Add to Del.icio.us
Digg this Article
Add to Mixx
Pick the Monument and There’s a Story
The Jefferson Memorial sits quietly above the Tidal Basin, famously surrounded by the Japanese cherry trees, beloved by all. But what a ruckus it caused in the 1930s when it was built. Modern architects were in a snit over the classical design; the designer’s widow was having the vapors over tinkerings with her husband’s blueprint; and a group of ladies in Persian lamb coats were threatening to chain themselves to the cherry trees that were being uprooted to break ground.
Last summer’s debate over the design of the new World War II Memorial was hardly the first fuss about development on the Mall.
“Pick the monument and there’s a story,” says Don Alexander Hawkins, blue eyes twinkling. Even the cherry trees themselves were controversial. “The first bunch that was sent over in 1907 or so, they were all diseased. It was a diplomatic disaster.”
Hawkins, an architect with a shock of Leonard Bernstein hair, is the genial curator of Washington: Symbol and City, a new, permanent exhibit at the National Building Museum that explores the quirky evolution of our capital city and the forces that shaped its buildings, monuments, and neighborhoods. The wonderment is that anything was ever built here at all.
If the exhibit’s title rings familiar, it should. It’s been reprised from a show that ran from 1991 to 2001 and attracted more than a quarter of a million visitors. “Anyone who thinks they’ve seen it would have to have a long memory,” he laughs. Apart from a couple of objects, “everything is entirely new.”
Politics and Paris – Where They Fit in Our City’s Development
Politics have played a role in every aspect of the development of Washington. Take the Mall, for example.
You hear visitors gasp, Washington is so like Paris! Perhaps you think it yourself. “Washington does not look like Paris,” says Hawkins. “Paris looks like Washington. The street layouts, the boulevards in Paris, almost all of them were created in the 1850s. Washington was created in the 1790s.”
But it does have a French sensibility, thanks to the city’s original architect, Peter L’Enfant. (Please don’t call him Pierre. Though French by birth, Washington’s original architect preferred the English form of his name. “He wanted to be one of our guys,” says Hawkins.)
L’Enfant, who designed before concrete was invented, pictured a more bucolic Mall with embassies and theaters tucked into gardens along a grand, 400-foot-wide avenue lined with trees. Statues of heroes were envisioned here and there, although the only heroic event at the time had been the American Revolution.
However, L’Enfant was a fractious chap and was fired after a year, and the city was then too poor to do more than lay out his street pattern of circles and grids.
Washington Monument – A Drawn-Out Process.
Arguably the most iconic symbol of the city, the Washington Monument, was not in the original plans. “There was the idea before the city was even founded that there would be an equestrian statue of George Washington somewhere important,” says Hawkins.
In 1800 there was a proposal in Congress to erect a “mausoleum of American granite and marble, in pyramidal form 100-feet square at the base and of proportionate height,” it read. But the House and Senate disagreed on funding. By 1832, Congress was proposing that the first president be re-interred in a tomb in the Capitol. A catafalque was prepared, but the move was opposed by Washington’s family.
“It took them 50 years to decide that they’d build an obelisk where the monument is now,” says Hawkins.
It was not the simple, elegant column we so admire. A 600-foot obelisk, designed by Robert Mills, was to sit on a 200-foot circular-based temple, 100-feet high, and surrounded by 30 massive columns. Statues of various luminaries were to be placed around the perimeter, including a sculpture of Washington in a quadriga, a chariot, driving four horses.
The staggering costs of such a monument forced the design to be stripped back. “It ended up with just the obelisk,” says Hawkins. “And even that had sculptures on the face of it and symbols on it–faces, maybe a hundred feet above the ground, and bas-reliefs of important events in Washington’s life.”
While construction finally began in 1853, the design contretemps, funding problems, and controversy continued. “It was not until 22 years later, 1876, that the nation was more or less shamed into completing the monument,” says Hawkins.
Then There was Lincoln
“The Lincoln Memorial was a huge story for years,” says Hawkins. “It was really Grant who was the great hero at the end of the 19th century. Lincoln grew in stature as the stories about him took on a mythological element. But Grant was to have his memorial where Lincoln’s is now. The Memorial Bridge was going to be the Grant Memorial Bridge.”
Though there was some lobbying for a monument to Lincoln as early as 1867, “every step along the way there was a battle between the House, controlled by Joe Cannon, and the Senate over the location,” says Hawkins. The project was also plagued by arguments over funding and design. It wasn’t until 1910 that a bill for its construction was approved, and it was 22 years more before the memorial was finally open to the public.
And Now…
Washington: Symbol and City has models of five of the capital’s architectural icons, in a scale of 1:60. By contrast to the city behind bollards and barricades that we look at today, these intricately detailed replicas are accessible; built to be touched by tiny hands, the visually impaired, and visitors confined to wheelchairs. There’s the Capitol, the White House, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and, oh yes, the Jefferson Memorial.
There is a story, of course, to the end of that construction scuffle.
“When the ladies said, ‘We’re going to chain ourselves to the cherry trees,’ FDR, whose project it was, said, ‘Then we’re going to transplant the trees with the ladies chained to them in the farthest reaches of our national parks,’ ” says Hawkins with a last laugh. “It was a fairly genteel battle.”
