Chapter 2:
Introduction to Washington: The National Capital Park
and Planning Commission
At the age of twenty-eight I placed my young wife and
our ten-month-old boy with our parents in Minneapolis and Saint Paul and
went to Washington to begin a career in the federal government. I had to
leave my little family behind until I could afford to bring them east. I
had been out of work for over nine months, we were broke, and our debts
were staggering.
It was a rather warm but windy Tuesday in May, 1928,
when I arrived in Washington on an early train. After checking the
newspapers to see about a room, I decided to delay renting one until I
had called at the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, since
perhaps there I could get advice as to a suitable location. The offices
were then in the World War I temporary Navy Building at Constitution
Avenue and Eighteenth Street, N.W. Because I had more time than money, I
checked my bag for ten cents in Union Station, walked the eighteen
blocks to the Navy Building, and got there a half-hour before the
offices were to open at 8:00.
I waited around a few minutes before Mrs. Nettie
Benson arrived. Mrs. Benson was later to become secretary to two
National Park Service directors and, in 1951, my administrative
assistant. At that time she was secretary to Lieutenant Colonel U. S.
Grant III, who then had three titles: vice-chairman and executive and
disbursing officer of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission
and engineer in charge of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds of
the National Capital. The latter agency built, operated, and maintained
the federal parks and buildings in the city of Washington and the nearby
region. Grant was one of the finest Corps of Engineers officers I have
ever known, a man who was not only an excellent engineer but a fine
administrative officer, a gentleman, and a strong conservationist of our
natural environment, deeply involved in the preservation of our historic
heritage. I was very fortunate to have the opportunity of working under
his direction.
I had first met Colonel Grant some five weeks before,
early in April. But I had not yet met the staffs of the planning
commission and the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds. After a short
talk Grant took me down to meet the staff of the planning commission,
including Major Carey H. Brown, assistant executive officer to Grant,
and Charles W. Eliot II, director of planning. I was to join Eliot's
staff in the planning commission, but I soon learned that the colonel
had assignments for me in connection with the operation of the parks of
Washington as well. Therefore I was taken to meet Major Joseph C.
Mchaffey, Grant's assistant in the Office of Public Buildings and
Grounds. He in turn took me to meet the top-flight park people charged
with responsibilities for the parks of Washington. I met Captain Kelly,
chief of the park police; Frank Gartside, general manager of the parks;
George Clark, the chief engineer; and John Nagel, who was the engineer
responsible for such big construction projects as the Arlington Memorial
Bridge. I also met Charles Peters, who was then in charge of the federal
buildings and who through the years became a very dear friend. By his
reorganization order (no. 6166) of June 10, 1933, President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt transferred to the National Park Service the entire
Office of Public Buildings and Grounds. So, the group of fine park
people I met that morning in May, 1928, became National Park Service
people.
After meeting my new colleagues, being assigned a
drafting board and part of a desk, and having lunch in a cafeteria on
the roof of the old Navy Building, I inquired about where I might look
for a room on a weekly or monthly basis. I was told that there were
fairly good and reasonable places in northwest Washington. I spent that
afternoon looking for a room and found one that suited my strained
financial situation, though the landlord required a down payment of one
week's rent. That night I quickly discovered the bed was infested with
bedbugs, and the next morning I packed my bags and left, reluctantly
forfeiting my first week's rent.
It occurred to me that there were a couple of
universities in Washington and that possibly one of them had a chapter
of the Kappa Sigma fraternity, of which I was a member. Sure enough,
there was a chapter at George Washington University, and they had a room
for me. Apparently they needed a few paying guests, even though the
state of my funds required that they wait until my first payday for the
rent money.
On May 17, I received my appointment. The National
Capital Park and Planning Commission was established by Congress in
1926, made up of several odd committees established in earlier years for
special projects with no effective coordination to develop a sound
comprehensive plan for the National Capital. Shortly after the federal
government was established on April 30, 1789, and Congress started
meeting, it was realized that it would be very difficult for the
government to operate in any of the existing cities. President George
Washington was authorized to proceed with the selection of a seat of
government and the plans to develop the national capital. He employed
Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant, of France, for the task. L'Enfant,
working with the president and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, laid
out a plan for the city of Washington and the District of Columbia.
Construction was started shortly after 1791, and in 1800 Congress moved
to Washington.
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Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant, of
France. Courtesy National Capital Planning Commission.
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L'Enfant's plan of Washington, D.C.
Courtesy National Capital Planning Commission.
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While the plan prepared for the city of Washington in
the late eighteenth century was a very good one, very advanced in
relation to those of other cities in the United States at that time, a
lack of continuous attention caused it to deteriorate during the
nineteenth century. Alterations in the plan were made at times during
the nineteenth century to satisfy political and personal interests.
These changes more often than not were at odds with original concepts of
Washington as the capital city of a great nation. Consequently, in late
1898, when the first hundred years had passed and an anniversary
celebration was being planned, the central part of the city, especially
the Mall area, was in sorry condition. Permits had been granted for
buildings in the Mall, cattle and other livestock were grazed there, and
Congress had approved the building of the railroad station at the foot
of Capitol Hill.
The people of the District of Columbia worked hard
making arrangements for the centennial, which naturally took on a
national aspect. A joint committee of the two houses of Congress was
appointed to act with the citizens' committee in planning the
celebration. The celebration was very successful and was brought to a
very satisfactory conclusion with a reception and ban quet given by the
Washington Board of Trade in honor of the congressional committee and
distinguished guests. However, a good deal of dissatisfaction was
expressed by people throughout the country with the conditions they
found in Washington.
