Creating the North American Landscape Gregory Conniff, Edward K. Muller, and David Schuyler Consulting Editors George F...
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Creating the North American Landscape Gregory Conniff, Edward K. Muller, and David Schuyler Consulting Editors George F. Thompson Series Founder and Director Published in cooperation with the Center for American Places Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Staunton, Virginia
The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro Zachary M. Schrag
The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore
© 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2006 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 98765432 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schrag, Zachary M. The Great Society subway : a history of the Washington Metro / Zachary M. Schrag p. cm. — (Creating the North American landscape) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8018-8246-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Subways—Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. 2. Subways— Washington Metropolitan Area. 3. Local transit—Social aspects—Washington Metropolitan Area. I. Title. II. Series. he4491.w44w376 2006 388.4v28v09753—dc22 2005012141 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Frontispiece: The Washington Metro, 2004 (Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority)
For Rebecca
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations
Introduction
xiii
1
1
The City, 1791–1955
2
The Plans, 1955–1965
3
The Stations, 1965–1967
4
The Region, 1966–1967
95
5
The Bridge, 1966–1971
119
6
The Builders, 1972–1976
7
The Money, 1972–1980
8
The District 196
9
The Suburbs
10
221
The Riders 243 Conclusion 273
Notes 285 Index 347
11 32 65
142 171
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Acknowledgments
Writing this book has been a delightfully social activity, characterized by intense interaction as well as lonely stretches in the archives. I particularly enjoyed the company of the dozens of people—named individually in the notes but thanked here collectively—who answered my questions in the course of oral-history interviews. These conversations were the most rewarding part of my research, and they are responsible for most of the insights contained in these pages. Within this group I must give special thanks to Cody Pfanstiehl and Tom Deen, each of whom was able, thanks to his early involvement and varied roles, to comment on the broad historical significance of Metro as well as his individual experiences, and to put me in touch with other Metro veterans. I began this work at Columbia University, under the expert supervision of Elizabeth Blackmar and Kenneth Jackson. Ken provided keen strategic advice, prodding me to fit this case study into a broader view of transportation and urban history. Betsy read drafts with fearsome precision, spotting every flaw, yet promising it could be fixed. In trying to reach her standards, I have done my best work. Other Columbia faculty proved equally supportive. Alan Brinkley’s insights on liberalism, Marianne de Laet’s explanations of technology, Ron Grele’s expertise on oral history, and the transportation-planning knowledge of Owen Gutfreund and Elliott Sclar were all critical to my work. My fellow students Rit Aggarwala, Chris Capozzola, Sara Gregg, Ellen Stroud, and Ashli White carried me through graduate school, emotionally as well as intellectually. The George Washington Plunkitt Benevolent Society and the Public Policy Consortium were welcome sounding boards. Prior to Columbia, Sue Ikenberry, Helen Kimmelfield, and Judith Vichniac prepared me to take on big writing projects. John Stilgoe told me to look at the American landscape, and the undergraduate term paper on Metro I wrote for him must count as the seed of this work. I completed this book as a member of the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, a glorious intellectual home. Prior to my arrival at Mason, the Department of American Studies at George Washington University, and the departments of history at Baruch College and Columbia were equally stimulating. I thank all my colleagues—too numerous to list—and my students for making it thrilling to be a historian. Scholars of cities, technology, and Washington helped me with their
x
Acknowledgments
criticism and perspective. From my first groping toward a topic, Howard Gillette, Clay McShane, and Mark Rose were particularly generous with their time and wisdom. Themis Chronopolous, Tim Davis, Sarah Elkind, Martin Gordon, Dolores Hayden, Matthew Klingle, Jeremy Korr, Carol Herselle Krinsky, David Krugler, Bob Levey, Jane Freundel Levey, Alan Lessoff, Jane Loeffler, Richard Longstreth, Stephen McGovern, Ray Mohl, Robert Post, Martin Reuss, Mark David Richards, Anne Rollins, Matthew Roth, John Staudenmaier, Joel Tarr, Alexander von Hoffman, Chris Wells, and Patrick Zilliacus also gave vital pointers along the way. The Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, the Society for the History of Technology, the Transportation Research Board, and the Urban History Association were important institutional actors in this regard. Washington History and the Journal of Urban History published articles based on portions of chapters 2, 4, and 5. Through years of research I depended on the expertise and patience of librarians and archivists in Washington and around the country. From beginning to end, Matthew Gilmore, first at the D.C. Public Library and later at H-DC, offered constant encouragement and countless research tips, as well as maps for chapters 8 and 9. At my main research site, the Special Collections Department of Gelman Library, George Washington University, Bernadette Boucher, Francine Henderson, Jennifer King, Nancy Richards, Lyle Slovick, and, especially, La Nina Clayton provided hospitality and essential help over the course of several years. Equally essential was the help I received at the Washingtoniana Division of the D.C. Public Library from Peggy Appleman, Faye Haskins, and Susan Malbin. Although I never met him, I salute the late Darwin Stolzenbach, whose research in the late 1970s and early 1980s preserved documents and memories that otherwise would have been lost forever. Cody Pfanstiehl and Peter Craig were also important collectors of materials that made my research possible. Several key interviews were expertly transcribed by Doug Wilson. I am also grateful to Heather Crocetto and Ingrid Kauffman of the Arlington Public Library; Matthew Cook and Steven Peters at the Chicago Historical Society; Geir Gundersen of the Gerald R. Ford Library; Cindy Janke and Gail Rodgers McCormick of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.; Robert Tissing at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library; Ron Sodano at the National Archives; Betsy Pittman of the University of Connecticut; Daniel Davis of the University of Wyoming; Tammy Beck of the Washington Research Library Consortium; Pat Hodges and Betty Yambrek of Western Kentucky University; and other librarians and archivists at the D.C. Archives, the Fairfax County Public Library, George Mason University, the National Archives, and the Kennedy, Johnson, and Ford presidential libraries. Although this is by no means an official history of Metro, I deeply appreciate the help I received from the staff of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, especially Leona Agouridis, Colin Alter, Murray Bond, Matilda Broadnax, Cheryl Burke, Marilyn Dorfman,
Acknowledgments
xi
Larry Levine, Donna Murray, Mark Pohl, Phil Portlock, Susan Serrian, and Pamela Wilkins. Financial support for this project came from several sources, including a President’s Fellowship and a Public Policy Fellowship from Columbia University. The National Science Foundation’s Program in Science and Technology Studies supported my work under grant number 0004242. In addition to administering the grant, John Perhonis gave helpful comments, as did the proposal reviewers. The American Society of Civil Engineers and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation hired me to curate a website on the history of Metro, now available at chnm.gmu.edu/metro. Thomas McLane and Lorena Diaz of the ASCE oversaw the project, and it was a special pleasure to work with Roy Rosenzweig, Dan Cohen, and Jim Sparrow of George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media to launch and develop the site. A grant from the Gerald Ford Foundation funded my travel to the Gerald R. Ford Library. I owe special thanks, as do my readers, to Steve Burt, poet and scholar, who volunteered to edit the entire manuscript, trimming redundancies, useless adverbs and unhelpful metaphors. More than anyone, he turned a dissertation into a book manuscript. Once it reached that stage, Randy Jones, George Thompson, and anonymous referees of the Center for American Places, and Courtney Bond, Glen Burris, Tara Lenington, Trevor Lipscombe, Juliana McCarthy, and Brian MacDonald at the Johns Hopkins University Press guided me through the final stages and brought the book to its present polish. Anne Holmes of EdIndex prepared the index. Throughout the writing of this book I have depended on the support of my family: Elizabeth Alexander, Rhoda Bernard, Sophie Davidson, Bob Fenichel, Emily Fenichel, Lisa Lerman, Sam Lerman, David Schrag, Lala Schrag, Philip Schrag, Sarah Schrag, Eve Tushnet, and Mark Tushnet. Rebecca Tushnet—my best student and my best teacher—sought clarification, as is her nature. And in a thousand ways she inspired me to learn, to work, and to write. Leonard Tushnet Schrag arrived too late to help with this book, but I look forward to taking his hand and exploring Metro anew.
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Abbreviations
AH AMB BART BLW C100 CAH-JFKL CAH-LBJL CDS CFA CFA-NA COG CO-OPT CPf DCCC DHCD
August Heckscher, White House Staff Files, Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston Andre M. Buckles, Files, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan Bay Area Rapid Transit (San Francisco) Basil Lee Whitener, Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript, & Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina Committee of 100 on the Federal City, Papers, Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Charles A. Horsky, White House Staff Files, 1961–1965, Presidential Papers of John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston Charles A. Horsky, Office Files, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Austin, Texas C. Darwin Stolzenbach (Fairweather), Papers, Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Commission of Fine Arts U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, Project Files, 1941–1978, and Minutes, Record Group 66, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Council of Governments Coalition for Optimum Growth, Collection, 1971–1977, Record Group 61, Arlington Community Archives, Arlington, Virginia Cody Pfanstiehl, Papers, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. District of Columbia City Council, Records, Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. D.C. Department of Housing & Community Development, Records, Record Group 14, District of Columbia Archives, Washington, D.C.
xiv
Abbreviations
DOT FG GG GRFL GWU HW JFKL JLF II JRH LBJL LCB LJ MHPC MNCPPC MSC MTS NCPC NCPC-NA
NCPPC NCRPC NCTA NPMP NVTC OMB OMB-NA
U.S. Department of Transportation Frederick Gutheim, Collection, Collection #7470, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, Laramie Gilbert Gude, Congressional Papers, Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Harry Weese, Collection, Chicago Historical Society John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston Joseph L. Fisher, Papers, Part II: U.S. Congressman (1974– 1981), Special Collections & Archives, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia Judith R. Hope, Associate Director for Transportation, Domestic Council, Files, 1974–1977, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, Austin, Texas Lyle C. Bryant, Personal Papers, Record Group 20, Arlington Community Archives, Arlington, Virginia Louis Justement, Papers, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. WMATA Metro History Project Collection, Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission WMATA Metrorail Specifications Collection, Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Mass Transportation Survey National Capital Planning Commission National Capital Planning Commission. Records, 1900– 1976, and Transcripts of Proceedings and Minutes of Meetings, 1926–1972, Record Group 328, National Archives, Washington, D.C. National Capital Park and Planning Commission National Capital Regional Planning Council National Capital Transportation Agency Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National Archives, College Park, Maryland Northern Virginia Transportation Commission U.S. Office of Management and Budget U.S. Office of Management and Budget, General Budget-
Abbreviations
PSC REM RLA RNG UMTA WHA WHCF WHN WMATA WMATA-A WW
xv
ary Administration Subject Files, Subject Files for the District of Columbia Government, 1962–1969, Record Group 51, Series 60.23, National Archives, College Park, Maryland Peter S. Craig, Papers, Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University, Washington, D.C. Robert E. Mathe, Papers, Research Collections, Office of History, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alexandria, Virginia Redevelopment Land Agency Robert N. Giaimo, Papers, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, Storrs Urban Mass Transportation Administration Washington Housing Association, Records, D.C. Community Archives, Washingtoniana Division, D.C. Public Library. White House Central Files (Johnson and Ford libraries, Nixon Presidential Materials Project) William H. Natcher, Papers, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (METRO) collected materials, 1961–1987, Record Group 39, Arlington Community Archives, Arlington, Virginia William Walton, Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston
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Introduction
When Metro began serving Washington, D.C., and its suburbs in 1976, it was one of the first rapid transit systems opened in this country since the popularization of the automobile in the 1920s. Along with its cousins, San Francisco’s BART and Atlanta’s MARTA, it has pioneered new technologies and uses. Stretching 100 miles, the Washington Metro is the largest postwar system, and one could argue that it is the most ambitious effort ever made to offer Americans an alternative to the automobile. And Americans have taken up the offer, making Metro the most heavily used of the newer systems. Its location in the national capital has made Metro particularly visible, and it continues to attract not only local attention, ranging from D.C. neighborhood associations to the White House and Congress, but also the admiration of tourists and visitors from around the world. What is most surprising about Metro’s creation is that it took place in an era when Americans passionately embraced the automobile. By the mid-1960s four out of five families owned at least one automobile, and many owned multiple cars. Officials at every level encouraged automobile ownership and driving; gas was cheap, and low fuel taxes helped keep it that way, while government funds supported massive road-building programs, most notably the 41,000-mile Interstate Highway System. Jobs and people stampeded to the suburbs, where driving was easier. Cities left behind tore themselves apart to make room for roads and parking. In this context, investing in rail was a bold act of dissent. Unlike the pre-1930 transit systems of Boston, New York, Chicago, and other cities, which were planned with a captive market in mind, postwar systems were built by people who knew they were competing with cheap, convenient, even luxurious automobile transportation.1 How did this happen? Why in an age of highway building did Washington reject freeways and build rail transit instead? What does it mean that this city was the nation’s capital? And what were the consequences of that decision? In short, what is Metro for? To answer these questions, we must understand Metro not only as a work of planning, engineering, and architecture, but as a work of politics and ideology. Any transportation system, whether based on privately owned vehicles or shared conveyances, uses public space and is therefore a matter of political debate. The particular system chosen by a community will express that community’s political values. And Metro, born in the Washing-
2
The Great Society Subway
ton of the 1960s and 1970s, reflects that community’s dominant ideology, a set of beliefs held by many citizens and officials from both parties that reached their fullest expression in Lyndon Johnson’s call for a Great Society. “We have the power to shape the civilization that we want,” Johnson told the nation, contributing to what historian Irwin Unger describes as “a time of swaggering national confidence and a profound sense that with enough will and money any goal was in reach.”2 It was from this confidence that Metro was born. Johnson and other liberals of that period believed in the power of government to do good. They treasured cities for their density, diversity, and shared space. They promoted justice by bringing together people of varying classes and races, and sought to balance vision and pragmatism, grandeur and thrift, leadership and democracy. They promoted public investments, from the National Endowment for the Arts to Project Apollo, suited to the grandeur and dignity of the world’s richest nation. And, in an extraordinary fourteen-year streak, the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations pushed through legislation that changed the way Americans plan and build. Federal laws covering everything from transportation planning to handicapped access to historic preservation to environmental protection insisted that public projects take into account broad social goals. A product of its era, Metro emerged as public transportation intended not merely to transport commuters, but to build, in Johnson’s terms, “a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”3 This historical understanding may inform what is now a divisive debate over the role of rail transit. On one side are those who see rail as the answer to energy shortages, suburban sprawl, and greenhouse gases. Few serious scholars expect to see the private automobile dethroned in their lifetimes, but many believe that public policy can do more to offer alternatives to driving. They argue that rail transit can promote development dense enough that people at least have the choice of traveling to work or buying a carton of milk without getting into a car. The boldest visions are those of California planner Peter Calthorpe and planning professor Robert Cervero, who have made rail the centerpiece of “Transit-Oriented Development” and “Transit Villages.” In their visions, dense, mixed-used clusters of development around rail stations will allow people to eliminate automobile trips both long and short. Other observers, while not emphasizing rail quite as much, still see it as the best hope for American cities. Vukan Vuchic, for example, writes that “rail transit is actually the only mode that makes large cities possible with their diverse densities and human character.” Jonathan Barnett acknowledges that transit-oriented development can border on the utopian but still asserts that “ultimately every metropolitan region in the U.S. should have the equivalent of the Washington Metro.”4 These planners and scholars see rail transit as the salvation of the city; others see it as a fraud, a shiny toy that consumes public funds without pro-
