Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
around major government buildings and streets, while small farms, gardens,
and pastures gradually supplanted much of the thickets and woodlands that
once dominated the landscape. When Jefferson became president, he had
Pennsylvania Avenue ornamented with rows of fast-growing poplars, an
explicitly artificial but visually effective practice he may have admired while
serving as ambassador to France.While many observers ridiculed the aspir-
ing capital as a “city of magnificent intentions,” some found charm in its
slow pace and bucolic scenery, which appealed to Jeffersonian beliefs in the
virtues of agrarian democracy as well as to the contemporary penchant for
pastoral imagery. Gazing over the city from the heights of the Capitol,
Washington confidante Margaret Bayard Smith exclaimed: “Indeed the
whole plain was diversified with groves and clumps of forest trees which
gave it the appearance of a fine park.”
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Traveling artists such as George Parkyns and George Beck encapsulated
this romantic vision of early Washington. Their turn-of-the-century views
presented the nascent capital as an Arcadian idyll and reassuring emblem of
Jeffersonian democracy. In contrast to ostentatious European capitals,Wash-
ington was a diminutive “city on a hill” embowered in nature and innocent
of the oppressive environment and moral corruption that theoretically
afflicted larger metropolises (figure 2).While such images provide a general
sense of the city's development, their depiction of local scenery was strongly
influenced by contemporary pictorial conventions that added imaginative
accents to emulate traditional landscape painting. A few wealthy landown-
ers took this process a step further, creating attractive country seats by
embellishing existing landscapes according to the tenets of contemporary
aesthetic theories. One of the most impressive of these estates was Kalo-
rama, developed in the early years of the nineteenth century in the pictur-
esque highlands bordering Rock Creek. Kalorama garnered widespread
praise for its artfully constructed mixture of natural and man-made scenery.
A contemporary painting by Charles Codman (figure 3) presented a highly
romanticized view that epitomized contemporary landscape tastes.
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The first successful large-scale attempts to “reinvent nature” in Washing-
ton in actual, physical terms were largely utilitarian in character.The desire
to improve trade and communications, rather than lofty appeals to political
symbolism, aesthetics, or science, brought about significant changes in the
city's relationship with its physical environment.While the Potomac played
a decisive role in siting the city, its waterfalls, shifting channels, and widely
varying water flow obstructed travel and inhibited the river's viability as
