“Poor old Pennsylvania Avenue, to which our historical memories used to cling.” - Elbert Peets

The new president was young and handsome. On January 20, 1961, all twenty feet of John F. Kennedy’s black Lincoln Cosmopolitan convertible, open-topped despite a 22-degree outside temperature, rolled northwest on Pennsylvania Avenue — up Pennsylvania Avenue — from the Capitol to the White House, and past an enormous crowd. Along the avenue, two million eyes fixed themselves on the president and first lady.

Kennedy, beaming, energetic, waved vigorously. The street was lined with spectators — some in furs and finery, an attractive American scene in full color. Flags hung on lampposts, red-white-and-blue bunting on buildings. Though it had cleaned up well enough, Pennsylvania Avenue was not what it used to be. Or, rather, Pennsylvania Avenue had never really become what it was supposed to be.

From the founding of the capital in the late eighteenth century, the thoroughfare that in 1791 was christened “Pennsylvania” had been meant to be something special. Pennsylvania Avenue was supposed be the grandest artery of them all — to rival even the Champs Élysées in Paris — an axis on which the city, the nation, the world might spin. That had never quite happened. Instead, on that Inauguration Day 56 years ago, there were empty lots, abandoned buildings, liquor stores and peepshows. “It’s a disgrace,” Kennedy said. “Fix it.”

On his hundredth day in office, he appointed an ad hoc committee “to survey the future of Federal office space in and about the City of Washington.” This included the avenue linking the White House and the Capitol. “Pennsylvania Avenue should be the great thoroughfare of the City of Washington,” the ad hoc committee reported. “Instead, it remains a vast, unformed, cluttered expanse at the heart of the Nation’s Capital.”

A President’s Council on Pennsylvania Avenue soon followed. It was formed of the foremost specialists — nine men, one woman; mostly architects; mostly Easterners. Over 18 months, this new body was to make a detailed historical study and then propose a clear plan to remake the avenue as an iconic space that would be “lively, friendly, and inviting, as well as dignified and impressive.” The litany of adjectives worked as well for the re-imagined avenue, the Council pointed out, as it did for the president: “nothing could have better described the finest qualities of the City of Washington, nor of the Chief Executive who wished them intensified.”

Can one street tell a man’s life story?

Can it tell a nation’s?

Kennedy never read the final report from the President’s Council on Pennsylvania Avenue when it was completed and published in the spring of 1964. He was killed on a different stretch of American pavement, in Dallas, Texas.

One last time, on Sunday, November 24, 1963, Kennedy traveled along Pennsylvania Avenue, from the White House to the Capitol — down Pennsylvania Avenue — in a coffin draped in an American flag, pulled by a team of six white horses. Six hundred thousand eyes fixed themselves on the box, the horses, the single-file line of ten identical black cars.

Kennedy’s own story intersects with that of Pennsylvania Avenue — or runs along with it, flows with it — at these two moments in time: January 1961, November 1963. Two historic crossings, also, in the story of the country: a national celebration, a national catastrophe; a snapshot of a man’s life as a journey — up and down — a single American street.

Pennsylvania Avenue was originally designed, as the President’s Council confirmed in their report, as the preeminent site for such things. It had been imagined for the historic highs and lows in the life of the nation. By 1963, for more than 150 years already, the Avenue had shared in presidential inaugurations and birthdays, military reviews, victory marches, and state funerals. It was at one time proposed that the sidewalks along the Avenue be built up in a multi-leveled stadium style, so that citizen-spectators might have a better view of the processions. Pennsylvania Avenue has borne witness, as the Council put it, to “a pageant of the history of the Nation.”

And though the report made no mention of such things, Pennsylvania Avenue had also become the preeminent site for American protest. This identity has intensified since the 1960s, and up to December 31, 2016, a conservative estimate of the total distance logged by demonstrators between the White House and the Capitol would have taken them to the moon and back again, twice. More Americans, both in celebration of their government and in criticism of it, have walked that 1.2-mile stretch of road than any other byway in the country.

In its original eighteenth-century plans, Pennsylvania Avenue was designed to connect the president with the Congress; the long, straight road symbolically linked, and symbolically separated, the executive and legislative branches of government. The Avenue itself was a different kind of space. As the Council noted in 1964: “Along the Avenue the Government can be said to live with the people.”

In the spring of 1791, Major Pierre-Charles L’Enfant surveyed, plotted, planned, and then drew Federal City — a place of a 100 square miles that as of that September would be known as the City of Washington.

The Paris-born engineer chose a forested mound called Jenkin’s Hill, the highest point in what was still semi-wild country, as the place for a “Federal House” for the Congress. The mound “[stood] as a pedestal waiting for a monument,” he wrote to his patron, George Washington. From the hill, L’Enfant drew a long line, downhill, to a “Palace for the President,” at an emplacement of Washington’s own choosing. First on paper, then in space, Pennsylvania Avenue extended beyond both points — into Georgetown in the northwest, and into the waters of the Anacostia, an eastern branch of the Potomac, in the southeast. The most important stretch of road, however, was between the two future structures. “The grand avenue connecting both the Palace and the Federal House will be most magnificent and most convenient,” L’Enfant reported.

