The D.C. Freeway Revolt and the Coming of Metro 

Introduction

Table of Contents

A Template for Cities...................................................................................................................... 2

The Comprehensive Plan for the District........................................................................................ 4

Major Thoroughfares .................................................................................................................... 10

The District Creates an Expressway Plan ..................................................................................... 16

The 1941 Plan ............................................................................................................................... 21

Rock Creek Park ........................................................................................................................... 27

The Public Speaks ......................................................................................................................... 31

Refining a Plan .............................................................................................................................. 32

The Highway Bridge ..................................................................................................................... 33

Elevating the Battle of the Bridge ................................................................................................. 41

Postwar Thinking .......................................................................................................................... 45

The Interstate System for the District ........................................................................................... 48

Washington Present and Future .................................................................................................... 50
The D.C. Freeway Revolt and the Coming of Metro 

By Richard F. Weingroff 

Federal Highway Administration

“Washington’s transportation problems are—in one form or another—a microcosm of our 

Nation’s transportation problems.” 

Secretary of Transportation Alan S. Boyd 

September 26, 1967 

Introduction

A Template for Cities

On April 27, 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt submitted a report to Congress called Toll 

Roads and Free Roads. At the request of Congress, the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) had 

examined the feasibility and cost of three east-west and three north-south toll superhighways. 

BPR concluded that the toll superhighways were not financially feasible, but offered an 

alternative: a master plan for a network of toll-free express highways. 

The need to improve the primary interstate portions of the Nation’s road network was clear, but 

BPR was especially interested in the alignment of expressways to help solve problems in 

metropolitan areas. The report explained that “the new facilities most urgently required are beltline distribution roads around the larger cities and bypasses around many of the smaller cities and 

towns.” Through traffic, however, was only a small part of the congestion problem: 

By far the greater part is originated in or destined to points in the city and largely points 

near its center or customarily reached by traveling through the center. Bypass routes, 

therefore, may not be regarded as means for the relief of congestion on the highwayconnecting streets of large cities.

Belt-line distribution roads with control of access were needed for all large cities and many 

smaller ones to allow traffic not bound for the city to bypass it and to serve as a transfer route 

among the radial highways serving the city. An inner belt-line should also be built “generally 

somewhere within the ring of decadent property surrounding the central business area.” The 

property had been abandoned by the middle and upper class residents who had moved to new 

suburban housing, usually still within the city limits, and they had been replaced by residents 

with lower or no income. The report explained: 

Such a belt line, connecting at appropriate points with radial arteries extending out of the 

city, may avoid the cutting of a new route directly through the business sections, and may 

either serve as a substitute or supplement for the outer belt line. 

An outer belt-line was needed to serve similar purposes at a distance from downtown. This beltline could be built within the outer limits of city boundaries where possible, or just beyond the 
boundary. [Toll Roads and Free Roads, Message from the President of the United States, House 

Document No. 272, 76th Congress, 1st Session, April 27, 1939, page 95-98] 

In April 1941, President Roosevelt appointed a National Interregional Highway Committee to 

investigate the need for a national highway system to improve the facilities now available for 

interregional transportation and to advise on the character of such improvements. Thomas H. 

MacDonald, Commissioner of Public Roads, served as chairman, while Herbert S. Fairbank of 

the Public Roads Administration (PRA, as BPR was known in the 1940s) was secretary and 

primary author. Harland Bartholomew of St. Louis, one of the Nation’s leading urban planners, 

was an active non-PRA member of the committee. 

The committee essentially completed its work in 1941, but the report was held during World 

War II while PRA and State highway officials focused on defense highway needs. Moreover, its 

release could be delayed until near war’s end because constructing the interregional network was 

seen as a source of jobs for the returning soldiers after victory. President Roosevelt transmitted 

Interregional Highways to Congress on January 12, 1944. 

It outlined a proposed National System of Interregional Highways, but with special emphasis on 

segments in metropolitan areas. For the largest urban areas, the report prescribed a series of 

circumferentials. One would encircle the central business district, a second would be located 

further out but within or near the city boundary, and a third (or more) would be located at a 

greater distance. All would serve bypass traffic while providing links among the radials for local 

traffic. [Interregional Highways, Message from the President of the United States, House 

Document No. 379, 78th Congress, 2d Session, January 12, 1944, pages 64-65, 71-74] 

Full control of access in urban areas, the report stated, “may require the raising or lowering of 

extended sections of the interregional route above or below the adjoining ground level, in order 

to carry it over or under frequent cross streets or over some and under others.” Crowding an 

elevated highway “into the narrow space generally afforded by existing surface streets will 

usually result in unsatisfactory design of the express route and impairment of the utility of the 

surface street for local service.” A wider right-of-way was needed, with one option being to 

acquire properties on one side of the street. “In general, the Committee considers elevation of the 

express routes a solution acceptable only in a commercial or business environment.” The 

committee agreed with the “widely held opinion opposing the cutting of such facilities through 

residential areas.”

By comparison, the committee preferred depressed expressways if obstacles could be overcome. 

Depression of the express highway would “usually require extensive reconstruction of 

underground facilities, such as water mains, sewers, and electric conduits.” As a result, 

achieving full depression within the right-of-way of an existing street would rarely be possible. 

However, where the obstacles could be overcome, the depressed expressway “may be considered 

by many, more pleasing to the eye and more consonant with a gracious improvement of the urban 

environment than any other solution of the express-highway problem.” [Interregional Highways, 

page 80] 
In the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, Congress directed the Federal Works Agency, which 

included PRA, to consult with the State highway agencies to designate a 40,000-mile National 

System of Interstate Highways. PRA asked the State highway agencies to propose mileage for 

inclusion in the Interstate System. 

The Comprehensive Plan for the District 

The District of Columbia is unique among cities because it is not part of a State, but rather is a 

separate entity created under a provision of the Constitution. Section 8, which lists the powers of 

Congress, includes the following: 

To exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever, over such District (not 

exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of 

Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States, and to exercise like 

authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state in which 

the same shall be, for erection of forts, magazines, arsenals, dockyards, and other needful 

buildings . . . 

After President George Washington identified the location for the capital city, officials created a 

diamond-shaped District out of Maryland and Virginia centered on the Potomac River and 

including the existing cities of Georgetown, Maryland, and Alexandria, Virginia. After the 

central government moved to the ill-prepared District in 1800, Congress exercised varying levels 

of control over the years. (In 1846, Congress returned the Virginia portion of the District to the 

Commonwealth of Virginia.) 

The District committees in Congress were the real power over virtually every aspect of civic life, 

including highways and parks. The District did not have a vote in Congress. 

By the 1920s, Washington was searching for a template. 

On June 6, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation creating the National Capital Park 

Commission. The legislation authorized the commission to acquire land in the District, Virginia, 

and Maryland for parks and playgrounds, with advice from the Commission of Fine Arts. For 

this purpose, the legislation authorized $1.1 million a year. In particular, the commission was to 

turn its attention to “Rock Creek and the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers . . . and to provide for 

the comprehensive, systematic, and continuous development of park, parkway, and playground 

systems of the National Capital.” [Gutheim, Frederic, and Lee, Antoinette J., Worthy of the 

Nation: Washington, DC, from L’Enfant to the National Capital Planning Commission, 

2nd Edition, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, page 178] 

Congress expanded the role of the commission and changed its name in legislation that President 

Coolidge signed on April 30, 1926. The amendment directed the new National Capital Park and 

Planning Commission to prepare, develop, and maintain “a comprehensive, consistent and 

coordinated plan” for the National Capital and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs, as well as 

coordinating the plans of Federal and District agencies. The legislation also abolished the 1895 
District Highway Commission and transferred its powers to the new commission. [Gutheim and 

Lee, page 180] 

According to Frederic Gutheim’s and Antoinette J. Lee’s history of planning in the Washington 

area, the chairman of the commission, Frederic A. Delano, was not a trained planner but was “a 

longtime activist in planning in Washington, having been “a prime organizer of the Regional 

Plan of New York and Its Environs, which was published in 1928.” (Delano was future President 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s uncle.) [Gutheim and Lee, pages 170, 194] 

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., “made substantive contributions to the Planning Commission in its 

early years, taking on much of the work himself.” He “had established his own reputation 

distinct from that of his famous father,” the leading landscape architect of his generation, and had 

“Secure lines of communication with influential people.” Staff member Charles W. Eliot II, at 

27 years old, was the commission’s initial “City Planner.” He was the “nephew and namesake” 

of a famous landscape architect who had helped prepare the 1893 Boston Metropolitan Park 

System, “a model which many Washingtonians admired.” Eliot II had trained in Harvard’s 

Graduate School of Landscape Architecture, which offered city planning, and had worked for 

Olmsted in Massachusetts. Eliot, according to Gutheim and Lee, “saw his job as the function of 

‘allowing for necessary municipal growth, yet preserving as much as . . . I can of the flavor of the 

past.’” [Gutheim and Lee, page 194] 

Colonel Ulysses S. Grant III was the executive officer. At the time, he was Director of the 

independent Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital, which had an ex 

officio seat on the commission. Eliot said that Colonel Grant had excellent contacts with 

President Herbert Hoover, crediting the executive officer with “managing the White House” on 

policies affecting planning the city. [Worthy of a Nation, page 195] 

Unlike other commission officials, Colonel Grant would be involved in transportation issues in a 

variety of roles well into the 1960s. The grandson of the Civil War hero and President (1869-

1877), Colonel Grant graduated from West Point in 1903 and was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant 

in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He began his first stint in Washington in August 1909 

when he became Superintendent of the State, War, and Navy Buildings. He held the post 

through May 1913. After service in other parts of the country and in Europe during and after 

World War I, he returned to Washington as Director of the Office of Public Buildings and Public 

Parks in 1925, receiving his promotion to Lt. Colonel in 1926. 

This assignment was the start of his activities in city planning. According to a summary of his 

career by the Columbia Historical Society:

In this capacity he had responsibility for the construction, maintenance, care, custody, 

policing, upkeep, and repair of public buildings, parks, monuments, and memorials in the 

District of Columbia . . . . Additional duties were added: he was Executive and 

Disbursing Officer of the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway Commission, the Lincoln 

Memorial Commission, the Arlington Memorial Bridge Commission, and the Ericsson 

Memorial Commission; member and Executive Disbursing Officer of the National 
Capital Park and Planning Commission and the Public Buildings Commission; 

Coordinator of Motor Transport in the District of Columbia; etc., etc. 

After graduating from the Army War College in Washington in June 1934, he was assigned to 

posts outside the District. He was commissioned Colonel later that year and Brigadier General in 

October 1940. In June 1942, General Grant became War Department Representative on the 

Board of Civil Protection, Office of Civilian Defense in Washington. 

After Delano asked to be relieved of his post of chairman of the National Capital Park and 

Planning Commission, his nephew, President Roosevelt, asked General Grant to take the 

position. It was, the President wrote to Grant, an “urgent job,” especially “in times like these 

when the pressure to meet quickly the wartime needs for office buildings, housing and public 

services of all kinds tends to push planning aside.” He wanted the commission “to take a strong 

role and exercise real leadership to expedite these facilities and at the same time build toward a 

well planned National Capital.” 

On September 11, 1942, General Grant became chairman. In 1944, President Roosevelt relieved 

General Grant of his military duties so he could devote full time to the commission. He retired 

from the army in July 1946 after 43 years. 

General Grant’s term as chairman ended in April 1949, but he remained active in Washington 

planning for the rest of his life in a variety of roles, such as president of the American Planning 

and Civic Association and one of the original trustees of the National Trust for Historic 

Preservation as well as Vice-Chairman (1950-1954). As will be discussed, he would be involved 

in most battles over highways and bridges affecting the area’s monuments, National Mall, and 

parks until his death on August 28, 1968, at the age of 87. [Rubincam, Milton, “Major General 

U.S. Grant, 3rd, 1881-1968, Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Published by the 

Society, 1969, pages 387-400] 

While in Washington, he lived in homes at several addresses, including 1868 Columbia Road, 

1929 Q Street, 1135 21st Street, NW., and, finally, 1255 New Hampshire Avenue, NW. 

[Congressional Directory, various years] 

The commission unveiled its comprehensive plan on January 17, 1930, in a presentation at 

Constitution Hall. Governor Albert C. Ritchie of Maryland, Governor John Garland Pollard of 

Virginia, Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, and Members of Congress attended the 

event. The Virginia General Assembly attended in a body along with other officials from the two 

States and the District. 

President Hoover was unable to attend but sent a letter to Chairman Delano saying that creation 

of the revitalized commission was “one of the fundamental steps taken in national recognition of 

our need and opportunity to build the most effective and most beautiful capital city in the world.” 

The 1926 legislation ensured that the city would have “the advantage of the diversity of skill and 

experience in this renaissance of the City of Washington through our new undertaking for the 

expansion and revision of our Capital city.” 
The first necessity was a “continuous study of the character and probable growth of this city, with 

intelligent anticipation of such growth.” President Hoover listed problems to be addressed such 

as “the scores of problems of transportation, of abolition of slum areas, development of park and 

recreation facilities,” and issues related to schools and other concerns. He concluded: 

It is our national ambition to make a great and effective city for the seat of our 

Government, with a dignity, character, and symbolism truly representative of America. 

As a nation we have resolved that it shall be accomplished. To succeed in the fullest 

measure we have need for planning not only within the District of Columbia, but also for 

co-operation from the adjacent States.

Colonel Grant presented the plan. A comprehensive plan can never be complete, he said, “any 

more than a single suit can be patterned to permanently clothe a growing child,” but plans for the 

District, Maryland, and Virginia must be “a single seamless garment, so that we may have here a 

region that is a living, growing organism, each part of which fits into and collaborates with 

adjacent parts.” 

The Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs was in sections: highways, railroads, water 

terminals, airports, parks within the district, and regional parks. For highways, Colonel Grant 

said:

Because highways constitute the most important contribution made at public expense to 

the individual’s life, because they are the arteries through which the life-blood of the 

community must circulate and finally because they are the specific part of the city in 

which the conditions have changed most in a very short time, the ‘battle of the streets’ 

commands our full attention. City planning studies naturally begin with a consideration 

of the highway system and the work done in the past—that is, existing conditions—is 

found to set certain limitations upon what can be done in the future. 

The plan that Pierre L’Enfant devised at the city’s creation “was originally laid out on a scale 

amply adequate for a large city,” and subsequent generations continued the plan despite great 

increases in population after the Civil War and other changes: 

But this highway plan was for the days of animal-drawn transportation and to meet traffic 

conditions incident thereto. With the advent of the automobile and motor truck traffic(,) 

conditions and requirements have changed. The need for differentiating between streets 

according to their use and purpose, just as telephone lines, sewer lines and other public 

works are designed to meet their special purposes economically, is being more and more 

generally appreciated. The differentiation between thoroughfares or traffic arteries and 

the secondary streets or system of veins to pick up local traffic and bring it into the 

thoroughfares permits curvilinear location of the latter, their relation to the natural 

contours of the land and the preservation of attractive features of the topography of trees 

and of the natural surface soil, as well as the lengthening of blocks and other variations 

which not only add measurably to the individuality and interest of each residential 

neighborhood, but also save materially in both the first cost of development and in the 

annual cost of maintenance and administration. 
With 29.3 percent of the city’s usable surface devoted to streets and alleys, the best use of such 

land deserves “the most careful study, and which should not be left to be solved by the method of 

appropriation in compliance with the loudest expressed local demands.” 

Accordingly, the comprehensive plan must include a major thoroughfare plan that was in 

development. Some thoroughfare work was underway, such as straightening Michigan Avenue 

and upgrading B Street, NW. (future Constitution Avenue), to “a great cross-town artery from the 

Capitol to the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway and the Virginia road system.” 

In addition, high-level crossings of Rock Creek Park were needed, “at least one immediately to 

stop the danger and prevent the waste of time and traction incident to carrying all cross-town 

traffic 140 feet down hill and then again up the same height on the other side.” They would be 

built at intervals of about a mile at Aspen Street, Military Road and Utah Avenue leading to 

Madison and Kennedy Streets, and Tilden/Upshur Streets. 

The commission’s study of urban growth in the past decade revealed an octopus-like growth 

“based on transportation facilities.” To the extent that such facilities could be fitted into the 

topography and existing developments, “the general growth of the region will be better balanced 

and distributed”:

This has been a major consideration in the location on our map of proposed radial roads leading 

into the adjacent area of Maryland and Virginia; that is, the foreseeing of a system which will 

make possible as nearly equivalent transportation facilities in every direction available for 

residential or commercial development. Of course, as far as possible this system has been based 

on existing roads and their widening and extension as necessary and justified from time to time. 

The distribution of this inflow and outflow of traffic around the perimeter of the congested part 

of the city has also been cared for.

Colonel Grant cited examples such as connecting Massachusetts Avenue with the Maryland road 

system and linking Arlington Memorial Bridge with the Virginia road network “so that the 

solution may be arrived at which most nearly meets the best interest of all concerned, and 

reconciling any conflict of interest that may be found to exist.” The cooperation of State and 

local officials in resolving such conflicts had been “most gratifying.” 

However, “a good system of radial highways is not enough.” The area also needed “crossconnections, not only to permit easy exchange of traffic from one radial to another and for local 

hauling, but also to permit the by-passing of congested areas.” As an example, he cited traffic 

moving between Baltimore and Richmond that had to pass through the District’s “congested 

business center and out over one of the most heavily traveled bridges,” the Highway Bridge at 

14th Street carrying U.S. 1, the East Coast’s main road, across the Potomac River. Colonel Grant 

considered that “the direct connection with our nearest metropolitan neighbors on the north and 

on the south—Baltimore and Richmond—are of first and special interest.” 