3
Introduction
viding needed service. The bible of this critique is a 1965 book, The Urban Transportation Problem, by John Meyer, John Kain, and Martin Wohl. In the bland language of economic analysis, the book questioned urban transit subsidies, which all agreed would be necessary to any new rail construction. For forty years, these economists and their followers have criticized new rail transit projects in strictly quantitative terms. First, they collect the rosy projections of low cost and high ridership put forth by rail advocates in the planning stage. Next, they compare actual figures showing high cost and relatively low ridership. Finally, they argue that the same ridership could be better served with buses, using dedicated freeway lanes, priority signaling, and even underground busways.5 This approach has its merits; rail transit never lives up to the most extravagant claims of its promoters, and improved bus service is often overlooked as an investment with high returns. But many planners and economists are unpersuaded. John Bates questions the assumptions used in the original Meyer-Kain-Wohl report, and Jesse Simon faults rail critics for taking ridership projections out of context. Vuchic faults rail critics for attacking systems that have not had a chance to prove their worth and points out that, whatever complaints were made about San Francisco’s BART in its first two decades, the service it performed after the collapse of the Bay Bridge in the 1989 earthquake repaid the entire investment.6 Quantitative studies have their limits. One 1977 study of Metro excluded as “not susceptible to precise measurement” such benefits as providing transportation for people without cars, reducing pollution and fuel usage, shaping land use, and “improved mobility of both urban and suburban residents.”7 With these factors excluded, it is hard to know what is left. Most quantitative studies also suffer from inattention to history. They may include capsule histories of the project they evaluate, but they draw this information from previous reports and studies, without asking who wrote those studies and why. Without the historical context in which a decision was made—nonquantifiable considerations and all—it is difficult or impossible to know what the real choices were. William Murin, for example, provides a booklength critique of Metro’s failure to do more to serve Washington’s poorest neighborhoods. By ignoring the effort that went into ensuring that those neighborhoods did ultimately get service, he portrays as total defeat what was in reality a substantial victory for champions of the inner city. Similarly, Stephen Zwerling, in his book attacking the process that produced BART, fails to note the hostility toward freeways that led San Francisco to stop freeway construction in 1965. Meyer, Kain, and Wohl’s own proposed alternatives to urban transit subsidies included such proposals as removing highway subsidies or expanding urban boundaries to include the suburbs. Although such solutions might make sense in the abstract, a more pragmatic evaluation of American politics in 1965 (or since) would have led the authors to see transit subsidies as the far easier path to take.8
4
The Great Society Subway
A good example of the advantages and disadvantages of the quantitative approach is Andrew Marshall Hamer’s chapter on Washington in his 1976 book, The Selling of Rapid Rail Transit. Hamer, a student and admirer of Meyer and Kain, makes a two-part criticism of transportation planning in the Washington region. First, he mathematically demonstrates the fragility of the traffic projections published by transit planners and their consultants in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, he argues that because actual ridership figures are unlikely to reach the level projected, the city would have been better served by a system of buses running on dedicated freeway lanes and exclusive downtown streets. Hamer’s critique of traffic projections exposes the sensitivity of computer models to mistaken assumptions. Yet Hamer’s argument is limited by his failure to consider context. Hamer misrepresents the origins of the demand projections he derides, failing to report that they were the joint product of rail and road agencies, and thus were inflated by pro-freeway forces at least as much as by pro-rail planners. Conversely, he takes at face value a 1963 pro-bus, antirail response by Martin Wohl rather than understanding Wohl as a participant in the debate of the time (see chapter 2). Similarly, he is silent on how the various studies he criticizes were interpreted. It is one thing if an overly optimistic study misleads naive officials, another if it is accepted with a wink and a nod by canny policy makers.9 As for Hamer’s bus proposal, only by ignoring the intense freeway fight that raged throughout the 1960s and early 1970s (not to mention the long history of urban planning in Washington) could he believe that Washington’s citizens, merchants, and political leaders would even consider, much less accept, a proposal to convert downtown’s most prominent streets into corridors carrying hundreds of buses each rush hour. Ultimately, Hamer’s argument about how one set of estimated projections could be recalculated and reinterpreted to support a hypothetical bus system tells us little about the real city of Washington and the people who live there.10 Perhaps the clearest illustration of the gap between purely quantitative arguments and lived experience is an exchange published in the Washington Post in 1996. Martin Wohl, still skeptical of Metro after thirty-five years, complained of Metro’s failure to meet its projections of ridership and cost. A few days later, Ken Schellenberg of Prince George’s County responded: “If I understand Martin Wohl, Metro shouldn’t expand to Dulles because in 1969 Metro made predictions that didn’t come true. So what? Can anyone in his or her right mind seriously maintain that Metro is not the single best thing that’s happened in the metropolitan area in the past three decades? If Metro is keeping ‘only’ a half-million people off the road every day, isn’t it worth every penny?” Wohl answers no, but even he conceded that his condemnation of transit planners’ projections could not in itself prove that Metro was misguided. “I am only looking at some things,” he explained. “I am not looking at a big picture at all. . . . I don’t pretend to measure what the people of this community want.”11
5
Introduction
I write as a member of that community. I moved to the District of Columbia at age seven in 1977, when Metro consisted of a single line with seven stations. Metro and I grew together, and when I was fourteen years old, the Red Line reached my neighborhood, giving me the freedom of the city a year and a half before I got my learner’s permit to drive. Since then, as a resident of the District and, now, Arlington County, I have used Metro for daily commutes, for errands and entertainment, as the first and last leg of overseas trips, and, while researching this project, to get to libraries and archives around the Washington region. Though I have lived in several cities, all told I have spent half my life in the Washington area, and I credit Metro with helping make the city such a pleasant home. Because I believe that many share my experience, I seek to bring attention to some of Metro’s achievements, once the objects of bitter fights, now largely taken for granted. Washingtonians and visitors remark on the stunning beauty of Metro’s stations and the cleanliness of its trains, but they are less likely to think of the neighborhoods preserved from expressway construction, the growth of regional cooperation, or the addition of an important public space to the region. Yet it is these and other unquantifiable measures, as well as the number of passengers carried, that have made and will make the case for Metro. On the other hand, close attention to the history of Metro reveals the paths not taken. Instead of criticizing Metro’s creators for not pursuing impossible dreams, I point out what I consider shortsighted decisions made when real alternatives were at hand. Understanding Metro’s history may illuminate today’s debates. To conservatives who decry Metro’s expense—around $10 billion in nominal dollars—this book serves as a reminder that Metro was never intended to be the cheapest solution to any problem, and that it is the product of an age that did not always regard cheapness as an essential attribute of good government. To those who celebrate automobile commuting as the rational choice of free Americans, it replies that some Americans have made other choices, based on their understanding that building great cities is more important than minimizing average commuting time. This book may also answer radicals who believe that public funds should primarily—or exclusively—serve the poor, which in the context of transportation means providing bus and rail transit for the carless while leaving the middle class to drive. It suggests that Metro has done more for inner-city African Americans than is generally understood. And to those hostile to public mega-projects as a matter of principle, it responds that it may take a mega-project to kill a mega-project. Had activists merely opposed freeways, they might well have been dismissed as cranks by politicians and technical experts alike. By championing rapid transit as an equally bold alternative, they won allies and, ultimately, victory.12 Most important, this book recalls the belief of Great Society liberals that public investments should serve all classes and all races, rather than functioning as a last resort. These liberals believed, with Abraham Lincoln, that
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The Great Society Subway
“the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”13 This approach justifies the government’s role in rail not as a means of redistributing wealth, but as an agent for purchasing rapid transit—a good that people collectively want but cannot collectively buy through a market. And for Metro’s fans, who ask why Metro failed to become a model for other cities, why it took so long to build, and why it does not serve every destination, this account suggests that Metro embodies the limits, as well as the hopes, of 1960s liberalism. Like many of the grand projects of the Kennedy-Johnson years, it emerged from an ambitious, idealistic blend of top-down and bottom-up approaches to policy making. It depended on a fragile consensus among a wide range of interest groups. Such an approach made the most sense when the economy was booming, and a few million more dollars could smooth over differences among various factions. As the Vietnam War competed for public funds and drove up inflation, many observers began to eye Metro, like so many other liberal projects, as a luxury of questionable value. Metro survived proposed cuts, and today it functions as a vital organ of the Washington metropolitan region. Few of the hundreds of thousands of people who ride the system each day know the story of how it came to be. Yet that story matters, for it reminds us that public works do not arise from easy consensus among policy makers or from the neutral assessments of dispassionate engineers. Rather, they emerge from study, assumptions, ideas, and, most of all, debate. In rejecting freeways and building rapid transit instead, Washingtonians proclaimed their love for their city as it stood, their desire for equality, and their confidence in the largesse of the federal government—in short, their faith in the public realm. Whether they agree with those values or not, those who would judge Metro should consider doing so on those terms. In addition to presenting Metro’s virtues and its flaws, this study makes an argument about how big technological investments should be evaluated. The story of Metro demonstrates that quantitative arguments are unconvincing without a consensus on the proper function of a given program. For Meyer, Kain, Wohl, and their followers, a transit system exists to move as many bodies for as little money as possible, period. This assumption can make a plausible, though still flawed, case for buses. But for Cervero and Calthorpe, rail is a planning tool. For an architect, rail is an opportunity to design a stunning interior; for a civil rights leader, it is a chance to correct past discrimination; and for an ordinary rider, such as Ken Schellenberg, it may simply be a source of hometown pride. Metro is many things to many people, and without agreement on what factors constitute success, there can be no agreement on whether Metro is a success. Throughout Metro’s history, waves of numbers—cost-benefit studies, ridership projections, and budget analyses—have crashed against the solid confidence of the people of
7
Introduction
Washington that Metro was worth building, for reasons beyond enumeration.14 At first glance, Metro might seem to be an odd case study, for Washington, as a metropolitan region, appears exceptional. Politically, its center city is cut off from any state and denied full self-government, while economically, the city has little heavy industry and enormous dependence on a single employer, the federal government. But as Carl Abbott has shown, the region is not as exceptional as it first appears. Many metropolitan areas share Washington’s demography of a majority African American central city bordered by majority-white, politically independent suburbs. While no other city has been as closely controlled by Congress, in the postwar era every American city has worked within the constraints set by such federal programs as urban renewal and the Interstate Highway System. Washington’s paucity of smokestack industry and dependence on government agencies, government contractors, and information-based businesses resembles many Sunbelt cities and may well exemplify the future American economy. Moreover, as Howard Gillette has observed, Washington has long served as “a national workshop for urban policy.” Policies tested in Washington have often spread.15 The factors that make Washington important to urban history apply to its transit system. Throughout the political debate over planning and financing, advocates and detractors of rail transit hoped or feared that Washington would set an example for other cities. As Congressman John McFall noted a few weeks after Metro’s opening in 1976, “Metro runs within two blocks of the Capitol Building. Congress may judge the efficacy of heavy rail transit to a good extent by what happens right here in our own backyard.” In practice, Metro has not been the model for other cities. With Congress funding the system generously, and the General Services Administration dominating the office real-estate market, the federal government worked hard to give Metro advantages not enjoyed by other systems. As a result, Washington is, in one observer’s opinion, “the only U.S. city that can boast of an up-to-date, world-class transit system.” This book tells the story of a path not taken by American cities. Nevertheless, as a best-case scenario for rail transit, Metro is worthy of study, for its successes and failures can tell us a great deal about what rail transit can and cannot do.16 Nor is Washington only significant as a place where policy is made; the metropolitan region is home to close to 5 million people. The creation of Metro marks an important milestone in the maturation of that region, yet it is a story that has not been told. Out of sight is out of mind, and underground is out of sight. General histories of Washington, or studies of the capital’s present condition, often ignore Metro entirely or mention it only in passing. Howard Gillette scarcely mentions Metro in his superb history of federal planning and social policy in Washington, though it was a major step in both. Even authors who regularly ride Metro forget it when they sit down to write. For example, the preface of Carl Abbott’s Political Terrain
8
The Great Society Subway
