UMBC’s Imaging Center Recreates Early Washington

An 1800 map showed a completed Washington, but at the time the city had only a handful of streets and buildings. (Library of Congress image)

Nearly everyone has a good idea of what Washington looks like now — broad avenues, columned porticos, the tree-lined Mall, the Capitol, the Washington Monument. But what was here before all that? Turns out that’s been a tough question for scholars to answer, according to an article in The Washington Post Magazine. Early maps are scarce, early drawings are unreliable, and the original landscape has been significantly altered as the city has grown up.

Now students and faculty members in the Imaging Research Center at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County campus are recreating the original landscape digitally. They have brought together details from maps, old paintings, old letters, surviving site surveys for buildings like the Capitol, and satellite imagery to assemble a topographically-correct virtual landscape of the federal district as Pierre L’Enfant found it when he arrived to lay out the city in 1791. The efforts has precisely located both early buildings and long-lost but critical local features like Tiber Creek, vestiges of which survive today as a sewer under Constitution Avenue.

It’s been a big project, but valuable to historians. Dan Bailey, an associate professor at the university who is director of the Imaging Research Center, says that after four years and some 5,000 hours’ worth of work, “we can now generate a view of the infant City of Washington from any location we wish.” —Lawrence Biemiller