A history of Washington DC - 24 January 1997

When the country's famous television anchormen – and the top ones are men, though there are many talented ladies in waiting – when they go to cover a Washington story, they always say, "Reporting tonight from Washington".

Not quite always. Once every four years, when the next president is about to be inaugurated, on the morning of the great day, they announce they are speaking "This morning from the nation's capital".

Since I mentioned last week that, by the time of Jefferson, the Congress had stopped looking around for a capital city and had purchased a site which is now Washington, a listener wants to know, what do I mean by "purchased" and why wasn't Washington the capital city from the start?

This seems a good time to explain the peculiar way it came about, one of the earliest national capitals that was invented as a place not for living but for the periodical conduct of government, like today, Brasilia, say. Especially was it not, as all the great capital cities of the Earth are, towns that became the hub of the nation's life because of a natural advantage, a great port, the intersection of travellers' routes or whatever.

The question of where the new republic was to place a capital city was a very delicate problem. The North had carried most of the debts of the War of Independence but didn't propose to take on the costs of constructing a capital city. At the same time, the Bostonians, who had cradled and bred the revolution felt touchy about letting the centre of government go south. In the end, both sides agreed to set aside a neutral zone of about 100 square miles, the costs not to borne by any state but by the federal government. It would be called a district. The District of Columbia. And in the end, the Congress agreed that an ideal place would be a plot of land, a peninsula between two rivers, which would be ceded to the federal government by the landowners. Part of Virginia and part of Maryland.

Now, who was to design and build it? A commission originally appointed a notable soldier and a famous surveyor. (By the way, he was a black man.) They began to draw up the outlines of a city when a Frenchman appeared, who'd been innocently directed to assist the two architects, one Pierre Charles L'Enfant. A very interesting character. A Parisian, who, like many another Frenchman, most notably the 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, was inflamed, thrilled, by the colonists' scores and at the age of 22 enlisted in the American Revolutionary Army as a volunteer.

He was an army engineer and he must have done some pretty impressive work because, though he was captured by the British and held for four years, the moment he was released, Congress made him a major of engineers. He went home to France but he was too excited about the prospect of life in the new republic he'd fought to create that he returned here, settled in New York and, when Congress chose this city as an interim capital which, good listener, is why George Washington was inaugurated here, he was promptly commissioned to make the old City Hall worthy of a national government. Its total recreation is there today. And mighty handsome it is. One of the very few 18th-century buildings left in this city.

So when the deal was made to create a capital city, President Washington hired Pierre, Major L'Enfant, to design it. Unfortunately, as I said, there was another soldier and a black surveyor already there as chief architects. "Very well," said President Washington, "then the major will assist you". The major, still only 34, must have been something of a charmer, or a very powerful martinet. His assistance took the form of tearing up the plans of the originals and laying out his own, vastly grander, design.

What he had in mind, he said, was that the plans should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandisement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue, at any period, however remote. Mostly, he thought of Versailles and produced a master plan which astounded the natives and appalled such as Thomas Jefferson and his hope for sights and sounds and institutions that would reflect only republican simplicity.

Nobody in America had seen avenues 200, 300 feet wide but L'Enfant created miles of great diagonal avenues crossing the rectangular network of streets. So-called "circles" would produce majestic vistas down the avenues in several directions. And, incidentally, as a point of tactics, allow birds'-eye view for look-outs and, down below, the placement of cannon.

For the first half of the 19th Century, L'Enfant's radiating vistas and grand avenues were a joke to visiting Europeans for they remained unpaved and, in winter, presented miles of bog and mud. But the great turning point was the Civil War, when the place was packed with government, with soldiers, contractors, lobbyists and, ever afterwards, civil servants – half the town's population today works for the government – pressure groups, fixers, political hangers-on and lobbyists, lobbyists.