notes that he began work on the text while a visiting professor at George Washington University and a daily Metro commuter from Bethesda to Foggy Bottom. Yet his only mention of Metro in the text of the book itself is a dismissive comment that “Red, Yellow, Orange, and Green Metro lines notwithstanding, present-day Washington has been built around the needs of two-car and then three-car families.” Similarly, Ray Suarez’s pessimistic portrait of the District of Columbia mentions Metro only to complain that it attracts some suburbanites who park their cars in his neighborhood before boarding their trains. Although Suarez notes that he too rides Metro to work, he does not pause to ask if the system provides a counterpoint to his story of parasitic suburbs and victim city locked in eternal competition.17 Wedded to a master narrative of Washington history that asserts perpetual antagonism between federal and local, city and suburb, and black and white, these and other observers too easily overlook Metro or try to shoehorn it into an ill-fitting scheme. Some depict the city’s recent fate as nothing more than the scandalous career of four-term D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, while failing to look beyond the District’s borders to see metropolitan Washington as a unit. It is easy for them to conclude that “racism and racial insecurities made Washington what it is today.”18 I agree that racial antagonism has shaped Washington and that the District of Columbia is the heart of the metropolitan area. But by calling attention to Metro’s importance to postwar Washington and by taking the suburbs seriously, I hope to complicate the narrative of racial animosity and suburban parasitism with a story that includes cooperation and symbiosis. This book is not an encyclopedic history of Metro or the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. It only brushes against such topics as labor relations, bus operations, and maintenance. As important as those matters are, they are secondary to my basic questions of how an entire metropolitan area faced its choices about transportation. At the very least, this question matters to all Americans who live in or near large cities. And in an age when the earth’s health and prosperity are threatened by carbon dioxide emissions, it may prove a question of world-historical significance. I have therefore focused on events that may explain why people chose to build rapid transit in Washington, why they built it the way they did, and the consequences of their decisions. Because my focus is as much on process as on results, the story that evolves is less an argument for a specific outcome—a 100-mile heavy-rail system—than a recounting of a political regime that balanced idealism and pragmatism, direction and democracy. While recognizing that power is never evenly distributed, that democracy on some level depends on selfishness, and that people make mistakes, it applauds a moment in history when millions of people were able to make a collective decision based on hope, trust, and imagination. Finally, a note on names. Prior to 1968, Washingtonians debated the need for what they called “rapid transit.” Unlike local mass transit—city buses
9
Introduction
or streetcars—rapid transit uses an exclusive right-of-way, so its vehicles do not get stuck in street traffic or highway congestion. Unlike commuter rail, rapid transit operates on relative short headways (anywhere from ninety seconds to ten, or occasionally twenty, minutes between trains) rather than fixed schedules, and fares are collected on entry into a station, rather than on board the vehicle. Rapid transit can use a variety of technologies and may operate underground, on aerial structures, in open cuts, in the median strips of highways, or alongside long-distance railroads. In part for this reason, advocates of rapid transit in Washington preferred not to use the term “subway,” with its emphasis on underground tunnels. Since 1968 Washington’s rapid transit system has been called “Metro.” Because this name is used for transit in many cities, many publications, and this book’s subtitle, refer to “the Washington Metro” for clarity. After Metro’s operator took over the area’s private bus companies in 1973, it termed the merged bus service “Metrobus.” Soon afterward, some Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority documents began referring to “Metrorail.” This term—apparently coined by the Washington Post and Washington Star reporters—was never officially adopted, nor has it caught on among riders, but it remains in some Authority documents and signage and in the Washington Post.19 Even the shorter version has undergone changes. When designer Massimo Vignelli first proposed the name, he argued that because the same term was used in many cities, “metro” was a common noun that should be spelled in lowercase letters. To this day, the official logo consists of a capital M with “metro” (lower case) underneath. But in the 1970s, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) and the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) began operation, flaunting their all-capital, anthropomorphic acronyms. Though Metro is not an acronym, policy makers became confused: many official documents of that decade refer to “METRO.” Eventually, the extremes compromised on capitalizing just the first letter; even Vignelli is content with that.20 I have tried to write this book using my own sense of the Washington vernacular. To my ear, one may ride the Metro to work or one may ride Metro to work. It is also appropriate to ask if there is a Metro (station) near one’s destination. I have, however, rejected one common usage. Many Washingtonians and journalists use “Metro” to refer to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the interstate body created in 1967. I refer to this body as WMATA (pronounced w’mah-ta) or the Authority, but not as Metro. While WMATA is certainly a very important player in Metro’s history, to conflate the two entities would be to diminish players outside the Authority: predecessor agencies, political officials, consultants, contractors, developers, taxpayers, voters, neighbors, and riders. Metro belongs not to WMATA but to the people of the region, and it is their story that I have tried to tell.
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1791–1955
1
The City
On 22 February 1955—George Washington’s Birthday—Walter Washington testified before the United States Senate’s Committee for the District of Columbia. He asked, “When does a community become of age?”1 Washington, an African American lawyer, destined to become the city’s first elected mayor in a century, cited the grown-up problems faced by the city that shared his name. Housing, public works, zoning, traffic, education, and recreation demanded a real government, and he called on the senators to give the District, then run entirely by Congress and by presidential appointees, the chance to vote for a mayor, city council, school board, and nonvoting congressional representative. By 1955 Washington had come of age. For a century and a half, the city had largely failed to live up to the dream of that first Washington, George, that it would serve not only as the national capital but as a city in its own right, thriving and prosperous. Now, almost a decade after VJ-Day, it was clear that the flood of World War II would not ebb. The Washington metropolitan area, though no match for New York or Chicago, had to be taken as seriously as Philadelphia, Cleveland, or San Francisco. Walter Washington and his fellow witnesses that February knew that being a real city was not all roses. Sturgis Warner of the Washington Home Rule Committee spoke of “big city problems.” Philip Graham, publisher of the Washington Post, warned that “we are beginning to see the center of our city decay.” Senator Frederick Payne, cosponsor of the home rule bill under consideration, agreed, noting that “some of the foulest slums in the United States exist right here in the shadow of the Federal Government.”2 As hard-eyed as these witnesses sounded not only about slums but also about corruption and racial tension, they did not emphasize what in retrospect appears to have been a greater problem facing the city. Washington was finally a big city, but in 1955 Americans as a whole were turning away from big cities. They were buying more cars than ever before and using them to move away from old cities, to suburbs and sparse Sunbelt settlements. Transportation expert Wilfred Owen would write in 1959, “we have begun to doubt that the city can survive the automotive age, or even that it should.”3 Had the automobile made the city obsolete? Had Washington arrived at the party just as it was breaking up? In 1955 Washington decided to confront such questions.
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The Great Society Subway
The Unfulfilled Promise
Washington arose out of a distrust of cities. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, Anglo-America’s largest city and a major commercial port. Had Congress wished to create an American London, it could have found no better starting place. But delegates to Congress were ambivalent about cities in general and Philadelphia in particular, where they had been gouged by merchants and attacked by mobs, feeding every republican worry about the viciousness of cities and their power to corrupt government. The final straw came on 21 June 1783, when members of Congress, meeting in the State House, were menaced by hundreds of drunken troops. Congress responded by abandoning Philadelphia and seeking land where it could exercise its own jurisdiction and build fresh. Exercising its constitutional power to carve out a seat of government, in 1790 Congress settled on a ten-mile by ten-mile square straddling the Potomac River near its highest point of navigation.4 Congress called on President George Washington—whose Mt. Vernon plantation was close by—to pick the exact site, and he set the boundaries to include two river-port towns: Georgetown on the east bank and Alexandria on the west. But rather than naming either of these towns as the capital, in 1791 he chose to build a new federal town on open land southeast of Georgetown. Not only was this land cheaper, but it provided a blank slate on which to draw an ideal plan.5 President Washington gave that task to Peter Charles L’Enfant, a French artist who had served with the Continental army. L’Enfant gave the new city a rectilinear, compass-oriented grid, like that of Philadelphia, but modified it with a more elaborate, Baroque design, based in large part on the boulevards of Versailles, where he had spent part of his childhood.6 Paying close attention to the natural topography of the chosen site, L’Enfant picked the grandest hill for the Capitol, reserving other hills for less important public squares. These he connected with wide diagonal avenues, superimposing a series of stars over the rectangular grid. These avenues and their intersections (several of which were later built as circles) gave the plan a hierarchy absent from either the organic plans of Boston and New York or the grid of Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, the State House had been built far from the central square designated by Penn; after all, one rectangular block was much like another, and the central square was inconvenient from the Delaware waterfront. In Washington, the Capitol and President’s House could only fit where L’Enfant placed them, no matter how many people grumbled about the inconvenient distance between the two. Transportation was central to both the city’s location and the L’Enfant Plan. As a fall-line city with a deepwater harbor on the Anacostia, Washington could hope to attract some of the Atlantic trade that had built the cities of Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Charleston. And to improve on nature’s highways, L’Enfant provided the city with a canal connecting the city’s two rivers. Washington was to be
13
The City, 1791–1955
The L’Enfant Plan, 1791 (Library of Congress)
both the nation’s capital and a great commercial city. L’Enfant explained that his plan was “proportioned to the greatness which . . . the Capital of a powerful Empire ought to manifest.”7 Washington soon fell short of such hopes. In 1800, when the ten-yearold city became the nation’s capital, it remained unfinished, with tree stumps along the street and few urban diversions. In 1814 British troops torched the city’s public buildings, including the White House. In the long term, Congress was an even greater threat than the Royal Marines. New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were all supported by state governments who could invest in their futures. The Erie Canal, financed by New York State, did not bring New York City to dominance, but it did keep it there. Washington City, in contrast, had no state legislature to boost it, but rather a national legislature reluctant to fund a potential rival to the home cities of
14
The Great Society Subway
its members. Congress did allow Washington a locally elected government and occasionally favored the city with investment, most notably a decision in 1825 to subscribe $1 million toward the construction of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, a project designed to give Washington the same access to the Ohio valley that the Erie Canal provided to New York City. But the canal, like so many others of that period, was a disappointment. Railroads offered much cheaper connections to the West, and Baltimore beat out Washington in this more significant contest, becoming the premier port of the Chesapeake. In 1846, disgusted with the District’s stagnation and fearing congressional interference in the slave trade, the residents of Alexandria and the rest of the District on the west bank of the Potomac gained the return of their land to Virginia. Washington’s commercial potential withered. Through the 1850s, the city rattled around in a street plan too big for the 40,000 residents who served the federal government in one manner or another.8 The Civil War brought a boom in population. Thousands of Union troops came to defend the city and to use it as a staging area for campaigns against the Confederate capital at Richmond, only 100 miles away. As these troops marched south into Virginia, another column marched north: slaves seeking freedom. The 1867 District census revealed that “more than twothirds of black Washingtonians and half of all white residents had arrived since 1860.” Quick gains could be quickly lost; that same census showed a population decline from 140,000 in 1864 to 106,000, threatening the city’s boosters with a return to stagnation. Even worse, victorious midwesterners proposed removing the capital from a place so recently tainted with slavery.9 President Ulysses Grant’s opposition to removal of the capital assured Washington of its status, and in 1871 Congress attempted to improve local government by giving the District of Columbia territorial status, similar to that enjoyed by western territories with aspirations to statehood. The capital’s elite seized the chance to improve the physical appearance of the city, where senators could still be splattered by the swine, goats, and sheep that ran free along muddy avenues. Alexander Shepherd, a local businessman, led the effort, first as the vice president of the Board of Public Works and later as territorial governor. He pushed through a $6.25 million public works program of sewers, paving, and tree planting. The program improved the city’s physical infrastructure; it also vastly overspent the city’s debt limit. Congress responded by revoking all suffrage for District residents while promising to finance and organize public works. In 1878 it passed the Organic Act, concentrating most municipal powers in the hands of three presidentially appointed commissioners: two local civilians plus an officer of the Army Corps of Engineers to serve as the engineer commissioner responsible for public works. Congress retained for itself the power to review District budgets and major policy decisions, vesting these powers in House and Senate Committees on the District of Columbia. The congressional coup d’etat led Ambrose Bierce to define a Washingtonian as “a Potomac tribes-
15
The City, 1791–1955
man who exchanged the privilege of governing himself for the advantage of good government. In justice to him it should be said that he did not want to.”10 In revoking the city’s self-determination, Congress displayed contempt for the city’s residents, yet it retained a fondness for its buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government’s move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L’Enfant’s avenues as the best guide for the city’s growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham’s Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation.11 The City Beautiful was not built in a day; the Lincoln Memorial was not dedicated until 1922. Lest that be the end of the beautification of Washington, in 1926 Congress institutionalized the process by creating the National Capital Park and Planning Commission (NCPPC) to create, in President Calvin Coolidge’s words, “a city of stately proportion, symmetrically laid out and adorned with the best that there is in architecture.” Notable efforts in this regard included the Federal Triangle complex of government offices along Pennsylvania Avenue, joined, during the Hoover administration, by the massive Commerce Department, at the time the world’s largest office structure. Meanwhile, developers and government planners took advantage of new transportation technologies—the railroad, the streetcar, and the parkway—to extend the metropolis beyond city limits. In the 1890s developers built exclusive residential suburbs in Chevy Chase and Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of the District. In 1932—the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth—the Department of Commerce opened the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway from the city to Washington’s home: its stateof-the-art parkway design included the nation’s second cloverleaf. The New Deal provided its own ideal planning in 1935 with the building of Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb built by the Resettlement Administration.12 This growth was a mere prelude to the boom of World War II. Even before Pearl Harbor, the Pentagon was under construction to house an
16
The Great Society Subway
