The City Shaped by Rivers It Mostly Covered Up

Washington sits at the confluence of two rivers and was shaped by several more that most visitors never see. The Potomac forms the southwestern boundary of the District, wide and tidal by the time it reaches the city, draining a watershed that extends deep into the Appalachians. The Anacostia joins it from the east, splitting the city in two in ways that have never been purely geographic.

The streams that ran through the interior of the original city are mostly gone now, buried under streets and neighborhoods. Tiber Creek, which L'Enfant had planned to make a navigable canal, ran roughly along what is now Constitution Avenue before emptying into the Potomac near the Mall. The Washington City Canal, built between eighteen ten and eighteen fifteen, connected the Anacostia to the Tiber, running along what is now the National Mall, with a branch extending north. It was intended to be the commercial artery of the capital.

It was not a success. The canal was shallow, prone to flooding, and carried the city's sewage by the eighteen forties. Congress debated its elimination for decades before Alexander Shepherd's urban renovation began covering it over in eighteen seventy-one, a process that continued in stages into the early twentieth century and was part of the same project that bankrupted the District government.

The Anacostia River, which flows through the eastern portions of the city, was historically one of the most polluted urban rivers in the United States, the result of a century of industrial discharge, sewage overflow, and runoff from the expanding suburbs. A cleanup effort that began seriously in the nineteen nineties has made measurable progress. Bald eagles were spotted nesting along the Anacostia in the two thousand tens for the first time in a century.

The Potomac, meanwhile, was dead as far as fish were concerned by the nineteen sixties. President Lyndon Johnson called it a national disgrace in nineteen sixty-five. The Clean Water Act of nineteen seventy-two turned it around. It is now considered one of the most successful large river restorations in American history.