Can Los Angeles Teach Gotham About City Planning and Historic Preservation?
From The Clyde Fitch Report, by Susan Kathryn Hefti
The French artist and engineer, Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, must have thought he had died and gone to heaven. President George Washington had asked his fellow revolutionary soldier to design the nation’s capital city on what was a near-empty canvas: the land designated by the fledgling U.S. Congress was still relatively undeveloped in 1791. What a glorious opportunity for a true visionary!
Surely the Major, who had won the plum assignment after impressing the president with his design for the insignia of the Society of the Cincinnati, must have had étoiles in his eyes imagining a city that would stand in perpetuity as the triumphant symbol of the freedom and independence that the beleaguered rebel army wrestled from the British.
There may also have been dollar signs in L’Enfant eyes. For his baroque plan, with its radiating boulevards and dedicated green spaces, was intended to serve as a model for future American cities as our nation developed. In other words, the good Major expected a shot at national syndication.
But, just like the quivering mouse learned at the wrong end of the Scottish poet Robert Burns’ plough one cold winter morning, “[t]he best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men” are often laid to waste. For no sooner did L’Enfant finish his marvelous design for what would become the District of Columbia was he booted from the project for having stubbornly crossed the powers that be (just the names change in politics, the rest remains the same). So, while the artist’s personal vision for our nation’s capital was ultimately realized, its execution was carried out sans L’Enfant. And, despite 219 intervening years, D.C. still remains one of the very few planned cities in all of America.
Prior to his grand misadventure in Washington, however, L’Enfant had successfully managed to complete the 1789 remodeling of City Hall in New York City to be used as the nation’s temporary capital. The very thought of this genius toiling, drafting, planning in Gotham makes me wonder what might have happened if L’Enfant had been born 100 years earlier. Might he have been granted the opportunity to plan New York City? What might it look like today if he had?
keep reading at: http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=5358
Very interesting and well written.
Very interesting and well written.