L'Enfant's Plan and His Disgrace

Every time you walk one of Washington's diagonal avenues, Pennsylvania or Massachusetts or Connecticut, crossing the grid at an angle no other American city quite replicates, you are walking the plan of a man who was fired in disgrace and died in poverty. His name was Pierre Charles L'Enfant.

L'Enfant was a French-born engineer and architect who had served under Washington during the Revolution. In seventeen ninety-one, President Washington asked him to design the federal city. L'Enfant delivered a grand Baroque scheme, diagonal boulevards overlaid on a grid, radiating circles, a central axis from the Capitol to the Potomac, open vistas designed to make the capital feel like the seat of a continental republic rather than a provincial town. The plan was visionary and, on its own terms, remarkably close to what eventually got built.

The problem was L'Enfant himself. He refused to release his plans to the city commissioners who needed them to proceed with construction. He demolished the house of a wealthy landowner that encroached on one of his planned avenues without authorization or warning. He feuded with the commissioners over everything from his salary to his authority. George Washington, who had championed him, lost patience.

L'Enfant was dismissed in February seventeen ninety-two, less than a year into the project. He left without turning over his drawings. His surveyor, Andrew Ellicott, reconstructed the plan from memory and completed the layout of the city. L'Enfant spent the next three decades seeking compensation from Congress for his work, receiving almost nothing. He died in eighteen twenty-five, living on the charity of friends.

Congress reinterred his remains at Arlington in nineteen oh nine, on the hill above the cemetery, with a view of the city he designed. The city had carried his plan for over a century before it thought to honor the man.