As a result Senator James McMillen, chairman of the
Committee on the District of Columbia, introduced a resolution which,
when passed on March 8, 1901, instructed his committee as follows:
Resolved, that the Committee on the District of
Columbia be, and it hereby is, directed to consider the subject and
report to the Senate plans for the development and improvement of the
entire park system of the District of Columbia. For the purpose of
preparing such plans, the committee may sit during the recess of
Congress, and may secure the services of such experts as may be
necessary for a proper consideration of the subject. The expenses of
such investigation shall be paid from the contingent fund of the
Congress and reported to the Senate on the 15th day of January,
1902.
Senator McMillen and his committee selected Daniel H.
Burham, a noted architect from Chicago, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.,
a nationally recognized planner and landscape architect of Brookline,
Massachusetts, and gave these two gentlemen the opportunity to add to
their committee for the study as they saw fit. Burnham and Olmsted chose
as their colleagues Charles F. McKim, a well-known and capable architect
of New York, and one of America's great sculptors, Augustus
Saint-Gaudens.
The report that resulted, often referred to as the
McMillen Report, really stirred things up. On the front page of the
second edition, dated March 14, 1903, a note by the Senate Committee on
the District of Columbia states:
The 57th Congress authorized the construction of the
War College and the Engineering School of Application (page 117); the
building of the Agriculture Department (page 44); a building for the
national museum, to be located on the north side of the Mall (page 44);
the Union Railroad Station, to be located at the intersection of
Massachusetts Avenue and Delaware Avenue (page 29); a building for the
use of the members of the House of Representatives, to be located on the
square facing the Capitol grounds, East of New Jersey Avenue (page 38);
a municipal building for the District of Columbia, to be located on the
south side of Pennsylvania Avenue, between 13 1/2 and 14th Streets (page
70); and a Hall of Records, to be located on E Street between 18th and
19th Streets (page 29). The Daughters of the American Revolution have
begun the erection of a Continental [Constitution] Hall, on the second
square south of the Corcoran Museum of Art, and, the restoration of the
White House has been completed (page 65).
All these projects were recommended in the first
edition of the McMillen Report. Within a little more than a year those
actions had been taken. Thus did Congress eagerly begin carrying out the
recommendations of the report and continued to do so in the first two
decades of the century. An Act of Congress of May 17, 1910, established
a permanent Commission of Fine Arts. A zoning law passed in 1920
provided the authority to control building set back and elevation of
buildings in conformity with the overall city plan.
In 1924, Congress made provisions for the detailed
planning of a public park and open space system, recognizing the failure
to carry out the proposals of the 1901 plan for an open space system so
important to the growing population of the city. Very soon the National
Capital Park Commission and Congress came to the conclusion that a
satisfactory park system could not be laid down without the full
knowledge of the inter-relationship of parks, roads, zoning, building,
and other elements of a comprehensive city plan. The authority of the
commission was therefore broadened in 1926, when it was given its new
title and responsibilities as the National Capital Park and Planning
Commission. The authority of the presently named National Capital
Planning Commission has been extended to regional responsibility,
insofar as federal interests are concerned, which requires close
cooperation with the authorities of Maryland and Virginia surrounding
Washington.
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Members of the McMillen Commission
working on a model of the Mall area. Courtesy Fine Arts
Commission.
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The National Capital Park and Planning
Commission in the mid-1930s. Left to right: H. S. Settle, staff;
J. A. Ryder, staff (behind Settle); Planner J. Nolen, Jr.; Commissioners
Colonel Dan Sultan, William A. Delano, Norman Brown; Chairman Frederic
A. Delano; J. C. Nichols; J. B. Gordon; Arno B. Cammerer; unidentified;
H. V. Hubbard; T. C. Jeffers, staff; unidentified. Courtesy National
Capital Planning Commission.
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After I had settled into my work in Washington, I
found that one of the big things the commission, other governing
agencies, civic groups, and Congress were working on was a proposed
piece of legislation called the Cramton-Capper Bill. The sponsors of the
bill were Representative Louis C. Cramton, from Michigan, and Senator
Arthur Capper, from Kansas. Representative Cramton, one of my heroes,
was chairman of the House Subcommittee on Appropriations, which handled
the Park Service's as well as the Planning Commission's appropriations.
He had been associated with many of my other idols, such as Horace
Albright, U. S. Grant III, J. Horace McFarland, Frederic Delano,
Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and Miss Harlean James, secretary of the
American Civic Association. Several of this group had worked for some
ten years to establish the National Park Service and, joining with
Mather and Albright, helped to get the legislation passed authorizing
the service in 1916. This same group, along with others, were the
backers of the establishment of the planning commission in 1926. Cramton
was perhaps as much a Park Service man as he was a member of Congress.
He befriended the service particularly when we greatly needed his help
during the late twenties and early thirties.
The Cramton-Capper Bill called for an appropriation
of some thirty-two million dollars for land acquisition for parks and
for stream-valley protection within and adjacent to the District of
Columbia. It included establishment of the George Washington Memorial
Parkway on both sides of the Potomac River from just above Great Falls,
upriver from Washington, to Mount Vernon on the Virginia side and to
Fort Washington on the Maryland side, downriver. It also included
acquisition of land for the city's park and recreation system and the
development of a Fort-to-Fort Drive connecting the Civil War forts that
ringed the capital. The growth of the city was such that by the time
acquisition funds were available it was no longer practicable to build
the Fort-to-Fort Drive, although practically all of the fort sites had
been acquired and are now part of the city park system. The bill
included aid to the counties in Virginia and Maryland bordering the
District of Columbia on a matching-fund basis for the development of
their park systems.
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