Make No Little Plans; Part II Developing the Old East End (2/24/2017)
There was no relaxation at the Capitol Crossing construction site while you were away. In my last Construction Note, I mentioned that BBC/PGP planned the topping off ceremony a few days before the building was actually topped off in order to permit as many employees as possible to join the celebration. When the building was actually topped off on January 31, Mackenzie Delaney from the BBC team and I climbed the stairs and secured a pine branch to the crane mast above the roof of the building — a symbolic representation of the tree that often is hoisted to the building’s top when the final section of a concrete roof is poured. You can see the branch attached to the crane in the picture below.
Concrete for the mechanical penthouse atop the roof of 200 Massachusetts Avenue is being poured. Once the concrete crews have finished, the superstructure will be complete and the now familiar tower crane will come down. A second crane will then rise as construction begins on 250 Massachusetts Avenue. These crane events will occur around the end of February or in early March.
Much of the current work is taking place inside 200 Massachusetts Avenue and is thus, invisible to passersby. Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing features are being installed and ductwork to carry the air though the building is rising. It is difficult to describe all of the complexity and intricacies of a building’s interior features. For example, two air handling units will occupy each floor of the building. They are responsible for circulating fresh air and removing stale air from each floor. It is interesting to note that there are very stringent acoustical requirements for this project. The air flowing though these air handlers cannot disturb the occupants. In order to confirm that the units will run almost silently, the BBC team flew to Houston where the units are fabricated to witness the acoustical tests. Fortunately, the units passed the test. The grease-duct riser shown below provides another example of the complexity of the equipment. It is part of an exhaust system that will serve the building’s future kitchens. Because air coming from the kitchen is very hot, kitchen grease can ignite, causing a fire. To minimize the danger, the risers are wrapped with fire-wrap insulation. It would be rare for a fire to start but if it did, the fire-wrap would provide an additional measure of protection and will prevent the fire from spreading outside of the grease- duct. There are many of these soon to be invisible safety features associated with the project. I will be writing about them in future Construction Notes.
As you walk along Massachusetts Avenue toward 3rd and 4th Streets, you can watch the crews drive pile and set lagging boards for the garage. You can also see that the western section of the new highway entry ramp on Massachusetts Avenue is also taking form. The portal soldier beams and lagging boards are in place and the concrete roadway is being poured. When the portal is completed in April, the old entrance ramp on 3rd Street will be demolished, permitting the excavation of the remainder of the garage. Work is also continuing on the platform. The topping slab has been poured on most of the center block, and work continues on the East Concourse.
As I mentioned in an earlier Construction Note, the city of Washington was born as a speculator’s paradise and continued to be so throughout its history. Since the city was established, buying and selling land has been the “chief pursuit of those who take risks in order to gain financial rewards”. (Lewis, See Sources below) Speculation, however, is often accompanied by greed, unfulfillable dreams, pride and conflict, deception and corruption. Pierre L’Enfant was fired after his pride made him reject design changes that clashed with the Commissioners’ needs to sell lots. L’Enfant was a difficult man. Indeed, prior to his termination, he cavalierly razed the mansion being built by the powerful Daniel Carrol of Duddington because it lay upon the land L’Enfant had laid out as New Jersey Avenue S.E. When Carroll protested, Washington could no longer retain his favorite designer and L’Enfant was fired. Soon thereafter, he became destitute and died in poverty in 1825. James Greenleaf, Robert Morris, Daniel Carroll, and other of the early land speculators went bankrupt and some were even sent to the debtor’s prison. The various lawsuits against Greenleaf did not end until 1853, ten years after his death. Petty squabbles among the Congress, the Federal District, Maryland, and Virginia, often over money, were as acrimonious at the District’s founding as they are today. Loans were difficult to obtain and government appropriations were sporadic. George Washington, a successful speculator himself, noted in a letter in 1799 that the city was on a passage “through [an] ordeal of local interest, destructive jealousies, and inveterate prejudices.”(Lewis, See Sources below) But the President, like Daniel Burnham much later, believed in “making no little plans,” because little plans have “no magic to stir men’s blood.” Despite years of setbacks, Washington’s dream for a city that stood as a noble and powerful statement of government by the people prevailed and the Federal City grew in population and importance. Sadly, he did not live to see it. Shortly after he penned his letter decrying the obstructions he encountered, Washington died, leaving the City to President John Adams and a Territorial population of 3,210, many of whom were enslaved. Fewer than 400 buildings, mostly modest wooden structures, existed within the entire 5,000 acres of the Territory of Columbia.