Construction on Pennsylvania Avenue began on April 14, 1792. Its existence preceded the groundbreaking on the Capitol by a year. The President’s House was not roofed until 1797, by which time the 1.2 miles of avenue had been cut through the dense alder shrubs. The Washington Monument, the third point of the triangle imagined by L’Enfant as the heart of his city — and initially conceived as an equestrian statue of George Washington — was not started until 1848.

L’Enfant had originally come to America not to create, but to destroy. He was the son of a Parisian artist, born August 2, 1754. His father painted military scenes dominated by horses, punctuated by distant steeples, peopled by flat military men in primary colors. He illustrated many of the great French victories of the age. Pierre-Charles L’Enfant trained as an artist and engineer, then joined the army. He sailed for America in 1777, one month before Lafayette. At the age of 23, he joined the American Revolution.

After the Revolution, L’Enfant stayed on, staging banquets in elaborate, temporary buildings he erected for special occasions in Philadelphia, the nation’s first capital. He was hired to remodel New York’s City Hall (later destroyed in 1812), a project that was supposed to create “something characteristically American.” The style was, in fact, continental and classical, but L’Enfant had sourced some local materials, like the American marble he used for certain chimneys.

In the spring of 1791, he was hired to design the new Federal City, and in March the Georgetown Weekly Ledger announced the arrival of “Major Longfont.” (The Frenchman’s name could vary wildly on the tip of Anglophones’ pens. George Washington rendered it occasionally as Lanfang. Other early announcements of his appointment called him “de l’Enfant,” bestowing nobility where there was none.)

L’Enfant was Washington’s architect only for a year. He was brilliant; he was also impossible. He fought with speculators, contradicted his superiors, disagreed violently about the size of the city’s sidewalks, about the conformation of private buildings to his precise plans. He sent a subordinate to raze an offending structure downtown. He hid his maps and plans. By March 1792, a month before construction began on Pennsylvania Avenue, L’Enfant had been relieved of his post. He died a pauper three decades later, in 1825, his role in the original design of the Federal City largely forgotten. He was buried on a friend’s farm in Maryland.

Throughout the history of the capital, Pennsylvania Avenue consistently came, and went, first. A dozen years after L’Enfant’s death, the first macadam — the latest in road-building technology — in the city was laid on the stretch of Pennsylvania between the President’s House and the Capitol. It then was the most expensive non-structure federal project ever undertaken. In 1845, the same stretch was replaced by cobblestone paving. After this, Congress didn’t pave anything else in the city; the District would have to pay for all the non-Pennsylvania-Avenue improvements. The stretch of road between the Capitol and the White House received the city’s first streetlights in 1842; for seven years it was the only street in town lit at night. And yet Pennsylvania Avenue always seemed to be only just hanging on. By the early twentieth century, the avenue was still sinking in mud, seasonally on the brink of being erased altogether by the floods of spring.

In April 1909, L’Enfant’s remains were exhumed from their quiet, unmarked grave. Historical interest, too, ebbs and flow. Congress wanted to give L’Enfant proper recognition; a new urban planning commission was reviving his plans for a democratic metropolis the likes of which the world had never seen.

D.H. Rhoades of the War Department carried out the operation. (Rhoades had, according to the Washington Evening Star, “supervised the exhumation of thousands of bodies.”) The War Department man found some pieces of a disintegrated coffin, and a few bones. It took an hour to move what was left of the delicate remains; they were placed in a strong new box, draped in an American flag, and sent back to Washington, where the casket traveled along 4th Street before turning onto and moving up the great arterial — Pennsylvania Avenue — where the flags were flying at half mast.

Generations of urban planners have tried to fix L’Enfant’s grand avenue, to reform, improve, change it. Pennsylvania Avenue, democracy’s great hypotenuse, has seemed to always balance what it could be, what it is, what it means and what it has meant. Citizens have seen many different things in those 1.2 miles, and by 1909 Americans were moving onto Pennsylvania Avenue in new ways.

Read Part Two of “Democracy Way” here.

Works cited

+ Elbert Peets, “Washington, Williamsburg, the Century of Progress, and Greendale” in City Planning Housing by Werner Hegemann (1937)
+ President’s Council on Pennsylvania Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue: A Report (1964)
+ J.J. Jusserand, With Americans of Past and Present Days (1916)
+ W.B. Bryan, A History of the National Capital (1914)
+ “Dug From Grave,” Evening Star, 23 April 1909; “Burial of L’Enfant,” Evening Star, 27 April 1909; “In a New Grave,” The Topeka State Journal, 28 April 1909

Originally published on January 19, 2017