(Image above, Dejeuner sur l' Herbe, Washington, DC ca. 1870. Rats were a major problem for DC city planners in downtown's early days).
Immediately after the last posting, my attorney* advised me to figure out how to combine my illustrations with this blog. Before legal counsel, I was going to write about the "pestiferous" historic conditions around the market, and how this figured into public thinking about a market downtown. Post-counsel, I tried to sum up the issue cartoon-style.
During most of the 19th century, butchers regularly dumped poultry innards, rotted fish and animal carcasses into a canal that used to run alongside B Street. The canal path is now Constitution Avenue. This was covered up in 1871 when a pipe was installed to make the canal into a real sewer.
This was a hugely significant complement to a modern, grand market on the Mall. For decades, the market was a growing eyesore, a "squatty" mess, completely inappropriate for a national capital in-the-making.
An account from 1870:
"the present old rookery embraces within its struggling circuit of sheds a sort of barn-yard where horses and vehicles are coralled on market days, and which yard is delightfully paved with manure, floating straw, dead kittens, rotten eggs, stinking fish, and rubbish of all sorts, it does not follow that a bill may be wholly objectionable that fails to perpetuate this feature of our unique market."
The Adolf Cluss-designed Center Market replaced squalor with splendor, and provided the right kind of backdrop for Washington's image-conscious social elite -- as well as a central shopping venue for millions of ordinary citizens and tourists.
* my fiance, Henry
No comments:
Post a Comment