Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/216603
A Fig. 2. The L'Enfant Plan of Washington, D.C. A) Manuscript drawing, 1791. B) Coast and Geodetic Survey tracing, 1887. C) Coast and Geodetic Survey scanned copy, 1991. 4 THE CAPITOL DOME B ALL LIBRARY OF CONGRESS the surveyors, the Ellicott brothers, in laying out the city without designs for the major federal buildings, but some details of its plan indicate that he harbored definite ideas about their shapes and sizes. A "Map of Red and Yellow Dotted Lines" (fig. 3) was drawn by Benjamin Ellicott as part of a report on the progress of the survey of the city in November 1791.10 It shows the centerlines of the streets and avenues, color-coded to indicate whether they were already laid out or would be so during the current surveying season. The C map stands chronologically between the surviving L'Enfant manuscript (fig. 2A) that was submitted to the President on August 19, 1791, and the series of engravings of the plan that began to be produced in March 1792.11 The Map of Dotted Lines shows that L'Enfant participated with the surveyors in the process of simplifying significant aspects of the plan relative to the August version, fixing in place every important element of the city's northwest section. East of the Capitol, the colors of some lines and the sketchiness of others indicate that final planning in that half of the city was far less advanced than it was in the western half. The manuscript plan was one of a series of maps drawn by or for L'Enfant in the process of developing a design for the city. It is casually drafted, indicating its preliminary character. The lines defining its avenues are not strictly parallel with one another or evenly spaced, and their intersections are oddly irregular. This irregularity is sometimes cited as characteristic of L'Enfant's "painterly" design technique, well suited to the design of a garden. Close inspection of the drawing reveals that it is not so much gardenesque as it is careless and undeveloped. For instance, the convergences of the four pairs of avenues meeting near the Capitol are noticeably skewed where the contemporary rules of composition dictated symmetry or an appearance of symmetry. The streets are mostly traced over lightly penciled rectilinear guidelines, and are more regular than the diagonal avenues. Though not perfect, Ellicott's Map of Red and Yellow Dotted Lines is far more carefully drawn than the August 19 manuscript, notably so at the Capitol, where the avenues are drawn symmetrically, though not precisely in their final locations. In 1887 after nearly a century of fading and rough usage, the then-visible elements of the manuscript map were preserved in a carefully traced copy by the Geological Survey (fig. 2B). In 1991, they copied it again by digital scanning (fig. 2C).12 Much of the Capitol plan had been erased from the manuscript early in its history, and neither of the later attempts to salvage its fugitive image retrieved useful clues to the building's planned shape. In 2009 spectral imaging at a variety of light SUMMER 2013