enormously expanded military bureaucracy, and 4,000 people were arriving in the city every month. In the year after Pearl Harbor, another 70,000 arrived. As war-related bureaucracies expanded, Washington had plenty of jobs, but it was short on office space and housing. Newly hired workers from around the country slept in shifts, and, in the recollection of newsman David Brinkley, “government offices spilled into skating rinks, where the ice was melted and the floors covered with sawhorses and plywood desks. . . . Secretaries could be seen sitting in front of bathroom sinks, their typewriters perched on boards laid across the basins, their steno pads propped on the toilet seats.”13 War is the health of the state, and the state is the health of Washington, so perpetual Cold War meant continued prosperity for the metropolitan area. As the nation girded itself against international communism, whole new federal agencies and departments sprang up. The National Security Act of 1947 alone created the Department of the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Close to a quarter of a million federal civilians worked in the metropolitan area, accounting for more than one out of every four jobs. National organizations set up lobbying offices, while military contractors set up both offices and manufacturing plants, mostly on cheap land in the Virginia suburbs. These were good jobs, and by 1949 the region had the highest mean salary per family of any major metropolitan area, and one of the highest levels of education. The census of 1950 showed Washington to be the nation’s ninth largest city, edging out Boston and gaining on St. Louis.14 By 1955 Washington was finally approaching the goal that its founders had set for it a century and a half before. To be sure, the federal government, and private employers doing business with it, remained the heart of the city’s economy. By 1955 those sectors could support the magnificence envisioned by L’Enfant, even in peacetime. Washington had an airport, a major-league baseball team, and several universities. As the home-rule witnesses acknowledged, it still had problems, but at least they were “big-city problems.” To disparage Washington was to disparage all American cities. Many were prepared to do just that. The Challenge of the Automobile
Washington was designed as the ideal city of the eighteenth century. In 1955 another ideal city was born. Like Washington, this twentieth-century ideal city was laid out along a central, ceremonial axis and divided into multiple sectors. Like Washington, it drew power from resonant symbolism. Like Washington, it was designed to serve not merely its region but its nation and took its name from a great American visionary. Unlike Washington, this new ideal city was private, not public; Western, not Eastern. And it avoided potential headaches like slum clearance and schooling by having no resident population at all. It was called Disneyland. Disneyland, of course, was not a real city, but a 140-acre amusement
17
The City, 1791–1955
park near Anaheim, California. In large part it was designed to be the opposite of a real city, specifically the opposite of New York City, with its dirt, decay, chaos, and cynicism. And the key to this anti–New York was the automobile. The Santa Ana Freeway allowed Walt Disney to transform orange and walnut groves, twenty-five miles from Los Angeles, into a mechanical playground for middle-class, automobile-owning Californians, almost all of whom arrived by car. Although the park’s 1959 monorail would inspire many transit fans, it was the miniature freeway, Autopia, that proved the most durable vision of the future in Tomorrowland. Disneyland told Americans that the easiest way to escape all the problems of the city—smog, dirt, crime, disorder, and poor people—was to drive away.15 American cities had been grappling with the automobile since Henry Ford turned on his Highland Park assembly line in 1913. Washington was no exception; during the 1920s alone, District automobile registrations quadrupled. But the Depression limited purchasing power, and just as the Depression eased, World War II prompted the government to impose gasoline rationing and to command Detroit to cease production of civilian automobiles in favor of war machines. Only with the resumption of full-scale automobile production after the war did American cities face a second wave of change. In 1948—the first full year of automobile production—only 54 percent of American families owned automobiles, scarcely more than in 1929. Fifteen years later, the number of cars registered nationwide had doubled, and 80 percent of families owned at least one.16 The expansion of automobile ownership was both a cause and effect of suburbanization: auto-owning families took advantage of their mobility to move to the suburbs, and suburban families found that they needed cars. Although the vast bulk of the nation’s population growth took place in metropolitan areas, much of that went to suburbs, not central cities.17 Washington followed the trend. The census of 1960 was the first to show a decline in the District’s population; in 1953 for the first time less than half the population of the metropolitan area lived in the District of Columbia. As in other regions, wealthier families led the movement to suburbs, particularly Montgomery County, Maryland, where the median family income of $7,600 dwarfed the $4,750 median in the District. With greater means and motives, suburbanites purchased cars even more eagerly than city dwellers. Between 1940 and 1950, automobile registrations increased 178 percent in suburban Maryland and Virginia, compared with a 22.6 percent rise in the District. By 1958 one Arlington planner could declare that “suburbanization has made us a nation of automobilists.”18 Suburbanization radically changed Washington’s ethnic composition. In every census between 1810 and 1940 (except for 1860), the proportion of African Americans in the District had hovered between 20 and 30 percent. With postwar suburbanization, that changed rapidly. Between 1950 and 1960, the District’s white population declined by 167,000, while the black population increased by 131,000. As a result, in 1957 the District became the
18
The Great Society Subway
Population growth, 1930–1955 (Arlington County, Virginia, Office of Planning, Land Use in Arlington County, Virginia, 1955. Virginia Room, Arlington Public Library)
first major American city to be majority African American. The city’s federal status muted the political effects of this demographic change. Integration proceeded fairly peacefully; however southern in their attitudes, white Washingtonians owed their livelihood to the federal government and dared not openly defy Supreme Court rulings on racially restrictive covenants and school integration. Moreover, lack of home rule denied the new black majority the chance to govern. Until 1963 the presidentially appointed Board of Commissioners remained all-white, and the nearly all-white House District Committee remained dominated by its South Carolina chairman, John McMillan, and a clique of subcommittee chairmen also from rural southern districts.19 The new suburbs remained primarily residential, and the president of the Montgomery Council expressed pride in her county’s being called “the bedroom of Washington.” But by 1955 the classic model of suburbanization—a downtown office worker using transit or his (occasionally her)
19
The City, 1791–1955
car to commute into the city in the morning and back at the end of the workday—was getting more complicated. Employers across the country began considering suburban locations for factories and office complexes. In Washington, the federal government led the movement out. During the war, federal offices had spilled over the borders of the District of Columbia. Most famously, the army set up shop in the Pentagon—the world’s largest office building—across the Potomac from Washington itself. Other facilities followed the pattern of “a campuslike federal installation located on a major transportation artery, surrounded by new communities of singlefamily homes.” Many of these installations were designed as temporary, wartime measures, but as long as the Mall remained cluttered with rickety temporary office buildings (as it would through the 1960s), there was little chance for the spread-out agencies to return to the District.20 Nor did most policy makers see recentralization as desirable. In its 1950 Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs, the NCPPC warned of the “danger of further overconcentration of Federal employment centers, in terms of traffic congestion and security,” and called for “wider distribution of administrative establishments in the central area; and for locating other functions farther out.” To be sure, the commission did not want “drab, unorganized urban sprawl” (who would?), but with proper zoning and other controls, it was confident that the suburbs could provide “uncrowded living . . . sunlight, and clean air.” Decentralization would also reduce the government’s vulnerability to atomic attack. In 1950 the General Services Administration—charged with finding offices for federal executive agencies—announced its plan to move agencies, especially the new ones concerned with atomic power and national security, away from the crowded downtown, where a single nuclear bomb could vaporize them. Thus the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency found themselves in Maryland and Virginia, several miles from the Capitol.21 Recognizing that the city no longer stopped at the District line, many proposed to enlarge Coolidge’s NCPPC to include Maryland and Virginia representatives. As the Evening Star commented, such a change would recognize “the phenomenal construction boom and population growth” that had made the suburbs “so much a part of Greater Washington.” But it was not easy for parties to agree on how power should be allocated. A 1950 proposal that would give Virginia only one vote out of fifteen brought complaints from Richmond. On the other hand, a plan giving two votes each to Maryland, Virginia, the District, and the federal government drew criticism from President Harry Truman’s friend, renowned city planner Harland Bartholomew. Bartholomew complained that “the federal interest in the national capital is dominant and should not be impaired by sectionalism.” To address such concerns, in 1952 Congress decided to replace the NCPPC with two agencies. The first, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) would plan primarily for the District of Columbia,
20
The Great Society Subway
Planned decentralization (NCPPC, Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs, 1950)
representing the federal interest. The second agency, the National Capital Regional Planning Council (NCRPC) would address regional concerns. The two were instructed to work together on a regional plan and a transportation plan.22 The National Capital Planning Act did not directly address the problems of the center city. In 1955 Washington was a crowded place, with few attractive housing vacancies. Particularly affected were Washington’s African Americans, whose plight was only aggravated by World War II. Housing reformers, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, had a simple solution: build better houses, whether by building public housing directly or by enforcing housing codes. They were not particularly pro-automobile or anti-automobile, and many of their reforms would have made just as much sense for a city of pedestrians and horse-drawn buggies. In contrast, Washington architect Louis Justement hoped to make the automobile central to the city of the future. After working on both public and private housing developments before World War II, Justement, in his words, “became convinced that the question of what to do with slums was merely a part of the question of what to do with cities.” In 1946 he pub-
21
The City, 1791–1955
Justement’s plan (Louis Justement, New Cities for Old. Copyright 1946 McGrawHill Book Company)
lished a manifesto called New Cities for Old. Unrelentingly modernist, it laments the “disorder caused by the crazy-quilt pattern of land ownership and the haphazard fashion” of development. It then proposes a gradual program of condemnation that would eventually result in all land being owned by a municipal corporation which could “completely rebuild our cities in accordance with modern needs”—that is, in accordance with the automobile. The result would be a version of Le Corbusier’s ville radieuse: a city shorn of many or most of its houses, shops, and side streets, filled instead with large
22
The Great Society Subway
apartment complexes, drive-in shopping centers, and high-speed arteries linked to feeder roads by cloverleaf intersections. Justement promised to end congestion and provide ample parking everywhere. Judging from his illustrations, walking would become unpleasant if not impossible, except in specialized downtown pedestrian shopping districts.23 Most of the book concerns cities in general; the central section uses Washington as a case study. Justement had enough admiration for L’Enfant to preserve the heart of the federal city—essentially the triangle between Pennsylvania Avenue, Independence Avenue, and the Potomac River—but for the most part he was unsentimental about the street plan and the buildings on top of it. He called for the demolition of the Federal Triangle and the gradual conversion of the city’s posh Connecticut Avenue into a limited-access highway. Except for the Mall and its immediate surroundings, Justement’s Washington would be unrecognizable. Congress was sympathetic to the idea of rebuilding American cities, starting with Washington. In 1946 it passed the District of Columbia Redevelopment Act, establishing the Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA) as the federal agency responsible for removing blight in the District. Congress did not appropriate funds for the endeavor until the 1949 National Housing Act, which provided that the federal government would pick up two-thirds of the cost of urban renewal: the city would use its power of eminent domain to purchase large sectors of land, defined as slums, keep some of the land for public housing, schools, and highways, and then sell the rest to private developers. This was Justement’s proposal in miniature, though limiting condemnation to blighted areas and not whole cities, and reselling land to private developers rather than leasing it. Congress rejected the NCPPC’s first proposal for redevelopment: Marshall Heights, a poor neighborhood across the Anacostia and four miles east of the Capitol. But when, in 1951, the NCPPC proposed redevelopment of the Southwest, it had a winner.24 Southwest is that portion of the District lying south and west of the Capitol. When the District was originally created in 1790, the quadrant included the port town of Alexandria. But after 1846, when Alexandria and the rest of the Potomac’s west bank reverted to Virginia, all that remained of the District’s Southwest was a small triangle of land between South Capitol Street, Independence Avenue, and the Washington Channel. By the twentieth century, most of this area was cut off from the rest of the city by railroad tracks. In the early 1950s, the area was home to about 24,000 people, 80 percent of them African American. District officials regarded it as a slum, noting the lack of plumbing and electricity in many of the dwellings, and Congress was repeatedly embarrassed by photographs showing run-down houses and yards with the Capitol dome behind them. When the RLA proposed ending this embarrassment as its first try at urban renewal, Congress seized the chance.25 At first, the proposed Southwest redevelopment area was bounded on the north by E Street, three blocks from the Mall. In 1951 the RLA con-
23
The City, 1791–1955
sidered a fairly moderate plan to improve the area by rehabilitating existing homes. But the agency rejected this plan in favor of a much more radical proposal, coming much closer to the Mall, by Justement and fellow architect Chloethiel Smith. Justement and Smith called for the leveling of most of the neighborhood’s homes. In their place they would build a “new fashionable district,” better suited to federal civil servants than to the laborers and domestics then in residence. To connect this new district to the Mall, they would bridge both the railroads and a planned four-lane freeway with an esplanade at 10th Street. All together, the renewal would cover 561 acres.26 Over the next several years, the RLA and other agencies tinkered with the details of the Justement-Smith plan. The 10th Street esplanade, intended for commercial, residential, and retail uses, evolved into the 10th Street Mall for federal office buildings and L’Enfant Plaza, the intended site of a performing arts center. Architects argued about the desirability of mixing townhouses and apartments. One landowner contested the constitutionality of the use of eminent domain for aesthetic reasons, only to lose in the U.S. Supreme Court. But no one in power challenged the idea of flattening the slums and building from scratch, nor the goal of gentrification. The bulldozers arrived in April 1954, and soon hundreds of acres of city land had been scraped clean. Elderly people who had lived their entire lives in the neighborhood found themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, and retirees whose only income had come from renting out rooms were thrown into dependence on relatives or welfare programs. But their voices were lost in the cheering, as rotting slums were replaced with luxury apartments and carpeted bowling alleys. By 1965 the renewal area was 88 percent white.27 Even as it was being completed, the Southwest project became a model. The Washington Post commented that “the pattern set in Southwest Washington very likely will be the pattern for later projects in other slum and blighted areas.” In 1955 James Rouse and Nathaniel Keith presented the District commissioners their report, No Slums in Ten Years, which proposed designating an additional eleven areas for renewal, covering more than onefourth of all dwellings in the District. The Washington Housing Association began printing its newsletters on paper emblazoned with the slogan.28 Central to these visions of the ideal city—in Disneyland, in the suburbs, or in Southwest—was the expressway. Limited-access highways had first entered American cities as parkways, represented in Washington by the Rock Creek Parkway, completed in 1936. These early parkways were originally intended as venues for recreational driving amid picturesque scenery, but as automobile ownership expanded in the 1920s and 1930s, drivers began using parkways for daily commutes, sparking a debate over the proper function of limited-access roads. By the 1940s the debate had been decided in favor of commutes, and planners in Los Angeles and elsewhere invented the freeway, an urban, limited-access road with minimal landscaping, designed to speed cars through the city unimpeded by stoplights or intersections.29 Shortages of funds and materials during the Depression and World War