A solution of “great mutual advantage” would be “a broad and adequate boulevard over which [a 

motorist] can pass by the crowded city streets, skirting the hills of Montgomery County and at the 

same time obtain, perhaps, various impressive and inspiring views of the Capital City, then over 
a bridge near Great Falls or near Little Falls and connecting with a good road in Virginia which 

will permit him to go on his way without being entangled in the most congested local 

developments near the river or overloading the terminals of the city bridges even if they were to 

be improved.” 

He discussed railroads, waterways, parks, and other aspects of the regional plan, including rail 

and water terminals:

A plan which considers only questions of beautification and public projects having an 

aesthetic value, such as our great public buildings program [in what is now known as the 

Federal Triangle, authorized by the Public Buildings Act of 1926], even though it may be 

artistically splendid, will not be complete economically in so far as it fails to provide for 

the less attractive and perhaps less inspiring, but equally or more important, utilitarian 

and commercial needs of the community. 

He also emphasized that the city must not be influenced by the tall buildings being erected 

elsewhere:

Washington also had been most fortunate in having had since 1910 a law preventing the 

construction of buildings higher than 130 feet, for to the constantly more accentuated 

crowding of the land [by construction of skyscrapers] in most of our cities we must 

attribute a large part of their traffic congestion, which is gradually throttling the 

circulation essential to their economic life. This commission believes that present 

conditions in this city already justify the contention that even the 130-foot limit is too 

high, and that the 110-foot limit originally established by the Zoning Commission should 

have been adhered to. 

He admitted to favoring height restrictions in part for “the sentimental one of preserving the 

dominance of the dome of the Capitol as the chief characteristic of the National Capital, just as 

the dome of St. Peter’s dominates Rome.” 

At present, traffic was within the limits that the L’Enfant plan could handle “without recourse to 

such expensive public works as subways, double-deck streets, overhead pedestrian crossings, 

etc.” These were common ideas for city planning at the time, and Colonel Grant thought they 

might be needed some day, but not at present. 

Colonel Grant concluded his presentation: 

For the perfection of the plan as here laid before you, and for the work of keeping it upto-date and further fitting it to the needs and best interests of the entire region, the 

National Capital Park and Planning Commission begs your sympathetic understanding, 

your criticism and advice, your collaboration and help, so that we may all have a hand in 

constructing the edifice, in finding what is America’s highest attainment in the art of city 

building. [“Hoover Pledges Nation’s Aid For Greater Capital,” The Evening Star, 

January 19, 1930; “Rock Creek Park High Level Bridge Plan Is Explained,” The Sunday 

Star, February 2, 1930] 
An editorial in The Evening Star said of the event: 

After a hundred years or so of pitiful neglect of the American capital, such meetings as 

those held last night come as inspiring reassurance that the renaissance of the last twentyfive years gains in strength and that the ideals so nobly expressed by the fathers in their 

original conception of the American Capital are becoming the ideals of the Nation. [“The 

Nation’s City,” The Evening Star, January 18, 1930] 

Major Thoroughfares 

By “thoroughfare,” Colonel Grant did not mean the urban expressway that would come in later 

generations. The thoroughfare might be designed to carry more traffic than a regular street, but it 

typically had access points from private properties along the way and at-grade intersections that 

undermined the free flow of traffic. It was designed to pull through-traffic away from congested 

areas, such as the downtown business district. 

The idea of major thoroughfare plans was not unique to Washington. Cities had been developing 

such plans since early in the 20th century in response to the growth of the automobile. For 

example, the October 1918 issue of The American City carried an article on “Principles of Design 

for a Complete System of City Thorofares” [sic] by Robert H. Whitten, City Plan Advisor of the 

Cleveland City Plan Commission. “The traffic problem in all large cities,” Whitten began, “is 

leading to a demand for more radial streets coming from the periphery of the city into and thru 

the central business section”:

Unless heroic measures are taken to provide an adequate thorofare system, the traffic 

problem will be the limiting factor in the growth of many of our big cities . . . . The 

present crisis has largely arisen from reliance on a few main thorofares converging at or 

near a central square. The remedy lies in provision of more streets of adequate width 

coming from the outskirts of the city into and thru the central business section and out to 

the city boundaries on the opposite side. 

Whitten explained that, “The mixing of vehicles of different kinds, widths, motive power, uses 

and speeds multiplies difficulties and increases accidents.” He believed, therefore, that the 

thoroughfare system “should be laid out in pairs so as to secure a better segregation of traffic.” 

One route would carry street cars and trucks while the other would carry automobiles. At the 

same time, the thoroughfares must provide for rapid-transit routes from the outskirts to the 

central business district. “In order that a rapid-transit route shall be financially self-sustaining, it 

is essential that it be so located as to secure a large amount of non-rush hour and short-haul 

traffic.” 

Whitten recognized the difficulties inherent in change: 

After streets are built up solidly with business buildings and apartments, it becomes 

almost prohibitively expensive to alter greatly the general street plan. Yet it is apparent 

that the limited number of thru traffic routes that many cities now possess will be 

absolutely inadequate for traffic needs twenty-five, fifty or one hundred years hence. 
Unless measures are taken in time, growth will suddenly stop and the city may be faced 

with the alternative of permanent ruin or back breaking financial burdens that could have 

been avoided by a little vision in the planning of the city. 

As Professor Robert M. Fogelson discussed in his history of downtowns, planners developed city 

plans that included new streets, widened existing roads, and crosstown highways, as well as inner 

and outer belts, to divert traffic not destined for downtown. Some critics feared that such plans 

were self-defeating because the new streets would lead to increased traffic and worsened 

congestion. Nevertheless, cities embarked on costly construction programs as a result of which, 

“the street systems were able to handle far more motor vehicles in the late 1920s than in the early 

1900s.” [Fogelson, Robert M. Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950, Yale University Press, 

2001, pages 256-257] 

Eliminating nonessential traffic from central business districts was equally important, but more 

difficult because it involved costly construction. A few crosstown highways were built to allow 

passage from one part of a city to another without entering downtown and some cities began 

building inner belts around the central business district and outer belts for traffic destined for 

distant locations. Their effectiveness in reducing congestion was limited, according to Fogelson: 

But these crosstown highways and inner and outer belts made up only a small fraction of 

the major thoroughfares, most of which still converged on the central business district, 

funneling in tens of thousands of automobiles en route elsewhere. 

He also explored why so few of these roads were constructed in the 1920s: 

The answer is that the authorities could not build all the proposed bypasses and radial 

highways without raising property taxes to unacceptable levels. Given the choice, most 

downtown businessmen favored radial highways over bypasses. So did the many 

motorists who worked and shopped downtown. And though many planners and engineers 

thought bypasses were the most economical way to relieve traffic congestion, they also 

believed radial highways were necessary to make the central business district “directly 

accessible” to all the other parts. [Fogelson, page 258.] 

Some attempts were made to segregate traffic, such as construction of rail-highway grade 

separation structures and parkways that excluded commercial traffic. However, construction of 

separate street systems faced financial and political hurdles that officials had difficulty 

overcoming. Construction “would have been prohibitively expensive” while banning 

automobiles from commercial thoroughfares “would have been very unpopular—and probably 

unenforceable.” [Fogelson, page 259] 

These initial efforts to address urban congestion in the automobile era failed to solve the 

problem. As Fogelson put it, “By the late 1920s more automobiles were pouring into the central 

business district than ever, far more than would have been possible if the authorities had not 

opened new streets and widened existing ones.” Despite the diversion of some traffic, “traffic 

congestion was as bad as ever.” He cited a few examples:
“Despite every scheme of traffic control so far devised,” midtown Manhattan still “ties 

itself up in a knot twice a day,” wrote the New Republic in 1928. Broadway had traffic 

jams seventy-five years ago. “It has them still.” Although Baltimore spent millions of 

dollars on street widening after the great fire of 1904, traffic conditions downtown were 

just as bad twenty years later, a special committee informed the mayor. Despite the 

efforts of Harland Bartholomew, chief planner for St. Louis, traffic downtown “moves 

slowly and irregularly,” wrote the president of the St. Louis street railway system in 1926. 

 “Conditions are bad in the middle of the day, and in the morning rush, but are well nigh 

intolerable in the evening rush.” Conditions were very bad in downtown Los Angeles 

too, the city’s traffic commission acknowledged in 1930, a decade after it had been 

formed by downtown business interests and civic and commercial groups to solve the 

city’s traffic problem. 

Although some observers remained optimistic, many others were skeptical: 

As they saw it, the cities were caught in “a vicious circle.” To relieve traffic congestion, 

the authorities opened and widened streets; but the new streets attracted more traffic, the 

additional traffic generated more congestion, and eventually every street system reached 

what Minneapolis engineers called “a saturation point,” a state of “almost but not quite 

intolerable congestion,” to quote Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and two of his associates. 

Another planner, George A. Damon of Los Angeles, went even further. “Every possible 

cure seems to be worse than the original disease,” he wrote. [Fogelson, pages 259-260] 

The National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s leaders and staff were well aware of these 

efforts. They developed the comprehensive plan for the Washington area in the context of city 

planning initiatives around the country. The planners also were well aware of how the 

automobile created new impacts for the Washington area. Commission member J. C. Nichols, 

who had worked in city planning in Kansas City, expressed concern in 1928 about the effect of 

the automobile on cities, as Gutheim and Lee stated: 

He observed that, contrary to public notions about city planning’s ornamental results, “the 

growing acuteness of automobile congestion in all our population centers . . . is forcing 

upon the public . . . the dire need of better planning to meet the rapidly changing 

conditions in the size and number of our transportation units.” This enlarged physical 

dimension of the city increased the “tendency of business to move from downtown 

districts to suburban neighborhood shopping centers, accentuated by the building of 

outlying apartments and kitchenettes, neighborhood picture shows, filling stations and 

chain stores.” [Gutheim and Lee, pages 195, 197] 

On January 21, Eliot addressed the Washington Board of Trade’s committee on streets and 

avenues. He explained the proposal for a major thoroughfare plan, pointing out that such a plan 

would result in savings from two new ideas in city planning that Colonel Grant had mentioned 

during his Constitution Hall presentation. One was the use of longer blocks in purely residential 

sections where traffic did not need a cross street every 400 or 500 feet. This idea would save 

money on paving costs. The other was the use of curvilinear streets that conform to the natural 
contour of the land rather than a predetermined gridiron street pattern. This process would 

reduce the cost of grading and filling.

The commission had agreed on a tentative major thoroughfare plan. One of the immediate 

projects in the city planners’ proposal was to realign Harvard Street between 13th and 16th Streets 

on a straight course as part of a cross-town link. It would carry eastbound traffic while 

westbound traffic would use parallel Columbia Road. Eliot invited the committee to study the 

system and provide opinions to the commission. [“Highway Changes Urged By Eliot,” The 

Evening Star, January 21, 1930] 

By mid-April, the Board of Trade committee had submitted its recommendations, developed in 

conjunction with Eliot. The commission approved the thoroughfare plan on May 21. [“Heads 

Are named In Traffic Survey,” The Evening Star, April 18, 1930; “Commission Approves 

Thoroughfare Plan,” The Evening Star, May 21, 1930] 

The commission’s first annual report discussed the plan: 

This plan for major streets proposes the improvement of a comprehensive system of wide, 

direct arteries in which the vital traffic flow of the community may freely move. To 

develop such a system requires an acceptance of the principle that all streets are not of 

equal importance in the circulation scheme, that some are of much greater value to the 

community than others, and that it is advantageous to select these community routes and 

work consistently upon them until they function as a system. 

There is in Washington and vicinity urgent need for the promotion of the major 

thoroughfare idea. If streets of this type can be set apart from all others in the popular 

mind and in the minds of officials, a notable step will have been taken toward the creation 

of a more perfect Capital City.

The plan was important to other modes of transportation, including franchises for streetcar and 

bus routes, which “cannot be discussed intelligently without a major thoroughfare plan.” Street 

lighting, traffic signals, paving specifications, school and playground sites, the location of 

neighborhood store centers and fire and police stations, tree planting, and even deed restrictions 

on private property – “all are dependent upon a designation of major thoroughfares.” 

Developers of subdivisions would be “in the dark” without knowing where the major 

thoroughfares would be. “It will be increasingly helpful to all [of] Washington to have an 

official major thoroughfare plan.” 

The report thanked the Washington Board of Trade’s special committee for its suggestions for 

revising the thoroughfare plan. “As a result of those suggestions some additions to the 

thoroughfare plan have been made by the commission (notably the extension of New Hampshire 

avenue), and the plan as a whole has been brought up to date.” 

The 70th Congress had helped with the plan by approving the straightening of Michigan Avenue 

in the vicinity of Soldiers’ Home and Trinity College. The project had been completed and the 

commission staff had prepared a plan for eliminating a dangerous crossing of the Baltimore and 
Ohio Railroad tracks just beyond the end of the straightened section. Other work underway on 

the plan included studies for the east-west pair of Columbia Road and Harvard Street; for a highlevel bridge across Rock Creek Park upstream from the Calvert Street Bridge; and a plan to 

extend Vermont Avenue to Georgia Avenue at Trumbull Street. [“Major Highways Plan 

Advocated in Annual Report,” The Evening Star, December 27, 1930] 

Around this time, Edward M. Bassett, a New York City zoning expert, addressed the National 

Conference on City Planning about a new kind of thoroughfare that would be similar to a 

parkway in that it had control of access, but that allowed commercial traffic that was excluded 

from parkways. He coined a term to describe his concept: “freeway.” He said:

This word is short and good Anglo-Saxon. It connotes freedom from grade intersections 

and from private entrance ways, stores and factories. It will have no sidewalks and will 

be free from pedestrians. In general, it will allow a free flow of vehicular traffic. It can 

be adapted to the intensive parts of great cities for the uninterrupted passage of vast 

numbers of vehicles. [Bassett, Edward M., “The Freeway - A New Kind of 

Thoroughfare,” The American City, February 1930, page 95] 

Through the 1930s and 1940s, the District, Maryland and Virginia, and the National Capital Park 

and Planning Commission attempted to keep up with motor vehicle demand, but during the 

Depression and World War II could never do so. After World War II, the commission found that 

the challenges accelerated with population growth, suburbanization, and an explosion of 

automobile use. 

General Grant discussed these challenges in a 1948 article that indicated the city was facing a 

sudden population increase and a postwar building boom that “threatens to destroy many of the 

amenities secured by the carefully planned developments of the past twenty years.” Demands for 

“housing, slum clearance, schools, additional reservoirs, permanent government buildings, and 

the relief of traffic congestion” were creating “a new crisis in the city’s growth.”

The impact of the automobile “raised new and acute problems”:

By extending in a single generation the radius of convenient urban development from 

approximately five miles to nearly twenty-five miles, and thus increasing the area 

available for land subdivision from 75 square miles to 1875, or 25 times, it has 

encouraged the growth of scattered suburban developments outside the original city limits 

on cheap ground usually carrying a lesser burden of local taxes, increasing the cost of 

municipal services such as water, sewerage and roads to serve these new dispersed 

communities, and at the same time throwing a new load of traffic on the city streets. The 

consequent congestion of traffic in the central business district has itself become so acute 

in many instances that it tends to choke the circulation necessary for the transaction of 

business itself.

In an echo of Nichols’s words from 20 years earlier, General Grant continued: 
The result is that retail trade, moving picture theaters and other commercial enterprises, 

which are a convenience to the suburban communities, tend to move there as soon as it 

appears likely to be profitable to do so, and thus drain away the substance of the central 

business district.

The commission wanted to counter these “centrifugal forces” by increasing demand east of the 

Capitol to shift the focus away from the west side where at the time, permanent Federal buildings 

were clustered along the National Mall and Pennsylvania Avenue adjacent to the central business 

district. This goal could be accomplished by disbursing permanent Federal office buildings east 

of the Capitol, thereby creating demand for housing and businesses in the area while 

reducing the traffic load on the streets north and west of the present central district, which were 

“now so over congested by employees working in temporary war buildings.” 

(During World War I and II, temporary office buildings were constructed in the city’s open 

spaces, including the National Mall. Between B Street, NW., and the Reflecting Pool in front of 

the Lincoln Memorial, two tempos, as they were called, were built during World War I, one for 

Army Staff, the other for Navy staff. Three tempos were built on the south side of the Reflecting 

Pool, with pedestrian bridges across the water, and three more tempos were built just west of the 

Washington Monument. Two tempos were on Constitution Avenue between 12th and 14th

Streets, with others located on the grounds of Fort McNair, near the site of today’s Robert F. 

Kennedy Memorial Stadium, and on the site of the future Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space 

along Independence Avenue, SW, among others. 

(Despite the end of the wars they were built to serve, the tempos remained in place. Even after 

the Pentagon opened in 1943 the “leaky, hot-in-summer, cold-in-winter tempos still thrummed 

with office life,” according to Post local columnist John Kelly. A canvass in the 1950s counted 

54 tempos around the city, “housing such agencies as the Veterans Administration, the State 

Department, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Civilian Aeronautics board.” The 

tempos remained in service until 1964, when demolition began on two tempos at the museum 

site. The final demolition occurred in 1970 when the Navy and Munitions Buildings, the two 

structures built in 1918 north of the reflecting pool, were razed. Constitution Gardens is located 

where they had been for over 50 years. 

(Kelly reported that only two tempos remained as of early 2017. Built in 1919, the Liberty Loan 

Building at 401 14th Street, SW., across from the Tidal Basin processed war bonds. It was 

upgraded to three floors in 1927. Kelly wrote that the building, now called the Liberty Center 

Building, “houses something called the Bureau of Fiscal Service” of the U.S. Department of the 

Treasury. The other survivor, dating to 1944, at 425 Second Street, NW., originally housed the 

Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Today, it is a homeless shelter operated by the Community 

for Creative Non-Violence. [Kelly, John, “Answer Man Remembers the ‘Temporary’ Office 

Buildings That Once Blighted D.C.,” John Kelly’s Washington, The Washington Post, January 8, 

2017; Kelly, John, John Kelly’s Washington, “Tempos: More Good and Bad Times of Their 

Lives,” John Kelly’s Washington, The Washington Post, January 15, 2017]) 

General Grant cited another key component: 
In addition, construction of the Fort Drive as an express parkway is recommended, to 

provide a circumferential route of high traffic capacity outside the congested area to 

receive and quickly distribute traffic coming in or going out of the city along arterial 

streets and to join together residential areas within the District between which exchange 

of traffic is now inconvenient and time consuming. 

