The Grand Avenue, America's Main Street, a National Embarrassment--Pennsylvania Avenue has been known by these names and more since it was laid out across farmland in the 1790s. From the beginning, the one-mile stretch between the Capitol building and the White House was intended to be a symbolic link between the key branches of government, but over more than two centuries, it has witnessed grandeur and squalor, national pride and neglect, and crowds full of celebration and rage. While the pillars of government at either ...
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The Grand Avenue, America's Main Street, a National Embarrassment--Pennsylvania Avenue has been known by these names and more since it was laid out across farmland in the 1790s. From the beginning, the one-mile stretch between the Capitol building and the White House was intended to be a symbolic link between the key branches of government, but over more than two centuries, it has witnessed grandeur and squalor, national pride and neglect, and crowds full of celebration and rage. While the pillars of government at either end have stood watch, the avenue has seen buildings, institutions, and neighborhoods rise, prosper, decay, and fall. A grand marketplace, a major train station, dozens of hotels and restaurants--all thrived, yet only a handful remain. Once a teeming city thoroughfare, then a bland, nearly lifeless area dominated by hulking federal buildings, the avenue today is regaining some of the vitality that marked its earlier years even as it remains one of the nation's best-known streets.
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When I moved to Washington, D.C in the mid-1970s, I walked to work from a Capitol Hill apartment and up Pennsylvania Avenue to past 17th street. It was an energetic walk for my younger days. I remember Pennsylvania Avenue during my walks, the character of the street, and how it was changing and continued to change. I have walked Pennsylvania Avenue many times since during my life in my adopted home town.
I was reminded of my early walks on Pennsylvania Avenue and of the Avenue I never got to see in Christopher Cavas' short pictorial history "Pennsylvania Avenue" (2019), part of the "Images of America" series of Arcadia Publishing. Cavas, a Washington, D.C. native, aptly describes the 1.2 miles of Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House as "America's Main Street". His book captures well the story of this iconic main street and of my own experience as a walker.
The book begins with Pierre L'Enfant's "Grand Vision" under which a ceremonial boulevard would stretch diagonally from the Capitol to the Executive Mansion. Pennsylvania Avenue was the product of this vision with many additions, changes, and stops and starts along the way.
Cavas' book shows the ceremonial aspects of Pennsylvania Avenue over time, with its Inaugural Day and other historic parades. He also shows how Pennsylvania Avenue accommodated the needs of the growing government from the beginning with rooming houses and hotels to the present day with many government buildings, museums, monuments, and parks lining both sides of the avenue. The history of these developments is well-told.
But I was much more interested in Pennsylvania Avenue as a place of community for the many people that came to call Washington, D.C. home, and especially to walk the street as I did and as other walkers such as Walt Whitman may have done. The street has changed many times and had its ups and downs. It deteriorated to the point that President Kennedy described it as a national disgrace, followed by decades of effort at urban renewal.
I enjoyed seeing the street before my time with its many street cars, as well as its even earlier horse-drawn carriages called Herdics. I enjoyed seeing the images of busy people and life on the streets day and night over the many years. The book describes the many changes in storefronts, including hotels, restaurants from the fancy to the humble, large retail stores, and small businesses, some of which I remember and some of which I should have known. The book includes images of buildings that are no more, some of which were razed or abandoned during my time in the city.
I enjoyed learning about Chinatown which once occupied Pennsylvania Avenue near third street on the site of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art. I was fascinated by the lengthy discussion in the book of Center Market, between Seventh and Ninth Street. This was a site that provided shopping for food and entertainment to residents of Washington from the 1870s to the 1930s before the property was taken for the development of the Federal Triangle. This is the type of communal facility that captures the spirit of city life and I was glad to learn of it. The closest analogy I know is the still function Reading Terminal Market in downtown Philadelphia which I had the opportunity to visit a few weeks ago.
Another part of Pennsylvania Avenue's history that fascinated me was the Division or Murder Bay. This notorious part of the city was established when Civil War General Joseph Hooker rounded up the many ladies of the evening during the war and relocated them to a site just south of Pennsylvania avenue on 15th Street. Over the years, this area became famous for gambling, alcohol, sex, ragtime and jazz and crime. The area consisted mostly of small nondescript buildings that the reader gets to glimpse in a chapter of Cavas' book. The Division flourished and disappeared well before my time in the city, but it too is a part of America's Main Street and has its place in life.
I was glad to walk Pennsylvania Avenue through time in the company of this book and to recover some of my own walking of the street and thoughts about city life.
