Читать книгу Ten Years in Washington: Inside Life and Scenes in Our National Capital as a Woman Sees Them - Mary Clemmer - Страница 9

Table of Contents

Hopes Realized—A Truly National City—Washington in 1873—Major L’Enfant’s Dream—Old and New—“Modern Improvements”—A City of Palaces—The Capital in All Its Glory—Traces of the War—Flowers on the Ramparts—Under the Oaks of Arlington—Ten Years Ago—The Birth of a Century—The Reign of Peace—The Capital of the Future.

And now! The citizen of the year of our Lord 1881 sees the dawn of that perfect day of which the founders of the Capital so fondly and fruitlessly dreamed. The old provincial Southern city is no more. From its foundations has risen another city, neither Southern nor Northern, but national, cosmopolitan.

THE NATIONAL CAPITOL.—WASHINGTON.

It covers more than three and a half acres. Over thirteen million dollars have thus far been expended in its erection.

Where the “Slough of Despond” spread its waxen mud across the acres of the West End, where pedestrians were “slumped,” and horses “stalled,” and discomfort and disgust prevailed, we now see broad carriage drives, level as floors, over which grand equipages and pony phaetons glide with a smoothness that is a luxury, and an ease of motion which is rest. Where ravines and holes made the highway dangerous, now the concrete and Nicholson pavements stretch over miles on miles of inviting road. Where streets and avenues crossed and re-crossed their long vistas of shadeless dust, now plat on plat of restful grass “park” the city from end to end. Double rows of young trees line these parks far as the sight can reach. In these June days they fill the air with tender bloom. Gazing far on through their green arcades the sight rests at last where poor Major L’Enfant dreamed and planned that it one day would,—on the restful river, with its white flecks of sails, upon distant meadows and the Virginia hills. Old Washington was full of small Saharas. Where the great avenues intersected acres of white sand were caught up and carried through the air by counter winds. It blistered at white heat beneath your feet, it flickered like a fiery veil before your eyes, it penetrated your lungs and begrimed your clothes. Now where streets and avenues cross, emerald “circles” with central fountains, pervading the air with cooling spray, with belts of flowers and troops of children, and restful seats for the old or the weary take the place of the old Saharas. In every direction tiny parks are blooming with verdurous life. Concrete walks have taken the place of their old gravel-stone paths. Seats—thanks to General Babcock—everywhere invite to sit down and rest beneath trees which every summer cast a deeper and more protecting shadow. The green pools which used to distill malaria beneath your windows are now all sucked into the great sewers, planted at last in the foundations of the city. The entire city has been drained. Every street has been newly graded. The Tiber, inglorious stream, arched and covered forever from sight, creeps in darkness to its final gulf in the river. The canal, drained and filled up, no longer breeds pestilence. Pennsylvania avenue has outlived its mud and its poplars, to be all and more than Jefferson dreamed it would be,—the most magnificent street on the continent. Its lining palaces are not yet built, but more than one superb building like that of the Daily National Republican soars high above the lowly shops of the past, a forerunner of the architectural splendor of the buildings of the future. Cars running every five minutes have taken the place of the solitary stage, plodding its slow way between Georgetown and the Capital. Capitol Hill, which had been retrograding for more than forty years, has taken on the look of a suddenly growing city.city. Its dusty ways and empty spaces are beginning to fill with handsome blocks of metropolitan houses. Even the old Capital prison is transformed into a handsome and fashionable block of private dwellings. The improvements at the West End are more striking. Solid blocks of city houses are rising in every direction, taking the place of the little, old, isolated house of the past, with its stiff porch, high steps, and open basement doorway. Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut avenues are already lined with splendid mansions, the permanent winter homes of Senators and other high official and military officers. The French, Spanish, English and other foreign governments have bought on and near these avenues for the purpose of building on them handsome houses for their separate legations. The grounds of the Executive Mansion are being enlarged, extending to the Potomac with a carriage drive encircling, running along the shore of the river, extending through the Agricultural Smithsonian and Botanical garden grounds, thus fulfilling the original intent of connecting the White House with the Capitol by a splendid drive. The same transformation is going on in the Capitol grounds. Blocks of old houses have been torn down and demolished, to make room for a park fit to encircle the Capitol, which can never be complete till it takes in all the rolling slopes which lie between it and the Potomac. No scaffolding and pulleys now deface the snowy surfaces of the Capitol. Unimpeded the dome soars into mid-air, till the goddess of liberty on its top seems caught into the embrace of the clouds. The beautiful Treasury building is completed, and a block further on, the click of ceaseless hammers and the rising buttresses of solid stone tell of the new war and navy departments which are swiftly growing beside the historic walls of the old. Even the Washington monument has been taken into hand by General Babcock, to whom personally the Capital owes so much, and by a fresh appeal to the States he hopes to re-arouse their patriotism and insure its grand completion. Flowers blossom on the ramparts of the old forts, so alert with warlike life ten years ago. The army roads, so deeply grooved then, are grass-grown now. The long shed-hospitals have vanished, and stately dwellings stand on their already forgotten sites. The “boys” who languished in their wards, the boys who marched these streets, who guarded this city, how many of them lie on yonder hill-top under the oaks of Arlington, and amid the roses of the Soldier’s Home. Peace, prosperity and luxury have taken the place of war, of knightly days and of heroic men.

The mills of time grind slowly. What a tiny stroke in its cycles is a single century. One hundred years! The year nineteen hundred! Then if the father of his country can look down from any star upon the city of his love he will behold in the new Washington that which even he did not foresee in his earthly life—one of the most magnificent cities of the whole earth.