(Fort Drive, an intermediate circumferential that would link the circle of Civil War forts just 

within the District border, will be discussed later.)

Space, he said, must be made for parking all the automobiles arriving in the central and 

government districts, but “it is a physical impossibility to provide . . . all the automobile parking 

space desired.” As a result, making public mass transportation “as expeditious and convenient as 

possible” was “of utmost importance.” He added: 

Much can be done at little expense to increase the usable capacity of existing streets by 

reducing on-street parking and loading, and by inducing a natural segregation of throughtraffic into especially favored streets, leaving the other streets for local traffic use.

The commission had promoted a major thoroughfare plan in the 1930s to keep through-traffic out 

of the central area. Now, General Grant said, it favored the modern variant: 

An inner belt thoroughfare around the congested area is also an obvious need to receive 

and distribute traffic or by-pass the most congested streets.

He emphasized that city planning was not simply about beautification. “It is a reconciliation of 

all the requirements and interests, often competing and conflicting, of utilitarian and social needs 

to the best advantage of all the inhabitants as a whole, so that the city will be a good place in 

which to live, to work, and to raise a family.” [Grant, Ulysses S. 3rd, “Planning the Nation’s 

Capital,” Confidential – From Washington, The Georgetown Washington Victory Council, The 

George Washington University, March 1948, No. 44, pages 6-7] 

The District Creates an Expressway Plan

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1938, which asked BPR for a report on toll superhighways, also 

contained a provision making the District of Columbia eligible for Federal-aid highway funds 

under the same terms and conditions as if it were a State starting with FY 1940:

Provided, That the system of roads on which Federal-aid apportionments to the District of 

Columbia shall be expended may be determined and agreed upon by the highway 

department of the said District and the Secretary of Agriculture [home of BPR] without 

regard to the limitations in section 6 of the Federal Highway Act (42 Stat. 213) respecting 

the selection and designation of such system of roads; and, when the system first 

determined and agreed upon shall have been completed, additions thereto may be made in 

like manner as funds become available for the construction of such additions. 

Previously, the District had received emergency highway funds and grade-crossing funds for FY 

1938 and 1939, but not formula Federal-aid highway funds. 
Under the Federal Highway Act of 1921, BPR and the States had designated two classes of 

highways: primary or interstate and secondary or intercounty, with the total limited to 7 percent 

of the rural road mileage within each State. These were the only roads that would be eligible for 

Federal-aid highway funds. Unlike the States, the District of Columbia did not have urban and 

rural or intercounty components; it was entirely urban. The 1938 Act, therefore, exempted the 

District from the Section 6 limitation to rural mileage. 

This change in eligibility also meant that, as in the States, 11⁄2 percent of the District’s annual 

highway allocation must be spent for “surveys, plans, engineering and economic investigations,” 

as provided for in the Hayden-Cartwright Act of 1934 and continued in later Federal-aid 

legislation. BPR and the State highway agencies had used the funds for highway surveys that 

provided the data used in preparing Toll Roads and Free Roads. 

Now, under the 1938 Act, the District was included in the national planning program of 

assembling information, analyzing and interpreting traffic data, and using the data to develop 

plans for highway development. The District Department of Highways established a Highway 

Planning Survey Unit to carry out the function. 

According to a 24-year highway department history, the unit accumulated data “from a survey of 

the parking demand in the General Area of Washington, from a study of the use made of urban 

routes in and about Rock Creek Park, from interviews with motorists on Trans-Washington trips, 

and from a study of the travel habits of all employees in the central business and governmental 

areas.” 

Captain Herbert C. Whitehurst, District Director of Highways, released a preliminary report on 

the study during a presentation to the Washington Board of Trade on April 24, 1941. The unit’s 

findings and recommendations had several impacts. First, the results “were of such significance 

that they were utilized by the Department of Highways to institute a long-range program of 

highway developments proposed for subsequent years.” 

Second, in view of the “critical nature of the parking situation in the business and Government 

districts,” Congress authorized a Motor Vehicle Parking Agency for the District in legislation 

approved on February 16, 1942: 

The Act conferred broad powers upon the Commissioners. It authorized the acquisition, 

creation and operation of public off-street parking facilities in the District, as a necessary 

measure to insure the free circulation of traffic in the public interest.

The District activated the agency in 1946.

Third, the unit’s preliminary report, released on April 24, 1941, resulted in “engineering studies 

which were aimed directly at the preparation of Washington’s highway system to bear the impact 

of vastly increased traffic pressures engendered by accelerated Federal activities in the 

approaching war.” These studies led to a series of improvements: 

Briefly, they consist of major thoroughfare reconstruction on radial trunk highways 

connecting the central district to outlying residential and suburban areas in Maryland and 
Virginia. They also include such major projects as grade separation structures at 

congested, multiple intersections in the general central area which encircles the business 

and Government districts. Where structures of this type were not feasible for one reason 

or another, the faulty intersections were redesigned and channelized on the surface. The 

narrow streets of the distributor type, which were considered essential to the proper 

dispersion of heavy traffic streams entering the central area via high-volume radial 

highways, were widened and repaved. 

Fourth, the expanded program required additional funds. Captain Whitehurst called for Congress 

to approve a 2-cent increase in the gas tax. “It is our considered judgment that the rate in the 

District of Columbia should be increased to 4 cents and an earnest endeavor made to meet the 

traffic and transportation situation with an adequate solution of the problem.” [Twenty-Four 

Years of Progress in Highway Development 1924-1948, The Department of Highways, 

Washington, D.C., 1948, pages 62-66] 

The report called for five radial trunk highways at a total estimated cost of $10,175,000, as 

described in the Star: 

1. To Southeast and Southwest East of Anacostia River – From South Capitol street and 

Independence avenue south on South Capitol street across the Anacostia River; 

2. To Northeast-K Street Route – From Seventh and K streets N.W. to Florida avenue and 

K street N.E. with connections at Sixth street to new Ninth street overpass across terminal 

yards at West Virginia avenue to New York avenue at Florida avenue to Fifteenth street 

and Benning road; 

3. To Northwest Section West of Wisconsin Avenue and Key Bridge – From Connecticut 

avenue and K street N.W. to Key Bridge, thence via Canal road to Foxhall road and 

Conduit road; 

4. To Northwest Section East of Wisconsin Avenue and West of Rock Creek Park – a. Rock 

Creek and Potomac parkway connections and extensions. b. Additional highway 

facilities east of Rock Creek and west of Connecticut avenue through north and south 

streets to connect Constitution avenue and Massachusetts avenue. 

5. To Northwest East of Rock Creek Park - This area, the most thickly populated in the 

District and carrying the highest registration of motor vehicles, is now served by several 

north and south streets directly from the central areas, namely, Sixth, Ninth, Eleventh, 

Thirteenth and Sixteenth streets. As these streets reach the old City of Washington limits 

[Florida Avenue], they can be made to provide connections with main thoroughfares in 

such manner as to permit the spread of traffic to all points in this area; 

Major projects in the plan included an elevated highway along K Street between Rock Creek 

Park and Francis Scott Key Bridge, a tunnel under the Potomac River between Alexandria, 

Virginia, and Shepherds Landing, S.E., in the District (with two lanes, one in each direction), and 

a bridge to connect South Capitol Street with the area on the other side of the Anacostia River. 

(District Commissioner Melvin C. Hazen had been promoting a bridge between Alexandria and 

Shepherds Landing for several years as part of a bypass of the Nation’s capital. Hazen, a 

Virginia native who had lived in the District for a quarter century, was a bank director, horse 
breeder, member of the Board of Trade, and District Surveyor in the engineering department. 

President Roosevelt appointed Hazen to his post as Commissioner in October 1933. 

(On May 2, 1938, in an address to the Congress Heights Progressive Citizens’ Association, 

Hazen said, “We must have a by-pass.” He explained that Shepherds Landing south and east of 

the city was a better location for it than Chain Bridge on the west. Building a bypass to Chain 

Bridge was objectionable because it would have to go through residential areas in Chevy Chase 

and northwest Washington. The Shepherds Landing bridge would be ideal for north-south 

travelers on U.S. 1, the East Coast’s main highway from Maine to Florida, as well as motorists 

bound for Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Moreover, the Potomac River was at its narrowest 

point south of the District at Alexandria. Hazen described a bypass route through southeast 

Washington to Bladensburg or possibly further north to meet U.S. 1. [“By-Pass Bridge Urged By 

Hazen,” The Evening Star, May 3, 1938]) 

The report considered other problems. For example, it recommended that every streetcar loading 

zone be replaced with a platform:

These death traps should be replaced in the immediate future even at the sacrifice of other 

work. The number of street car loading points or stops should be reduced to the 

minimum consistent with proper service. Generally speaking, there are too many stops 

for both buses and street cars to permit expeditious mass transportation service.

The Whitehurst report also recommended “construction of pedestrian islands of an improved 

type at intersections on all arterial highways or boulevard streets with a roadway width of 60 feet 

or more.” The report also found that Chain Bridge across the Potomac River in the Palisades 

area near the western District/Maryland line “is not being utilized to anywhere near its useful 

capacity, probably due in large part to inadequate approaches and roads leading thereto, 

particularly on the Virginia side.”

The report contained a section on terminal facilities that addressed short-time and long-time 

parkers in the central business district. Whitehurst wanted to give priority to short-time parkers, 

such as shoppers and theater-goers who stimulated the local economy. They have access to only 

10,000 of the 36,000 parking spaces in the central area. To help them, the report proposed 

installing parking meters that would discourage long-time parkers.

For long-time parkers, such as government employees, the report adopted an idea recommended 

in Toll Roads and Free Roads, namely parking lots or garages near but not in the central area 

plus short-line buses to convey the parkers closer to their destination. (As discussed in BPR’s 

report, the inner loop was a terminal where parking facilities would keep traffic out of the central 

district.) Revenue from the parking meters installed for short-time parkers would pay for the lots 

or garages serving long-time parkers. The report rejected proposals to provide underground 

parking facilities in the downtown area for long-time parkers as “economically unsound.” 

[“$44,450,000 Street, Bridge Program Proposed to Ease Traffic,” The Evening Star, April 25, 

1941; this edition included several articles describing the report] 
Speaking after Whitehurst released the report, PRA Commissioner of Public Roads MacDonald 

addressed the Washington Board of Trade. He put the study in the context of the highway 

planning surveys that provided the basis for Toll Roads and Free Roads: 

We developed the fact that cities have become the focus of traffic problems. They are 

undergoing a migration of values. There is a depreciation of values in the central areas 

due to congestion of traffic, and the failure of cities to serve newly developed traffic and 

to meet new conditions. 

The findings of the national survey were not the point, he said. The Whitehurst report “comes 

closer home to you, and attacks the interests of business in the community.” He acknowledged 

that, “there may be some who will take exception to part of it.” However, if members of the 

board had confidence in the facts behind the report, “I feel certain you can support its findings”: 

If these recommendations are followed through, with reasonable support of the Federal 

Government, they will attack the disease of cities, which we have found epidemic 

throughout the Nation. 

You will set a model for other cities of the Nation. [“Mitigating ‘Downtown Disease’ 

Seen in Highway program,” The Evening Star, April 25, 1941] 

Chairman Delano of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission also praised the 

Whitehurst report as a “comprehensive and important piece of work.” He had not had a chance 

to review it in detail, but said, “One thing is certain, and that is that Washington has got to have 

better transportation facilities.” He doubted that the parking problem could be solved by private 

parking lots as long as the city provided free parking on city streets. “Automobile owners will 

not pay for parking as long as they can find free space in the city streets.” At present, he said, 

Washington transportation facilities were “very backward,” mainly because of the “glut of 

private motorcars.” [“Delano Praises Whitehurst Road Survey,” The Evening Star, April 26, 

1941] 

Whitehurst made clear that he wanted the report to be presented at a public hearing. He and 

Engineer Commissioner David McCoach announced that the public hearing would take place on 

May 20, 1941, in the board room of the District Building. 

(Under the District’s form of government at the time, the President appointed three 

commissioners as the District’s governing body. One was an Engineer Commissioner from the 

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Lt. Colonel David McCoach, Jr., who came to Washington from 

New York City where he was district engineer, took his oath of office on September 7, 1938, 

saying, “I never believe in upsetting a going concern, and I have been advised that the municipal 

government here is one of the best in the country.” [Warren, Don S., “Lt. Col. M’Coach 

Assumes Duties As District Head,” The Evening Star, September 7, 1938]) 

Shortly before the announcement of the public hearing, Whitehurst had appeared at a meeting of 

the traffic committee of the Board of Trade. During the meeting, Washington I. Cleveland of the 

American Automobile Association (AAA) asked Whitehurst about the revenue he expected the 
2-cent increase in the gas tax to generate. He estimated it would yield $3 million a year. With 

funds already available, the District would have about $5 million available for a 12-year program 

of road improvements. If the gas tax were increased only by 1 cent, the city would have about 

$3.5 million: 

It all depends on how quickly you want this program completed. But I venture to say that 

if every man and woman in this city were convinced that this plan would make 

Washington streets safe they wouldn’t complain about having a 2 or even 3 cent increase 

in the gas tax.

Colonel E. G. Bliss, chairman of the board’s Statistics and Accident Prevention Subcommittee, 

said that, “We have got the city so crowded with human targets and automobiles that now it’s not 

merely a matter of enforcing present traffic regulations but a question of a possible cure for 

traffic congestion.” He added that the Whitehurst report “points the way for this cure.” 

John F. Victory asked Whitehurst about removing all streetcar tracks in the central business 

district. Whitehurst did not agree. “We are very dependent on mass transportation into the 

central area and buses alone can’t take care of the crowds and [removing all the tracks] would 

merely increase congestion.” 

The traffic committee endorsed the Whitehurst plan “in principle” and commended Captain 

Whitehurst and F. W. Lovejoy of the PRA, which had collaborated with District highway 

officials on the plan. [“Public Hearing Set on Highway Program,” The Evening Star, April 29, 

1941] 

The 1941 Plan 

In advance of the public hearing, the Star carried a series of articles about the Whitehurst report. 

The goal of the proposed radial highway system was to eliminate bottlenecks from principal 

streets to provide a more regular flow of traffic during peak periods. Captain Whitehurst said the 

goal was not to speed traffic but to eliminate congestion and make traffic safer. He had 

considered the solution adopted in Manhattan, which built freeways along the edges of the island 

but in that city, traffic was primarily north-south. A different solution would be needed in the 

District because traffic moved in all directions, particularly during peak periods. 

The city considered elevated or depressed routes, but dismissed the idea because of cost: 

The District’s problem, it was decided, did not warrant such a large outlay as would be 

entailed in either elevated or subway transportation, either of which would cost many 

times more than that of the system finally selected . . . . The department concluded that 

highly expensive features should be resorted to only if reasonable success could not be 

obtained by use of surface and depressed highways, with the aid of appropriate grade 

separations, channelized intersections and light control. 

To keep costs down, the District wanted to use existing routes to the extent possible within the 

current traffic pattern:
In selecting the various trunk routes, the problem was to choose as near as possible the 

most direct connection with the outlying residential areas and to select streets along 

which traffic could be made to flow most freely. 

For this reason, the department had decided to upgrade K Street instead of M Street as the radial 

line east of Key Bridge:

M street already was highly congested, it was not wide enough for a depressed highway 

and it was undesirable because of the business interests involved. As still another bad 

feature, its roadway was heavily loaded with underground construction and, to avoid a 

bottleneck in Georgetown, a subway would be necessary. 

The department also rejected construction of a bypass north of M Street because “it would 

require expensive property acquisition, because it would border a residential area and because the 

eastern terminus would bring the congestion back into Pennsylvania avenue and M street at 

Twenty-ninth street. Moreover, there would be no connection with Key Bridge.” 

By contrast, K Street had “a wide right-of-way and involves virtually no property acquisition,” 

while connecting with other main highways, “which would make its usefulness much greater.” It 

also would relieve congestion on New York and Rhode Island Avenues. The city was planning 

an elevated structure in the K Street corridor.

To serve the greatest percentage of population, which lived west of Rock Creek in the northwest 

section of the city, the report recommended improving traffic flow on five thoroughfares. They 

would be widened, with grade separations at intersections, and in some cases, extended to 

improve connections. The department considered the alternative of building an elevated highway 

between blocks as far north as Florida Avenue, but the cost was prohibitive. “The conclusion 

was reached at last that improvements should be made in existing highways, and that grade 

separations and other relief should be provided at the points of worst congestion.” 

In some cases, roads would be depressed, with structures carrying cross roads over them. For 

example, K Street would be depressed west of Connecticut Avenue to west of 24th Street, NW., 

passing under Washington Circle. “Capt. Whitehurst explained that the costly structures and the 

grade separations had been decided upon only in instances where no more satisfactory and less 

costly method was considered feasible. [Jones, Pat, “Radial Street Plan Designed To Eliminate 

‘Bottlenecks’ Here,” The Evening Star, May 4, 1941] 

The city had chosen to build a two-lane tunnel across the Potomac River between Shepherds 

Landing and Alexandria after considering three alternatives. Aviation concerns prompted 

rejection of a high-level bridge with a 135-foot clearance. “A two-lane tunnel such as that 

proposed will cost twice as much as a four-lane bridge, it is estimated, but it is understood the 

War Department would not approve the additional barrier [that] a bridge would be to planes 

landing and taking off at nearby Gravelly Point, the Naval Air Station and Bolling Field.” 

