Washington Reborn

On Capitol Hill, giant cranes swing slabs of gleaming marble onto the fac,ade of a new, $70 million House Office Building. On Independence Avenue, Government girls are still learning their way around the corridors of "FOB 6,"* an ultramodern Federal Office Building housing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Near tranquil Thomas Circle, huge holes in the ground mark the sites for two multimillion-dollar hotels. In the nation's capital, these and scores of other scenes bear testimony to a dramatic fact: Washington, D.C., is getting the greatest face lifting in its history.

It is high time. Behind the pink of its cherry blossoms and beyond the noble sweep of Pierre L'Enfant's broad avenues, Washington long ago became a blighted city, with some of the U.S.'s worst slums and nightmarish traffic. By 1950 the rush to the suburbs was in full surge, tax revenues were plunging, building within the city was at a standstill, and the downtown area alone was short 29,000 parking spaces. Effective plans for rehabilitating the city were lost in the bureaucratic babble of congressional committees, commissions, boards and councils that govern Washington.

Fewer Flyspecks. It took a group of private citizens to get things moving. Led by Washington Post President Philip Graham and Investment Banker George Angus Garrett, who was the first U.S. Ambassador to Ireland from 1950 to 1951, a small, select band of Washingtonians organized in 1954 as the Federal City Council. They pleaded their case for a better Washington in the White House and to the Congress, raised $500,000 to start modernizing the city's shabby central shopping district. Their efforts paid off: by 1960, Congress had provided king-sized enabling programs for urban redevelopment, federal building construction and road-building authority in the Washington area.

Nowhere has the drive to rehabilitate Washington achieved more remarkable results than in the city's Southwest quadrant, from Capitol Hill to the Waterfront. The area was long a fetid slum (through it once ran bawdy old Four-and-a-Half Street, the capital's last centralized red-light district). Now the builders have cut a 550-acre swath through Southwest Washington. Some 4,657 families, most of them Negro, have been relocated. Beside NASA's new edifice, three other Federal Office Buildings are rising on Independence Avenue, and two more will be built by 1966. A new brick marketplace has replaced the flyspecked old Twelfth Street Market, and the Maine Avenue wharves, with their cluttered array of seafood houses, will give way to a broad promenade with modern marinas, shops and restaurants.*

In the heart of the Southwest project is a complex of glass-and-stone apartments, a new shopping center, 81 trim town houses, and a new theater for the city's Arena Stage Players. Along Tenth Street, which will be widened, Manhattan's William Zeckendorf is putting up a 1,000-room hotel, three big office buildings and dozens of shops, all surrounding a plaza to be named after City Planner L'Enfant.

But Washington's rehabilitation does not stop with the Southwest district. An 82-acre slum district flanking Union Station is being cleared for an attractive new commercial center. On Capitol Hill, 89 blighted acres are being readied for housing redevelopment. New Government buildings are sprouting like marble mushrooms. They include the already completed $57 million State Department Building, a $38 million Museum of History and Technology, a $19 million addition to the domed Museum of Natural History, a $20 million Civil Service Commission headquarters, and a U.S.-owned sports stadium, seating 50,000, which opened last month.

Headache's Cure. Washington's traffic headache has long been compounded by the thousands of tourists who, unable to find a convenient way to bypass the city, clog its thoroughfares as they fight their way en route north or south. The remedy: a 65-mile, limited-access expressway that will encircle Washington and sluice off much of the through traffic. Within the city, a sixto eight-lane "Inner Loop" freeway, all of it elevated, depressed or tunneled underground, will ring the business, federal and civic memorial districts. Eight bridges are under construction or planned to span the Potomac and its tributaries, to speed the commuter traffic from Virginia's and Maryland's bedroom counties. Two expressways from downtown Washington to the Maryland suburbs will be finished next year, and a third in 1968.

Pierre L'Enfant planned Washington as a city that could grow and renew itself. "It will be obvious," he wrote, "that the plan should be drawn on such a scale as to leave room for that aggrandizement and embellishment which the increase of the wealth of the nation will permit it to pursue to any period, however remote.'' It has taken an awfully long time, but at last L'Enfant's dream seems about to come true.

* In Washington parlance, Federal Office Buildings are known as FOBs, just as the House Office Buildings are referred to as HOBs and their Senate counterparts as SOBs.

* Hall's, one of the city's oldest and finest restaurants, has moved to new quarters on the banks of the Anacostia River, a few blocks away, taking its famed nude painting, Adam and Eve, its crab imperial and terrapin Maryland. Gone with the demolition crews is Hall's garden walk, where Ulysses Grant once paced away his flatulence.

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