One man more than another filled L'Enfant's austere and regal plan with the foliage that today festoons the city. A man named Alexander Shepherd, the city's first boss when it first ventured on its home rule, the city council that ran things with a budget controlled by Congress. He built the roads, the sewers, got pure water running, paved the streets, gas lines. But, which was a lucky thing for the growing population and for all of us who came afterwards, he had a passion for, an obsession with trees. And for his long term in office, he stayed on a planting rampage with sycamores, lindens, willows and the great variety of American oaks. It has guaranteed that Washington should be, and remains, one of the leafiest capitals on Earth.

This is the picture, I believe, held in the mind by most travellers and people on the east coast, from the blossoming cherry trees of early spring to the end of the golden fall. The summer is an inferno. The winter, damp and grey and shivery, but mild, by the perishing standards of the rest of the country. Rather like London. I say most travellers and people on the east coast because it will be no news to sociologists and humbler observers of the human scene that the vast majority of Americans have never seen Washington.

It occurs to me in passing how about the stereotypical pictures set solid in the minds of the not quite equally vast majority of Americans who have never been to New York City. Certainly the early and middle 20th Century and a goodly stretch of the '70s and '80s have imprinted an indelible roaring city of skyscrapers, bustling speed, ill public manners, homeless squatted in Grand Central Station, much street crime, splendid museums, every sort of food cooked by humans anywhere on Earth and gabby cab-drivers, usually Italian or Irish who talk a sort of stage Brooklyn and say "[foist] of all".

Well, new studies have appeared in the past two months painting a true picture of New York that has astonished even the natives. The most striking figure is the decline in the incidence of crime, especially of violent crime. So late as 1990, the city registered 2,200 homicides. In 1996 it had 975. New York City is now, on the nation's disgraceful roster of crime statistics, 63rd.

This dramatic change has happened entirely during the reign of the Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It may be an accident, but not to him. It all happened, as they say, on his watch. So, he's like a president during whose term the economy is robust and stable. He claims the prosperity always, though the national economy, its ups and downs and wobbles, has nothing much to do with any president.

On another aspect of New York, how about those talkative Irish and Italian cab-drivers? They are non-existent. Taxi driving is a first job, what they call an entry profession. And you can correctly guess the largest influx of a particular nationality by talking, if he has a syllable or two of English, to the driver. Well, this is the list of the latest swarms of immigrants recorded by country of origin from the most newcomers to the least. Number one, the Dominican Republic, way at the top. Two, former Soviet Union. Three, Chinese from Taiwan or Hong Kong. Next Jamaica, Guyana, Poland, the Philippines, Trinidad, Haiti, India and on and on and down to Korea. No Europeans mentioned in this list except at the bottom, a couple of thousand Irish.

No wonder the place feels and sounds very different from the New York City of the 1930s, or of the old Warner Brothers' movies which provided a pretty accurate, if rollicking, reflection.

As for the drastic drop in crime, the best guess is the hiring of thousands more police to adopt what the city calls a dazzling new strategy, what they call community policing. What we called in my boyhood, the local copper on the beat. And, the mayor says, the 24-hours-a-day computer tracking of crime, its habits and its districts, the ability to sniff out places where crime is most likely to happen. This could be true.

I leave you with a postscript about Washington. I forgot to mention last time that it's bankrupt. They never have figured out a way of making the city solvent. The original agreement not to have the city dependent on any state, which means it can't go begging to a state legislature, has meant it has to go begging to Congress, which never grants enough.

The present mayor of Washington once said, "Apart from the homicide rate, Washington is one of the safest cities in the country". Which is not quite as hilarious as it sounds. In this spacious and ordered 100 square miles, there is a small, compact quarter, very slummy, and entirely black, which bears 98% of Washington's ferocious reputation for homicides.

An old lady of my acquaintance, watching the jolly fuss and pomp of the inaugural parade last Monday, said the president could have done himself a power of good if he'd had the simplest possible swearing-in ceremony, had cancelled all parades and banquets and balls, and handed over the $38 million they cost to the budget of the bankrupt nation's capital.

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