(Gravelly Point, the location of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, was named 

because of the large amount of gravel deposited nearby inside a big bend in the Potomac River. 

The gravel has been used for construction projects throughout the area, including the nearby 
Pentagon. [Kelly, John, “Gravelly Point Park’s moniker is one that shouldn’t just be shoveled 

aside,” John Kelly’s Washington, The Washington Post, February 6, 2018] 

The city also rejected a low-level bridge because it would require a draw span that would have to 

be opened so often that it would constitute a serious obstruction for highway traffic: 

The proposed tube would extend under the river from Alexandria to Shepherds Landing, 

a point at which the stream is approximately 3,500 feet wide, and would cost 

approximately $9,500,000. It would form part of a suggested bypass route linking 

Virginia roads with the highways north and west of the District, but its greatest benefit 

would be in the relief of the immediate traffic load now taxing the Highway Bridge [in 

the 14th Street corridor].

The proposed program included replacing the Highway Bridge at some point, but not 

immediately; the current bridge had many years of life left in it. However, Captain Whitehurst 

had been surprised by the amount of inbound traffic revealed by meter check. “The source of 

this traffic is not wholly known, he added, but an effort will be made to locate it in the hope that 

there also will be found the reason why Highway Bridge is so much more heavily taxed than 

[Arlington] Memorial Bridge.” Of the four existing Potomac River crossings, the Highway 

Bridge was the only one “carrying anywhere near its capacity load.” 

The “most important bridge” in the program was the structure across the Anacostia River at 

South Capitol Street. At the time, South Capitol Street’s southern terminus was P Street, SE., the 

northern border of Fort Humphreys (renamed Fort Leslie J. McNair in 1948). The nearest bridge 

across the Anacostia River was at 11th Street, NE., with a terminus at the intersection of Good 

Hope Road and Nichols Avenue: 

This [South Capitol Street] bridge, it is expected, would take a good part of the traffic off 

Anacostia Bridge, now badly overloaded, and would relieve congestion on Nichols 

avenue and Good Hope road. Moreover, it would provide an important link in the trunk 

highway to the Southeast and would connect with a new system of streets planned in the 

Southeast area east of the river. [Jones, Pat, “Potomac Tube to Alexandria Held Best of 

3 Possibilities,” The Evening Star, May 5, 1941] 

(The South Capitol Street Bridge, now called the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, opened 

on January 14, 1950. Engineer Commissioner Gordon R. Young called it one of the most 

important public works projects in the District since he took office. Twin sisters Della and Mary 

Randall of Forest Hills, Maryland, 12 years old, cut the ribbon across one of the eastern 

approaches to the bridge, after which a motorcade of more than 100 cars crossed the bridge. In 

brief remarks, General Young said the city’s public works deficiencies were caused by the lack of 

construction during World War II, coupled with a 40-percent increase in population. 

(The new bridge was expected to open up about one-third of the land east of the Anacostia River 

to direct access to the central city while stimulating growth in nearby Maryland. It would relieve 

congestion on the 11th Street Bridge and, to some extent, the Pennsylvania Avenue Bridge across 

the river to the north. “The next urgent project is to get one more bridge across the Anacostia 
River.” He acknowledged the impatience of residents east of the river who felt they had been 

neglected, but said that feeling was not justified. “Your area has run away from us so fast that it 

took longer to catch up.” Young favored placing the bridge at East Capitol Street, but some staff 

members of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission preferred Massachusetts 

Avenue for the bridge. “I hope the location will be settled soon so we can go ahead with the 

construction. [“South Capitol Bridge Opened by Gen. Young,” The Sunday Star, January 15, 

1950] 

(City officials broke ground on February 13, 2018, on a $441 million project to build a 

replacement structure.)

Grade separations were included in the proposed program only where no other solution was 

possible: 

“In the interest of safety, where two heavy streams of traffic are always present and 

roadway capacity is insufficient, to permit effective light installation, there remains only 

one solution to the problem—separation of grades,” Capt. Whitehurst said. “In some 

instances, streets can be widened to obtain more reservoir, but not in all.” 

The intersection of 14th Street and Maine Avenue in the southwest part of the city was a good 

example: 

Possibly the city’s worst congestion point, according to a recent survey, is at Fourteenth 

street and Maine avenue. This intersection averages 51,000 vehicles daily, heavily 

augmented on special occasions such as the Cherry Blossom Festival. Cars sometimes 

are held up there as long as 30 minutes. 

To correct this situation, it is proposed that Fourteenth street be raised above Maine 

avenue and East Potomac Park at that point. A low-level bridge will be constructed 

across Tidal Basin to handle park traffic, thus making it possible to segregate entirely 

what may be called through or commercial traffic and park traffic. There also will be 

interchange roads between Maine avenue and Fourteenth street, providing access in all 

directions. 

Another particularly bad intersection was the six-street junction of Florida and Maryland 

Avenue, 15th and H Streets, and Benning and Bladensburg Roads, NW. (Bladensburg and 

Maryland Avenue were part of U.S. 50.) This intersection was hazardous to motorists and 

pedestrians, who could not cross the 126 feet from curb to curb before a change in the traffic 

light:

Capt. Whitehurst admitted that the situation there is so extreme that no specific plan has 

been agreed upon. Maryland avenue and Bladensburg road constitute the line of heaviest 

travel, and it is evident that a grade separation of some nature, possibly an underground 

tunnel for these two streets, will be necessary. 

As noted, the city had already decided on an elevated structure for K Street as a bypass for 

M Street in Georgetown. “The present grade separation structure at K street and Rock Creek was 
designed to take a superstructure that would give access to an elevated highway.” [Jones, Pat, 

“Grade Separation Projects Urged Only as a Last Resort,” The Evening Star, May 7, 1941] 

The fringe parking plan was based on a total cost for commuters of 15 cents a day (10 cents for 

parking all day and 5 cents for a short-haul bus to the destination). This fee structure would cost 

$3.75 a month or $45 a year. Whitehurst thought the lots or garages should have a capacity of 

400 to 500 cars; beyond that would lead to congestion at entrances/exits during peak periods. 

“The cheapest structure to operate, he said, is the three-story parking plaza type.” Land values 

within the central business district were too high for parking lots to be profitable for the city. 

The District could subsidize the parking areas, but “has no authority to proceed with 

subsidization for Virginia and Maryland car owners, who comprise a major portion of the 

motorists involved.” Given the complexities of location and coordination, Whitehurst 

recommended establishing a motor vehicle parking agency with four public officials and three 

citizens comprising the leadership:

But whatever is done, Capt. Whitehurst is emphatic in his warning that no single 

individual should be placed at the head to say how the problem should be solved. “I do 

not believe any one man,” he said, “knows enough about the situation and would give 

proper enough consideration to all the factors involved to bring about a satisfactory 

solution . . . .” 

The situation was grave, but Whitehurst’s report did not recommend a solution. “That must be 

worked out with time. What we have tried to do is show the way toward a solution.” [Jones, 

Pat, “Fringe Parking Plan Is Aimed At 15-Cent Daily Cost,” The Evening Star, May 8, 1941] 

(As mentioned earlier, Congress authorized a Motor Vehicle Parking Agency for the District in 

1942.) 

Another issue to be considered was the city’s parkland. Development of roads in Rock Creek 

Park and the National Zoological Park was vitally important, Whitehurst said, but he understood 

that park officials might disagree. “The automobile is here to stay, and it is up to us to keep pace 

with transportation trends. I realize, however, that the co-operation of agencies controlling park 

land must be secured before park roads can be adjusted to suit the city’s traffic needs.” He knew 

from experience that the National Park Service (NPS), which controlled Rock Creek Park, and 

the Smithsonian Institution, which was responsible for roads in the zoological park, wanted the 

roads preserved for scenic and recreational purposes: 

“I don’t blame them in the least for looking at it in that light,” the highway director said, 

“especially when you consider that the land originally was set aside for park purposes 

alone. I have become convinced in recent years, nevertheless, that the increased demand 

for highway facilities makes it imperative that certain park roads be expanded and 

improved to fit into the general highway picture.” 

For that reason, the preliminary report included $5.7 million for park road development, 

including $3.75 million for improvements in Rock Creek Park and the Zoo. 
At present, narrow park roads and inadequate bridges resulted in congestion. Whitehurst thought 

that extending the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway northward through the zoo would be a 

prime remedy of a significant obstacle to north-south park traffic. He also recommended a road 

along the western border of the park north of the zoo connecting with Oregon Avenue and 

Military Road. The result would be that existing roads within the parklands north of Blagden 

Avenue-Broad Branch Road could be reserved for park use. 

He was concerned, too, about bridges in Rock Creek Park, some of which were only 19 feet wide 

and had a load limit of 12,000 pounds. Despite this limit, vehicles weighing as much as 30,000 

sometimes used the bridges. “Wouldn’t it be a terrible thing if a bus-load of children crashed 

through one of those bridges?”

Highway surveys demonstrated that only 10 percent of the vehicles entering Rock Creek Park 

turned off the principle routes while still in the park. “This knowledge led those making the 

study to the conclusion that since the vast majority of drivers use the roads in the park as a means 

of traveling on the north-south axis, first-rate thoroughfares or possibly freeways ought to be 

provided for their convenience.” He explained, “The first thing to consider in making a traffic 

survey is demand. Roads should be built or improved to accommodate these demands.” 

The Star reporter reminded Whitehurst of a 10-year old plan to build high-level bridges across 

narrow parts of Rock Creek Park for cross-traffic between Tilden and Upshur Streets; Military 

Road/Utah Avenue to 16th Street; and Oregon Avenue near Wise Road to Aspen Street at 16th

Avenue. Whitehurst replied that the proposal offered a “right-angle solution to a diagonal 

problem.” The heaviest traffic was southwest-northeast, followed by southeast-northwest. The 

suggested bridges would be almost due east-west, thus not addressing the heaviest need. 

The remaining $2 million in the preliminary report for park roads was to extend and broaden 

Independence Avenue west of 14th Street, NW., and to complete the Fort Drive roadway: 

Fort Drive is needed to provide a complete circumferential around the eastern margin of 

Washington, with interchanges with the major radial highways intersecting it, Capt. 

Whitehurst said. He explained that Fort Drive would intersect Michigan avenue, Stanton 

road, Good Hope road, Naylor road, Kansas avenue, Massachusetts avenue, Ridge road, 

East Capitol street, and Benning road. “It is essential to the general highway plan of 

Washington,” he declared. 

Whitehurst added that Fort Drive would provide another approach to Arlington Memorial 

Bridge:

“Traffic bottlenecks don’t develop on the bridge itself,” he emphasized, “but on the roads 

leading into it. Take some of the traffic load away from Constitution avenue and you will 

hear less talk about the need for another bridge between Arlington and the District.” 

[Mustin, Henry A., “Park Roadway Developments Face Utilitarian Objections,” The 

Evening Star, May 9, 1941; the series included an article about street improvements 

(May 6) and safety devices (May 10)]
Rock Creek Park

Because Rock Creek Park would be a major factor in the transportation debate in coming 

decades, a brief look at its road network would be helpful. 

According to an NPS historic resource study, the park’s origins can be traced to Senate interest 

after the Civil War in providing a new residence for the President to replace the aging 

presidential mansion situated in an unhealthy part of the city: 

The Washington City Canal, which once ran along what today is Constitution Avenue 

was an open sewer by the 1860s. In 1866 the outlet for this waterway into the nearby 

Potomac River was located just below the Executive mansion (the Potomac Flats were 

not reclaimed until the 1880s), at Seventeenth Street. President and Mrs. Lincoln often 

removed to a cottage at the Soldier’s Home to escape the stench, heat, and contagion of 

the city. 

(Soldier’s Home, a summer home to several Presidents and their families, is located at 140 Rock 

Creek Church Road, NW., on one of the highest points in the District. It is near the Petworth and 

Park View neighborhoods between North Capitol Street and New Hampshire Avenue.) 

In 1866, the House and Senate adopted resolutions calling for a study to identify a tract of land of 

not less than 300 acres for a park and site for the mansion “which shall combine convenience of 

access, healthfulness, good water, and capability of adornment.” 

President Ulysses S. Grant vetoed the plans, preferring to retain the existing historic mansion, but 

the idea of acquiring land for a park “had more permanence.” The idea languished until the 

1880s: 

The renewal of interest in the creation of a major urban park in Washington in the 1880s 

was also a product of growing public health concerns. Eradication of waterborne 

diseases, especially typhoid, was a vigorous reform movement in all major American 

cities in this decade. In 1879 the sewers in Georgetown and Northwest Washington 

emptied into Rock Creek. By 1889 the pollution of Rock Creek was considered a serious 

threat to public health . . . . [Bushong, William, Rock Creek Park, Historic Resource 

Study, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1990, pages 63-66] 

After much debate and controversy, Congress passed legislation authorizing and funding the 

park. President Benjamin Harrison approved it on September 27, 1890: 

The law establishing Rock Creek Park set a limit of 2,000 acres for the land area with an 

appropriation of $1,200,000, equal portions to be paid out of District revenues and the 

U.S. Treasury. A rough southern boundary was established at Klingle Ford Bridge, and 

the law specified limits of 600 to 1200 feet for the park’s width below Broad Branch and 

Blagden Mill Roads. This provision accounts for the reservation’s parkway character in 

the neck of land that today forms the southern tip of the park. The width of the park’s 

remaining boundaries was left to the discretion of the Rock Creek Park Commissioners. 

These officials were the Chief of Engineers, United States Army, the Engineer 
Commissioner of the District of Columbia, and three citizens appointed by the president 

with the advice and consent of the Senate. The remaining sections of the act explained 

the duties of the commission and outlined condemnation, appraisal, and benefit 

assessment procedures. The final provision placed the new park under the joint control of 

the D.C. Commissioners and the Chief of Engineers of the U.S. Army, “whose duty it 

shall be as soon as practicable, to lay out and prepare roadways and bridle paths . . . .” 

[Bushong, pages 72-73] 

On January 1, 1895, after the park commissioners had completed their work, the Rock Creek 

Board of Control assumed responsibility for the new park, which consisted of 1,605,976 acres 

purchased for $1,740,511.45. The NPS assumed responsibility for Rock Creek Park on 

August 10, 1933. [Bushong, pages 77, 101] 

Under the Capper-Cramton Act of May 29, 1930, the Maryland-National Capital Park and 

Planning Commission acquired property to extend the park into Montgomery County. (The 

Capper-Cramton Act will be discussed later.) The NPS remains responsible for Rock Creek Park 

in the District, but the Maryland commission owns and operates the Maryland portion of the 

park. 

The agitation for park roads began early, as described in an NPS history of the Rock Creek Park 

roadway network: 

The first campaign to compel the government to expand the park’s road network was 

spearheaded by the Brightwood Citizens’ Association, whose influential members resided 

in the rapidly developing area on the east side of the park. At a widely reported October 

6, 1896 meeting, the association adopted a resolution urging Congress and the District 

Commissioners to provide $100,000 for the development of roads and paths in Rock 

Creek Park. Observing that six years had passed since Congress authorized the park, the 

group’s president W. W. Cox inveighed, “Yet so far as I am aware, not a single dollar has 

been spent in making it accessible to the people for whose recreation it was purchased.” 

Captain Lansing H. Beach, assistant to the Chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was 

largely responsible for the park’s development beginning in 1896. A native of Dubuque, Iowa, 

Beach graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1882, was commissioned in 

the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and had worked to improve navigation in the Ohio River 

Valley and on a commission to settle the boundary between the United States and the Indian 

Territory (now part of Oklahoma) before arriving in Washington in 1984. 

In the absence of appropriations for road improvement, Captain Beach began in 1897 employing 

chain gangs of prisoners to improve existing roads, reclaim sections of road that had been 

abandoned, and clear brush adjacent to the paths. With an appropriation of $24,000 for 1899, 

Beach focused on improving and macadamizing a road from Blagden Mill Road to Military Road 

along Rock Creek north of the National Zoological Park: 

The completed driveway—7,000’-long, with gently winding curves and an almost 

undetectable rise of 60’ over the distance between Blagden Mill Road and Military 
Road—was widely praised as an engineering feat, as an artistic accomplishment, and as a 

long-awaited response to the need for enhanced access to Rock Creek Park . . . . The 

completion of Rock Creek Drive, as it was originally called, not only exposed the 

beauties of the creek to popular view, it eliminated the need for backtracking or breaking 

the trip into east and west portions combining park roads and ordinary city streets. 

Rock Creek Drive cost $15,000, with Captain Beach using the remainder of the appropriation on 

other roads. 

On November 20, 1901, Rock Creek Park’s Board of Control honored Captain Beach for his 

work improving the park’s roads. The board changed the name of Rock Creek Drive to “The 

Beach Driveway,” soon shortened to Beach Drive, the name the road north of National Zoo still 

bears. [Rock Creek Park Road System, Historic American Engineering Record No. DC-55, 

National Park Service, pages 37-44; Kelly, John, “The resourceful man who helped make Rock 

Creek Park more accessible,” John Kelly’s Washington, The Washington Post, December 31, 

2017] 

Despite limited appropriations for park roads, officials gradually improved Beach Drive to meet 

changing needs as the automobile began to dominate traffic in the District of Columbia. In the 

1930s, as the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission extended the park 

beyond the District line, park officials planned extension of Beach Drive to Maryland. The 

Maryland planning commission had begun work on the 1.2-mile Maryland section of Beach 

Drive to East-West Highway in early 1931. Construction began on March 30. 

General Grant, then still Director of Public Buildings and Public Parks, began surveying the 

District extension in the spring of 1931: 

The new three-quarter mile long roadway wound along the southwest bank of Rock Creek 

from the bridge leading to Kalmia Road to the District line, where it connected with the 

park drive already constructed by the M-NCPC. This part of Rock Creek had previously 

been accessible only by foot and bridle paths. 

