Capital crossings

On my first day living in Washington, I crossed the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and saw the best of the city laid out like a panorama of postcard views — the Kennedy Center, the Washington and Lincoln memorials, and the necklace of green parkland along the Potomac River. I assumed that life in the city would be centered on the river below me, that I would walk daily along its banks and perhaps, from time to time, float on its placid expanse. Surely, water would shape my mental map of Washington, as the left and right banks of the Seine make sense of Paris, or as the bridges of London give form to the city’s sprawl.

Washington is defined by its waterways on three sides. It sits at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, and Rock Creek runs through the city’s western flank. George Washington founded the nation’s capital upstream from his estate at Mount Vernon, and tourists still flock to the Virginia plantation by boat, a reminder that the wealth of this country’s first elite was dependent on navigation; on wide, accessible estuaries; and, later, on inland ports and canals.

But although waterways are omnipresent, and often a nuisance (when rush hour arrives), they don’t really give shape to the city’s psychology. Unlike other cities, where urban life throngs to the waterfront, Washington-area residents seem only intermittently in love with their rivers. We know they’re there, and sometimes we visit. But while the map reminds us that the Potomac is tidal and connects us to oceans beyond, mentally, we are landlocked.

Perhaps that explains why, despite the watery setting, Washington is not quite a city of great bridges. Yes, the graceful arches of Arlington Memorial Bridge have an elegance worthy of an old European capital, and the muscular engineering of the Francis Scott Key Bridge has an appealing formal rigor. But for every good bridge, there is a terrible bridge. The vast majority of commuters who cross a bridge en route to the District enter the city on ugly and utilitarian structures, including the 14th Street Bridge and its dispiriting upstream cousin, the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. Some of the city’s best bridges — those spanning Rock Creek Park — don’t cross a major river. They were built to a higher standard because they served the interests of real estate developers who were creating a privileged enclave of Whiteness in the city’s Northwest quadrant.

A new bridge, however, is rising in Washington, and its soaring arches signal deeper change. The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history with a price tag near $500 million, isn’t just the first major D.C. bridge to reach for the sky — it represents a revolution in how the city thinks about its waterfront. The people who designed and are building it call it a “gateway,” and that word also indicates a transformation in local bridge thinking. Bridges are both functional and metaphorical, and the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge is changing the metaphors the city uses to describe its relation to water, waterways and the waterfront.

14th Street Bridge

Crossing, linking and accessing rivers was essential to the survival of the early republic, and it seemed to me that bridges should be as fundamental to Washington’s daily reality as they are to its history. Chapters two and three of Thomas Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia” — that commonwealth just across the river — were devoted, respectively, to “Rivers” and “Sea Ports.” Thomas Paine, who inspired the revolution that made Washington possible, also helped revolutionize the building of bridges out of iron. Bill Clinton, who was president when I came to town in the late 1990s, spoke vaguely of building a bridge “to the 21st century,” a meaningless phrase that somehow confirmed how important bridges are to the way we conceive of ourselves in a democracy.

But bridges require investment, and that can bring out some of the worst in a democracy — its penny-pinching and shortsighted pragmatism. One of the most heavily trafficked portals to the city crosses the Potomac River near 14th Street, and on that site, for centuries, we have built bad bridges, symptomatic reminders of our ingrained tendency to do things on the cheap, to compromise beauty and engineering to the swamp god of expediency.

LEFT: The 14th Street Bridge is one of the most heavily trafficked portals into Washington. RIGHT: The bridge remains a utilitarian span.

There are actually five spans across the Potomac near 14th Street, to carry not just the automobile traffic of Interstate 395, but also Metro trains, Amtrak, Virginia Railway Express and the CSX rail line. No one, today, enjoys this crossing, and many who use it may not even register that they are crossing the river. Like so many bridges built in the middle of the last century, the three highway structures aren’t designed to be noticed. They were meant to be seamless insertions into a bleak, interstate artery, pipes for the liquid flow of traffic, connecting A to B without the experience of architecture, design or beauty in between.

This is close to the original location of Long Bridge, not the first bridge in the District (that was built across Rock Creek near M Street NW) nor the first to cross the Potomac (that was Chain Bridge several miles upstream from Long Bridge). But Long Bridge, originally a wooden structure built on a dense thicket of pilings, is the oldest of the city’s bad bridges. Its memory has haunted Washington for centuries, and its site is magnetic to shortsighted urbanists.

