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Art Of Landscape Architecture

The region under consideration in this plan as designated by the Act of Congress includes that section of the District of Columbia situated between B Street S. W., the Capitol, Pennsylvania and Delaware Avenues, and requires a connexion with the Zoological Park. It should be specially noticed in this plan that the original design of Major L'Enfant made one hundred years ago has been treated with due respect. Pennsylvania Avenue and all the boundary streets have been retained in exact accordance with the original design. Like L'Enfant's design also the main treatment of drives and lawns is kept on the axis of the Capitol and Washington Monument. Moreover, by setting apart the Botanical Garden and the grounds of the Smithsonian Institute and the Agricultural Department and the space around the White House, an actual park in the heart of Washington has been already secured. The design under consideration seeks as far as possible to retain and improve all this highly developed and desirable park effect and also seeks to enlarge and complete it by purchasing the necessary land to extend it to Pennsylvania Avenue and Delaware Avenue. Very few cities in the world have such a park development as already exists in the Washington of the present day, which is much of it in a peculiar degree really the Washington of the past and of L'Enfant's creation. The essential and underlying idea of the plan in question is that in place of a park crisscrossed by traffic streets and obstructed here and there by an inferior class of houses, the plan proposes to retain the half dozen important public buildings existing and lay out the grounds around them, or in other words park them. Broad lawns are arranged for pastoral effects and trees and shrubs are clustered along the paths and drives and on the borders of the lawns, and a series of longitudinal elliptical grass spaces leads the eye of any one standing in front of the Capitol down over a vista of green lawns to the Washington Monument.

By the employment of bridges over the transverse streets the entire territory of park space is brought into one unified whole, a park unit and yet correlated in the most intimate way with the neighbouring city. It is intended that the bridges shall be so screened and planted in the manner of those of Central Park, New York, that the sense of the close neighbourhood of the city shall not be appreciably felt as one wanders through the park. It is also proposed that in future all public buildings for the United States or the District of Columbia that may be erected here shall be kept strictly out of the main area of the park, and disposed along the borders of Pennsylvania and Delaware Avenues.