The extension of Beach Drive in the District portion of Rock Creek Park opened to traffic on 

June 25, 1932: 

Completion of this segment enabled motorists to drive along Rock Creek all the way from 

the National Zoo into Maryland. The Maryland section of the park road system provided 

an intersection with East-West Highway, the primary route between Bethesda and Silver 

Spring. These links to the rapidly growing suburbs of Montgomery County helped fuel 

the transformation of Beach Drive from an isolated park drive into a busy commuter 

thoroughfare playing an increasingly prominent role in the transportation system of the 

Washington Metropolitan area. [Rock Creek Park Road System, pages 76-77] 

The Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway served traffic south of the zoo. President William 

Howard Taft, on his last day in office, approved the Public Buildings Act on March 4, 1913. 
Section 22 authorized a commission “for the purpose of preventing the pollution and obstruction 

of Rock Creek and of connecting Potomac Park with the Zoological Park and Rock Creek Park.” 

Construction began in the 1920s, but land disputes and funding issues delayed progress. The last 

segment, the bridge over Rock Creek at P Street, was completed on June 4, 1936. 

The Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway is 2.5 miles long, from the Lincoln Memorial to the 

National Zoo. Meanwhile, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission had 

opened its connector road in June 1932 between East-West Highway and the District line. With 

completion of the parkway in the District, motorists could “drive from the Lincoln Memorial to 

Maryland without leaving an attractive tree-lined setting.”

An NPS brochure about the parkway explained that the first federally authorized parkway was 

“conceived as a pleasure route for recreational drivers, but it soon became a major commuter 

artery for traffic from Washington’s northwest suburbs.” In recognition of its use as a commuter 

route, NPS instituted one-way use, southbound during the morning peak period, northbound in 

the afternoon, a change in effect to this day. [Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, Highways in 

Harmony, National Park Service,1992; Krakow, Jere L., Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, 

George Washington Memorial Parkway, Suitland Parkway, Baltimore-Washington Parkway, 

Historic Resource Study, National Park Service, January 1990, pages 29-36] 

Although motorists could drive from the Lincoln Memorial to East-West Highway, they ran into 

a bottleneck at the National Zoological Park because of sharp curves and periodic high water 

levels. The NPS history of the Rock Creek Park road system explained the problem: 

Following the completion of Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, District transportation 

officials continued their efforts to increase the flow of traffic through Rock Creek valley. 

The first major obstacle—though ultimately one of the last issues to be settled—was the 

creation of a permanent, all-weather connection between the north end of Rock Creek and 

Potomac Parkway and Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park. Until the current tunnel was 

completed in 1966, parkway traffic entered the zoo grounds through a ford located several 

hundred yards west of the current bridge. Traffic then followed the zoo roads across 

another ford before joining Beach Drive on the north side of the zoo. Since the zoo 

grounds were only open during daylight hours, and the fords were impassable during high 

water, motorists were often forced to take a roundabout route through surface streets to 

get from Beach Drive to Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. [Rock Creek Park Road 

System, page 106] 

As early as 1933, highway advocates proposed a tunnel link to carry traffic through the area. 

Also by the 1930s, pressure began for an all-purpose highway through the valley. The NPS 

history of Rock Creek Park stated: 

In addition to the tunnel project, highway proponents over the years have advocated 

construction of a highway through the Rock Creek Valley. In 1938 District 

Commissioner Melvin C. Hazen favored the construction of a highway connection from 
the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway through the zoo grounds and Rock Creek Park to 

the East-West Highway in Maryland. Opponents stalled the project and World War II 

delayed serious consideration of Hazen’s proposal. [Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway; 

Bushong, pages 145-146] 

The Public Speaks

The board room of the District Building was crowded on May 20, 1941, for the public hearing on 

the Whitehurst plan. While speakers generally supported the plan in principle, they differed on 

the proposed gas tax increase. The Washington Board of Trade, the Federation of Citizens’ 

Associations, and the Keystone Automobile Club opposed any tax increase. They and others 

thought the Federal Government should provide more funds for the city’s transportation needs, as 

the trade board explained in a statement:

We desire to call attention to the fact that the Federal Government now is studying ways 

and means of levying the heaviest taxes which ever have been levied on the people of this 

country. This it is necessary to do in order to finance the defense programs. 

The board anticipated that the Federal excise tax on gasoline, instituted in 1932 as a deficitfighting measure with no link to Federal-aid highway funding, would be increased as would taxes 

on individuals and businesses: 

We therefore recommend against increasing the gasoline tax until after we have seen 

what new taxes will be levied by the Federal Government during this session of Congress. 

Some groups, including the District division of AAA, favored a 1-cent gas tax increase. 

[“Citizens Oppose Hike in D.C. Gas Tax for Highway Program,” The Evening Star, May 20, 

1941; “Commissioners Study Mass of Testimony On Whitehurst Plan,” The Evening Star, May 

21, 1941] 

(By an act approved on December 26, 1941, Congress approved an increase in the District’s gas 

tax from 2 to 3 cents. Because of wartime rationing of gasoline and tires beginning in 1942, 

revenues declined despite the increase, prompting a second increase to 4 cents a gallon.) 

To consider all options, District highway officials decided to study the feasibility of relieving 

congestion by construction of “lower-level street or tunnel systems, as a means of diverting 

excess traffic, particularly mass transportation vehicles, into underground channels. Congress 

authorized the study by joint resolution approved March 7, 1942, directing the District 

commissions to study the feasibility of a subway system. 

The Director of Highways conducted the study, reporting preliminary findings on June 24, 1942. 

The study contained three basic conclusions. “(1) That rapid transit subway lines to the outlying 

sections of the District of Columbia are not warranted or necessary; (2) that a system of streetcar 

tunnels and underpasses, including appropriate terminal facilities in the central congested area, is 

feasible and, in many cases, warranted; (3) that the construction of grade separation structures 

and depressed highways within and beyond the central area is necessary and logical.” 
The National Capital Park and Planning Commission, in a companion report, “expressed itself in 

favor of grade separation structures, or localized subways, in the heavily congested multiple 

intersections caused by the convergence of several arterial streets into overtaxed rotaries, such as 

Thomas and Scott Circles, and at 14th Street, S.W., and Maine Avenue.” [Twenty-Four Years of 

Progress, pages 66-68; underlining in original] 

Refining a Plan 

In October 1944, the Department of Highways received a report from the consultant firms of J. E. 

Greiner Company and DeLeuw, Cather and Company. “The report is mainly concerned with a 

discussion of a master plan for the correction and future development of transportation facilities 

in the Central Area of the District of Columbia.” The goal was to improve accessibility to the 

central area’s retail and Federal districts:

In their analysis of conditions in the congested downtown district, the consultants again 

advanced the proposal of lower-level streets [tunnels] as the only positive means of 

reducing the conflicts between fixed-wheel mass transportation vehicles [i.e., streetcars] 

and free-wheel traffic on surface pavements. The contemplated relocation of streetcar 

lines, which now operate on Connecticut and Pennsylvania Avenues and Fourteenth 

Street, to underground tunnels in the critical downtown area, is a project which appears to 

be amply justified.

A subway system of streetcars would serve the greatest number of people with minimum 

mileage; extend the benefits of rapid transit to all parts of the city; remove streetcars from surface 

streets in the most congested areas; allow for coordination of rail and bus routes on the surface; 

and allow for expansion. “It was further pointed out that the flow of buses, after subways were 

built, would be reduced to the extent that patrons would be attracted to the faster underground 

routes.” 

The consultants also proposed “extensive improvements in the existing street layout through the 

construction of grade separation structures and channelized connections, to form convenient 

inner and outer belt line distributor routes around the central portion of the city.” They 

recommended K Street, “on the northern rim of this area,” for improvement as part of the inner 

belt route and as a surface distributing artery. For overloaded rotaries at Dupont Circle and 

elsewhere, the report recommended underpasses to separate heavy traffic flows.

The reference to inner and outer beltline distributors was not unusual, as urban planners had 

adopted the concept as described in Toll Roads and Free Roads. Urban planners would adapt the 

idea as they developed thoroughfare plans for cities around the country. 

The October 1944 report made clear that the District needed major improvements: 

The population and traffic volume curves have been on the rise . . . but without a corresponding 

expansion of the highway system to absorb excess traffic movements in the Central Area. 

Hazardous conditions, increased cost of motor vehicle operation, delay and inaccessibility of 
vital regions located in this area are the wasteful and unproductive results suffered each day by a 

large segment of the population. [Twenty-Four Years of Progress, pages 71-74] 

One issue remaining to be resolved was replacement of the Highway Bridge at 14th Street, NW. 

The Highway Bridge 

Today’s 14th Street Bridge complex is the modern incarnation of the Highway Bridge, itself an 

incarnation of the Long Bridge, which had been authorized by a law that President Thomas 

Jefferson approved on February 8, 1808. The toll Long Bridge, which opened in May 1809, was 

a 1-mile long pile structure with draw span to allow ships to pass. President James Madison was 

the first to cross the $100,000 bridge, crossing in his carriage to Alexandria (then part of the 

capital city) where residents entertained him with a dinner. The bridge included a broad 

carriageway and pedestrian paths on both sides. 

Twenty years later, the bridge sustained damage from floodwaters. When the bridge company 

was unable to pay for repairs, Congress intervened to finance a new bridge. President Andrew 

Jackson and his Cabinet celebrated the opening of the new $130,000 Long Bridge in October 

1835 by walking across to Alexandria. They returned in carriages. In later years, flooding and 

ice flows continually damaged the bridge. 

By the 20th century, the Long Bridge, now controlled by the Pennsylvania Railroad, was 

primarily used by railroads and an interurban trolley line. It was replaced by a double-tracked 

railroad bridge that opened on August 25, 1904 (2,529 feet long with 11 fixed truss spans and a 

swing span). It included a swing draw span to allow ships to pass on the river. 

The old Long Bridge remained in use for road traffic until it was replaced 2 years later. On 

February 12, 1906, officials inspected the completed through-truss Highway Bridge, although the 

approaches would not be ready until later in the year. The bridge, which cost $1,196,000, was 

2,667 feet long, 40 feet wide, and 21 feet above the normal river level. It included a swing span 

similar to the new Pennsylvania Railroad bridge’s swing span so they could be synchronized to 

allow the passage of ships. 

Commissioner H. B. F. Macfarland called the new structure “a fine bridge,” but added: 

My only regret about the two new bridges across the Potomac is that the War Department 

was not able to carry to success its suggestion that the bridges should be made beautiful 

as well as useful, which could have been done, the department believed, with little or no 

additional expense. 

Following the inspection, the Alexandria and Mount Vernon Railway Company’s trolleys were 

able to use the new bridge from their District terminus at 14th Street and Maryland Avenue.

The Long Bridge was finally closed on December 15 and all nonrailroad traffic shifted to the 

Highway Bridge. A few weeks later, the engineer in charge, Captain Spencer Crosby, reported:
A careful census of that traffic shows a daily average of 111 electric trains, 822 double 

teams, 301 single teams, 3 equestrians and 523 pedestrians. These figures apply to the 

daily traffic in good weather. There is practically no business traffic on Sundays and 

holidays. The greater part of the travel outside of the electric trains consists of the twohorse teams going to and from the brick yards in Virginia. 

[Emery, Fred A., “Washington’s Historic Bridges,” Records of The Columbia Historical Society 

of Washington, D.C., Volume 1938, pages 58-60; Cohen, Robert, “History of the Long Railroad 

Bridge Crossing Across the Potomac River,” Washington DC Chapter, National Railway 

Historical Society, http://www.dcnrhs.org/learn/washington-d-c-railroad-history/history-of-thelong-bridge; Proctor, John Claggett, “Old and New Bridges Spanning the Potomac,” The Sunday 

Star, March 24, 1946; “New Highway Bridge,” The Evening Star, February 12, 1906; “Over 

Highway Bridge,” The Evening Star, January 19, 1907] 

The Highway Bridge was still in operation in the 1940s, when officials began debating how to 

replace it. With World War II underway, District officials began planning a replacement for the 

Highway Bridge as a post-war project. Quickly, though, officials split on what was needed, as 

the Star reported on April 20, 1944: 

After more than nine months of conferences, District officials are holding out for two 

one-way bridges of four traffic lanes each in preference to a counterproposal for single 

six-lane bridge. The latter plan, however, is tied in to a large extent with a scheme to 

build at some future date another cross-river bridge at Alexandria to by-pass traffic into 

the Anacostia area.

PRA and the Commission of Fine Arts supported the District’s view. The support by PRA was a 

strong point in favor of the two-bridge option because Congress, which would have to resolve the 

dispute, usually deferred to PRA. The basis for the District’s and PRA’s position was that two 

bridges with eight lanes would be able to carry present and future traffic. According to the Star: 

The weight of evidence is so overwhelmingly in favor of two bridges, Commissioner 

Thomas H. MacDonald has pointed out in correspondence on the matter, that it would be 

most difficult, if not impossible, to approve the single plan if submitted for Federal 

participation.

The District conceded that its two-bridge plan would cost more than a single span, but contended 

any bridge that was inadequate for future traffic would be too expensive. 

The National Capital Park and Planning Commission and NPS supported the single-span option. 

 Commission Chairman Grant said the commission’s preferred option was consistent with studies 

by Frederic Law Olmsted, Jr. With the Highway Bridge carrying interstate U.S. 1 traffic that did 

not have any reason to be in the District other than to use the bridge to cross the river, by the time 

traffic volumes exceeded the capacity of the single span, other crossings would be available, 

General Grant pointed out, particularly a crossing at Alexandria, Virginia, from Shepherds 

landing: 
Aside from the additional cost of two bridges, he sees no justification for eight lanes of 

traffic feeding into the six lanes on the Fourteenth street overpass at Maine avenue. The 

funnel of southbound traffic actually becomes smaller as it enters Fourteenth street, he 

claimed, by reason of the streetcar tracks.

Gen. Grant contended also that aside from the additional cost of two bridges, the public 

would be paying also a real loss in the harm that would follow to the appearance and 

background of the new Jefferson Memorial. 

Supporters of the single span also pointed out that with planned post-war dispersal of Federal 

offices to East Capitol Street, the Pentagon, and Suitland, Maryland, many workers who used the 

Highway Bridge would no longer have to do so. 

Secretary of the Interior Harold I. Ickes strongly agreed with General Grant and his department’s 

own NPS. He had written to the District commissioners in support of the single-span option. He 

also reminded them that NPS held title to parklands that would be needed for approaches. “He 

simply asked, however, to be advised before bridge appropriations are sought from Congress and 

before a final decision is reached, so that he might have an opportunity to present the views of 

the Park Service.”

The Fine Arts Commission supported the two-bridge option, which was surprising in view of its 

usual consideration of aesthetics in its decisionmaking:

It has emphasized the importance of avoiding an axial relationship between the bridge, or 

bridges, and the memorial. Nor does the fine arts group subscribe to the view of the 

Planning Commission that a “regrettable impression” would be creating by building two 

passenger bridges across the Potomac paralleling the railroad bridge. 

The District could ignore the planning commission’s view, which was merely advisory, as PRA’s 

MacDonald noted in a letter to General Grant on January 12, 1944: 

It is recognized that the District of Columbia and the Public Roads Administration could 

proceed to design a facility on any basis they might select. It is also recognized that your 

Commission carries sufficient weight to aid or delay the accomplishment of a civic 

improvement. [Authorizing the Construction of Two Four-Lane Free Highway Bridges 

Across the Potomac River to Replace Existing Highway Bridge at or Near Fourteenth 

Street, Washington, D.C., Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, U.S. House 

of Representatives, 79th Congress, 2d Session, Report No. 2346, June 26, 1946, pages 10-

12] 

In short, the commission and the Interior Department were influential with Congress and 

Washington area decisionmakers. [Shepard, Nelson M., “Four Agencies Split Over 6-Lane 

Bridge For 14th Street,” The Evening Star, April 20, 1944] 

On July 21, 1944, the District commissioners approved the two-bridge plan. A statement 

explained:
The provision of four lane capacity in each direction can be most adequately provided by 

two bridges of four lanes each, and such facility will not detract from the Jefferson 

Memorial.

A single six-lane bridge will not meet the prospective traffic needs, and any economy in 

present construction costs will be more than balanced by the cost of another crossing in 

the future. 

Present access routes in the District and Virginia would be sufficient for traffic using the new 

bridges. 

The statement pointed out that the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which 

opposed the two-bridge plan, had “never expressed the opinion that future traffic demands will 

not require the eight lanes of capacity.” To demonstrate that eight lanes were needed, the 

commissioners cited a PRA study ordered by MacDonald, who reported: 

An analysis leads to the conclusion that the facility should be designed for a peak load of 

5,000 vehicles in each direction for a period of time in excess of an hour . . . . The 1960 

(probably not more than 10 years after completion) average daily traffic is estimated to be 

89,000 vehicles. A normal distribution of the expected average daily traffic for 1960 

would result in numerous one-way peak loads in excess of 5,000 vehicles per hour, but 

the observed distribution at Highway Bridge is such that it would be safe to design for 

that figure. 

Regarding the National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s idea that sufficient traffic 

would be diverted to the Alexandria-Shepherds Landing bridge to require only six lanes at 

14th Street, MacDonald said that, “it is my considered judgment that it would be unwise to 

construct a facility of inadequate capacity with the hope that such an act would cause the building 

of an additional facility at another location, and that the two combined would solve the problem.” 

