Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
surrounding swamps and mud flats to create hundreds of acres of new park
land that was carefully drained and shaped to produce broad lawns, well-
defined water features, attractive paths, and a mixture of formal tree-lined
boulevards, curving carriage drives, and naturalistic plantings. So seamlessly
were these new lands blended with the surrounding environment that few
visitors realize that the western half of the Mall from 17th Street to the
Lincoln Memorial, West Potomac Park, and East Potomac Park is entirely
man-made.
26
While the Army Corps of Engineers transformed Washington's water-
front, the District government busied itself with equally ambitious alter-
ations to the city's physical fabric. Determined to modernize the sleepy
southern town, Board of Public Works leader Alexander “Boss” Sheperd
initiated an aggressive civic improvement campaign. Sheperd's men laid
down an extensive system of gas and sewer pipes, greatly improving public
health conditions and literally turning darkness into light with widely pop-
ular street illumination programs. More controversially, Sheperd set about
redressing disparities between L'Enfant's rigidly geometric street plan and
the anomalies of Washington's natural topography. Hills were leveled and
declivities filled to produce uniform street grades and a more orderly and
urbanized appearance. The street improvement campaign was a boon to
speculators building subdivisions outside the original urban core, but in
previously developed areas the heavy-handed imposition of uniform street
grades left houses and businesses perched on hillocks or overshadowed by
embankments carrying the new roadways. On a more positive note, city
forces initiated a street tree planting campaign of monumental proportions.
By 1881 Washington could boast of 120 miles of verdant avenues shaded
by over 53,000 newly planted trees. Combined with federal efforts to
embellish the city's squares and circles, this campaign helped transform
Washington from a raw and unsophisticated country town into an increas-
ingly tidy and mature, if still somewhat sleepy, metropolis. The legacy of
shady tree-lined streets and neatly tended small parks lasted well into the
twentieth century, when the ravages of Dutch elm disease, automobile-
induced street widening, and shrinking maintenance budgets diminished
the sense of leafy repose that characterized large portions of the city for the
better part of a century.
27
Despite radical transformations to the city's physical environment, the
nation's capital entered the last quarter of the nineteenth century without
a proper public park along the lines envisioned by Downing and developed