I have written about the development in general in an earlier Construction Note, Make No Little Plans I, December 15, 2016, https://medium.com/construction-notes/make-no-little-plans-12-15-16-2aff3cf2f83#.ltrklbhgs; http://www.law.georgetown.edu/campus-services/facilities/construction-info/index.cfm. In this one I focus specifically on our neighborhood, the East End. The area George Washington selected for the nation’s capital was originally owned by nineteen proprietors. Much of the land upon which our neighborhood sits was called Bealls Levels. It was so named by an early Scottish immigrant landowner, named Ninian Beall (1625–1717). Beall fought for King Charles II in his wars with Oliver Cromwell. When Charles lost the Battle of Dunbar, Beall was captured by Cromwell’s forces and sent as a captive laborer to Barbados and then brought to Maryland as an indentured servant. He prospered in Maryland after he served his indenture, and grew to be one of the largest landowners in the area. Beall’s Levels stretched from Georgetown to what is now Union Station.
I have done no research about the area after Beall died, but I believe his heirs must have sold some of the land within Bealls Levels to Benjamin Oden (1762–1836). Oden was a business agent and landowner in Princes Georges County, Maryland. From his home plantation, Bellefields, and from a store he owned in Upper Marlboro, Oden grew wealthy and speculated in land, banking, and tobacco. He also sold and managed slaves. At the time George Washington arranged the land sales with the nineteen original proprietors, Oden owned most of the East End and all of the land where Capitol Crossing and the Law Center are situated. The Tiber Creek was the eastern boundary of his land which ran from K Street to roughly C Street. His land definitely included the area that is now Union Station and it may have stretched down to Pennsylvania Avenue close to the Capitol. You can learn more about Oden in the Oden Family Papers at the Maryland Historical Society.
A small portion of what would become the East End was owned by the notoriously cantankerous David Burnes. The eastern part of Burnes’ property stretched to 6th Street, N.W. in its northern portion, and as far as 2nd Street, N.W. farther south at Constitution Avenue. Most of his land, however, was destined to become the sites of the White House, the Treasury, and the Mall. Burnes had signed the 1791 agreement reluctantly and did not rush to relinquish his land, especially that part of the land that was destined to be the grand Pennsylvania Avenue. His stubbornness stemmed from the fact that the proprietors received no compensation for land they transferred to the government if it was designated for boulevards and streets. Burnes objected to that arrangement and so continued to grow his crops on the land despite the Commissioners’ pleas to relinquish it. It was only after his death in 1799 that the developers gained control of all of Burnes’ former holdings. Burnes’ original cottage, however, was maintained by his wealthy daughter and his descendants. It stood at 17th Street and Constitution Avenue, N.W. until 1894.
The Early 1800s
At the start of the nineteenth century, development moved forward slowly as the city suffered from “incompetent city planning and blatant federal indifference.” (Dickey, See Sources below) While the rest of America grew, the population of Washington remained small, rarely growing by more than a thousand people a year. A few houses existed on North Capitol Street and the Sewall-Belmont house, built in 1800, was close to the East End but not in it. That house is one of the oldest residential properties in the District and is still standing at 2nd Street and Constitution Avenue, N.E.