The District commissioners awarded a contract to the New York City consulting firm of Howard, 

Needles, Tammen and Bergendoff to prepare working drawing for the bridges, which the Star

described:

The new crossing will consist of two identical bridges about 400 feet apart and each with 

four-lane traffic capacity. There will be 15 steel deck girder spans, each approximately 

160 feet in length, residing on stone faced piers. Navigation features will have to be 

passed upon by the War Department, but openings for river traffic are planned for each 

structure. [Crist, Bainbridge, “Two Four-Lane Spans Approved to Replace 14th Street 

Bridge,” The Evening Star, July 21, 1944] 

By January 1945, America could anticipate the end of the war. Planning for post-war 

construction took on urgency, causing the debate over replacing the Highway Bridge to intensify.

The chairman of the House District Committee, Representative Jennings Randolph (D-WV), 

introduced several bills at the request of the District commissioners, including H.R. 541: 
“Authorizing and directing the Commissioners of the District of Columbia to construct two fourlane bridges to replace the existing Fourteenth Street or Highway Bridge across the Potomac 

River, and for other purposes.” The bill authorized $7 million for the two bridges. 

Senator Theodore G. Bilbo (D-Ms.), chairman of the Senate District Committee, introduced 

companion bills, again at the commissioners’ request. As for the Potomac River crossing, he 

thought two tunnels might be better than any bridge. Two tunnels, he said, would put an end to 

complaints that a bridge or bridges would “mar the beauty” of the area or handicap navigation. 

He also thought the tunnels would be cheaper than the bridge alternatives, but admitted that 

despite his comments, he did not have the “question settled in my own mind.” 

On January 13, Chairman Randolph released sharply conflicting statements he had received from 

public officials on the bridge issue; he had sent the statements to Chairman Clarence F. Lea (DCa.) of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, who indicated he would hold a 

hearing on the bridge legislation. Secretary Ickes’s statement said the two-bridge option would 

cost too much and “do violence” to the approach to the Nation’s capital. It also would 

overburden area streets. The National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s concerns were 

“based on sound economy and modern city planning.” In view of his preferred options, he said, 

“Sooner or later, another bridge should be constructed crossing the Potomac at Alexandria. This 

bridge would provide a by-pass for the passenger vehicles and trucks which do not have occasion 

to enter downtown Washington.” 

Major Philip B. Fleming, administrator of PRA’s home, the Federal Works Agency, said that the 

assertion that the two-span, eight-lane proposal would overload the street was “not in agreement 

with the traffic facts.” His agency had considered the national commission’s views, “but the 

conclusion reached was that neither traffic nor the interests of the District would be served by a 

bridge which soon would be unable to accommodate the traffic that inevitably would use the 

structure.” Traffic studies demonstrated the need for eight lanes to support probable growth. 

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson also had commented on the dispute. “I know of no objection 

to the favorable consideration” of the District’s twin-bridge project. [“Ickes and FWA Clash 

Over Plans for Spans Across Potomac,” The Sunday Star, January 14, 1945] 

In December 1945, Representative Virgil M. Chapman (D-Ky.), chairman of the Subcommittee 

on Bridges of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, held a hearing on the debate. 

On December 11, Chairman Grant of the National Capital Park and Planning Commissioner 

released a previously confidential report that consulting engineers Sverdrup and Parcel had 

prepared for the War Department in 1941. He quoted the “pertinent and important” section of 

the report on the bridge situation: 

The very thorough study of highway traffic in the Washington area presented in the 

special report of the Director of Highways for the District of Columbia, indicates (a) a 

vehicular crossing at Alexandria to relieve the congestion on the Fourteenth Street Bridge 

and (more particularly) the city streets leading to it is a present necessity, and, that (b) a 

reconstruction of the Fourteenth Street Bridge and a revision of the approach roads, to 

increase traffic capacity, may become a necessity in the reasonably near future.
The report estimated that a six-lane bridge would cost $4,694,000, while the Alexandria bridge 

would cost $3,510,000, for a total cost of $8,504,000. The two spans the city favored for the 

Highway Bridge location would cost $7 million. [Two Four-Lane Highway Bridges Across the 

Potomac River, Washington, D.C., Hearing on H.R. 541 Before the Bridge Committee of the 

Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, 79th Congress, 

1st Session, page 20] 

General Grant also argued that the city had “violated” traffic estimating principles to show the 

need for four lanes of Washington-bound traffic instead of three lanes. The bridge could not 

carry the predicted 6,700 vehicles per hour because they would be “poured into the Fourteenth 

street bottleneck,” which could not be relieved because of the impracticability of removing the 

Maine Avenue overpass. 

He regretted that for the first time, as far as he knew, the commission had to appear before a 

congressional committee in opposition to a District proposal. “But, unfortunately, they are 

recommending to you what past experience and sound planning show will inevitably prove an 

unduly costly and harmful project, to the city, as well as to the Federal Government, which will 

pay half of this cost and presumably half of that of the future, more expensive remedial 

measures.” In view of the “dire effects” of the city’s twin-bridge proposal on the central area 

park system, he was surprised that PRA was advocating a project that would “deluge the 

Jefferson Memorial with a congestion of trucks and business traffic.” 

In a statement introduced for the record, Chairman Gilmore D. Clarke of the Commission of Fine 

Arts argued that twin bridges would provide a more dignified approach to the Jefferson 

Memorial area at the edge of the Tidal Basin. In a letter to General Grant, Clarke had written 

that the issue regarding one versus two bridges is “debatable, since it is based upon esthetics and, 

in that area of thought, there may be as many answers as there are persons to debate.”

Secretary Ickes, appearing before the subcommittee on December 18, denounced the District’s 

plan for two four-lane bridges because they would jeopardize the beauty of the Jefferson 

Memorial along the Tidal Basin. Referring to the appearance of vehicles instead of trees, he said, 

“I can only compare such a backdrop to the mechanical ducks which move across the back of 

every two-bit shooting gallery in the country.” He supported General Grant’s claims, arguing 

that the additional traffic from the eight lanes would require additional funds to depress or 

elevate roads throughout downtown Washington. 

The Star summarized another aspect of Secretary Ickes’ attack:

Mr. Ickes charged Public Roads Commissioner Thomas H. MacDonald had taken the 

position that if the District built a single six-lane, two-way bridge, no Federal funds 

would be forthcoming for the project. 

“I believe I would find it difficult to avoid arriving at the same conclusion as the District 

Commissioners after Mr. MacDonald had said in effect, ‘Do it my way or else.’ 
“I believe that Mr. MacDonald misconceives his role as a Federal official, efficient and 

high minded as he may be. It would seem to me his function is to build the roads that 

policy-making agencies may determine upon,” Mr. Ickes said.

Secretary Ickes also questioned PRA’s “curious” conclusion that the 89,000 vehicles that would 

use the crossing to enter Washington would cause no more congestion downtown than the 44,500 

using it in 1941. “The two-bridge plan would have sad consequences in the downtown business 

district.”

He also criticized Clarke for saying that the issue about two bridges was “debatable, since it is 

based upon esthetics.” Secretary Ickes said he was surprised to hear that “educated judgment” on 

aesthetics, “which might include his own - is to be taken with a grain of salt.” 

Even before Secretary Ickes testified, District officials had threatened to “blow off the lid” in the 

controversy, promising to present statistics that would conclusively rebut his views. [“Ickes Will 

Be Horatio for a Single Bridge,” The Washington Post, December 12, 1945] 

Captain Whitehurst, who followed the Secretary at the witness table, told the subcommittee that 

the 1941 classified report that General Grant had released was misleading. It had, Whitehurst 

said, covered only the war emergency and covered not only vehicular but rail traffic. The Star

summarized his 21 typed pages of testimony: 

1. At least four lanes and more are available on both the District and Virginia sides for 

service to the bridges.

2. By minor changes additional facilities can be provided. 

3. If in future still further capacity is necessary, it can be provided without undoing existing 

improvements and at a relatively small cost.

4. It would be uneconomical to provide less than four-lane capacity bridges in each 

direction. 

5. Bridge facilities of less capacity than that proposed by the District Commissioners would 

be inadequate.

6. Any facility of whatever cost would prove expensive if inadequate. 

On the final day of the hearing, PRA’s Fairbank testified with a mass of data in response to 

General Grant’s claims. He disputed the idea that the Alexandria bridge would divert any more 

than 5 percent of the traffic using the Highway Bridge. Based on PRA surveys, he said that most 

of the traffic was local, with the center of destination at Third and G Streets, NW., for cars and 

Union Station for trucks. 

General Grant had bolstered the commission’s claims of authority by pointing out that the 1944 

report to Congress, Interregional Highways, had favored giving planning commissions a voice in 

the design of bridges. Fairbank said that was incorrect. “I wrote the report,” he told the 

subcommittee and it favored giving planning bodies a role only in the location of bridges. 

He also disputed a claim by John Nolen, Jr., the commission’s planning director, who said he had 

observed 3,000 cars an hour using Arlington Memorial Bridge without difficulty. Fairbank 
reported that surveys the past week indicated the bridge was crammed to capacity when volume 

reached 3,000 vehicles, leaving cars to move at about 10 miles per hour. 

The District’s traffic director, William H. Van Duzer, disagreed with General Grant’s bottleneck 

argument. He said the District end had enough outlets for traffic from Virginia to avoid the 

problem. Building a six-lane, two-way bridge would be only a “palliative.” Van Duzer said he 

had never heard of a highway project that had been overbuilt. 

Colonel Joseph D. Arthur, assistant to Engineer Commissioner Young, said, “It is neither good 

economy nor good planning to build a bridge of insufficient capacity at Fourteenth street in order 

to justify a second bridge at Alexandria.” He also disputed the claim by Secretary Ickes that 

PRA’s MacDonald had coerced the city. Colonel Arthur said he had been unable to find any 

statement by MacDonald along those lines. 

General Grant was not willing to recant his claims despite the Fairbank data. Statistics, he said, 

could be used equally by both sides. [“Twin Bridge Plan Denounced As Too Costly,” The 

Evening Star, December 11, 1945; “Ickes Attacks Twin Bridges As Unsightly,” The Evening 

Star, December 18, 1945; “House Hearings On Twin Bridge Proposal End,” The Evening Star, 

December 19, 1945] 

The Star editors were particularly skeptical of Secretary Ickes’ presentation, preferring Clarke’s 

acknowledgement that appearances were at least “debatable.” Regarding the Secretary’s 

reference to mechanical ducks, the editorial said: 

To Mr. Ickes, the automobiles are not merely mechanical ducks but ugly ducklings as 

well. To others, however, they are the chariots which carry busy little taxpayers to and 

from work, and pictured in this light they are things of beauty and a joy forever. They 

transport the busy little taxpayers who pay the cost of that coldly austere pile of white 

marble erected to the memory of Thomas Jefferson, and their movement gives it needed 

warmth and life. They pay the salary of one-bridge Ickes, the expenses for the two-bridge 

Fine Arts Commission, the salary of two-bridge Public Roads Commissioner Thomas H. 

MacDonald and the salary of one-bridge Major General Ulysses S. Grant, 3d. 

The purpose of the bridges (or bridge) to be built after the experts are through 

disagreeing, is to get these busy little taxpayers back and forth across the river. And one 

cause of the present controversy is that too many people like Mr. Ickes are thinking of 

them as mechanical ducks, interfering with the appearance of the Jefferson Memorial, 

instead of as busy little taxpayers who have to get to work in the morning and back home 

in the evening with a minimum of delay and inconvenience. [“Useful Little Ducks,” The 

Evening Star, December 20, 1945] 

Secretary Ickes did not appreciate the Star’s views. In a letter to the editor, he called the editorial

the newspaper’s version of the “widows and orphans” fiction that was often cited as the need for 

action. As for those “busy little taxpayers,” he asked, what about those taxpayers “who want a 

beautiful setting for the Jefferson Memorial for which they helped to pay and who can’t quite see 

the sense of pouring through eight lanes of highway traffic that Washington is not prepared to 
handle.” The editors apparently did not “grasp the issues,” and he would not point them out 

“because I doubt if you would be interested.” He continued: 

The thought occurs to me that the “busy little taxpayer” could get back and forth much 

more quickly if it were not for the circuitous roads around the Lincoln Memorial. So, if 

Mr. MacDonald, whose ability is unquestionable but whose zeal to use power improperly 

is as clear as day so far as these proposed bridges are concerned, should want to demolish 

the Lincoln Memorial in order to build wider and straighter roads I would expect The Star 

to join in the acclaim.

Asserting that there is “more to human life than mere utilitarianism,” he thought that “beauty and 

perspective” were also important. But by the Star’s standards, why not get rid of the District’s 

traffic circles and trees that interfere with traffic and “why should there be any inhibitions against 

the unlimited vehicular use of Rock Creek Park, which now is little more than a glorified 

boulevard, and of other areas that our childish-minded predecessors thought might be both 

appropriate and fitting as a frame for what ought to be a lovelier Capital City than it is?” [“My 

Ickes Replies to Editorial on ‘Useful Little Ducks,’” Letters to The Star, The Evening Star, 

January 1, 1946] 

The problem with responding to editorials is that the editors always have the final say. An 

editorial the same day said that Secretary Ickes “dodges the issues.” After explaining the support 

for the two-bridge plan, the editorial applauded Secretary Ickes “for his interest in safeguarding 

the beauties of Washington.” However, the editorial did not concede “that this beauty is 

enhanced by ignoring the realities of modern traffic needs”: 

A few more mistakes by city planners unconcerned with traffic, like their location of a 

Chinese Wall of Government buildings south of Pennsylvania avenue, closing off such 

important north-south thoroughfares as Thirteenth, Eleventh and Sixth streets, and the 

beauties of Washington will be more obscured than they are now by snarled traffic. The 

problem of constructing an adequate bridge facility should be approached on the basis of 

facts and not irrelevant rhetoric. [“My Ickes and the Bridge,” The Evening Star, January 

1, 1946] 

Elevating the Battle of the Bridge 

On January 14, 1946, Secretary Ickes arranged for President Harry S. Truman to join a group that 

went to the top of the Washington Monument to observe the site of the dispute. The Star

reported that in so doing, President Truman became “the first President ever to ascend the shaft, 

according to records of the National Capital Park Service.”

In addition to Secretary Ickes, President Truman was accompanied by General Grant; Arthur E. 

Demaray, associate NPS director and a member of the national planning commission; T. Sutton 

Jett, NPS chief of national and memorial and historical areas; and Edward J. Kelly, 

administrative assistant to the superintendent of National Capital Parks. They spent a half hour 

atop the monument discussing the proposal. They also discussed the post-war public buildings 

program, including removal of the temporary buildings on park property, as well as “new State 
and Navy Department buildings, an Interior Department annex, extension of the Treasury annex 

and two new Smithsonian Institution museums, all within view of the top of the shaft.” 

(According to the Post, “He spent an hour visiting the Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln Memorial 

and topped it off with a trip to the top of the Washington Monument.”) 

After leaving the Washington Monument, the group took a car across the Highway Bridge into 

Virginia. They returned via Arlington Memorial Bridge: 

In this way he had an opportunity to drive over some of the principal approaches to the 

crossing; approaches which advocates for twin bridges contend are adequate and which 

opponents have said are inadequate. 

The Star reported: 

It was reliably understood today that the President did not commit himself on the bridge 

proposal, allowing these three officials to do most of the talking. [“Truman Views D.C. 

Bridge Sites From Washington Monument,” The Evening Star, January 15, 1946] 

Secretary Ickes submitted his resignation on February 13, indicating that he wanted to complete 

pending business before leaving office on March 31. He decided to resign following a dispute 

resulting from his unfavorable testimony about a Truman nominee for Under Secretary of the 

Navy. President Truman accepted the resignation, but made it effective February 15, in view of 

the Secretary’s statement that the Truman Administration expected him to commit perjury to 

support the nominee. 

On the final day of Secretary Ickes’ 13-year tenure at the Department of the Interior, the Star

reported: 

The Secretary, as had been his custom for years, drove in from his estate near Olney, Md., 

and was at his desk by 8:30 o’clock. There he found a great stack of mail from people in 

all walks of life, from national leaders to file clerks in the Interior Department, expressing 

regret over his departure. [Baird, Joseph H., “Ickes Rushes to Clear Office; Cabinet 

Meets Without Him,” The Evening Star, February 15, 1946] 

(The estate was called Headwaters Farm at 11 Shallow Brook Court in Olney.) 

Ickes’ successor would be Julius A. Krug, a longtime government servant who had recently been 

Chief of the War Production Board. He took office on March 18, 1946. 

Representative Chapman indicated that before the subcommittee reported on the Randolph bill, 

members would visit the site of the Highway Bridge and also might follow President Truman’s 

example by ascending the Washington Monument for a “bird’s eye view” of the area. They also 

planned to visit the site of the Alexandria-Shepherds Landing bridge. [“House Unit Plans Span 

Site Tour Before Report,” The Evening Star, February 20, 1946] 
The tour did not occur until May 14, 1946, just as the committee was finally planning to consider 

the bill. All five members of the Chapman subcommittee took the tour along with Chairman 

Grant; Captain Whitehurst; Superintendent Irving C. Root of National Capital Parks and his 

assistant, Harry T. Thompson; and PRA’s H. E. Hilts, C. E. Swain, and E. H. (Ted) Holmes. The 

group did not ascend the Washington Monument, but did tour the approaches to the Highway 

Bridge on both sides of the river and inspected the site of the proposed Alexandria-Shepherds 

Landing bridge. The subcommittee members did not express their views, but according to the 

Star, “asked many questions.” [“House Group to Press For Action on Bridges After Tour of 

Sites,” The Evening Star, May 14, 1946] 

On June 6, with the Randolph bill still in committee, the White House let the District and other 

parties to the debate know the President’s views. Matthew J. Connelly, Secretary to the 

President, wrote to John Russell Young, president of the District Board of Commissioners:

The President has directed that I advise you that he favors the two-bridge plan for 

replacement of the present Highway Bridge across the Potomac River.