24
The Great Society Subway
II limited Los Angeles’s freeway program. Once victory was achieved, however, planners expected a freeway boom. A 1946 transportation study of Washington promised that “expressways are an engineering answer to the public’s desire for highways that make travel Facile, Fast and Foolproof.” The study’s boldest recommendations, including expressways on both sides of the Mall, did not make it onto official maps, but the D.C. Highway Department did experiment with limited-access highways and in 1949 opened the elevated Whitehurst Freeway to divert traffic from Georgetown’s narrow, eighteenth-century streets.30 Federal funding promised a vast expansion of urban expressway construction. On 22 February 1955, as Walter Washington testified to Congress, President Dwight Eisenhower announced his support for a national network of highways, 90 percent of whose $25 billion cost would be paid by the federal government. This Interstate Highway System did more than connect states; it also funded expressways through the hearts of American cities. In September 1955 the Bureau of Public Roads designated urban extensions in a document generally known as the Yellow Book. When Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, these routes became official.31 The District of Columbia Department of Highways salivated at the prospect. Like most highway departments, it was filled with engineers who saw their job as building roads. In the 1960s, for example, department head Harold Aitken served on the executive committee of the American Road Builders Association, whose name left no doubt about its philosophy. Unlike state highway departments, the D.C. department did not report to an elected legislature but to the District’s engineer commissioner, a serving officer—usually a brigadier general—in the Army Corps of Engineers.32 Since its creation in 1878, the post of engineer commissioner had been controversial, for it violated the American tradition of subordinating the military to civilian rule.33 But late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century engineer commissioners had occupied themselves with tasks whose desirability was generally accepted, such as reclaiming land along the Potomac and Anacostia rivers and preventing those rivers from flooding. As public works in the city expanded to include more contentious decisions about zoning, highways, and urban renewal, the government structure became a dangerous anachronism, allowing important political decisions by military fiat. With no one to stop them from building, and with the promise of 90 percent federal funding, the highway engineers eagerly sketched new expressways. The Yellow Book was just a start. Soon they had even more ambitious plans. The heart of their proposed system was the Inner Loop, a ring road around the core of the city. Ideally, such a road would intercept traffic that was merely trying to get from one side of the city to another, reserving the central streets for traffic with a destination within the core, such as the taxis taking members of Congress and lobbyists between the Capitol and the
25
The City, 1791–1955
restaurants north of the White House. European cities, most famously Vienna, had built ring roads when they tore down obsolete city walls. Washington had never had walls, so a ring road would have to be superimposed on the city. The highway department’s first thought, in 1944, was to upgrade some of L’Enfant’s 150-year-old streets, designating some as arterials: widening them, converting some of them to one-way operation, and favoring them with green lights to channel traffic. By 1950, with congestion getting worse, the Regional Highway Planning Committee—a joint body of the District, Maryland, and Virginia highway departments—was thinking bigger. Where possible, it would build the Inner Loop as a limited-access freeway, though the northern and eastern portions would remain as arterials because “excessive property damage” would make right-of-way too expensive.34 In 1955, with increased federal aid clearly on the horizon, the National Capital Planning Commission’s traffic consultant recommended building the whole loop as a limited-access expressway. With a commission from the District government, De Leuw, Cather & Company proposed just that, enlarging the loop to a figure eight covering most of the L’Enfant city. Rather than following the L’Enfant plan’s grid and diagonals, the entire Inner Loop would be built of spaghetti-like transition curves, running in open cuts below the grade of city streets. City planner Harold Lewis praised the proposal, writing, “the plan to erect a wall around the downtown area . . . will dam the further unfunctional sprawl of the city core while allowing crosstown traffic to avoid it and its growing congestion. It will ease the burden on existing streets, protect inlying residential neighborhoods, clear a few slums, relieve some population pressure in the crime-ridden second precinct, contribute 200,000,000 more federal dollars to the local economy, and advance the coming of the automobile age.”35 Urban renewal legislation encouraged such thinking. Under the Housing Act, the District would have to pay one-third of the cost of a renewal project, but that share could come in the form of public improvements, including highways. So if an area was declared a renewal zone, not only was condemnation of land for rights-of-way almost automatic, but the District government could build a superhighway and then write off its share of the cost as part of its renewal contribution, double-dipping into the federal treasury. Better still, under the renewal laws, the federal government would be left with the responsibility for rehousing anyone displaced by the freeway. The city planned to route most of the Inner Loop through renewal areas and to claim the cost of the highways as its share of renewal funds.36 To connect the Inner Loop with the suburbs, planners proposed radial expressways from the Inner Loop to the Beltway—another circumferential highway, to be built around the District—and beyond. The Interstate Highway map of September 1955 proposed one radial highway following the District bank of the Potomac River toward Frederick, Maryland; two highways toward the east that would meet and proceed toward Baltimore;
26
The Great Society Subway
The Inner Loop (Blair and Stein Associates, An Express Street System for the North Corridor of the Inner Loop, Washington, D.C., October 1962)
one highway heading south and terminating at the Beltway; and two highways crossing the Potomac into Arlington, Virginia. As with the Inner Loop itself, the promise of federal financing encouraged planners and engineers to boost their budgets by building roads to expressway standards. In suburban Maryland, for example, transportation planners defined their task in terms of financing, rather than serving citizens. The official report on one radial stated, “The problem which now faces us is to select a location for connecting U.S. 240 and the Washington Inner Loop at design stan-
27
The City, 1791–1955
dards sufficiently high to make the project eligible for 90 per cent Federal Aid.”37 Support for this highway network did not imply a wholehearted embrace of Justement’s Corbusian vision, but the essential attitude was the same. To prevent both employers and residents from leaving the city, planners would have to make driving in the city as easy as driving in the suburbs. L’Enfant’s plan had had its day. Parts of it, like the quill pens at the Supreme Court, could remain as what Justement called “a grateful tribute to the vision of the founders and planners of the capital city.”38 But, for the most part, the days of walking were over. Such a vision of a city dominated by automobiles became all the more plausible when the transit company died. The Collapse of Capital Transit
Washington was unusually still on the first day of July 1955. All 750 buses and 450 streetcars lay idle, their operators on strike. Motorists gave lifts to stranded riders, and the vacant streetcar tracks proved useful as emergency parking for automobiles. But neither transit workers nor regular riders were happy.39 Transit had not always been such a problem. Since 1933 the District had been served by a single company, Capital Transit, formed from the merger of two competing lines with the blessing of the federal government. In addition to its buses, it proudly ran one of the nation’s largest fleets of Presidents’ Conference Committee (PCC) streetcars, the most modern type available. Washington’s streetcars did face one disadvantage. Congress did not want overhead electric lines ruining the appearance of the monumental city, so it forced the company to power its vehicles downtown using electric conduits buried between the streetcar tracks. Each streetcar reached a metal plow down through a slot in the street to reach the power source. In the winter, snow, ice, and links from automobile tire chains jammed the slots; in the summer they swelled shut with the heat. Almost every day at least one streetcar became disabled when its plow broke or became jammed, and an entire line stopped for fifteen to forty-five minutes while an emergency crew sped to the rescue.40 Despite such mishaps, Capital Transit held onto its customers, especially during World War II, when gasoline rationing limited automobile use but transit companies got all the supplies they needed. It built up a $7 million reserve of cash and government bonds for purchasing new buses as old ones wore out. And it took delivery of more PCC cars during the war and just after.41 There was even talk of a subway. In 1906, shortly after the opening of subways in Boston and New York, Congress had built a short subway to connect the Senate Office Building with the Capitol, allowing Senators to hurry to the floor to vote. Three years later, the Washington Post called for a citywide subway, and in the 1930s other newspapers took up the cry for a network of streetcar tunnels. But the first serious proposal came in the 1940s
28
The Great Society Subway
with a pair of studies by the engineering firms of J.E. Greiner and De Leuw, Cather & Company—the same studies that had been so enthusiastic about expressways. The reports, commissioned by the D.C. government, called for a $35 million program to depress some streets and use them exclusively for streetcars. Observers doubted that the benefits of such a system could outweigh the cost. For the most part its recommendations were shelved, although in 1949 Capital Transit and the city collaborated on a streetcar tunnel beneath Dupont Circle.42 Capital Transit’s prudence was its undoing. The company had kept its dividend low, building up cash reserves but reducing the stock price. So when the federal government forced the North American Company, a utility holdings company, to sell its shares in Capital Transit in accordance with a 1935 antitrust law, there were few takers. But the four Wolfson brothers saw an opportunity. They had gotten rich just after the war by buying and selling surplus Florida shipyards, and Capital Transit seemed to be another undervalued property. Though they had no previous experience with transit, in September 1949 the Wolfsons purchased a controlling interest in the company for $2.2 million.43 The Wolfsons found an enormous loophole in the District’s public utility law. Had Capital Transit been swimming in profit, D.C.’s limits on a “reasonable rate of return” would have restricted the amount it could pay its shareholders in dividends. But because the limit applied to the company’s rate of return and not its investors’, as long as the company earned less than the maximum profit, it could pay as much as it liked in dividends from stored surplus. Over the course of several years, the Wolfsons paid out large dividends, often exceeding the company’s net earnings. Between the end of 1949 and 31 May 1955, the Wolfsons had reduced the company’s war chest of cash and securities from $6.7 million to $2.7 million. Though legal, these payments were regarded by the public and many politicians as the plunder of what had been a prudent, conservative company. But the Wolfsons defended their conduct, often pointing to maintenance awards as evidence that the dividends were not hurting service. And echoing Commodore Vanderbilt, Louis Wolfson proclaimed that his duty was to his stockholders. Congressional investigators conceded that the company’s equipment was in good shape, its operation “efficient and economical,” and its actions legal, but they termed the dividend policy “wholly inconsiderate of the public interest” and suggested legislation to close the loophole.44 In some ways, management decisions were a sideshow compared to the declining prospects for mass transit in general. Nationwide, transit carried 11.5 billion riders in 1955, less than half the patronage of the peak year of 1946. “To meet this loss in revenue,” one observer noted, “most transit companies raise fares and cut service . . . encourag[ing] more people to leave transit and use the automobile.” Washington area residents owned 418,000 private automobiles, up from 203,000 in 1948. In those same years, transit trips declined from 678,000 to 639,000 per day, with schoolchildren and
29
The City, 1791–1955
Planned streetcar tunnels (J.E. Greiner Company and De Leuw, Cather & Company, Transportation Plans for Washington, 1946. Copyright 1946 Parsons Transportation Group Inc.)
poorer city residents—for whom driving was not an option—composing a greater percentage of all riders.45 Yet neither the Public Utilities Commission nor declining patronage finally brought down Capital Transit; the cause was labor relations. Before 1949 management and labor had gotten along fairly well. In 1916 workers had organized as local 689 of the Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway & Motor Coach Employees of America and won recognition after a three-day strike. Except for another three-day strike in 1945, they were able to negotiate contracts without strikes or arbitration.46 All of that changed under the Wolfsons. They refused to include an arbitration clause in their contracts and angered workers with their dividend policy. In the eyes of the union, the $7 million surplus had been squeezed out of workers during World War II, when gasoline rationing had packed the streetcars and wage freezes had kept transit workers from sharing the profits.
30
The Great Society Subway
In the spring and summer of 1955, these resentments boiled over. Beginning in January, the company had sought a fare increase from the Public Utilities Commission, only to be repeatedly rebuffed. So when the company began negotiating a union contract in May, it had no new cash. In the wee hours of 1 July, the operators walked out. For seven weeks, Washingtonians struggled to make do with hitchhiking and carpools, while the District commissioners and the District Committee of the U.S. Senate tried to settle the strike. The senators’ main concern was to keep the federal government functioning, and they were willing to consider any measure that would avert a strike or, after 1 July, shorten it. They summoned Louis Wolfson, who dared the Senate to revoke his franchise. “You go ahead and go to work for any private capital to come in here and render service here and we will step out.”47 Congress called Wolfson’s bluff. On 18 July, the D.C. government asked Speaker Sam Rayburn to terminate Capital Transit’s franchise, and on 2 August Congress passed a law repealing the charter of Capital Transit, effective two weeks later. The next week, the D.C. commissioners were able to resolve the strike, after which they authorized the company to continue operation for one year, until 14 August 1956. Given the need for several months’ lead time to order new buses, in practice they had only the autumn in which to line up a successor company.48 The commissioners remained committed to private enterprise, but no attractive buyer stepped forward. Only after months of searching, during which the commissioners reluctantly discussed establishing a public transit authority, did Congress finally find its man. O. Roy Chalk, an airline entrepreneur, bought Capital Transit, using creative financing. Putting only $500,000 of his own money on the table, he borrowed another $13 million from banks and from the Wolfsons themselves, securing the loans with Capital Transit’s own cash, equipment, and real estate. Happy to have any private investor whose name wasn’t Wolfson, the Public Utility Commission awarded a twenty-year franchise.49 That franchise did come with one condition: Chalk had to replace the system’s remaining streetcars with buses by 1963. Getting rid of Washington’s streetcars had been a top priority for the District commissioners as soon as they decided to revoke the Capital Transit franchise. Streetcars, they believed, were in the way of automobiles. A street with two-way streetcar tracks could not be converted to auto-friendly, one-way operation, and streetcar boarding platforms occupied traffic lanes. With congressional approval, the commissioners required that any new franchisee promise to sell off Washington’s streetcars and remove the tracks. Within two years, Chalk would fight to keep his streetcars, but the District government and Congress were adamant. It seemed as though the era of rail transit in Washington was over.50 Great fires can inspire rebuilding. The London fire of 1666, the Detroit fire of 1805, and the San Francisco fire of 1906 all inspired planners, who
31
The City, 1791–1955
sketched grand maps for perfect cities. No single catastrophe in 1955 so afflicted Washington, but together, the turbulence of World War II, the challenges of the automobile and of integration, and the collapse of the transit regime did create a fluidity comparable with that found after a great fire. Planners considering the Washington area in the year of Disneyland, the year of the Yellow Book, the year of the strike, would face unusual uncertainty and freedom. At such a time, in such a place, men asked to design a transportation system would realize that they had the power not merely to tinker with existing structures but to build a new machine.