A notable area of development in our neighborhood was Judiciary Square. The Square, between Indiana Avenue and G Street, N.W., was chosen by L’Enfant to be the site of the federal judiciary. When the Commissioners surveyed the buildings in the Square in 1801, however, they found only wooden shanties housing Irish laborers who worked in the city and dormitories for slaves hired to work on the Capitol. There was a small hospital on 5th and E Streets and “an old barn or tobacco house” (Stanley, See Sources below) that served as a makeshift, temporary prison near 4th and G Streets. Seeing the lack of federal buildings, the Commissioners decided to have a city jail erected in the Square in 1802, just north of E Street.
When Lafayette returned to Washington in 1824, only ten years after the British had laid it to the torch, he found a city growing like it hadn’t before. A new City Hall, designed by George Hadfield, graced Judiciary Square. The cornerstone for City Hall, still one of the finest examples of Greek Revival architecture in Washington, was laid on August 22, 1820, during a modest cornerstone ceremony. At the ceremony, local resident John Law spoke about his nearly thirty years of living in Washington, painting a picture of the great change the District had seen in a relatively short time. Law described a city of only 500 people when he arrived in 1796, a city where he walked to school in solitude through a “city of forests and streams.” (Proctor, Sunday Star, See Sources) Less than three decades later, he marveled at the growing population — now nearly 14,000 — and the more than $6,000,000 in expanding properties, of which City Hall was representative. Although the City Hall was occupied by 1822, a shortage of funds delayed the completion of one of its wings until 1849. During this same period, however, a Center Market was established at Pennsylvania Avenue and 7th Street, N.W. and the Northern Liberty Market was operating at the intersection of Massachusetts and New York Avenues, N.W. New streets were being paved to the north, providing better access to Baltimore and other markets and port towns in Maryland. The land east of New Jersey Avenue and north of D Street, however, remained largely rural and undeveloped.
Meanwhile, the area around Judiciary Square and to its east was becoming a real but somewhat raucous neighborhood. By 1820, the area between 5th Street N.W. and North Capitol Street and from E to roughly H — our neighborhood — had become known as “English Hill.” The name was given to distinguish it from nearby “Irish Hill” later called Swampoodle. Irish Hill’s boundaries were fluid, but were roughly between North Capitol Street and 3rd Street, N.E. and between D and K Streets. N.E. Ironically, English Hill was settled by mostly poor Irish families who were similar to those in Irish Hill. It was a rough neighborhood of weeds and gravel sidewalks with one prominent fixture, the hated Ace of Diamonds that stood at 4th and G Streets, N.W. The Ace was a gambling and drinking house of ill repute that was so unwelcome it may have been purposely burned down by some irate neighbors.
1830s, 40s, and 50s
By the 1830s, Irish Hill had morphed into the neighborhood of Swampoodle, notorious as an “Irish slum.” Long gone was the cluster of shanties in Judiciary Square. But the poor neighborhoods were growing at a rate that merited a new jail, built in 1838, and a public school built in 1845, both in the Square. East End residents during this era were mostly middle class and poor workers and merchants with a handful of more notable figures among them, including a few City Council members. Development northeast along the Tiber Creek, however, was still sparse and the people living there tended to be the city’s poorest citizens. Cows and pigs roamed English Hill, Swampoodle, and other poor neighborhoods, and notorious gangs, some of them members of rival fire brigades, frequently disturbed the peace of the “better” citizens. As an aside, a former student of mine in Georgetown’s Juvenile Justice Clinic is a direct descendant of one of those early Swampoodle settlers.
Artist: Augustus Kollner, 1813–1906 (Library of Congress)
Despite this population growth, the construction of stately houses that many of the “better” citizens desired in the East End was still slow to develop. Public Buildings Commissioner John Blake attributed this problem to the jail, where passersby were frequently treated to “profane and vulgar language [by the prisoners] that offended the moral sense of the whole neighborhood.” (Stanley, See Sources below) Although slats were placed over the windows of the jail in 1858, Blake’s attempts to have the jail moved entirely to the outskirts of town were unsuccessful. It would stand in the Square until 1878.
