grounds, and thence northward to the grounds of the President's house, including also Lafayette Park, opposite the President's house. The Mall, as the park extending from the Capitol to the Potomac is known, is adorned with fine trees. Numerous drives and walks furnish the opportunity of enjoying the unusual experience of rural surroundings in the heart of a great city, since Pennsylvania Avenue, the broad thoroughfare extending from the Capitol grounds to the vicinity of the President's house, lies a square or two north of this park of 230 acres.
The number and general distribution of the parks and the profusion of trees give to the city, when seen from an elevation, the appearance of a great park with buildings showing through the masses of foliage, or thrusting their tall forms of brick and stone above it. The tendency toward centralization in modern business has led to the erection of a number of lofty buildings for commercial purposes. The building regulations restrict buildings on residential streets to a maximum height of 80 feet, and in business sections to 110-130 feet, according to the width of the thoroughfare on which they front.
The principal business thoroughfares are F Street West, Seventh Street West, and Pennsylvania Avenue. There is a great diversity in the character of the domestic architecture, a circumstance which not only adds to the attractiveness of the city, but serves to give it individuality. Some of the fine residence streets are K Street North, Sixteenth Street West, Massachusetts Avenue, and Connecticut Avenue. The tendency in the growth of the city is toward the northwest.
Buildings. A conspicuous object is the great dome of the Capitol, 288 feet high, the central feature of a structure which stretches along the brow of a hill for 751 feet. Its width is 350 feet. The main structure is of sandstone painted white, while the two wings occupied by the Senate and the House of Representatives are built of white marble. As a whole the building, with its porticoes and lobby dome (of iron), ranks as one of the most impressive and beautiful examples of architecture in the world. In general, the style is classic, with Corinthian details. Beneath the dome is the Rotunda, 96 feet in diameter and 180 feet high, adorned with historical paintings. What is now known as Statuary Hall was formerly the chamber of the House of Representatives, and the court room of the Supreme Court was once the Senate chamber. Since 1897, when the building for the Library of Congress, just east of the Capitol, was completed at a cost of over $6,000,000, the books of the great national collection have been housed in the new structure, instead of in the inadequate quarters in the west front of the middle section of the Capitol building. The Library building is an elaborate specimen of Italian Renaissance, and its ornamentation both inside and outside is more profuse than in any other structure which has been erected at public expense. A tunnel connects the Library and Capitol buildings. See Library of Congress, with Plate.
About a mile and a half northwest of the Capitol is the President's house, or White House (q.v.). Owing to the unfortunate location of the granite structure occupied by the Treasury Department, the view from the Capitol down the broad expanse of Pennsylvania Avenue is interrupted by the southern portico of the Treasury building, instead of ending with the White House and its garden. Flanking the White House on the east is the Treasury Department building, with its vast colonnade, and on the left, the massive granite structure occupied by the State, War, and Navy departments. About midway between the White House and the Capitol are two marble buildings situated on opposite sides of F Street. One of these, an imposing specimen of the Doric, is the home of the Interior Department. The Patent Office is here, and in the building across the street are the Indian and Land offices. Still farther to the east along F Street is a great structure of brick, where the clerks of the Pension Office do their work. The building consists of a tier of offices, three stories high, surrounding a court protected by a roof of glass and iron. A feature of the exterior is the terra cotta frieze, depicting scenes from army life during the Civil War.
The only type of modern ‘skyscraper’ building for office purposes erected by the Government, in Washington is the nine-story granite structure occupying an entire square on Pennsylvania Avenue, between Eleventh and Twelfth streets. It is the home of the Post Office Department, with offices on the first floor for the city post office. Directly north of the Capitol is another lofty structure which forms a part of the plant of the Government Printing Office, the largest concern of its kind in the world. Another great workshop of the Government is the ordnance factory, which occupies the old Navy Yard site to the southeast of the Capitol. The great guns are forged elsewhere, but in this shop, which employs hundreds of men, they are finished. Another workshop of interest is that in which the paper money and the postage stamps of the Government are made. This is known as the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and is situated in a large brick structure on the south side of the Mall and at the west end of the line of structures occupied by Government institutions. Its neighbor on the east is the building of the Agricultural Department. Plans were being prepared in 1903 for a building of marble to cost $3,500,000, to take the place of the present structure, which is of brick. Farther to the east rise the Norman towers of the Smithsonian Institution, and near by is the low-lying but extensive building occupied by the National Museum. Even with the large floor space provided, there is not sufficient room, and Congress has authorized the expenditure of more than $3,000,000 in the construction of a building on the south side of the Smithsonian grounds west of Seventh Street. Not far from the National Museum is the Army Medical Museum of the Surgeon-General's Office, U. S. A., which has come to have a wide reputation as the home of the largest medical library in the world. Still farther to the east is the home of the United States Fish Commission.
As the dome of the Capitol building closes in the vista of the Mall to the east, so at the extreme west rises the impressive marble obelisk erected to the memory of the first President of the United States. It was begun in 1848 and completed in 1884. (See Washington Monument.)
- Vol. XX.—21.