1955–1965
2
The Plans
Even before the streetcar strike, all could agree that the spread of automobiles threatened the health of a city designed for pedestrians and carriages. Traffic engineers watched streets become ever more congested, politicians fretted, and commuters cursed. The Sunday Star complained that “motorists today spend from one to three hours of their off-job time in cars. This road time forces them to gulp their coffee in the morning, and they don’t have time to mow their lawns at night. The 189,000 metro residents who enter the core of the city daily by public transit . . . are plagued by slow movement and transfers.”1 Under Eisenhower, Washington-area planners found a simple answer: build more highways. To be sure, they realized that it would be impossible to find room for all the highway lanes needed to transport tens of thousands of commuters into and out of the city every rush hour, so they conceded that rapid transit might be needed to supplement the highways. But with or without rail transit, their basic strategy was to rescue the city from automotive obsolescence by rebuilding it. Everything changed with the election of 1960. President Kennedy appointed to key positions local residents, many of them opponents of the federal and District policies of the 1950s. The expressway, in their view, was not a grand improvement with a few problems, but an urban disaster to be avoided if at all possible. Consequently, they proposed that rapid transit be viewed not as a complement to highways but as a substitute. These new appointees believed in the power of government, and they believed in rail. Harland Bartholomew and the Mass Transportation Survey
During the Eisenhower administration, any question relating to the planning of the National Capital area eventually crossed the desk of Harland Bartholomew, one of the nation’s preeminent city planners. First a consultant and later an official, Bartholomew was for decades the most powerful shaper of the capital. Born in 1889, Bartholomew had entered city planning in his twenties when he worked on a comprehensive plan for Newark, New Jersey. He then built Harland Bartholomew and Associates, which became one of the pioneer city planning firms, designing comprehensive plans for twenty cities between 1920 and 1927. When President Calvin Coolidge formed the National Capital Park and Planning Commission in 1926, Bartholomew began
33
The Plans, 1955–1965
Harland Bartholomew (second from right) confers with area planners (Washington Star staff photo, 1957. Washington Star Collection, DCPL. Copyright Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
a quarter century of service as a consultant. He served as the chief consultant to the NCPPC as it drafted its 1950 comprehensive plan, tolerant of low densities and dispersion. In 1952, not long after the formation of the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Capital Regional Planning Council, he recommended a transportation study to supplement that plan.2 As it turned out, Bartholomew was essentially recommending a course of action for himself, for the next year, in September 1953, President Eisenhower appointed him chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission. The actual money to conduct such a study, however, did not come until 1955, when Congress appropriated $400,000 to create the Mass Transportation Survey (MTS). The MTS was officially a joint creation of the two federal agencies created by the 1952 Act: the NCPC and the NCRPC. But as chairman of the former, member of the latter, a planner with decades of experience in the region, and the man who had originally suggested a transportation survey, Bartholomew was the survey’s primary voice, setting its agenda and picking its expert staff. As one congressional observer put it, “as the dominant personality, a considerable measure of credit or blame for the outcome of the survey can be attributed to him.”3
34
The Great Society Subway
The central problem faced by Bartholomew and his survey was Washington’s increasing traffic congestion during weekday rush hours. The metropolitan region was growing and spreading out, as both families and employers moved to the suburbs. The survey’s experts projected that by 1980, the metropolitan region would grow from 2 million to 3 million people, and with increased suburbanization, “the total daily number of person-miles of travel [will] triple by 1980.”4 What could be done to get all these people where they needed to go, especially at rush hour? The survey set about drawing plans primarily to benefit women going shopping downtown and men going into offices and, to a lesser extent, to serve people who needed to bypass the downtown, presumably on the Inner Loop. They worried less about the mobility of those who already lived downtown or could not afford an automobile. Bartholomew and his team saw their job as predicting traffic demand rather than trying to shape it. One consultant explained that, given “the American pattern of universal automobile ownership,” continued metropolitan sprawl could not be stopped, but “it can be guided somewhat.” The final report reflected this humility, conceding that “it will not be possible, within the next two decades, to reshape the region to conform to a plan that constitutes a radical departure from current trends.”5 Within these constraints, the biggest question was if mass transit had any role still to play, or whether, in Bartholomew’s words, “individual automobile transportation can take over the full burden of transportation in a large metropolitan area such as Washington.” Streetcars were on the way out, in Washington as in other cities across the country. Limited-access expressways—with or without express bus service—seemed promising, but they were still so new that no one could say just how many people they could serve, or if they would only exacerbate congestion by encouraging more driving. Another option was rail rapid transit on exclusive rights-of-way: elevated, underground, in the median strips of highways, or alongside railroads. With multicar trains running at frequent intervals, such systems boasted the capacity to move 40,000 people per hour or more on each track.6 But would enough commuters forsake their cars to justify the expense of rapid transit? In 1955 no one could be sure. Of the six North American rapid transit systems then in operation, four (Boston, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia) had opened long before automobile ownership became common. The remaining two (Toronto and Cleveland) were brand-new and therefore not much of a guide. No one even knew quite how to study the problem. With the exception of Philadelphia’s 1953 study, most previous transportation studies had planned for cars and transit separately without trying to define the role of each mode. The MTS hoped to do better, to fix Washington’s congestion and “provide the pioneering example to other studies in metropolitan planning.”7 To achieve this, Bartholomew built the survey around two central values: expertise and balance. As befitted a man who had come of age during
35
The Plans, 1955–1965
the Progressive Era, and who had helped professionalize the field of planning, Bartholomew believed that planning was technical work best handled by professionals. As he later explained, “We are now reaching the point in the design of highway systems where it is becoming a scientific process or an engineering matter, just as the design of sewer and drainage systems. We determine the amount of rainfall and, in the case of highways, we determine the amount of origin of traffic. We also determine the runoff of traffic as we do with sewers and drainage.” Legislatures did not try to design storm sewer systems and, in Bartholomew’s opinion, had no more business designing highway systems.8 Nor would ordinary residents have much say. Bartholomew’s 1952 proposal for a survey did include three citizen members on a seven-member committee, but only one seat was reserved for a resident of the Washington metropolitan area, reflecting Bartholomew’s belief that Washington belonged to the nation, not the people who lived there. He saw no need for public hearings, nor much need for input from politicians. In mid-1957, on realizing that “an enlightened citizenry” would be more likely to accept the report’s recommendations, the NCPC and NCRPC resolved to seek funds for “a mass nonpolitical impartial campaign” to promote the plan. They did not, however, seek funds to solicit the input of enlightened citizens.9 In practice the survey was conducted by a team of transportation professionals—planners, engineers, managers—recruited by Bartholomew. Despite his faith in expertise, Bartholomew understood that even experts could be biased. Automobile experts thought that automobiles were the answer; rail and bus specialists thought the same of the technologies they knew. Bartholomew balanced the survey, hiring some of each. Bartholomew’s first picks were rail transit experts. As project director he selected Keneth Hoover, an executive at Parsons, Brinckerhoff, one of the country’s leading transportation engineering firms. Its founder was William Barclay Parsons, the man who built the New York subway. Hoover had recent experience on a public survey, having served as chief engineer of the 1955 study that recommended a new rail line connecting Philadelphia to its South Jersey suburbs.10 Consultant Donald Hyde of Cleveland was another important spokesman for rail rapid transit. He argued that any city that attempted to bring people into the central business district by freeway would be forced to replace its downtown with fields of garages; mass transit was the only sane alternative. And because middle-class commuters would not endure pokey local service, whatever the vehicle, frequency, or fare, only a rapid transit system on its own right-of-way could lure drivers out of their cars. Hyde had pushed through such a system for Cleveland, which opened in 1955. By running the line along an old railroad surface right-of-way, he avoided the massive expense of tunneling. Parking and “kissing loops” (driveways where women could drop off their commuting husbands) at outlying stations let Hyde’s system complement the automobile. As a midsize city that
36
The Great Society Subway
had invested in rapid transit, Cleveland was the best American model of the enduring potential of rail, and Hyde a prime spokesman.11 To balance these rail experts, Bartholomew brought in Pyke Johnson, a road proponent who had been lobbying for federal highway spending since the early 1920s.12 As president of the Automotive Safety Foundation, a creation of the automobile manufacturers, Johnson was a leader of the highway lobby. Unsurprisingly, he felt that there was plenty of mass transit already; what was really needed was more roads. In this view, he was supported by the highway departments of the District, Maryland, and Virginia and by the Congress itself—while the Mass Transportation Survey was underway, the highway lobby scored its greatest victory with the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. The highway proponents gained some support by two bus experts: Frank Herring of the New York Port Authority and NCPC member C. McKim Norton, executive vice president of Regional Plan Association, Inc. As bus proponents, they were not opposed to transit, but they did think rail’s day was done.13 Bartholomew himself was the man in the middle, a transportation moderate. He had a record of supporting highways, sometimes to the detriment of transit. In 1945 he had advised the NCPPC against the Greiner-De Leuw proposal for subways, arguing that it would “over-concentrate” real-estate values in a small area of downtown. In 1950 the NCPPC plan for which he had served as chief consultant dismissed rapid transit with a single sentence, stating that “neither the existing nor the probable future population pattern” would provide the densities needed to make rapid transit economically sensible. And he was proud of his support for circumferential highways, such as the proposed Inner Loop, and for radials leading to other cities. As he would tell Congress in 1960, “this is the age of the automobile and we cannot ignore it. People are going to have cars and they are going to wish to drive them.”14 On the other hand, Bartholomew was not ready to abandon the city to the automobile. In the 1930s and 1940s, he had sought freeways that met a broad set of goals, not just maximizing traffic flow. In 1949 he had observed that “the automobile has disrupted and virtually exploded the city fully as much as would an atomic bomb could its force be spent gradually,” hardly a reassuring image. And he eventually accused a colleague of a “prejudice against any form of rail transit,” insisting that rail still had a role to play when demand justified it. What he wanted most of all was to relieve traffic from the downtown core of the city, using whatever tools would work.15 To choose the appropriate mix of cars, buses, and trains, Bartholomew, in late 1956, proposed that the survey design three alternative transportation systems and subject each to computer modeling. The first hypothetical system, the “auto-dominant” system, would involve no new investments in high-speed transit service but would essentially tell suburbanites working downtown to drive where they needed to go, offering 70 miles of highways in addition to the 178 miles of new construction already proposed by the
37
The Plans, 1955–1965
highway departments of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Together, the roads would form a spider web of radials, with concentric ring roads at the Inner Loop, an Intermediate Loop of parkways, and an Outer Loop, later renamed the Capital Beltway. Added to the 81 miles that would be built by 1959, the proposed web would stretch 329 miles.16 The other alternatives added fast transit to the picture. Alternative two was the “express bus system”: buses would travel in reserved lanes on the new radial freeways into downtown, with few stops and fast service. Alternative three was a “rail transit system,” using rail rapid transit along freeway medians and older railroad rights-of-way to provide express service with more capacity than buses could offer. As initially proposed, alternatives two and three were to be “predicated upon a substantial reduction in required highway capacity,” the notion being that the more rapid transit was available, the fewer highways would be needed. Soon that reduction was forgotten. Instead, the consultants tested each of the three scenarios with models that assumed the massive new highway network. The bus and rail scenarios, therefore, envisioned transit in addition to all of the highways included in the auto-dominant scheme. In effect, this shift called for highways to be built until there was no room for more, express buses to be used until they were full, and rail as the last resort. And it meant that no matter what the consultants concluded about bus and rail, the construction of more than a billion dollars’ worth of new highways through the center of the region would be assured.17 Unlike the original plan of action, such a procedure was not a neutral experiment but a proposal that went far to determine the outcome by its very design. One obvious reason for the change was the passage of the 1956 Highway Act, which made highways five times cheaper from the state point of view and, in the view of highway advocates, made it the metropolitan area’s duty to help speed long-distance traffic as part of the new interstate network. But another cause seems to be that by early 1957, the MTS was in deep trouble: behind schedule and over budget. For the three alternatives to be studied, the MTS needed a map of proposed highways in the region, which was to be supplied by the state highway departments. As project staffer Robert Keith put it, “we didn’t do much to change the highway plans that the states were planning to build anyway. Everything that is in the MTS was really already in the plans of the District, Virginia, and Maryland.” In May 1956 the director of the NCPC confidently predicted that the commission would have a new thoroughfare plan ready by the end of July. But with the signing of the Highway Act on 29 June, the state and District highway departments were both swamped with work—trying to figure out how to spend the anticipated flood of federal aid—and could be much more ambitious with their plans. With everything uncertain, they refused to be pinned down on exact highway configurations. Without information from the highway departments, traffic consultant Wilbur Smith and Associates could not complete its traffic
38
The Great Society Subway
