Unruly and Lovely

When Pierre Charles L’Enfant began to design the federal city that came to be known as Washington in the District of Columbia, he was the envy of European architects who had been thinking about planning a city from the first brick for centuries. He is said to have been thinking of Versailles when he sat down to lay out a city in a hundred square miles (259 km2) that contained only a couple of villages, some farms and orchards, a large swamp, and nothing else to get in his way. Given the tabula rasa he was drawing on, Washington should be the most European of American cities, certainly the most French. It is not.

It never had a chance. L’Enfant may not have been insane, but in addition to being tactless and prickly, he wanted to build a chain of monuments completely out of proportion to the site and out of tune with human need. Perhaps this is because he went native—he called himself Peter Charles, pronouncing the final s, rather Pierre Charles with a silent s—and started to think big. The streets would be wide, there would be columns and obelisks everywhere, parks and squares all over the place—a city intended for processions, parades, and various solemnities. Not a city anyone would want to live in—and almost no one did until the Civil War created vast opportunities in the pen-pushing industry that has only grown larger.

In 1811, twenty years after L’Enfant was fired, the Abbé Correia, the Portuguese ambassador to the United States, was asked by an American woman what he thought of Washington. Considering that the place was more mud than marble at the time and diplomats got hardship pay for serving in a malarial swamp, the Abbé’s answer was remarkably and diplomatically quick-witted: “It is,” he said, “a city of magnificent distances.” It still is. It will never look or feel like Paris.

L’Enfant had too much blank canvas. He never tried to fill up the entire hundred square miles, for which residents should be grateful. But the plan he actually drew, for the heart of political and commercial Washington, was about eighteen square miles. Paris is forty-one square miles, so Peter Charles was trying to plan a city half the size of Paris from the ground up and all at once, and his successor, Andrew Ellicott, just finished what L’Enfant had left undone. But Paris has been under construction since the time of Julius Caesar. It has grown as it has grown, and growth of this sort is inevitably unruly from time to time.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Georges (silent s) Eugène Haussmann had an advantage when he rehabilitated Paris. Despite his reputation for tearing down everything—he called himself un artiste de démolition—he did not raze the whole city, so his tabula was only rasa here and there. He tore down mainly slums and built, or extended, grand streets and boulevards like the Rue de Rivoli and the Boulevard Raspail, making them suitable for carrying commerce and for shooting cannon balls to keep la foule bottled up in the side streets when the mob got restless. And the magnificent distances of the Champs Élysées and the Jardin des Tuileries do not intrude on everyday Parisian life as they do on Washington’s: they know their place and are destinations, not obstacles.

The result was—and remains—a city with bent, unpredictable streets and neighborhoods with distinctive characters inside the shapes (which defy geometric classification) created by the grand main thoroughfares. And what evocative names the streets have—like la Rue de l’Abbé de l’Épee or la Place des Martyrs Juifs du Vélodrome d’Hiver—rather than the prim A, B, C, the 1, 2, 3, and the state names of L’Enfant’s and Ellicott’s plan. The Abbot with the Sword and the Jewish Martyrs of the Winter Bicycle Arena are worth pondering—indeed, looking up—but what daydreams or deep thoughts arise from A Street, Fifth Street, or New Jersey Avenue?

Even so, they are not impenetrable, the neighborhoods, despite the bends in the streets and their wool-gathering names. In their odd-shaped boxes, they resist being pierced or plowed up for the shortcut or the monumental vista. Contained and content, they sit tight, go about their business, and let us go about ours without magnificence or distance distracting us from nos affaires of commerce, pleasure, or the heart.

A walk around any quartier in Paris convinces me that Haussmann, and later his successors, got it just right: he, and they, knew when to stop. Not every street ever needed to be part of a grand vision or merely a grid, to drop into place with the satisfying snap of the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, to be right and proper. If the cow path became a street and the cow couldn’t walk straight, what does anyone gain by bulldozing the street? Left to themselves, people don’t walk any straighter than cows anyway. Some chaos here, some unruliness there do no harm. At worst—and this seems to me the best as well—the chaos and unruliness tend to make cars and thoughts slow down, invite the walker to pay attention to the city itself, to the buildings, to the iron gates, the bakery, the café sitters, the dog walkers, the flowerpots on windowsills, life.

I don’t know if this is what makes Paris lovely or simply makes us notice how lovely the city is. It does not matter.

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© Joseph Lestrange

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