No. 1. Action of the Washington Board of Trade in relation to the park system of the District of Columbia. No. 2. Action toward the establishment of an arboretum. No. 3. The need of additional playgrounds, parks, and reservations. No. 4. Fort Stevens, where Lincoln was under fire. No. 5. Informal hearing before the subcommittee of the Committee on the District of Columbia, United States Senate. No. 6. Notes on the parks and their connections. No. 7. Notes on the establishment of a national park in the District of Columbia and the acquirement and improvement of the valley of Rock Creek for park purposes. No. 8. Men on horseback. No. 9. Essay on the city of Washington. No. 10. Informal conference of the Park Improvement Commission of the District of Columbia, held in the room of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia on October 21, 1901. No. 11. Extract from a paper on the commercial value of beauty by Daniel H. Burnham. No. 12. Centennial avenue. No. 13. The origin of the L'Enfant plan for the city of Washington. No. 14. Abstract of laws and ordinances relative to the Washington Market Company SENATE COMMITTEE ON THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. PARK IMPROVEMENT PAPERS NO. 16. THE EIGHTEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURY PLANS FOR WASHINGTON CITY. [Paper read before the National Arts Club, New York, February 12, 1902, by Glenn Brown, F. A. I. A.] APRIL 7, 1902.-Printed for the use of the committee. I felt a slight diffidence in complying with the request of your secretary when asked to read a paper in the metropolis. This diffidence passed away when I called to mind that I was simply to describe what Washington and L'Enfant did for the capital city at the end of the eighteenth century, and what New York, Chicago, and Boston, through Daniel H. Burnham, Charles F. McKim, Augustus Saint Gaudens, and Frederick Law Olmsted, jr., propose to do for it at the beginning of the twentieth century. The original map of Washington, made in 1791, was the first plan designed and drawn for a capital city of a nation. Other capitals have been a growth, beginning as villages without design or thought of future progress, and in their gradual development from village to town and their final expansion into a city, have been hampered by the original lines of roadways, the gradual addition of streets and suburbs and the location of more or less important buildings. Gradual growth has often produced picturesqueness, never stateliness or grandeur such as would befit a capital city. Many cities, after the country which they represent has grown in wealth and power, have attempted with varying success to remedy this want of an original, effective, and harmonious design. Paris has undergone many such changes, the later ones under Napoleon III, who at enormous expense opened new avenues and boulevards directly through the city, so as to command a view of focal points, and beautified the city with numerous parks and works of art. Although the effects accomplished in Paris, when viewed in connection with beautiful buildings, majestic arches, graceful columns, artistic statuary, and pleasing gardens, have been greater than similar accomplishments in other cities of the world, Paris is not what it |