New public buildings rose at the western edges of the East End in the 1830s. A new Post Office was built at 7th and E Streets, N.W. and a new Patent Office was erected at 7th and F Streets, N.W. Today those buildings house the Monaco Hotel and Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum. Private development also occurred as more residents from the upper classes moved into the East End. Stately houses began popping up along Judiciary Square in the second half of the 1830s and boarding houses were built in English Hill.
One of the individuals who helped spur development was Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
In 1851, when he was about to enter his second term in the Senate, Douglas bought land on each side of I Street, N.W. between New Jersey Avenue and 3rd Street and built his first home in the area. Four years later, he built another located at 205 I Street, N.W. Soon after, Senator Henry M. Rice of Minnesota, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, and other prominent members of the District community built their own houses on the lots adjoining Douglas’ property. After the Civil War, Generals Grant and Sherman also settled in what became known as “Douglas Row.”
By 1852, Blagden Row at 3rd and D Streets, N.W. was one of the city’s most elegant residential neighborhoods. Five four-story buildings were erected in 1852. Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney, the infamous author of the Dred Scott decision, resided there. A Freemason Hall that housed inaugural balls for Presidents Andrew Jackson and William Henry Harrison stood on John Marshall Place. Presidents Jackson, Polk, and Pierce attended First Presbyterian Church erected in 1827, while President Grant and Justice Salmon Chase worshipped at Metropolitan Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church built in 1869, both on John Marshall Place. While not praying, they may have spent their nights at the New Washington Theater erected at 5th and Indiana Avenue, N.W., currently the site of the I. Carl Moultrie Court House. Another of President Harrison’s inaugural balls was held at the Washington Theater.
While Douglas and his friends were developing I Street, Cornelius Wendell Wickersham sparked development on H Street when, in 1856, he built the Government Printing Office on the southwest corner of North Capitol and H Streets, N.W. A year later, likely because of the Printing Office, H Street was graded and graveled for the first time from New Jersey Avenue to North Capitol Street. Meanwhile, English Hill and Swampoodle benefited from the new means of transportation that were creeping into the District. The railroad came to Washington in 1835 when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad opened for service at 2nd Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. In 1851, the B&O opened a station at New Jersey Avenue and C Street, N.W., now the site of the Japanese-American Memorial. It was a charming Italianate style building which would remain in operation until Union Station opened in 1907. Abraham Lincoln arrived at this station when he snuck into the city to assume the Presidency. It was also the station from which his funeral cortege departed after his assassination. Some historians believe that given the number of residents living in the area in the 1850s, a small, local bus line may have existed to help residents get to and from work. If so, it would have been the precursor of a streetcar line that would serve H Street in the 1870s.
Civil War Era
During the Civil War, Washington was suddenly a city of strategic importance. The capital was a coveted prize in the eyes of the Confederates, and the Union moved to defend it when the southern states began to secede. When President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in 1861, Confederate sympathizers across the city had their houses searched and their property confiscated. Others were sent to prison — some to the prison on Judiciary Square at G and 4th Streets, N.W. The city’s population grew dramatically during the War and more government buildings and houses were erected. Boarding houses and homes along C Street between 1st and 4th Streets, N.W. housed the likes of Millard Fillmore, John Calhoun, Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, John Fremont, and Thomas Hart Benton, either before or after the War. Poor whites and disabled veterans, recent immigrants, and free and contraband African Americans also flocked to the city and occupied rough and overcrowded houses to the northeast of the Capitol Crossing. Land values in our area remained among the lowest in the city because of the swamps and marshes flooded by the Tiber Creek.
