failure and in his success. All Major L’Enfant wanted was to be judged by his work, and that work was all-consuming. It was also brilliant.”

“It was one of the greatest favors ever done by one artist for another, an homage and collaboration across a span of more than one hundred years. And it was, in the end, a true and lasting cause of the redemption of Peter Charles L’Enfant.”

“Not only did Rick Olmsted establish himself as L’Enfant’s kindred soul—another artist emerging from under the close tutelage of his father to take his own place on a national stage—but he also knew enough to tie the city’s original designer tightly to George Washington in a one-on-one relationship, the collaboration that L’Enfant had hoped so fervently to see recorded for posterity.”

“With this move of about twenty miles, to a homestead just outside the federal district on its northeast angle, close by the Eastern Branch,
L’Enfant’s list of major patrons was complete: his father, Beaumarchais, Baron von Steuben, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Monroe, Thomas Attwood Digges, and, finally, William Dudley Digges.”

“Over the next two decades L’Enfant would submit a new petition to nearly every new seating of Congress. He would recycle text, insert new information, revise or emphasize particular claims, but never would he waver far from the argument or the bitterness embedded in his first one, submitted in December 1800.”

“The plan was published in newspapers and magazines, displayed in statehouses, and printed onto handkerchiefs, but not a single copy bore the name of Peter Charles L’Enfant. No printing of the plan in the next ninety-five years ever would.”

“Though both Madison and Jefferson would soon enough turn against George Washington and later, during their presidencies, show little appreciation for Washington’s conception of the federal city, they were now to attend to the matter of getting the land sold.”

“The birth of the design of the city of Washington, like the birth of L’Enfant, may have occurred in Paris, but its ultimate expression was
wholly American.”

“The Champs-Elysees was a first in the Western world: a public road disappearing over the horizon and leading to an unknown, seemingly infinite place.”

“How Versailles first imprinted itself on the eyes and mind of the future designer of Washington, D.C., can never be known. It’s enough to imagine Pierre Charles walking with his father through one of the chateau’s massive entrance archways and onto its great western plaza. Here he would have seen for the first time in his life a true man-made vista. . . .”

“It was a life of relative anonymity, lived to generate and sustain the mortal fame of king and country. It was a life young Pierre L’Enfant would eventually leave behind, but not until he had taken from it the experiences and training necessary for his later work as a planner of cities.”

“America was a kinetic country, one dominated by hoof and wheel and keel, and its capital would respect this fact. It would have thoroughfares for carriages and wide greenswards for walking, yes, but waterways as well. L’Enfant would create a city, to which all roads, rivers, and oceans would lead.”