In his plans, L'Enfant connected the Capitol to the President's House by a mile-long avenue

L'Enfant: the stubborn genius who designed Washington

May 22, 2000
Web posted at: 12:57 p.m. EDT (1657 GMT)

In this story: 'Make no little plans' Stubbornness interfered Died in poverty RELATED SITES

WASHINGTON (AP) -- To put it simply, the man was exasperating. Maj. Pierre Charles L'Enfant, military engineer turned city planner was self-righteous, hot-headed, imperious, unreasonable, arrogant, scornful of authority and quick to take offense.

It took a century to make clear he was also a genius.

As chief designer of the new national capital, L'Enfant quickly antagonized the three commissioners in charge of making sure the place got built. When they complained, he alienated his principal supporters, including George Washington, who reluctantly fired him.

He spent the rest of his life dunning Congress for back pay, as lean and ragged as the dog that trailed him through the streets.

When L'Enfant died in poverty in 1825 his obituary called him "an interesting but eccentric gentleman."

Most people supposed that was the end of Pierre L'Enfant.

Born in Paris into a family of artists, L'Enfant arrived in America in 1777, the year he turned 23. After service in the Revolutionary War as an engineer, he attracted the attention of the new country's leaders by designing Federal Hall in New York City. And when a design was needed for an entirely new federal city to be built on a 10-mile square on the banks of the Potomac River, L'Enfant was ready.

He had a vision of what an American capital could be, a forerunner to the motto, "Make no little plans."

"No nation perhaps had ever before the opportunity offered them of deliberately deciding on the spot where their capital city should be fixed ...," L'Enfant wrote President Washington in 1789.

"And altho' the means now within the power of the country are not such as to pursue the design to any great extent it will be obvious that the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue at any period however remote."

That translated to a radiating sweep of broad avenues intersected by a grid of north-south streets and punctuated by circles and squares ready to accept the monuments of future national heroes.

The vision was as poetic as architectural. L'Enfant placed the Capitol on prosaically named Jenkins Hill, finding in its shape "a pedestal awaiting a monument."

He connected the Capitol to the President's House by a mile-long avenue, leaving plenty of room for parkland and cascades of water.

Washington was confident "that for projecting public works and carrying them into effect he was better qualified than anyone who had come within my knowledge in this country, or indeed in any other."

The problem, the president said, was that L'Enfant would brook no interference with his ideas, accept no alteration of his plans.

So when Daniel Carroll, one of the largest and most influential landowners in the new District of Columbia started to take his orders from the commissioners, L'Enfant repeatedly made clear he would not do it.

In the end, the city went on without him, generally following the plan he had made.

With his plans rolled under his arms for instant display, L'Enfant fruitlessly lobbied Congress for redress of ancient wrongs.

When he died, living on the charity of friends, his personal effects were valued at $44.

Some people started calling the city L'Enfant had designed as "the city of magnificent distances." When Charles Dickens visited in 1844 he amended that to "the city of magnificent intentions" marked by "spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere." It was designed, he noted, "by an aspiring Frenchman."

By the time the 20th century neared, it was clear that the city did not match the achievements and aspirations of the country.

But when architects and engineers and artists went to work to transform Washington into "the city beautiful," they found their guide and inspiration already spelled out in the plans L'Enfant had drawn a century before.

L'Enfant's stock was high. A movement started to give the major national recognition.

In the spring of 1909 L'Enfant's remains were removed from the garden of the house in Maryland where they had rested since 1825. They were reinterred with military honors on the hillside at Arlington National Cemetery overlooking the radiating avenues and circles and squares L'Enfant had designed.

"Few men can afford to wait a hundred years to be remembered," Secretary of State Elihu Root said when a permanent memorial was dedicated two years later.

"It is not a change in L'Enfant that brings us here," he said. "It is we who have changed, who have become able to appreciate his work. And our tribute to him should be to continue his work."

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

The L'Enfant Plan of 1791
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