In 1825, death came quietly for the unheralded urban planner of Washington, D.C.
Born in France in 1754, Pierre Charles L’Enfant ended his days in obscurity in Green Hill, Md., despite single-handedly designing one of the greatest cities the world has ever seen.
His death merited only one obituary, and a tiny one at that. The sad item in the National Intelligencer simply noted that L’Enfant “was a native of France” and that he served as an officer of engineers in America’s Revolutionary War.
The obituary did make passing reference to his design of the nation's capital, but it sourly added that he never felt adequately compensated for his “service” and that “his mind was of a cast to be gratified only by receiving that sort of consideration which his talents and high and delicate sense of honor entitled him to.”
“L’Enfant died a charity case and a pauper,” Scott Berg, author of “Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C.,” told IBD. “He never was a success in his own lifetime."
Titan For The Ages
Today L’Enfant stands as one of America’s historic giants and one of the greatest immigrants to grace her shores. Go to Arlington (Va.) National Cemetery and you will find his tomb not in one of its remote corners, but at its very center, just yards from the front doors of the Greco-Roman mansion that the legendary general Robert E. Lee once occupied.
As guides at that jewel of a national park note, L’Enfant’s grave enjoys pride of place, resting at the top of the cemetery’s hill overlooking the city whose sweeping streets and striking monuments he designed.
In life, L’Enfant was dismissed as a hopeless artist with an annoying personality. In death, he has been hailed as an architectural light of fierce brilliance, in whose imagination and vision “we still live,” as Berg puts it.
Most tourists ooh and aah over the circles, squares and avenues of Washington without realizing that a transplanted Frenchman laid the groundwork for them.
The son of an underappreciated painter at the French royal court, L’Enfant had a gift for seeing what others couldn’t.
Where others merely saw a wet marsh and wild forests, he saw a future metropolis of over a million people -- a city of great elegance that he drew from the best of Parisian and Roman design, even as he incorporated into it elements distinctively and originally American.
Cool On The Hill
Walk around D.C. and “you are inside his brain,” said Berg.
Take Capitol Hill: L’Enfant came up with the idea for it after walking near Jenkins Hill, a forested area that seized L’Enfant’s imagination as a pedestal on which he would place the greatest of statues in a democracy -- the chambers of its legislative branch.
Or consider his design of the National Mall. L’Enfant conceived of it as the ideal architectural symbol for a democracy accessible to all.
“When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him,” remarked the English satirist Jonathan Swift.
That was certainly true in L’Enfant’s case. No sooner had he formed the plan for D.C.’s design than a constellation of critics spread out against him, a group that included Thomas Jefferson and the New York surveyor Benjamin Ellicott.
Jefferson resented the grandeur of L’Enfant’s vision. Jefferson wanted a smaller and simpler capital city than the one contained in L’Enfant’s plans, one that would correspond to the third president’s vision of the federal government as small.
Tough And Right
It is certainly true that L’Enfant had an exacting and difficult personality, which rubbed many of the Founding Fathers the wrong way. Yet without that exacting personality, he never would have been able to establish his uniquely artistic plan for D.C.
Those plans required an uncompromising vision. The city’s namesake, George Washington, understood this L’Enfant trait keenly.
The first president told friends and colleagues that the only person who possessed the artistic talent to design America’s federal city was L’Enfant.
“If he should take miff and leave the business,” Washington wrote anxiously to the city commissioners, “I have no scruple in declaring to you (though I do not want him to know it) that I know not where another is to be found who could supply his place.”
“L’Enfant had a very complex personality,” said Bambi Sears, a ranger at Fort Washington, a Potomac River military installation that L’Enfant had a large hand in designing.
All The Way From Europe
One mystery of L’Enfant’s life was how he ended up in America in the first place.
Evidently, like the celebrated Marquis de Lafayette, L’Enfant traveled to the New World in 1777 -- in the thick of the War of Independence -- out of a kind of romantic idealism. In the France of L’Enfant’s youth, it was fashionable for ambitious and talented young men to go off and fight for fledgling people, such as the Colonists in America, in their drive for independence from great world powers.
L’Enfant wanted to fit in and would occasionally ask Americans to call him Peter, not Pierre. L’Enfant distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War, even suffering an injury in a battle in Savannah, Ga.
After the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, he made himself available for architectural projects from New York City to Philadelphia to Washington. It was that last project that preoccupied him. He saw D.C. as the canvas on which he would seal his artistic legacy.
Undermined by the District of Columbia's powerful commissioners, who objected to the cost associated with his vision, L’Enfant stood stubbornly by his original plan. Eventually, the city bosses ganged up on L’Enfant and fired him in 1792 over the objections of President Washington.
Consequently, L’Enfant’s vision for D.C. wasn’t implemented until many decades after his death. The urban plans he drew up lay stillborn in the dusty archives of the Library of Congress. It wasn’t until 1900, when anger at D.C.’s slovenly condition reached a fever pitch, that pols and government officials turned back to the Frenchman's original plan.
Huzzahs
Architect Rick Olmsted, who led the campaign to jump-start L’Enfant’s blueprint, praised the depth of the urban designer’s work.
Wrote Olmsted: “Here is a plan not hastily sketched, nor by a man of narrow views and little foresight. It is the plan with the authority of a century behind it, to which we can all demand undeviating adherence in the future; a plan prepared by the hand of L’Enfant, but under the constant, direct, personal guidance of one whose technical knowledge of surveying placed the problem completely within his grasp, and who brought to its solution the same clear insight, deep wisdom and forethought that gave pre-eminence in the broader fields of war and statesmanship to the name of George Washington.”
The great general's confidence in L’Enfant was vindicated by the passage of time. Such was the gratitude for L’Enfant’s imaginative plan that in 1911, President William Howard Taft held a special event in his honor. L’Enfant’s body, lying in a neglected grave in Maryland, had a couple of years earlier been dug up and laid in state, according to Berg.
Taft made a point of placing L’Enfant’s grave in front of Lee’s mansion at the top of the cemetery, with a large rock near it on which he had L’Enfant’s map of D.C. engraved.
“There are not many who have to wait 100 years to receive the reward to which they are entitled,” said Taft in his remarks at the event.
Berg finds it an appropriate resting place for the misunderstood genius.
“Standing next to L’Enfant’s grave on land retroceded to Virginia, then, it is easy to forget that we are not inside the city of Washington, D.C.,” he wrote. But the author concludes that “it is probably appropriate, a true reflection of the unfulfilled aspirations that came to rule his life, that L’Enfant has been left to rest forever on the outside looking in.”
L'Enfant's Keys
Frenchman whose vision shaped America’s capital city.
Overcame: Poverty, obscurity.
Lesson: Remain loyal to your vision in the face of criticism, and good results can follow.
“I ventured the chance and gave imagination its full scope.”
