INVENTING NATURE IN WASHINGTON, D.C. - Inventing for the Environment - page 78

history and its significance to the development of American city planning is
recounted in numerous publications, including the following: John A. Peterson,“The
City Beautiful Movement: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings,” Journal of Urban
History 2 (1976), August, 417-428; Peterson, “The Nation's First Comprehensive
Plan: A Political Analysis of the McMillan Plan for Washington,” American Planning
Association Journal 51 (1985), April, 134-150; Peterson, “The Mall, the McMillan
Plan, and the Origins of American City Planning,” in Longstreth, The Mall in Wash-
ington, 101-113; Thomas S. Hines, “The Imperial Mall: The City Beautiful Move-
ment and the Washington Plan of 1901-1902,” in Longstreth, The Mall in
Washington, 79-99; Reps, Monumental Washington, 96-154.
36. US Congress, Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, The Improve-
ment of the Park System of the District of Columbia (Government Printing Office,
1902), 12.
37. Ibid., 29-52. In a curious permutation of the concept of “inventing nature,”
the commission asserted that the Washington Monument itself was such a primal
and imposing visual force that it appeared to be “almost a work of nature” (p. 48).
38. Washington Evening Star, January 14, 1908. Cartoon and editorial reproduced in
Reps, Monumental Washington, 152.
39. The Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, 23.
40. Ibid., 75, 76. In the days before air conditioning, people were more attuned to
subtle variations in local climates. Well into the 1920s, families would drive into
Rock Creek Park to escape the heat. Many spent the night in their cars there to
take advantage of the cooler valley temperatures. In 1922 the Washington Herald
reported that as many as 500 cars could be found in the park on a hot summer's
night, most of them containing respectable families seeking relief from the heat
(“Parking in Rock Creek,” Washington Herald, June 14, 1922; see also “Night Park-
ing Prohibition Rule in Rock Creek Exempts Families,” Washington Evening Star,
July 18, 1922.
41. For more on American parkway development at this period, see Schuyler, The
New Urban Landscape, 126-146; Davis, “Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway,”
137-143; Davis, Mount Vernon Memorial Highway and the Evolution of the
American Parkway (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 1997).
42. For a comprehensive account of the origins and evolution of Rock Creek and
Potomac Parkway, see Davis, “Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway,” passim.
43. The Improvement of the Park System of the District of Columbia, 83-122, 137-
142.