He has also directed that a copy of this letter be sent to the National Park and Planning 

Commission and the Bureau of Public Roads. [Authorizing the Construction of Two 

Four-Lane Free Highway Bridges Across the Potomac River to Replace Existing 

Highway Bridge at or Near Fourteenth Street, page 2-3] 

The brief letter did not explain the basis for his decision, but the Star hoped that “the President’s 

candid indorsement of the plan to build twin bridges . . . will produce some action from the 

subcommittee” on the Randolph bill: 

The President’s support of the two-bridge plan shows that he is in agreement with the 

Public Roads Administration, the District Highway Department, the Commission of Fine 

Arts and others who have taken the view that within a few years one bridge would be 

incapable of handling the growing volume of traffic and that long-range economy and 

sound traffic engineering make two one-way structures advisable. [“Get It Started,” The 

Evening Star, June 8, 1946] 

The President’s decision did prompt House action. On June 14, members of the Chapman 

subcommittee ascended the Washington Monument to survey the area. Chairman Chapman and 

two other committee members were accompanied by General Grant, Demaray, Whitehurst, and 

Hilts. As the Star explained, the accompanying officials were split among one-bridge and twobridge men (in contrast to the all one-bridge officials accompanying the President). 

The officials were at the top of the monument for an hour, with each side citing familiar 

arguments. General Grant and Demaray argued that a single bridge would enhance the view of 

the Jefferson Memorial for tourists approaching the city. If needed, a second, smaller bridge 

could be built at some future date, but the likelihood of congestion was a long way off. General 

Grant predicted that completion of the one-bridge project would take 6 years from approval of 

authorizing legislation. 
Captain Whitehurst and Hilts said construction of the twin spans would take half that time. 

Captain Whitehurst said the northbound span would give tourists a fine view of the Jefferson 

Memorial. The Highway Bridge was in such poor condition that it could not be used for long as 

one of the twin spans. 

Chairman Chapman said he thought the Alexandria-Shepherds Landing bridge would be needed 

as a bypass before long. He said it would “divert more traffic from downtown Washington than 

we think.” Hilts replied that the new bridge at Morgantown, West Virginia, carrying U.S. 19-

119, combined with new roads connecting it to the U.S. numbered system would provide a direct 

bypass for north-south traffic. 

General Grant and Demaray questioned whether the economy-minded Congress would go along 

with the higher cost for the two-bridge solution; perhaps Congress would approve the two spans, 

but not appropriate funds for the second span. Captain Whitehurst and Hilts pointed out that the 

financing had been worked out on a 50-50 Federal-District basis under the Federal-aid highway 

program.

After descending from the Washington Monument, the group crossed the Highway Bridge into 

Virginia and returned to the city on Arlington Memorial Bridge to compare views. [Kauffman, 

Rudolph II, “Committee Visits Monument for New Span Study,” The Evening Star, June 14, 

1946] 

On June 26, the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce reported the Randolph 

bill authorizing $7 million for two four-lane bridges to replace the Highway Bridge. The 

committee report included extensive correspondence from officials arguing both sides of the long 

debate. The House approved the bill unanimously on July 3, with limited debate. 

The Senate District Committee approved the bill on July 5 without amendment. The 

committee’s acting chairman, Senator Clyde R. Hoey (D-NC), introduced the bill on the Senate 

floor on July 7. He requested unanimous consent for consideration of the bill. It then passed 

unanimously without debate, and was sent to the President for signature. [“$450 School Pay 

Raise And Bridge Measure Approved by Senate,” The Evening Star, July 10, 1946] 

President Truman approved the legislation on July 17, 1946 [P.L. 79-516]. As soon as the 

President signed the law, Captain Whitehurst said, he “pulled the trigger” to approve a contract 

with the engineering firm of Howard, Needles, Tammens and Bergendoff, which had previously 

been selected to prepare plans and specifications. He predicted that the first span would be ready 

in a year and a half. At that point, all traffic would be shifted to the new span, which would carry 

two lanes of traffic in both directions until the second span was completed. [“Signing of Bill 

Launches Plans To Build Spans,” The Evening Star, July 17, 1946] 

On May 9, 1950, officials dedicated the first span of the new 14th Street Bridge. Miss Mary Jane 

Hayes, Miss Washington of 1949, snipped the red ribbon before a crowd of about 300 people. 

After the ceremony, an official motorcade crossed the bridge into Virginia, then returned to the 

District along with the vehicles that had been waiting in Virginia for the opening. 
On October 19, 1958, an Act of Congress officially named the span the Rochambeau Memorial 

Bridge to honor the Comte de Rochambeau, of France. The Star explained, “Last year was the 

175th anniversary of the time when Gen. Rochambeau crossed the Potomac near the site of the 

present bridge on the way to aid Gen. Washington’s forces in the Battle of Yorktown,” which 

essentially ended the Revolutionary War. During the bridge ceremony, “French Ambassador 

Herve Alphand declared the dedication bound more closely the historic ties of friendship 

between his country and the United States.” 

Contrary to Captain Whitehurst’s original plan, the new bridge, with a double-leaf draw span for 

openings, would carry four lanes of District-bound traffic while the Highway Bridge would carry 

traffic from the District to Virginia until January 27, 1962, when the four-lane George Mason 

Memorial Bridge opened and became the southbound roadway. District, Virginia, and Federal 

officials gathered for the ceremony, which included unveiling a plaque honoring Mason, a 

Virginia plantation owner and politician, friend of George Washington, and an influential 

participant in the Constitutional Convention who refused to sign the document because it lacked 

a Bill of Rights similar to one he had drafted for Virginia. The Highway Bridge could finally be 

removed. 

In 1983, Air Florida Flight 90 crashed while taking off from Washington National Airport in a 

snowstorm, damaging the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge. The bridge was renamed as a 

posthumous honor for Arland Williams, Jr., a heroic passenger who lost his life helping others 

escape the airplane. The original name was shifted to a bridge opened in 1972 to carry high 

occupancy vehicles. 

Today, the 14th Street Bridge or Bridges carrying I-395 across the Potomac River consists of 

(west to east):

• George Mason Memorial Bridge (1962), 

• Rochambeau Memorial Bridge (1972), carrying express lanes for high occupancy 

vehicles.

• Arland D. Williams Jr Bridge (1950). 

• Charles R. Fenwick Bridge carrying Metro rapid transit trains (1983, named for a Virginia 

State legislator), and

• The 1904 Long Bridge, which was restored during World War II, continues in railroad 

service. 

As the Post pointed out in its Weekend article on District bridges, the structures comprising the 

14th Street Bridge “possess no visual distinction.” [Bisbort, page 9] 

Postwar Thinking

World War II had a major impact on Washington, as the District highway department’s 24-year 

history explained: 

After five years in the role of the world’s war-time capital, Washington was bursting at 

the seams under the pressure of its swollen population. New groups of military and 
civilian personnel, engaged in the accelerated functions of a Government waging war on a 

global scale, had, by 1946, overflowed into the adjoining counties of Maryland and 

Virginia in such numbers that transportation problems were no longer limited to the city 

of Washington. A metropolitan area, composed of vast new housing developments, had 

sprung up to form a populous and exceedingly active fringe on all sides of the District of 

Columbia. [Twenty-Four Years of Progress, page 74] 

With morning and afternoon peak periods “filled with danger and delay to the shuttling 

motorist,” the Department of Highways decided that “a revision of long-range highway programs 

to include expressways” was essential. 

Once again, the department called in J. E. Greiner Company and De Leuw, Cather and Company 

to conduct the study and submit recommendations. Their December 1946 report contained: 

. . . broad recommendations which emphasized the necessity of consolidating and 

enlarging past proposals for improvements in the District of Columbia’s highway system, 

to include a system of expressways serving all parts of the District and connecting with 

existing and proposed highways of this type in Maryland and Virginia. A network of 

arterials, improved at irregular, multiple and high volume intersections through the 

construction of grade separation structures, channelization, and the use of effective 

signalization and other control measures were also recommended. [Twenty-Four Years of 

Progress, pages 74-75] 

In 1946, Engineer Commissioner Young presented a plan for post-war highway improvements to 

take the District to the threshold of the 21st century. The plan, an update of the 1941 pre-war 

plan, included several expressways serving all parts of the District and linking with Maryland 

and Virginia proposals. These included: 

Mid-City Expressway was “designed to relieve the shopping district of through traffic 

destined for the Federal Triangle, the Southwest Mall and other points beyond the Central 

Area.” The expressway “would extend from Canal Street in the vicinity of Independence 

Avenue across the Mall, along Third Street as a depressed highway, west of Griffith 

Stadium [located at Georgia Avenue and 5th Street, and between W Street and Florida 

Avenue NW.], under the hill north of Howard University, along the west edge of the 

Soldier’s Home, through a hill east of Rock Creek Cemetery and thence northeast to the 

District line.” 

Capitol Hill Expressway would involve “two one-way drives depressed east of Capitol 

Hill, through which they would be carried in tunnels, and merging in the Mall east of 

Third Street, from which point they would be carried at-grade, on the approximate 

alignment of the present Madison and Jefferson Drives.” This expressway would connect 

with the proposed Baltimore-Washington Parkway, the Anacostia River highway 

crossings, and 17th Street, NW.
The consultants suggested that mass transportation vehicles could operate on the expressways on 

express schedules “to attract and induce a greater portion of the population to use public 

transportation.” [Twenty-Four Years of Progress, page 75-77] 

In addition, the plan included “somewhat lesser scale” improvements, such as a road through 

Rock Creek Park to connect with U.S. 240 to Frederick in Maryland, the K Street Elevated 

Highway, widening of Canal Road, the Whitehaven Parkway serving densely populated areas 

west of Wisconsin Avenue, the Anacostia-Kenilworth Freeway as part of a circumferential, and 

“the opening of the valley along Arizona Avenue as a parkway to connect Canal Road with 

Wisconsin Avenue.” The 1946 plan was consistent in many ways with the 1941 plan, but studies 

since then had “changed the plan to some extent, in that the Arizona Avenue Parkway has been 

approved as a substitute for the formerly proposed improvement of Foxhall Road as the ‘major 

arterial highway’ to serve the area west of Connecticut Avenue . . . .” [Twenty-Four Years of 

Progress in Highway Development, pages 74-76] 

The District Highway Department released a draft of its highway development program in March 

1947. The plan included depressed expressways through congested areas connecting with 

existing and proposed highways in surrounding jurisdictions; an inner loop around the central 

business district and one just within the city limits known as Fort Drive; and additional bridges 

across the Potomac River at Alexandria and across the Anacostia River at Massachusetts 

Avenue. The plan also called for subsurface streetcar tracks along downtown sections of F and 

14th Streets and Pennsylvania Avenue. [Mustin, Henry A., “Commissioners Slate Hearing March 

26 on Vast Highway Plan,” The Evening Star, March 16, 1947] 

At a public hearing on the plan, the National Capital Park and Planning Commissioners attacked 

the city’s draft. General Grant called for a “go slow” attitude toward the expressways and 

underground streetcars. The commission’s director of planning, John Nolen, Jr., criticized the 

plan for not taking into account other phases of city development. He suggested that the city 

should be working with its adjacent jurisdictions on a regional plan. 

The commission’s major criticism focused on the expressway plan. First, traffic expected by 

1965 would not justify the cost. Second, the expressways, which were far in excess of traffic 

needs, would make it easier to get to downtown from the suburbs, thereby hastening the shift of 

taxpayers to the Maryland suburbs. However, Nolen’s statement said, “It should be borne in 

mind that the opposite effect may well be produced on residential areas in the District which 

supply three-fourths of the District’s real estate tax income.”

The commission also was highly critical of plans for underground streetcars, except where doing 

so would relieve congestion as in Dupont Circle. Creating a rigid system of tracks that could not 

be easily changed with population and employment shifts was an old-fashioned way of thinking 

about transit. The trend around the country was to abandon streetcars in favor of streamlined bus 

systems that could easily adjust to such changes. 

In addition to criticizing the city’s plan, the commission offered its own ideas on overhauling the 

District’s street system. The plan was the latest version of the thoroughfare plan the commission 
had been promoting, without success, since 1927. [Kauffman, Rudolph II, “Planners Blast Road 

Program, Urge Substitute,” The Evening Star, March 26, 1947] 

The Interstate System for the District

On August 2, 1947, the Federal Works Agency and PRA designated the rural mileage of the 

National System of Interstate Highways plus extensions to carry each route through the cities in 

its path. According to a press release:

This network, comprising 37,681 miles of the 40,000-mile eventual extent of the entire 

system, includes 2,892 miles in cities, forming the principal extensions into and through 

the connected cities. The remainder of 2,319 miles has been reserved to permit addition 

in the larger cities of distribution and circumferential routes, essential as terminal 

connections of the system; designation of this further mileage in cities, now under way, 

requires the close cooperation of city, State, and Federal authorities. 

At the time, the rural designations were widely understood to refer to the existing U.S. numbered 

highway in each corridor rather than to a new freeway that would be built parallel to the 

inadequate existing road. 

In the District, which did not have rural segments, the principal extensions into the District of 

Columbia totaled about 22 miles and involved extensions of U.S. Routes 1, 50, 211, and 240. 

The Star listed the street extensions of those routes included in the new network: 

• Wisconsin avenue from Georgetown to the District line; 

• Massachusetts avenue from Wisconsin avenue to Twenty-second street;

• Twenty-second and Twenty-third streets from Massachusetts avenue to K street N.W.;

• K street from Wisconsin avenue to West Virginia avenue N.E. plus sections of New York 

avenue and Bladensburg road extending north from West Virginia avenue; 

• Constitution avenue from Third street to Twenty-third street N.W.; 

• Virginia avenue from Constitution avenue to Twenty-third street;

• Fourteenth street from Constitution avenue to Highway Bridge; 

• Third street N.W. from K street south to Maryland avenue; 

• C and D streets S.W. from Maryland avenue to Fourteenth street, and Key, Arlington and 

Highway Bridges and their approaches. 

The newspaper speculated that several District routes would likely be approved later: 

A bypass route using such streets as Nebraska avenue, Military road, Missouri avenue, 

Riggs road, South Dakota avenue, Benning road and Minnesota avenue, plus the 

proposed Arizona avenue Expressway, Fort Drive and Anacostia Expressway, if they are 

built, is likely to be approved later. 

The first grouping, from Nebraska Avenue to Minnesota Avenue would serve as a bypass for the 

downtown business district. [“New U.S. Highway Net To Speed City Traffic, Aid Defense 
Centers,” The Evening Star, August 3, 1947; “22 Miles in District in U.S. Highway Plan,” The 

Washington Post, August 3, 1947] 

PRA had been working with State and local officials to determine the location of the 

metropolitan segments based on the concepts outlined in Interregional Highways, but more work 

was needed. To determine rural interstate road needs, officials had used origin-and-destination 

surveys in the mid to late 1930s to gather traffic data by stopping vehicles and questioning 

drivers. Such surveys were impractical in large metropolitan areas with heavy traffic volumes. 

Therefore, PRA worked with the Census Bureau to develop a sampling technique that was 

similar to the methods employed by polling organizations. After the August 1947 designation of 

rural segments, PRA/BPR continued to work with State and local officials to develop an express 

highway network in each metropolitan area.

The District Highway Department’s 24-year history concluded with a section on “Plans for the 

Future” that included a discussion of expressways. Traffic engineers were “turning to this 

admitedly [sic] expensive measure as the only one capable of achieving the desired results” of 

congestion relief. Washington was particularly suited to limited-access expressways because the 

predominant traffic flow in the morning is toward the central business and government districts, 

with comparable exit traffic in the evening:

[The department] has reached the conclusion in consultation with several engineering 

firms, which were retained to study the traffic problem in Washington’s Metropolitan 

Area, that a system of expressways will probably become necessary in the not too distant 

future. These high-speed traffic channels should be depressed in order to preserve as 

much of the remaining pavement area, which is already at a premium, at grade level to 

serve local movements. Further studies and investigations are being made in this field.

While congestion relief and safety were the primary concerns in considering expressways, they 

would have other benefits: 

It has been the experience of other large metropolitan centers, plagued with the same 

troubles, that expressways have had a revitalizing effect on run-down residential 

neighborhoods which usually form an exceedingly unattractive ring around the business 

area. It is a well known fact that rehabilitated slum areas have a tax potential far beyond 

the values which are placed upon them in their present condition. 

Suitably interconnected with the street system at grade, expressways would also serve as 

protection for the valuable properties which occupy the retail business district by opening 

up new connecting arteries and speeding up the circulation of local surface traffic. 

Although it is extremely doubtful for example [sic], that F Street will ever be abandoned 

while the major federal installations with their thousands of highly-paid workers remain 

within walking distance of its shops, it is nevertheless essential and prudent to adopt 

measures which will forestall any further encroachment of the “downtown disease” upon 

its high tax-yield properties in the heart of the city. The slums can and should be 

eradicated before reaching unmanageable proportions. Highway facilities of the 

expressway type can very well mean the restoration of arteries through which new blood, 
in the form of healthier commercial activities, could be pumped to revive the stagnant 

neighborhoods. [Twenty-Four Years of Progress in Highway Development, pages 125-

127] 

Toll Roads and Free Roads and Interregional Highways made the same points about the urban 

segments of what became the Interstate System. In practice, building urban Interstates, even 

through “slums,” proved very difficult. In Washington, the main example was in the southwest 

quadrant, as will be discussed later.

