TT: Directionless in the Big City

ALAN: Before we carry on with this week’s tangent, did you realise that this is our 200^th conversation. Good heavens, aren’t we chatty!

JANE: That seems incredible…  I’ve had so much fun.  I salute you and invite you to ask me a question to get this historic 200^th Tangent started.

Washington D.C.:Past and Future

ALAN: One question that springs immediately to my mind is that if a city like Washington is so carefully planned, who actually did the planning in the first place? Was it done by committee or was there a presiding genius? And another question – just how rigidly do the builders stick to the plan? Do the realities of construction ever force changes to be made to the plan?

JANE: As is so often the case with history, the simple answer and the one that most closely embraces the truth differ substantially.  The simple answer regarding Washington D.C. was as follows: George Washington chose the site for the city.  He then appointed a committee who, in turn, selected a Frenchman, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, to design the city.  L’Enfant did.

Reality is a bit more complex.  L’Enfant was chosen to design the city.  He laid out a lovely plan that involved streets radiating out from the Capitol – then called “The Congress House.”  This, in itself, shows how in the perception of the young United States of America, the Legislative Branch, rather than the Executive, was viewed as the most important.

L’Enfant had grand, sweeping ideas, including what – especially for that time – were astonishingly wide streets.  From the start, he encountered protests from existing landowners.  He annoyed various important – and sometimes only self-important – people with his tendency to want to keep control of the plans.  Eventually, he was fired.

ALAN: Poor chap! So he got fired for doing what was asked of him. That’s not very fair..

JANE:  Since when are politics ever fair?  And, believe you me, building the capital city for a brand new nation – at a time when brand new nations were not at all the usual thing – was a very political event.

So, from the start, the plan for Washington, D.C., was distorted by the desires of people who were thinking of their immediate goals, rather than of creating a perfect planned city.

Some years ago, I wrote a short story called “Tigers in the Capital.”  It’s a free-flowing narration in which L’Enfant, still alive in the story’s present day, talks about all the changes his beloved city has undergone and how those alterations to his original plan have led to many of the nation’s problems.  All the facts about D.C.’s evolution, well – at least all of those except those that applied to the futuristic part of the story – are accurate.  In the end, I was beginning to convince myself…

ALAN: So the actual answer to my original questions about how it came to be designed is “all the above.”

JANE: Thou art supremely correct, my friend!

I realized we have – in the best fashion possible – tangented away from your original question as to whether roads in cities in the United States are named in such a fashion that you can tell which direction they run simply by whether they are a street or an avenue.

ALAN: Yes – I was most impressed by that scheme. Directionally challenged people such as myself would find it a great help. I never know what direction I’m facing in and I need all the help I can get!

JANE: As I said earlier, sadly, this is not the case.  Sometimes a street won’t even have a same name along its entire length – much less keep the same designation.  A good example of this is Montaño Road, which runs east to west through most of Albuquerque, which changes its identity at where it crosses Interstate 25.  At this point it becomes Montgomery Boulevard.

Please note, neither of these are “streets” or “avenues,” thus violating the neat provision you mentioned earlier that all, uh, roads that run north-south are called “avenues” and all those that run east-west are “streets.”

ALAN: We sometimes have the opposite happening. There’s a street in Auckland called Great South Road which passes through several suburbs. It keeps the same name all the way, but every time it reaches a new suburb the buildings start numbering again from the beginning. So, 42 Great South Road (for example) may well exist in half a dozen locations…

JANE: Oh!  That would be completely maddening.  We do sometimes have streets (or roads or avenues) with the same name, but they usually possess some additional designation, like “SW” or “NW.”  Zip codes (which I believe you guys call “postal codes”) can also help clarify which particular street is indicated.

Is there anything to help you figure out which 42 Great South Road you want or do you need to drive up and down, staring at signs and saying “Ah-hah!  There’s the sign for the eye doctor’s office.  This must be the 42 Great South Road we want!”

ALAN: No, there’s nothing to help you identify the 42 Great South Road that you want. You just have to keep going until you find one that looks right. And if it proves to be the wrong one, you just get back in your car and keep going. However, since the numbering starts again with each new suburb, one possible solution is to wait until you reach the appropriate suburb before you start checking the numbers. Unfortunately this turns out to be a much harder problem to solve because the suburbs aren’t sign-posted…

JANE: That sounds like purest insanity…  I recall an Agatha Christie novel in which the mystery hinged on an incorrectly delivered piece of mail because, at the time the story was written, houses had names, not numbers.  I’d thought that would be impossible these days, but I see the concept could easily be updated to happening in Auckland.

 I think you’d like living in Albuquerque – at least from the question of having an easy solution to being directionally challenged.  Directly east of the city is the great up-thrust bulk of the Sandia Mountains.  This makes it very easy – in fact, nearly impossible not – to know which way is east.  After that, all other directions are easily deduced.

When I first came house hunting here, I was very puzzled that my realtor would give me directions based not on “turn right” or “turn left” but “turn east” or “turn west.”  When I asked her to please clarify, she enlightened me as why she gave directions that way.  After that, I rapidly joined the confident navigators of Albuquerque.

My mother, who, like you, has never been certain about directions, was very impressed when she’d hear me saying things like “Jim, the place we want is just a bit further south.”  We let her in on the secret and, to this day, when she visits us, she will occasionally chirp up with “We’re going north now, aren’t we?” or similar comments, just for the pleasure of it.

ALAN: Oh, your mother is a lady after my own heart. I’d say exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason. Please tell her that we are soul mates.

Meanwhile, there’s an author you mentioned recently in your Friday Fragment who I’d really like to talk about…

JANE: Whisper in my ear… [Listens.]  Oh!  Absolutely!  That would be wonderfully fun.