The Long Bridge, which is how the railway crossing is still known, was commerce-driven from the start, its construction parceled out to a private company by an 1808 bill signed into law by President Jefferson, with aesthetics not even an afterthought. “Said company,” the law read, was authorized to build or have built “a good and sufficient bridge, at least thirty-six feet wide, of sound and suitable materials, and in all respects adequate for the passage of travellers, horses, cattle and carriages.”

[The 200-year evolution of the National Mall]

The result, a long, low-lying structure, allowed boats to pass through two channels at either end. It was burned on both ends during the War of 1812 and seriously damaged by floods repeatedly throughout the 19th century. It appears in a drawing by Winslow Homer showing the moonlit crossing on May 24, 1861, of federal troops to occupy Alexandria as the Civil War threatened the capital. It was built, and rebuilt, shored up and patched, expanded with parallel spans. In 1903, it was replaced with steel trusses. The current highway bridges were opened between 1950 and 1971, and the only good thing one can say of them is that they are relatively low to the ground and don’t block views up and down the river any more than can be expected.

Arlington Memorial Bridge

Arlington Memorial Bridge, just upstream from the old Long Bridge, is the spiritual and aesthetic antithesis of the 14th Street crossing. It, too, is a low-lying bridge and originally included a draw span for river traffic. But it was integrated into a coherent city plan, designed by a major architecture firm — McKim, Mead and White, which also designed Penn Station in New York — carefully aligned with the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery, and refined and improved through a vigorous design process. In Washington, it is the best of the good bridges, a living memorial to how, occasionally, democratic institutions can produce infrastructure that is both beautiful and functional despite the endemic pressure to skimp, chisel and compromise.

LEFT: Arlington Memorial Bridge being built in May 1928. The bridge, constructed between 1926 and 1932, originally included a draw span for river traffic. (Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress) RIGHT: President Herbert Hoover, center, inspects the bridge in January 1931. (Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress)

It is also the city’s essential “symbolic” bridge, built between 1926 and 1932 to link North and South after the Civil War. The symbolism may have been hollow — the culture of white supremacy that was the root cause of the Civil War is still with us today — but it inspired an ambitious design. And perhaps that hollowness is accidentally embedded in the bridge, which is made of concrete faced with decorative granite panels. It is the classic, well-dressed bridge, originally designed with a state-of-the-art steel draw span, but masquerading as something the Romans might have built two millennia ago, if they had dared to flatten their arches just a bit.

The debate about what Memorial Bridge should look like helped refine — and cement for decades — the fundamental “Washington” bridge type, a wide, open roadway over low arches, hugging the river like a tight string of pearls. To understand what a Washington bridge shouldn’t be, look to the proposed designs that were rejected for bridges on or near this site: a grandiose, classical arcade fronted by triumphal arches; soaring masonry towers standing sentinel over metal draw spans; or a sweeping suspension bridge reminiscent of the one in Brooklyn. None made the cut.

For all its elegance, the low profile of Memorial Bridge was the key design element. “It’s a very low city, and if you want to maintain the emphasis on the monumental elements, then you don’t want big, expressive forms down on the riverfront,” says Thomas Luebke, secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, the federal design-oversight body that approved the bridge design a century ago. “Bridges are thresholds, guiding you into the monumental city, as opposed to things that are very expressive in their own right.”

Francis Scott Key Bridge

Often lost in the history of Washington bridges are the occasional moments when the nation’s capital was at the forefront of national engineering ambition. Long Bridge was the longest bridge in the United States when it opened in 1809, and Taft Bridge, which carries Connecticut Avenue over Rock Creek, was reportedly the largest unreinforced concrete bridge in the world when it was opened to traffic in 1907. The 1923 Francis Scott Key Bridge, with its giant concrete arches, was also considered an engineering marvel, suitably grand enough to replace another engineering milestone, the old Aqueduct Bridge on the same site. Aqueduct Bridge, built between 1833 and 1843, had carried not just vehicles, but also boats, on a water channel complete with a tow path that created an extension to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from Georgetown to Virginia.

Like Long Bridge, Aqueduct Bridge began life as a mercenary venture, and its tolls were considered exorbitant; like Long Bridge, it was damaged and repaired throughout the 19th century. But unlike Long Bridge, when it was replaced in the 20th century with the Key Bridge, it was done right.

[Washington is a city of gardens, if you know how to find them]

Construction began in 1917 and continued for six years, during a world war and a global pandemic. Unlike Memorial Bridge, which came later, the Key Bridge isn’t pretending to be an artifact of an earlier era. It is made of raw, exposed concrete, and its beauty is all in the elegance of its geometry. And like Memorial Bridge, the Key Bridge was designed to be integrated into a monumental city plan, including a tree-lined ceremonial avenue along what is now M Street that would have connected Georgetown to Pennsylvania Avenue. That never happened, but the bridge remains a local favorite. Its center arch is set into the bedrock of the river, with shorter, interstitial arches filling in the gaps between the main arch and its neighbors.