Washington Present and Future

Harland Bartholomew, born in 1889, had long been influential in highway planning for the 

District of Columbia. He had developed Washington’s zoning ordinance of 1920 and proposed a 

planning commission to coordinate zoning with changes in the city’s land use. When the 

National Capital Park and Planning Commission was established in 1926, Bartholomew served 

as a consultant on highways. He would continue in this role until President Eisenhower 

appointed him to chair the commission, effective September 1, 1953 (term to expire on April 30, 

1959). He continued to live at 6228 Westminster Place in St. Louis where his consulting 

business was based. He was the third of the four most recent chairmen who did not live in the 

Washington area. [“Eisenhower Appoints Harland Bartholomew To Planning Body,” The 

Evening Star, August 6, 1953] 

For the initial plan developed in the 1920s, Bartholomew studied the evolution of roads in the 

Washington area as the basis for a concept that Gutheim and Lee described in their history of 

planning in the District of Columbia:

Outside the District’s boundaries, Bartholomew studied the commuting zones within 

Prince George’s, Montgomery, Arlington, and Fairfax counties. Because of the limited 

construction of county highways and heavy use of streetcar and railroad lines, the 

commuting zone resembled spokes about the hub of the L’Enfant federal city. 

Bartholomew recommended the strengthening of radial highways already largely defined 

by preautomobile transportation routes. To adapt these radials to the automobile, the 

routes were to be dramatically widened. To connect these radials and fill in the spokes, 

Bartholomew drew up a series of bypass routes resembling many belt roads encircling the 

District. The intersection of the radials with the belt roads was intended to be located at 

extant county towns to maintain the already developed points of concentration. Thus the 

configuration of highways outside the District would resemble a vast built spiderweb. 

[Gutheim and Lee, page 198] 

When the District of Columbia Redevelopment Act of 1945 called for a new comprehensive plan 

for the Washington area over a 25-year period, Bartholomew would again take the lead in 

projecting the area’s highway network. He coordinated with the area’s State and local officials, 

but also with PRA’s origin-and-destination and sampling surveys of the metropolitan area, which 

began in 1948. 
Developing such a plan was not unusual. With the data collected during the PRA surveys and 

the work of consultants such as New York’s Robert Moses, many cities established boards or 

commissions to develop an expressway network. Many of those cities hired Harland 

Bartholomew and Associates as a consultant in the work. In the case of the National Capital 

Park and Planning Commission, Bartholomew was already on board. 

Washington Present and Future, which Commission Chairman William W. Wurster transmitted 

to President Truman on April 3, 1950, found that jobs were too concentrated in the city:

The present pattern of job locations is highly concentrated. In 1947, 84 percent of all jobs 

were inside the District, 9 percent in Virginia, and 7 percent in Maryland. This means 

that, while practically all those living in the District work there too, most of those living 

in Maryland and Virginia must travel considerable distances to jobs in the District.

This lack of balance and excessive distances between home and work is a tremendous 

force for traffic congestion, overloading transit facilities, and requiring great expense for 

new bridges and superhighways. There should be a definite policy to locate as many as 

possible of the required new employment places away from the center, and actually to 

remove most of the existing temporary workplaces. Since the Federal Government itself 

is the major employer, it holds the key to the solution to this problem. 

To the greatest extent possible, “basic employment centers should be distributed throughout the 

metropolitan area in balance with existing and potential residential areas and transportation 

facilities.” The soundness of the proposed comprehensive highway plan depended on “the new 

balance of work places.” [Washington Present and Future: A General Summary of the 

Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs, Monograph No. 1, National 

Capital Park and Planning Commission, April 1950, page 10] 

Bartholomew believed, as did MacDonald and Fairbank, in using the new freeways to direct 

metropolitan growth patterns. The solution he devised to serve the Washington area’s shifting 

population involved a network of radials and circumferentials: 

A major aim of the comprehensive plan is moving 2 million people, their supplies and 

other goods, wherever they need to go—quickly, safely, and economically . . . . There are 

three attacks on the problem, which must all be used at once. Most basic: Cut down on 

the amount of travel needed, by getting home and work closer together. This is one of the 

major purposes of the comprehensive plan, to be attained by spreading Federal 

employment centers throughout the metropolitan region. Second, and cheapest, but 

possibly only as the third step is undertaken: Make public transportation so quick and 

convenient that more people will use it to go to work and fewer will drive. Third, most 

costly, but also necessary in spite of what can be done through the first and second: 

Create a system of collector and distributor roads, both radial and circumferential in 

function, that will redistribute traffic through the region and diminish the volume demand 

within the central area. This will entail cutting through modern highways, widening 

certain old ones, building some new bridges, and providing new parking facilities. 

[Washington Present and Future, page 27] 
The thoroughfare portion of the plan called for “an integrated network of radial and 

circumferential routes designed to function in combination and to serve all major movements of 

traffic—now and in the future.” The thoroughfares must be carefully designed: 

These new and improved main highways must be modern—at least divided highways, 

and preferably freeways for all types of traffic, or parkways for passenger cars only and in 

certain cases express busses [sic, here and throughout the report], with no cross traffic, no 

driveways or parking, no traffic lights, and only a few designated points of access. 

The thoroughfare plan was based on concepts of desirable future land use, and the location of 

government facilities and employment centers:

They must be laid out in line with land use plans—serving residential areas, but not 

smashing through home neighborhoods. For maximum traffic capacity and safety, they 

must be built to high standards of curves, grades, and pavement width. Main routes in the 

metropolitan area, inside the District and outside, must be coordinated into a single 

network of arteries, for trucks as well as passenger cars and busses. [Washington Present 

and Future, page 27] 

The goal was an “integrated network of radial and circumferential routes designed to function in 

combination and to serve all major movements of traffic—now and in the future.” The plan 

recognized the role of circumferentials “that will arise in the future when employment is more 

widely distributed and when a larger city is spread over a far greater land area.” The plan 

described the circumferentials:

There would be three complete circumferential routes in the plan. The first of these 

would be located about 1 mile from the White House; its most important function would 

be to carry traffic around and through the central area, relieving this congested section of 

unnecessary volumes. The second would be between 3 and 5 miles from the White 

House, following the route of Fort Drive through much of its length. The third, an outer 

bypass route, would follow new alinement; it would be between 6 and 10 miles from the 

White House. [Washington Present and Future, page 29] 

The Fort Drive concept can be traced to the early 20th century, but after World War I it was seen 

as a key part of a plan to convert Civil War forts into parks linked by a ring road just inside the 

city boundaries. In the 1920s, the National Capital Park and Planning Commission asked 

Congress for funds for construction of Fort Drive as a “single and unified project,” but funding 

never materialized. Gutheim and Lee explained that the idea “never captured the imagination of 

Congress”:

By 1926 the land required for the drive lay too close to the built-up city, so that the cost 

of this land would be much inflated over possible parkland farther out. Additional inertia 

in realizing the Fort Drive dream may be attributed to the circular drive’s being unique to 

Washington and not an element of City Beautiful prescriptions. In the next forty years 
. . . planning issues related to the city’s fort system gradually shifted away from circulation to 

open space and recreational uses extending through residential neighborhoods. 

Congress provided funds for some fort revitalization, but Fort Drive was still on the drawing 

board at the time of the 1950 plan and survived in planners’ thinking into the 1960s without 

being constructed. “Yet, however reinterpreted, even as a circumferential highway, Fort Drive 

failed to win sufficient support to be realized.” [Worthy of a Nation, page 205] 

Linking the circumferentials would be a network of radial routes including expressways, express 

highways, express parkways, and “dominant thoroughfares,” defined as, “Wide major streets or 

highways with divided directional roadways and with grades separated at major intersections 

when volumes warrant such treatment.” The report identified many of the radial routes: 

Important among these would be: The Northwest Freeway and George Washington 

Memorial Parkway to the northwest, the Northern Freeway to the north, the BaltimoreWashington Parkway to the northeast, the Annapolis Freeway and Suitland Parkway to 

the east, the Indian Head Highway and Mount Vernon Memorial Highway to the south, 

Shirley Memorial Highway to the southwest, and Lee Boulevard to the west. These 

routes would not just give direct access to the central area but, by means of the ring 

routes, provide for distribution to outer and inner residential areas and dispersed 

employment centers.

A map showed the existing, planned, and proposed express highways and parkways, including 

the proposed inner loop around the central area and an outer circumferential. Radials included: 

• Annapolis Freeway – Parallels U.S. 50. 

• Suitland Parkway – an existing parkway linking Bolling Field in Washington and 

Andrews Field in Maryland. An expressway extension would carry travelers to U.S. 301 

in the vicinity of Upper Marlboro, Maryland. 

• Baltimore-Washington Parkway – a planned parkway to Fort Meade; Maryland would 

provide an expressway extension into Baltimore as the city’s link to the new Friendship 

International Airport. The map shows the parkway extending into the District along the 

New York Avenue corridor.

• Columbia Freeway – north of the Prince George’s/Montgomery County line, this route 

appears to be the equivalent of today’s I-95 between Washington and Baltimore. It 

begins at the outer circumferential.

• Northern Freeway – The freeway begins at the circumferential a short distance west of the 

Columbia Freeway, just beyond the northern tip of Washington. The map does not show 

the northern destination, but the next significant city on a straight line to the north would 

be Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

• Northwest Freeway – Joins the outer circumferential near the Potomac River beyond the 

city limits in Montgomery County. It would circle around to U.S. 240 and follow that 

road to Frederick, Maryland. Construction on U.S. 240 was underway, having begun in 

the Frederick area while decisions were made on connections in the Washington area. As

the Star pointed out, this roundabout route was selected because a direct route via 

reconstructed U.S. 240 “would have gone through the Landon school property and many 
estates in which much money had been invested.” Landon School is a private school on 

75 acres in Bethesda, Maryland. [Kennedy, George, “Frederick Superhighway Goes 

Nowhere and Most Motorists Don’t Know It Exists,” The Evening Star, November 14, 

1951] 

• George Washington Memorial Parkway – The parkway was planned for both sides of the 

Potomac River. On the Maryland side, the parkway connected with the District’s inner 

loop. 

• Virginia’s circumferential was unclear on the thoroughfare map, but it appears to loosely 

follow the current alignment.

• Lee Boulevard – From a small inner loop surrounding Arlington National Cemetery and 

Fort Myer across the Potomac River from the District, this boulevard carried the U.S. 50 

designation at the time (since shifted to Arlington Boulevard). In today’s configuration, it 

would be the equivalent of I-66 between Washington and the Shenandoah Valley. 

• Shirley Memorial Highway – Built to serve the new Pentagon, this route (today’s I-95/I395) continued north of the Arlington Cemetery loop to connect with the inner loop in the 

District.

• Mount Vernon Memorial Highway – This route extended from the Arlington National 

Cemetery loop along the Potomac River to connect with U.S. 1 south of Mount Vernon 

(in the vicinity of I-95 on today’s map). It was eventually incorporated into the George 

Washington Memorial Parkway. 

• Fort Foote Parkway – This parkway would carry traffic on the eastern side of the Potomac 

River between Fort Drive and Fort Foote, built in 1862-1863 during the Civil War in 

Maryland along the river south of the city. The parkway linked with Indian Head 

Highway.

• Indian Head Highway – This existing highway, Maryland Route 224 at the time (now 

Maryland Route 210), connected with Suitland Parkway. The road ends at Indian Head, 

Maryland, on the Potomac River near Indian Head Naval Surface Warfare Center. This 

appears to be an extension of Fort Drive.

Within the city, radial routes would carry traffic between the Fort Drive circumferential and the 

inner loop: 

• Potomac and Arizona Drive Expressways to connect with K Street.

• Massachusetts Avenue would be a dominant thoroughfare. 

• Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway would be extended to Connecticut Avenue at about 

Quebec Street and to 16th Street at Colorado Avenue. 

• 13th Street would be a dominant thoroughfare serving residential areas between Rock 

Creek Park and Soldiers’ Home. 

• North Capitol Street would be extended north on the east side of Soldiers’ Home and 

Park Place would be extended on the west side. 

• Rhode Island Avenue would be developed as a dominant thoroughfare. 

• K Street would be connected with the New York Avenue extension to meet the 

Baltimore-Washington Parkway and the Annapolis Freeway. 

• Constitution Avenue and Independence Avenue would become expressways east of the 

Capitol to connect with the parkway to Baltimore. 
• Massachusetts Avenue would be a dominant thoroughfare extended through the grounds 

of Gallinger Hospital (District of Columbia General Hospital) and a new bridge over the 

Anacostia River.

• South Capitol Street would connect with the Third Street side of the inner loop and with 

Suitland Parkway. On the Anacostia side, the road would be an expressway link to Indian 

Head Highway. [Washington Present and Future, pages 27-31; Moving People and 

Goods: A Portion of the Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs, 

Monograph No. 5, National Capital Park and Planning Commission, March 1951, page 

24] 

The Comprehensive Plan recognized that expressways and other improved roads cannot solve the 

congestion problem by themselves. The city required places for vehicles to park at the end of a 

trip:

A few expressways cannot solve the problem, nor can a system limited to radial routes or 

circumferential routes. The individual will make many trips involving many 

combinations of types and kinds of routes. 

To keep the streets open for moving traffic and to assure cars a place to stop at the end of 

the trip, more offstreet parking must be created. New zoning regulations should see to it, 

in areas where such regulations are equitable, that all new buildings, whether apartments, 

stores, or offices, provide their own parking. The Federal Government should do as much 

as is practical to take the lead. Every new Federal building should have parking space for 

its own employees and official visitors, varying with the type of activity and location. 

The change was vital to congestion relief because the streets could not be freed of parked 

vehicles unless off-street parking was provided. [Washington Present and Future, pages 31-32] 

Public transportation at the time consisted of streetcars and buses, but the report pointed out that 

their passengers “suffer most from traffic congestion” since both types of vehicles depended on 

the same roads as automobiles:

If more people used public transit, there would be fewer private cars using the streets and 

therefore less congestion. Transit itself would become quicker and more comfortable, 

and the public would not be required to spend so heavily for new street and bridge 

improvements to handle such volumes of automobiles. The problem is to persuade 

people, by transit improvements, to reverse or at least check the trend away from transit 

riding toward use of private autos. 

A subway or elevated rail line would offer the “quickest mass transportation” because they would 

not be dependent on surface streets, but such facilities did not seem feasible in the Washington 

area “because sound operation demands much heavier mass riding to support subways than 

present and future population densities would produce.” The plan’s short section on public 

transit concluded: 
Bus traffic would benefit from a well-planned thoroughfare system. Freeways and 

parkways would make possible express bus service to suburban areas almost as fast as 

rail rapid transit. Within the central area, however, bus operation is sure to be slowed 

down by auto traffic. The Commission nevertheless recommends gradual replacement of 

streetcars with busses. It urges study of traffic rules, to speed up bus movements 

downtown—perhaps setting aside certain lanes for busses only, or even prohibiting 

private cars and delivery trucks entirely on certain streets in the rush hours. Since a bus 

carries about 30 times as many people as an auto, it is fair and reasonable to delay as 

many as 30 autos in order to speed up each bus. The goal is to move people, not vehicles. 

 [Washington Present and Future, page 32] 

A monograph released on March 21, 1951, as a supplement to the report elaborated on the transit 

question. Moving People and Goods explained that:

To effectively compete with the private automobile the transit system must offer fast 

service. This will be possible through the general amelioration of traffic conditions that 

will come about through the street improvements heretofore proposed and through use of 

the expressways and express parkways. A system of rush hour limited-stop “express” 

service should be established on these routes. In some cases all-day express service 

might be justified.

The need for fast service did not mean rail rapid transit:

Neither the existing nor the probable future population pattern contains sufficiently high 

population densities over a large enough area to warrant the extremely high cost involved 

in the development of a rapid transit system. 

Streetcars were “the backbone of the transit system here,” but were likely to disappear in coming 

decades. “Any transit plan should provide for substitution of busses for streetcars.” [Moving 

People and Goods, pages 25-26] 

The plan had only a limited impact, in part because of changes in the commission. Wurster, who 

was chairman for only about a year, returned to the University of California. The new chairman 

would be Bartholomew, who was, as Gutheim and Lee noted, “a long-time Truman associate” in 

Missouri:

Harland Bartholomew . . . began immediately to show that association with the 

commission and the city since 1920 did not prevent him from reaching independent 

judgments. Bartholomew’s most immediate past service to the commission was in 

directing the development of the 1950 Comprehensive Plan, and this, too, he was willing 

to jettison in tune with the times.

The city was evolving beyond its status as a Federal city:

The federal government also represented a diminishing share of the total employment in 

the area because a large private sector had developed separate from, if not independent of 

the federal establishment. [Worthy of a Nation, page 243] 
The National Capital Planning Act of 1952, approved July 19, 1952, resulted in additional 

changes. It reorganized the commission and changed its name to the National Capital Planning 

Commission (NCPC), dropping the park component. It became a Federal Agency receiving 

funds through congressional appropriations acts. Given the importance of highway development, 

BPR was designated an ex officio member. 

The new commission was responsible for the “appropriate and orderly development and 

redevelopment of the National Capital and the conservation of the important natural and 

historical features thereof.” It was to “correlate the efforts among the various agencies” and 

prepare a comprehensive plan, including a new regional thoroughfare plan. When agencies 

proposed new development or construction, they were to consult with the commission on how it 

would affect the Comprehensive Plan. The commission could then “take action in accordance 

with its legal responsibilities and authority.” 

The 1952 Act also established the National Capital Regional Planning Council as the central 

planning agency for the Federal Government in the capital region. Each jurisdiction in the area 

appointed a member of the council, but NCPC provided technical and clerical staff. The 

legislation charged the council to periodically adopt “a general plan for the development of the 

region, to serve as a general framework or guide of development within which each part of the 

region may be more precisely planned by the appropriate planning agency or agencies.” The 

general plan was to include a land-use plan for regional development, other elements “to provide 

for the proposed major movements of people and goods throughout the region,” and the 

development and conservation of natural resources. 

Bartholomew, after becoming NCPC chairman, recommended that NCPC and the National 

Capital Regional Planning Council, on which he also served, conduct a transportation study to 

supplement the 1950 plan, but Congress did not provide the funds until 1955. The Second 

Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1955 provided $200,000 for the two agencies to “jointly 

conduct a survey of the present and future mass transportation needs of the National Capital 

region . . . and to report their findings and recommendations to the President.”