modeling, and the Smith team had its own problems, especially in adjusting to an electronic computer instead of their usual punch cards. As project director Hoover recalled, “it was a haze—every day they’d come running in and say, oops, we made a mistake; we’ve got to go back and do this or that. And they were running us out of money, and out of time, and out of everything else. And we wouldn’t get any results.”18 Without the results, engineering consultant De Leuw, Cather could not proceed with its engineering studies. Nor did Charles De Leuw believe the numbers he did receive, writing in October 1957 that the traffic models were based on “two fallacious assumptions”: that no freeway would ever be congested and that local streets and nonfreeway arteries would not be improved. Because a driver in 1980 (the year for which the transportation system was being designed) faced a choice between a major road that had not been improved since 1955 and a freeway with infinite capacity, he would obviously choose the latter. Thus use of these two assumptions vastly exaggerated the demand for freeways. De Leuw also complained that he had underestimated the requirements and wanted more money. Hoover refused, and De Leuw responded by cutting corners in his engineering work. The result was a further delay, as well as an increasing doubt about the reliability of any conclusion in the report.19 Delay also meant that staff and consultants had to be paid more, putting the MTS increasingly over budget. To make up the shortfall, Bartholomew turned to the people with the money. He persuaded the Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. highway departments to share some of the enormous bounty they had received from the 1956 act to help him complete the transportation study, and he eventually extracted $30,000 from the Bureau of Public Roads. Under these circumstances, the MTS staff was not about to test more-limited highway systems. “We were so delighted to finally get the traffic forecasts and process completed for the [roads] we wanted to test in the first place, there was no thought of trying to go back and do more,” recalled Keith, the project’s final director. “It would have called for whole new procedures and techniques we didn’t have.”20 The final report, submitted to the president in July 1959, glossed over the failure to consider anything less than the complete spider web of highways. Rather than detailing its troubles, the report presented itself as the result of a coolly scientific, objective process. And to eliminate dissent, the proposal took the Santa Claus approach of offering something for everybody. Highways clearly gained pride of place—the plan would cover the metropolitan area in concrete. Eight routes of express buses were to form the bulk of new transit service, and even these would have to push through rush-hour traffic, rather than getting their own lanes. The plan did include two rapid rail routes, comprising about thirtythree route miles, about half of which would be underground downtown. Against the general decline of mass transit nationwide, this proposition looks remarkable, a testament to Don Hyde’s vision of viable rapid tran-
The Metropolitan Transportation Study plan of 1959 (NCPC, Transportation Plan, 1959)
40
The Great Society Subway
sit in the motor age. But it is also clear that the plan considered rail (in the view of one observer) an “afterthought.” To the extent that rail transit would reduce loads on highways, the effect would “be mainly to reduce highway widths, rather than to eliminate highways.”21 Despite Bartholomew’s efforts, he faced defection on both ends. Herring remained true to surface transit, arguing that if buses had done the job in 1944, they could certainly do it in 1980 with fewer people riding transit. (Herring did not consider the fact that buses and streetcars work a bit better when automobiles are kept off the road by wartime gas rationing.) McKim Norton questioned the “key assumption . . . that the proposed system should make it possible to live virtually anywhere in a 700 square mile region and enjoy a fast rush-hour commute to any other place in the region,” asserting that buses could provide all the transit necessary, without resort to rail. He and fellow NCPC member Alexander Robinson eventually insisted that their minority opinion be printed in the report. Nor could Bartholomew reach consensus on roads. At a 7 May 1959 meeting of the NCPC and NCRPC, four members, including the District’s engineer commissioner, voted against a proposal for a Northwest Freeway through the District and Bethesda, toward Frederick, also insisting on registering their objection in the final report.22 The divisions within the survey were amplified when the report was publicly debated, in the newspapers and in hearings before the Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems, established in 1957 and known as the Bible Committee after its chairman, Senator Alan Bible of Nevada. These debates revealed that many in the Washington area, particularly in the District itself, were having second thoughts about highways only a short time after the passage of the Interstate Highway Act. In contrast, rapid transit proved much more popular than the MTS seems to have expected. Typical was the reaction of District commissioner Robert McLaughlin, who worried about both the construction cost and collateral effects. He pointed out that the District would lose land to the freeways, which would then abet the flight to the suburbs by “middle and high income families,” leaving the District with a greater proportion of poor people. A subway would be preferable, he suggested, and in any case, if the federal government wanted to cut freeways through the District, it should expect to pay for them. The city would not fund its own destruction.23 The report’s release in 1959 also awoke the wrath of District residents, particularly those in or near the path of the proposed radials. If the Inner Loop was designed to save the center of the city by building a wall around it, it necessarily abandoned those neighborhoods outside the wall to the ravages of the automobile. For example, the plan called for a new road through Glover-Archbold Park, a long, narrow park leading down to the Potomac River. Appalled, the Archbold family, which in 1924 had donated some of the parkland, filed suit to prevent that land from being used as a
41
The Plans, 1955–1965
right-of-way. Meanwhile, a more general revolt erupted in Cleveland Park, a neighborhood sandwiched between Glover-Archbold and Rock Creek parks. First developed in the late nineteenth century and named after President Grover Cleveland, who kept a summer residence there during his first term as president, the neighborhood had been largely built up by the end of the 1920s. In the 1950s, it was home to white professionals—lawyers, doctors, journalists, and not a few members of Congress—and their families, whose large, detached houses were dwarfed by thick oaks and punctuated by private schools. Bartholomew saw in these houses the straightest path between the booming suburbs of western Montgomery County and downtown, just the place for the six-lane southern spur of Interstate 70, to be called the Northwest Freeway. Cleveland Park disagreed.24 After seeing a map of Bartholomew’s plan in the Washington Star, David Sanders Clark of Tilden Street began pounding doors, warning neighbors of the multilane highway. One of his knocks was answered by Peter Craig, a junior lawyer at the prestigious firm of Covington and Burling. Craig had come to Washington after graduating from Yale Law School in 1953. After a year in Georgetown and three in Fairfax County, he had decided to settle in Cleveland Park, attracted by the ease of getting downtown via the Wisconsin Avenue streetcar. Horrified by the prospect of a freeway ripping through his neighborhood, he quickly agreed to help Clark fight it.25 Together, Clark and Craig and other Cleveland Park lawyers formed the Committee to Oppose the Cross-Park Freeway, soon renamed the Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning because the first name sounded too negative. In 1959 such a group was quite novel; not until 1962 and 1963 would such freeway complaints become widespread nationwide. But the professionals of Cleveland Park knew how to make themselves heard, and at the hearings on the Mass Transportation Survey in 1959, Craig castigated the Highway Act of 1956 for forcing cities to choose between 90 percent federal funding for highways or no aid at all for transit: “[I]n my heart, I feel certain that Congress never intended that the Federal-Aid Highway Act would be used as a device for burying our cities in concrete.” Senator Bible was sympathetic, noting that “the impact of superhighways on many of the city’s best residential areas and parks has brought many thoughtful citizens to the appreciation that such improvements are not an unmixed blessing.”26 Perhaps puzzled by the debate, Congress proceeded cautiously. In the National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, it neither endorsed nor rejected the MTS plan, but instead took three careful steps to continue its work. To refine the MTS’s general plans for transit, the act created a federal agency, the National Capital Transportation Agency (NCTA), to prepare a “Transit Development Program.” The idea for such a successor had appeared as early as April 1958, when the Bible Committee’s consultant had warned that the MTS’s analysis was too shaky to serve as a definite program and suggested that, once the MTS had released its findings, “the area’s
42
The Great Society Subway
transportation problem should be turned over to a more broadly representative group,” one that had more local input.27 Although local governments rejected the notion of a permanent federal corporation to run transit, they were willing to accept a federal agency as a temporary measure, and on 14 July 1960 the National Capital Transportation Agency officially came into being. Eisenhower’s NCTA was essentially a continuation of the MTS. Harland Bartholomew, now in his seventies, resigned from the NCPC but joined the advisory board of the new NCTA. Donald Hyde, who had stood for rapid transit on the MTS, also joined the board. The staff included traffic engineers Bob Keith, project director of the MTS in its final year, and Tom Deen, who, like Keith, had trained with Wilbur Smith—the traffic forecasting expert—at Yale. Howard Lyon, a De Leuw, Cather veteran who had worked on the consultant’s report to the Mass Transportation Survey and on the 1955 Inner Loop study, headed civil engineering. To head the new agency, Eisenhower chose Holmes Vogel, a local telephone company executive with a good record in Washington’s business and Republican Party establishments, but with no desire to impose his own agenda.28 A second component of the 1960 transportation act was born in part from intense lobbying by Craig and other Cleveland Park activists. Rather than accept or reject the Northwest Freeway outright, the act imposed a moratorium on freeway construction in those parts of the District of Columbia west of 12th Street NW and north of the Inner Loop, until 1 July 1965, by which point the agency would have to decide whether such a road was needed. This was a compromise between the House version (inserted by District Committee chairman John McMillan), which had called for a moratorium until rail transportation “has had a fair trial,” and the Senate version, which fixed the date as 1 July 1962. The NCPC and the White House initially opposed the extension but acquiesced. In any event, a temporary measure covering a portion of the city could only postpone the real fight over freeways.29 A third component of the act carried out the MTS’s suggestion of a regulatory transit compact between the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. Prior to the act, each jurisdiction regulated private transportation companies separately, leading to such annoyances as Maryland commuters’ being forced to get off one bus and onto another at the District line. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Commission became active on 22 March 1961. The Eisenhower administration’s final contribution to planning Washington was the NCPC’s report, The Nation’s Capital: A Policies Plan for the Year 2000. Although it was not published until April 1961, and therefore bore John F. Kennedy’s signature in the introduction, it had been drafted largely in 1960, under the direction of W. E. Finley, who had been named commission director by Bartholomew in 1958. At first glance, the Year 2000 Plan, as it was commonly called, is a remarkably progressive document. Its
43
The Plans, 1955–1965
main purpose was to protect open space—forests, farms, and wild river valleys—around the capital from development or, in the plan’s words, “urban sprawl.”30 To do so, it proposed that metropolitan jurisdictions should use zoning, sewerage, transportation, and other government controls to channel growth into a few relatively dense “corridors” radiating from the District of Columbia, leaving green “wedges” of open space in between. Largely rejecting the 1950 Comprehensive Plan’s notion of dispersal as a goal, it praised the urban values of central Washington, calling for the maintenance of downtown. Nor did it favor a Justement treatment of developing the city into a field of Corbusian towers, but instead stressed the need for a mixture of houses, townhouses, and apartments to serve a variety of families. The report even seems friendly to transit. Not only should government build rapid transit, but it should guide land uses to encourage people to use transit. The corridors themselves would help “exploit the carrying potential of mass transportation,” especially if high-density development—including federal offices and apartment buildings—were concentrated near transit stations. Better still would be “an arrangement of land uses designed to reduce the necessity for travel,” whatever the mode, by encouraging people to live near their work, whether in the central city or the projected new towns. The plan concedes that “even with the extensive rapid transit system that is recommended, most of the travel . . . will take place in automobiles,” but maintained that “the freeway system . . . should be limited to that currently planned for.”31 A plan calling for a reshaping of the region to encourage transit use while imposing limits on freeway construction would seem a triumph for critics of urban expressways. But when push came to shove, the plan did not seriously threaten the highway program. Page 107 of the 113-page report bears a map that reveals the hollowness of all the fine language about limits on freeways. For that map, “A Framework for 2000 Development,” in addition to its proud new rapid transit lines, includes every freeway project for the District proposed to that time: the Inner Loop, a bridge across the Potomac at the Three Sisters Islands, and three separate freeways reaching from the Inner Loop toward Maryland, including one through the frozen zone of Northwest. Architect Victor Gruen complained that overall, the plan failed to propose “a method for separating human beings from their automobiles.”32 Like the MTS, Eisenhower’s NCPC felt that transit was just fine as long as it didn’t get in the way of highway construction. The Revolution of 1960
Eisenhower’s Mass Transportation Survey’s proposal to save the city by merging it into a broader metropolis had been visionary yet relatively uncontroversial. Who could oppose city-suburb cooperation? In contrast, the National Capital Transportation Agency, once it became active during the Kennedy administration, proposed a much more divisive program: save the city by rejecting freeways. Such a reversal illuminates a broader shift in fed-
44
The Great Society Subway
eral transportation policy under Kennedy and Johnson. Though powerful, pro-highway members of Congress remained in place, as did key officials in the Bureau of Public Roads and the District of Columbia government, executive branch officials did begin to fight the freeways authorized under Eisenhower. Their battleground was Washington, and their weapon was rapid transit. Though John F. Kennedy famously derided Washington as a city of southern efficiency and northern charm, in his deeds he was a friend of the city, especially in architecture and planning. Two years into the Kennedy administration, an architectural journalist would write with ample justification that Kennedy has “taken more interest in the face of the capital than any President since Jefferson.” Unlike President Eisenhower, who cared little about cities and whose most notable prior experience in Washington was helping Douglas MacArthur disperse the Bonus Army in 1932, the Kennedys themselves were familiar with the city prior to their arrival at the White House. Jacqueline Kennedy had attended George Washington University and later worked for a local newspaper. John Kennedy had arrived as a congressman at the age of 29. By the time he was elected president, he had spent fourteen years in Congress, including stints on both the House and Senate District committees and involvement in the Capital Transit investigation. Both Kennedys considered Washington their hometown. Early in the president’s term they quietly bought a Georgetown house to live in after leaving the White House. As president, John Kennedy made it clear to the Board of Commissioners that he wanted “to have Washington serve as a model for the country” in municipal affairs, from the prevention and treatment of mental retardation to ensuring that the hot dogs at the baseball stadium were indeed served hot.33 With worries about Cuba, civil rights, and other national concerns, the president had little time for the myriad details of urban and regional planning. His real impact resulted from his decision to make his Districtarea appointments from the same group of local liberals who had spent the Eisenhower years complaining about federal insensitivity. Although the presidency of the Board of Commissioners went to Walter Tobriner, who shied from controversy, the key federal posts went to more-aggressive locals already in the public eye. Some were residents of Cleveland Park, energized by the fight against the Northwest Freeway. Others were lawyers from Covington and Burling, a firm accustomed to seeing its lawyers move into government posts, as partner Dean Acheson had done when he became secretary of state.34 Some appointees were from both the firm and the neighborhood. Kennedy did not follow Andrew Jackson’s precedent of inviting a mob into the White House to dance on the tables, but he did take into the White House some people very unhappy with transportation planning under Eisenhower. One key appointment was Elizabeth Rowe—known to the formal documents of official Washington as Mrs. James Rowe, and to her friends as
