In trawling about the Library of Congress’s picture collection, I came across another attempt to reimagine Capitol Hill. The changes being promulgated are truly radical and are worth looking at a little more closely – if only to hope that nothing of this nature is ever actually built.
Capitol Hill has, over the years, ‘grow’d like Topsy.’ Need for more office space or more books or whatever, has been greeted by finding the closest empty spot – or spot that can be emptied – and building a new building. For the first 100 years of the city, this worked fine. There was plenty of empty space to build in, and what few buildings did exist were easily torn down.
Around the beginning of the 20th Century, the city fathers began to realize that this unbridled growth was not particularly attractive, and that maybe some kind of plan should be used to guide the future changes made. The resulting document, called the McMillan plan, essentially looked back to Peter L’Enfant’s map of DC and tried to guide the city’s growth within the limits of the now over 100 year old document.
The results of this effort were mixed, but there is no doubt that the changes wrought in the past 100 years have been, by and large, in accord with L’Enfant’s plan – or, at least, do not do it too much violence.
Not that there have not been numerous attempts to do so. A 1941 map is well-known as trying to restructure Capitol Hill. Ironically, it did seek to implement some of the ideas L’Enfant had, but while also creating enormous roads that would have required the destruction of a large number of Capitol Hill homes.
Further damage was done with the building of the freeways, a process that was, thankfully, slowed and eventually halted, as the idea that cities and their road system existed entirely to speed people from their homes in the suburbs to their jobs in the city lost favor.
This hardly stopped people from making plans, and the Architectural Record of January 1963 shows a whole new way of thinking for Capitol Hill. Done by the famous architect Paul Rudolph, best known for his complicated brutalist structures, it imagined a Capitol Hill almost completely different from how we know it today.
Detail of Rudolph’s plan. The Supreme Court was to be moved to A. (Library of Congress)
Rudolph’s biggest issue with DC seems to have been that he felt that the Capitol – White House – Washington Monument triangle that defines DC today was not enough. He Wanted to elevate Maryland Avenue to be equal with Pennsylvania Avenue, partially by improving the road, but also by relocating the Supreme Court from its current spot behind the Capitol to a spot a mile southwest of it on Maryland Avenue.
Meanwhile, Capitol Hill around the Capitol itself was to be given a number of gates – presumably a throwback to old cities with walls and gates that allowed them to regulate who came in and who did not. These gates would be in walls that connected the various Capitol Hill buildings and would thus – along with a low building that sealed off the north end of the Capitol Grounds – essentially surround the Capitol. This would leave as the two main open approaches Pennsylvania Avenue NW , and Maryland Avenue SW.
In short, it was a radical reimaging of the city – and particularly Capitol Hill. While it is understandable that Randolph would seek to separate the Supreme Court from the Capitol, and also increase the space on which the main government buildings were sited, the whole thing basically took L’Enfant’s plan and destroyed it.
How seriously this plan was taken is impossible to say. Certainly, no element of it seems to have been built. While L’Enfant’s plan is hardly sacrosanct, no changes of this nature have been done to it.