8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Man With No Little Plan, April 2, 2007
This review is from: Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (Hardcover)
Urban planners, landscape architects, those with an interest in early American history, and citizens within the influence of the orbit of the Beltway will especially enjoy this tale of the design of the District of Columbia.
Present day Washington is a strikingly beautiful capital city due in large part to the initial work and imagination of a difficult immigrant, Major L'Enfant. Along the way and over time, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Grant, and Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. all played significant roles in this great and continuing project.
While the flow of the narrative slows somewhat at mid-book as a result of too much concern over the details of the Major L'Enfant's arguments with the new city's three commissioners, the book finishes strongly as the author quickly traces the fitful implementation of the city's plan through to about the time of the reburial of the remains of Major L'Enfant at Arlington in 1909.
A very good first book by Mr. Berg. I expect he will write many more.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Redemption of a Master Planner, April 10, 2007
This review is from: Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (Hardcover)
Whatever you think about the shenanigans within Washington, D.C., you have to admit that the city itself is a collection of buildings some of which are remarkable in themselves, and all of which are arranged along roads that are beautifully laid out. Washington is a planned city, as any view of an overhead picture or map will show, with its fine Mall flanked with important cultural artifacts and its regular grid of streets overlaid with diagonals and radiations from the Capitol and White House. The planning was done by Pierre Charles L'Enfant, and architects and city planners agreed that his design was a brilliant one. The problem is that they agreed on this in 1900, 75 years after L'Enfant had died. L'Enfant had his successes; after Lafayette, he was the most famous of the French who assisted us in our war for independence. He certainly had architectural and surveying talent, and a keen eye for big plans. He was, however, a prickly character whose lack of tact and inability to sympathize with the viewpoints of others made the big plans impossible for him to achieve in his lifetime. _Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C._ (Pantheon), by Scott W. Berg, holds the story of this ambitious and talented artist who was in his lifetime a failure largely because of his personality defects.
L'Enfant, along with many other young Frenchmen, sought glory on the battlefield, and sailed in 1776 to help the Americans. He served at Valley Forge where he had the opportunity to meet and become friends with many of the Founding Fathers. He met George Washington and painted his picture. He illustrated a book of regulations and discipline for the army, but he was not confined to an artist's desk. He saw action in Savannah and Charleston, and got an honorable wound in the leg that bothered him ever after. Through a series of famous compromises after the war, the general site of the nation's capital on the Potomac was agreed, but not the precise location. Washington asked L'Enfant to survey an almost empty area east of Georgetown and identify locales for the main buildings. Seized with ambition, the Frenchman took up the survey in 1791, and in less than three months had drawn up a plan that went far beyond what Washington had expected, although the president was pleased with the design. L'Enfant further refined it to a schedule of building, and numbering one thousand workman who were to descend on the area for four years to produce the finished city. It did not happen that way. L'Enfant, for all his ambition and talent, was no politician. He managed to offend almost everyone connected to the project, including his last and best defender, President Washington himself. His inability to get along with all the others involved meant that he was fired the year after he began his work. His post was taken over by his chief surveyor who changed some of the details, and his plan was published without L'Enfant's name on it (an omission that Washington tried but failed to correct).
L'Enfant was never paid for the work he had done, and his life thereafter (he died in 1825) was mere beggary, although one family took him on as a sort of lost elder and kept a roof over his head. Berg shows that L'Enfant's plans may have been quixotic, but that if they had been financed at the time, they could have been accomplished for a fraction of the cost of doing them later. "Later" turned out to be 1900, when L'Enfant's plan was championed by (among others) the son of Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park in New York. His presentation to the American Institute of Architects sparked a re-interest in the original design, and two years later, there was an exhibit of models and paintings of how the city could look if L'Enfant's plan were instituted. L'Enfant's meager remains were dug up and in 1909 they were honored by lying in state at the Capitol, before being reburied at Arlington Cemetery. More than a century after his quarrels with others had led to his ouster and discredit, his talent had been allowed to get him a postmortem redemption. Berg's fascinating review of the historical record of long-forgotten agreements and misunderstandings lets the redemption continue.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Remembering a forgotten man, May 12, 2007
This review is from: Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (Hardcover)
This is an interesing story of how the basic plan for Washington, D. C. was formed. Pierre L'Enfant, a major in the Revolutionary Army worked with George Washington himself in the original design. L'Enfant was the graduate of excellent design schools in Paris, and he had been trained by his father. He had to fight off the influence of Thomas Jefferson the opponent of Washington and Hamilton in this project. His tenure on the project was short. Politics and land speculation was what really drove the process, little changed from today. A brilliant and far-seeing man who after this brief tenure died pretty much alone and unheralded. His work and his place in history was resurected about 1900. A well written and interesting account that meshes well with other biographical works of the era.
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