Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (Hardcover)

by Scott W. Berg (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. To all those who have encountered the delights of driving in the District of Columbia—and subsequently suffered the distress of getting lost amid its oddly angled avenues—Berg (a teacher of nonfiction writing and literature at George Mason University) offers a welcome narrative of the man responsible: Pierre Charles L'Enfant. A French volunteer during the American Revolution, L'Enfant was asked by George Washington in 1791 to design a gleaming federal city, not on a hill but in a swamp. Suffering from constant interference, not least by Thomas Jefferson, and a nasty episode of credit-stealing by a rival surveyor, L'Enfant—something of an easily inflamed control-freak himself—persisted for 11 months before being dismissed. Still, his plan lived on, a monument to Enlightenment architectural principles and plotted with geometric regularity. Washington, D.C., as conceived by L'Enfant, would be the republican antithesis to the medieval, dirty warren of Paris; it would be a polis where the people's Congress would form the city's nexus—and what would become the White House was pointedly set off to the side. Berg performs sterling service in excavating this little-known story from the archives. Every tourist to the nation's capital, and every driver within it, will enjoy the ride. B&w illus., maps. (Feb. 13)
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From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Benjamin Forgey

On the rainy evening in March of 1791 when Maj. Pierre Charles L'Enfant arrived in the lively little port of Georgetown, few people besides the 36-year-old major himself had an inkling of the visionary enterprise he was about to undertake.

L'Enfant's instructions were limited. He was to make drawings of the territory selected two months earlier by President George Washington as a site for the new nation's capital city. But to say that L'Enfant interpreted this limited mandate broadly is to greatly understate the case.

Setting to the arduous work the very next day and continuing without letup into the summer, the veteran of America's Revolutionary War proceeded to lay out a city that was ambitious in scale, boldly imaginative in form and rich in symbolic reach. The city L'Enfant foresaw was, in effect, a complex, spacious urban stage upon which the promise of the new democracy could be born.

L'Enfant early on gained the impassioned support of Washington, for his plan reflected the first president's Federalist penchant for making the capital a bold embodiment of a strong central government. But the transplanted Frenchman, who preferred the Anglicized Peter to his given name Pierre, made many more enemies than friends during his brief stay on the national stage, including local landowners and the three commissioners Washington appointed to oversee the capital's development. Nor was Thomas Jefferson a fan of L'Enfant or his plan -- he distrusted big cities and had his own, more modest ideas about what the capital should be.

In the end, not even George Washington's support could save L'Enfant from the political entanglements of his time, and he received scant credit during his lifetime. He was pretty well forgotten by the time he died, in 1825, an impecunious 70-year-old guest at a Prince George's County plantation.

The story of the city's founding and its great plan -- disillusioning and inspirational by turns -- is a riveting tale that has been told before. But the life of L'Enfant has long needed a lively, thorough, fair-minded accounting, and this is precisely what it gets in Grand Avenues. Scott W. Berg, who teaches writing at George Mason University, has gifts for narrative exposition and vivid description, which serve him well throughout.

Early in the book, Berg is able to dismiss the tired myth of the federal district as a "swamp" without even using the word. "Wedged in the elbow of two rivers," he writes, "the undulating landscape offered considerable variety: fields of tobacco and corn, small forests of maple and black cherry and tulip poplar, waterside bluffs and patches of tidal marsh, all of it spotted with great Georgian homes made of brick and the smaller wooden structures of tenant farmers and slaves."

This, then, was the land that L'Enfant traveled day after day, his mind alive with the possibility of its transformation. How he got to such a point is a tale rich with improbability. He arrived on American soil in early 1777, one of many ambitious young Frenchmen who sought glory by coming to the aid of the rebellious American colonies. Though he was neither a soldier nor an engineer, he came here under both labels. Severely wounded during a brave if ill-advised assault on British fortifications in Savannah, he served seven largely undistinguished years in the Continental Army. But he had spent much of his youth in the vicinity of André Le Nôtre's dramatic royal gardens in Versailles, had been rigorously trained as an artist at the Royal Academy in Paris and had observed urban plans at work in that city. He also had the gift of making friends in high places -- most notably, the commanding general himself -- and was able to parlay these skills into a career so promising that, by the mid-1780s, he was sought out by the new nation's elite for many artistic and architectural commissions.

These years were preparation for the plan of the new capital city, the one indisputably great deed of L'Enfant's life. Washington chose L'Enfant for the job because he was uniquely qualified to do it, but the president was forced to accept the planner's resignation less than a year after the appointment. This is the core of Berg's story. He spends several chapters disentangling the "contagion of disorder and distrust" that enveloped L'Enfant and his plan. L'Enfant never was able to comprehend the political importance of the presidentially appointed commissioners, and he oversaw the dismantling of a house that intruded on the route of one of his grand avenues -- a house belonging to a wealthy, well-connected landowner.

More important, however, Berg leads us to understand just how basic the disagreements between L'Enfant and his antagonists were. L'Enfant spoke the language of a sophisticated, visionary urban planner in the European tradition. The commissioners simply did not understand this language. Furthermore, L'Enfant knew that only public expenditure -- entailing public borrowing -- could pay for what today we'd call the plan's infrastructure, thus assuring a healthy beginning for the capital. That idea, rooted in royalist Europe, ran against the grain in the politically disputatious and sectionally divided new republic.

But what glorious infrastructure! It took more than a century to build even a semblance of L'Enfant's brilliant dream, but the vision was strong enough -- and subtle enough -- to survive. Berg tells the story with appealing empathy and comes to a rousing -- and proper -- conclusion: L'Enfant's plan was "the first great artistic achievement that could truly be called 'American.' "

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st ed edition (February 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375422803
• ISBN-13: 978-0375422805
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #528,726 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Man With No Little Plan, April 2, 2007

By	Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Redemption of a Master Planner, April 10, 2007

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Remembering a forgotten man, May 12, 2007

By	Edward H. Utley "bigdogspotty" (Bethesda, Maryland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.