The original jail that had been built on Judiciary Square by the Commissioners in 1802 had been converted into a hospital after the new jail was built in 1838. That hospital was now called the Washington Infirmary and was used as a war hospital at the start of the Civil War. However, the hospital became so overcrowded and overused in 1861 that a fire started and it burned to the ground in November. In 1862, the U.S. General Hospital was built in the middle of Judiciary Square as a replacement to serve the soldiers throughout the War. Casualties were high during the War and another hospital was built across from Douglas Row. It was during this period that the East End below 7th Street N.W. and along Massachusetts Avenue began to develop. Part of that story was told in earlier Construction Notes Who Lived Here Before Us, parts I — April 24, 2016, and II — May 19, 2016 http://www.law.georgetown.edu/campus-services/facilities/construction-info/index.cfm and more of it will be told in later Construction Notes about the Jewish, German, and Italian immigrants who came here. Still, the Bosch Map of 1861 shows few buildings in our part of the East End.
The Depot’s clock tower can be discerned in the lower center along the dirt road. (Library of Congress)
End of the 19th Century
Following the Civil War and during Reconstruction, the English Hill and Swampoodle neighborhoods remained mainly residential, but with some small shops and businesses. In the 1870s, Boss Shepherd brought roads, streetlights, and sewers to the neighborhood, and by 1877, most of the Tiber Creek was enclosed in a sewer. Immigrants poured into the neighborhood in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s. The Sachse Map below shows buildings on most of the lots in our part of the East End. A growing community of Italians formed alongside the Irish community, and the influx of Jewish immigrants was marked by the construction of Washington’s oldest synagogue, Adas Israel, completed in 1876 at 6th and G Streets, N.W. The Jesuits built St. Aloysius Church at North Capitol and I Streets, N.W. in 1859, and Gonzaga High School moved next to it in 1881.
Nearby, the Swampoodle Grounds, with its home plate at the corner of North Capitol Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was home of the Washington Nationals the from 1886 to 1889. The M Street School was completed in 1891 at M and 1st Streets, N.W., becoming the first school for black students constructed with public funds. The Gales School, northeast of the Law Center on Massachusetts Avenue, was built for white children in 1881 and was named after Joseph Gales, Jr., Washington, D.C.’s eighth mayor. It is now the home of the Central Union Mission.
In 1882, on the north side of Judiciary Square, workers broke ground for the Pension Office Building designed by General Montgomery C. Meigs, an unsung hero of the Civil War and one of my favorite Civil War officers. Drawing inspiration from the Farnese Palace in Florence, Italy, Meigs designed a building that was grand on the inside but was accused of having a “barnlike appearance” on the outside. Despite this criticism, the Pension Office Building was chosen as the location for President Cleveland’s inaugural ball on March 4, 1885; Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft would follow suit in later years. Used as government offices for decades, today this building houses the National Building Museum. A distinctive frieze above the first floor, sculpted by Caspar Buberl, depicts different Civil War military and medical components, 1,300 individual figures, and scenes depicting various supply functions.
That is not surprising since Meigs was Lincoln’s Quartermaster General during the War. In that capacity, he eliminated corruption from the Quartermaster’s Office and made sure Grant’s troops were well-supplied with food, uniforms, weapons, and boots. He also built Washington D.C.’s first water distribution system, parts of which are still in use today.
Finally, Georgetown Law School was established in 1870. The law school was born in the East End and has never left the downtown. We occupied five different buildings between 41/2 Street and 15th Street, N.W. before we settled at New Jersey Avenue and F Street in 1971. Pictures of all of the buildings can be viewed at the F Street entrance to McDonough Hall. Our former building at 5th and E Streets, N.W. was the first we actually owned. The turn of the century was the era of the Gilded Age, of Daniel Burnham, and of architectural grandeur and engineering advances. At the time the Law School building at 5th and E Streets opened, it was a model of Romanesque Revival architecture and modern engineering design. At the end of its life, it was fondly called the E Street warehouse because it had deteriorated so badly. It was then that the Law Center moved to what is now a seven-acre campus with five separate buildings. You can see the arch from the E Street Building entrance on the east wall of the Law Center’s G Street Green.