While the Key Bridge mostly conforms to the Washington bridge type — wide roadway over arched support — its arches are enormous, giving it a monumentality unique to the city’s Potomac crossings, especially when seen from the river. The views are tremendous, and it is the one bridge that really invites you to look upstream, to the rocky inland and forested interior regions that were once a symbol of the country’s potential strength and growth (though at a terrible cost), and are now simply the site of the city’s suburbs.

Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge

The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, which crosses the Anacostia River at South Capitol Street, will challenge the Key Bridge’s monumentality. Rather than design a low structure with a wide-open deck on top, the architects went for something more majestic — three pairs of parallel arches, rising in the center to about 168 feet above the river. The arches are unbraced, meaning they aren’t tied together by lateral connections, leaving the view to the sky open. The new bridge replaces an undistinguished 1950 bridge at the same site, but represents a milestone in new thinking about the river it crosses. Care has been taken to integrate both ends of the structure into landscaped traffic ovals, which will eventually become the sites for memorials. Unlike the desultory highway bridges built for decades in the city, this bridge will include esplanades on its north and south ends, integrating it into a ribbon of parks and paths on both sides of the Anacostia.

“We are creating a grand urban boulevard down South Capitol Street, and the bridge is a gateway to the monumental core,” says Dennis Howland II, program manager for the bridge at the District Department of Transportation. That word — gateway — represents a major shift from the old idea of bridge as “threshold.” The bridge isn’t just necessary infrastructure, but a thing to be celebrated and enjoyed, and the city it serves as a gateway isn’t just the tourist core of monumental Washington.

The resistance to this kind of bridge is reflexive, but it may be fading. When designs for the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge were discussed by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in 2017, some on the board noted how radically its vertical form broke with local bridge protocol, and they resisted immediate approval. In the parlance of design, they wondered whether “such a typological change is justifiable,” meaning, is this or is this not a Washington bridge?

But the project proceeded, in part because the designers emphasized its relation to the community. “We focused on things we could really make an impact on, to users, the community,” says Ken Butler, design manager for AECOM, the company that designed the bridge. That meant how the span relates to the riverfront and the communities nearby. If the 19th-century bridge was essentially a machine for moving vehicles quickly between two points, the 21st-century bridge is (ideally) seen as a form of community connection.

This isn’t a radically innovative new bridge. It isn’t going to put Washington on the map the way the Golden Gate Bridge helped make San Francisco a design destination, or how the bridges of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava have infused excitement (and sometimes controversy) into such cities as Dallas or Calgary, Canada. But now that the arches are up, it is thrilling to see how different the Anacostia River looks and feels, how much a “big, expressive form down on the waterfront” can frame a river, or put it on a pedestal.

11th Street Bridge Park

For all the ways the new Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge improves on decades of purely functional bridges in Washington — many of which created dead zones of concrete sprawl for those who live near them — there is another project on the boards that pushes the bridge as metaphor to even more ambitious lengths. And that is the 11th Street Bridge Park, in Southeast Washington, scheduled to open in 2024 and built on the disused piers of the old, entirely utilitarian 11th Street Bridge, which the city began replacing in 2009. Instead of vehicle traffic, this elevated park is designed to bridge social divides between the north and south sides of the Anacostia, with gardens, plazas, performance spaces and a cafe, among other amenities.

“For a long time, we turned our backs on the rivers,” says Scott Kratz, director of the park project, which includes a robust social justice component to counteract its impact on gentrification and the rising cost of housing. “They were industrial. The Anacostia was for the Navy Yard, or to get tobacco leaves up to Bladensburg.” A bridge without traffic, designed only to make the daily lives of people on both ends not just more pleasant, but also more integrated across long-standing racial and economic divides, is now all about its metaphors.

“Rivers have acted as dividing lines for generations, and particularly the Anacostia River,” Kratz says. “We can undo some of this damage, and reconnect what was divided, and take bridges to the next level.”

The 11th Street Bridge Park is meant to be crossed, but it would function just as well if people used it simply to meet in the middle. It recycles old infrastructure, preserving memory in its reuse of the original bridge piers. But it is the promise that matters, and it promises so much more than any bridge yet built in the nation’s capital. Every other bridge, even the best of them, is about getting you from here to there. This bridge says: Here is what matters. Stay here and get to know here, because here was always beautiful, and it can be so once again.