Like Burnham, Georgetown’s then dean, Paul Regis Dean, made no little plans. The deans that followed have adhered to that precept. There are many stories to tell about those
buildings and about the students, staff, and faculty members that brought renewed life to the East End and set the stage for the Capitol Crossing Project. You can read more about them in 1870 to 1995 — The First 125 Years, An Illustrated History of Georgetown University law Center and in Construction Notes, Transforming a Campus in Washington, D.C.
Wally Mlyniec
SOURCES
Meghan Strong, L’18, provided significant research and writing for this Construction Note.
Tim Bandel from BBC provided some technical research.
Samuel Clagett Busey, Pictures of the City of Washington in the Past, (Wm. Ballantyne & Sons, Washington, D.C., 1898).
Harvey W. Crew, William B. Webb, and John Wooldridge; Centennial History of the City of Washington D.C. (United Brethren Publishing House, Dayton, Ohio 1892), appearing in Washington, D.C. Genealogy Trails. http://genealogytrails.com/washdc/books/cenhistchp5.html
J.D. Dickey, Empire of Mud, (Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2014).
Buildings of the District of Columbia, Downtown East Chapter, Antoinette J. Lee (p. 178–203 in Pamela Scott & Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia, (Oxford University Press, 1993).
Douglas E. Evelyn and Paul Dickson, On This Spot, Pinpointing the Past in Washington, D.C. (3rd Ed. 2008).
Tom Lewis, Washington, A History of Our National City, (Basic Books 2015).
Iris Miller, Washington in Maps, 1606–2000 (Rizzoli International Publications 2002).
Wallace Mlyniec, Construction Notes, Transforming a Campus in Washington, D.C. (On This Spot Publishers 2006).
David Mould and Missy Loewe, Remembering Georgetown, A History of the Lost Port City, (History Press 2009). https://books.google.com/books?id=zhd_CQAAQBAJ&pg=PT14&lpg=PT14&dq=Why+was+it+called+Bealls+Levels&source=bl&ots=ihnE-XBL_O&sig=yFnZklWVVGCeqYwD6mwJuvKjYfY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjLk63P0YvSAhXG7YMKHd0VAOA4ChDoAQgeMAE#v=onepage&q=Why%20was%20it%20called%20Bealls%20Levels&f=false
Joseph Passenneau, Washington through Two Centuries, A History in Maps and Images, (Monacelli Press 2004).
John Clagett Proctor, Proctor’s Washington, written for The Washington Sunday Star (1928–1949), 1949.
John Clagett Proctor, English Hill: On the District’s Oldest Sections” The Washington Sunday Star (Mar. 8, 1936).
Joan H. Stanley, Judiciary Square, Washington D.C.: National Park Service Administrative Report, 1968.
John Stewart, “Early Maps and Surveyors of the City of Washington, D.C.,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., Vol. 2 (1899).
The District of Columbia City Hall, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_City_Hall
Early History and First Congregations, The Virtual Jewish World, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/washington-d-c-jewish-history
Histories of the National Mall, http://mallhistory.org/items/show/94
Oden Papers, 1755–1836, Maryland Historical Society, noted in Beyond the Battle of Bladensburg, http://beyondthebattleofbladensburg.blogspot.com/2013/05/blue-eyed-slave-runs-away-from.html
Our History, Holy Rosary Church, http://www.holyrosarychurchdc.org/about-holy-rosary/our-history/
Swampoodle Grounds, Where the Washington National Played During 1886–1889, The White House Historical Association, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/photo-1-78
Timeline of Washington, D.C. Railroad History, National Railway Historical Society, Washington DC Chapter, http://www.dcnrhs.org/learn/washington-d-c-railroad-history/timeline-of-washington-d-c-railroad-history
“Washington is Composed of Land from 19 Original Owners,” Ghosts of DC (March 2, 2012), http://ghostsofdc.org/2012/03/02/d-c-is-composed-of-land-from-19-original-owners/