45
The Plans, 1955–1965
Libby. Rowe was an active Democrat and an old friend of the new vice president, Lyndon Johnson. She was a Washingtonian, born in Maryland but raised in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood and a resident of Cleveland Park since 1951. In 1954, Johnson, then Senate majority leader, had appointed Rowe to a committee to plan a new auditorium—a project that eventually became the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Cochair of the 1961 Inaugural, she gained real office as a presidential appointee to the National Capital Planning Commission, first as a member, then, in 1962, as chairman.35 Rowe’s perspective as a near-native shaped her approach. Without denying the federal interest in the city, she worked to make the commission more responsive to the residents by inviting them to speak at its deliberations. While on the Auditorium Commission, she had been horrified by three-dimensional models of proposed highways in downtown Washington. Now, at the NCPC, she opposed highways as a preservationist, arguing that the resulting destruction of neighborhoods was too high a price to pay. Rowe was appointed too late to participate in the commission’s drafting of the Policies Plan for the Year 2000, which reflects the views of executive director W. E. Finley, Bartholomew’s man. But soon after she became chairman, Rowe prodded Finley out of his job, replacing him with her own man.36 Kennedy’s second key appointment was in the White House itself. Under previous administrations, and at the start of Kennedy’s term, matters concerning the District of Columbia had been passed to whichever White House aide was available.37 Area residents had long wanted one person to handle such questions, and in 1962 Kennedy agreed, naming Charles Horsky adviser for national capital affairs. Born in Montana, Horsky had come east to attend Harvard Law School, then south to Washington to work for the New Deal. He had left government service to join Covington and Burling, but he remained involved in several civil rights and housing organizations. In the late 1950s, as president of the Washington Housing Association, Horsky had lobbied a mostly dismissive D.C. government for better relocation services for people displaced by government construction, including freeways. He had been alarmed to learn that the D.C. Highway Department was planning to displace thousands of people to build the Inner Loop without provision for relocation, and further alarmed by the release of the Mass Transportation Survey in November, though his testimony before Congress consisted of a quiet plea for more emphasis on rapid transit that was easy to ignore. But in 1962, after he moved from the bat-infested Vermont Avenue offices of the Housing Association to the Executive Office Building, his White House letterhead brought him more notice.38 Kennedy’s third key planning appointment, and the one most central to this narrative, was C. (for Charles) Darwin Stolzenbach as NCTA administrator. Tall and gaunt, Stolzenbach had lived in the Washington area since 1934, when at age nineteen he arrived seeking work in Roosevelt’s New
46
The Great Society Subway
Darwin Stolzenbach (right), sworn in by Justice William Douglas (Washington Star staff photo, 1961. Washington Star Collection, DCPL. Copyright Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
Deal. After attending Case Institute of Technology and MIT, he eventually earned a B.A. at George Washington University in 1941, then went into the federal government for ten years, working as an economist for the War Department, the Bureau of the Budget, and the Department of Commerce. In 1951 he became an Asia expert at the Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins University, a job he held for ten years. At a time when operations research and systems analysis were being adapted from their military origins to civilian problems, Stolzenbach’s economics credentials qualified him to manage a major engineering project.39 More significant than Stolzenbach’s work history was his extracurricular interest in local affairs, particularly planning. In 1958 he ran unsuccessfully for Montgomery County Council. That same year, as president of the Montgomery County Planning Association, Stolzenbach had entered the transportation debate by opposing Bartholomew’s Northwest Freeway. The following year, speaking for an umbrella group of citizens’ associations, he testified that the region needed more than “a system that merely superimposes mass transit on top of an already preconceived regional highway plan,” and, in words that would be later used against him, that “highways and mass transit are and will always be competing facilities for mass trans-
47
The Plans, 1955–1965
portation.” In other words, more transit meant fewer freeways. This was enough to earn Stolzenbach the lasting enmity of the highway lobby, as well as the Montgomery County political establishment. But it endeared him to Cleveland Park’s freeway opponents, who passed his name on to their friends on the Kennedy transition team. He got his job over the objection of the Democratic Central Committee of Montgomery County, but with the endorsement of the D.C. Democrats.40 Peter Craig, one of the loudest voices against expressways in 1958–1960, declined a job in the new administration, but he did gain listeners. Turning down the chance to become NCTA general counsel, he suggested his Covington and Burling colleague, Ed Seeger, for the job and kept in touch with Seeger as he continued the highway fight. Horsky, at the White House, was equally easy to get on the phone. For example, when the District of Columbia Highway Department officials tried to withhold data from Craig, Craig simply contacted Horsky, who scolded the engineer commissioner for denying Craig’s rights “as a citizen of the District.”41 Kennedy’s housecleaning could not penetrate those agencies—federal and District—whose only mission was building. The Bureau of Public Roads, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the D.C. Department of Highways remained devoted to highway construction. In particular, Brigadier General Frederick Clarke, the District’s engineer commissioner, had been appointed to a multiyear term in 1960 and proved to be a dedicated highway man. Despite these pockets of resistance, Kennedy and his appointees—particularly Stolzenbach—fundamentally changed the terms of transportation planning. Stolzenbach was an economist, not an engineer or planner. Whereas Bartholomew and Vogel had gathered experts on moving people, goods, and vehicles, Stolzenbach sought to put such experts in the service of broader social goals. He saw transportation planning as an exercise in the allocation of scarce resources and competing priorities. He considered not only traffic congestion and capacity but what the Kennedyites called the “social costs” of highways—people displaced from their homes, neighborhoods split in half, parks lost. Not even the finest engineers could balance such issues, so in building up the National Capital Transportation Agency, Stolzenbach supplemented Vogel’s technical staff with trusted economist comrades, led by A. J. Goldenthal. And to give the agency a public face, he hired Cody Pfanstiehl, a distant cousin of “Buffalo Bill” Cody and not much less of a showman. Pfanstiehl was a seasoned public relations man whose volunteer work for charitable fundraising had taken him around the metropolitan area.42 Of course, engineering and planning still mattered. Seeking an aura of authority, Stolzenbach recruited two renowned experts: Stanley Forsythe and John Rannells. Forsythe had been the general superintendent of engineering at the Chicago Transit Authority, where he had helped plan a new rapid transit line in the median strip of a new expressway. He had testified
48
The Great Society Subway
at the November 1959 hearings on the MTS plan, when the Bible Committee showed interest in median strips as a way of getting rapid transit rights-of-way on the cheap. Rannells came from Philadelphia, where he had recently worked on that city’s landmark transportation study, along with the MTS one of the first to combine automobile and transit in a single report. He was also known as the author of The Core of the City, a study of the relationship between transportation and downtown land use. Forsythe and Rannells were supported on the NCTA Advisory Board by Donald Hyde, who, as a member of the MTS expert group, had pushed for rapid transit.43 Whatever the planning group came up with would die in Congress (like the MTS proposal) unless the NCTA did a better job of preparing the ground. Stolzenbach therefore assembled lobbyists, who began work even as the plan was being developed. Deputy Administrator Warren Quenstedt, like Stolzenbach, had experience in local politics, having run for Congress in 1956 as the Democratic candidate from Virginia’s 10th District. Though defeated in that election, he remained well connected in that state, bragging that he knew every elected official in Northern Virginia and every top appointed official. In several senses, he was hired to complement Stolzenbach; a Virginian to match a Marylander, a politically astute lawyer to match a bureaucratically astute economist.44 Sherman Perlman was the agency’s official lobbyist, but Ed Seeger, nominally the general counsel, may have been more effective, especially in gaining the trust and respect of Representative Basil Whitener, a Democrat from Gastonia, North Carolina. As a chairman of the House District Committee’s subcommittee number 6 (which oversaw the NCTA), Whitener held tremendous power in the final result. He was a freeway skeptic, having represented law clients displaced by highway construction. Moreover, his administrative assistant was a train buff who urged his boss to support rail transit. House District Committee chairman John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat, also proved sympathetic, perhaps because his brother, as South Carolina highway commissioner, opposed urban highways as a drain on funds better spent on rural roads.45 Even as the NCTA gained friends on Capitol Hill, its relations with local highway departments soured. During the debates over the 1960 act that created the NCTA, Peter Craig and other opponents of the Northwest Freeway had lobbied for a clause giving the NCTA administrator the power to veto freeway, parkway, and arterial highways if they were inconsistent with the agency’s transit plans. As passed, the act merely required that “the Agency’s studies shall . . . include evaluations of the transportation system recommended in the [1959] transportation plan, and of alternative facilities and kinds of service,” but Stolzenbach interpreted this clause to give him the power and duty to approve or reject all local highway plans. In July 1961, just months after his confirmation, he stated his opposition to lifting the Northwest Freeway freeze until his agency was ready with its transit pro-
49
The Plans, 1955–1965
posals. Given that Congress itself had already shown its ambivalence about that freeway, this statement might have gone unnoticed, but Stolzenbach followed it in November with a letter to the NCPC asking that it defer final approval of Interchange C of the Inner Loop and the Three Sisters Bridge over the Potomac. The latter would become particularly controversial.46 A six-lane bridge over the Three Sisters islands, a group of rocks in the river near Georgetown University, was first proposed in 1953 and included as part of the Mass Transportation Survey in 1955. The bridge was to carry traffic from Virginia to the proposed parkway to be built in Glover-Archbold Park. In 1960, in response to the Archbold family’s lawsuit, Congress rejected the parkway as part of the National Capital Transportation Act, and the bridge might have been expected to disappear as well, but the D.C. Department of Highways did not give up so easily. Instead, the department found a new mission for an even wider, eight-lane bridge: rather than diverting traffic around downtown, the bridge would funnel Virginia traffic into downtown’s Inner Loop. Stolzenbach’s opposition clearly expressed his desire to limit the flow of cars into central Washington.47 Though sympathetic to Stolzenbach’s call for a halt to road building, NCPC’s Rowe found herself outnumbered on her own commission, which declined to halt planning for the bridge. Moreover, by striking at the core of the freeway plan, Stolzenbach had tipped his hand. At the Bureau of the Budget, Harold Seidman shook his head at the naiveté of a new agency administrator who acted without consulting other federal agencies, alienated officials whose support he would need, and seemed to have “been captured by the anti-highway groups in town.”48 Stolzenbach’s position alienated the highway departments of the District, Maryland, and Virginia, all of which refused to cancel any highways. The NCTA’s counsel, Ed Seeger, returned their contempt. Engineer Commissioner Clarke had nothing against rapid transit, and in the late summer of 1962, over lunch at the Army-Navy Club, he proposed to Stolzenbach that they join forces to promote both highways and transit. “Darwin,” he said, “I’ll buy your rapid transit plan if you’ll buy my highway plan.” Appalled, Stolzenbach replied that even if he could accept such an “unholy proposition,” he would not trust Clarke and the other road builders to live up to the deal. The two men finished their lunch in silence. Although they continued to snipe at each other in correspondence to Charles Horsky, the top officials of the NCTA and the highway departments all but stopped talking.49 The NCTA staff soldiered on, moving to fifty-hour workweeks (nine hours on weekdays, plus Saturday mornings) in the spring of 1962. The agency’s basic task was to redo in more detail much of the work of the MTS, which had identified only general corridors for highways and transit and only vague cost estimates. Moreover, Stolzenbach wanted a result quite different from the MTS’s pro-highway conclusion. Although he did not need to redo the MTS’s careful study of the status quo, its meticulous land
50
The Great Society Subway
survey, he rejected its transportation recommendations and Senator Bible’s conclusion that “this thing has been studied to death.”50 In fact, Stolzenbach approached the problem of transportation in a manner quite different from Bartholomew. His expertise was operations research, a multidisciplinary approach that sought not only the right answers but also the right questions. Translated to transit in Washington, this meant throwing out the MTS’s assumption that anyone should be able to travel quickly anywhere in the region at any time, and the assumption that all proposed highways would be built. It meant rethinking the engineers’ rules of thumb about how many cars could fit on a freeway lane each hour. And it meant bringing in new factors, such as a desire to minimize dislocation of families and businesses; considering a rail-dominant plan; and employing economists—experts in allocating resources—as well as engineers.51 These decisions produced some tension between economists and engineers. In one extreme case, A. J. Goldenthal—Stolzenbach’s friend and fellow economist—dealt the engineers a backhanded insult by applauding their gravity model of traffic because “few people can master the methodology,” and therefore it would be hard to criticize the results. But, he warned, the model might produce lower projected volumes than the crushes predicted by the MTS, thus undermining the justification for rapid transit.52 One way or another, Goldenthal and Stolzenbach hoped to find a model to sell rapid transit. Despite such pressure, the engineers refused to adjust their calculations. Planners Keith and Deen and civil engineer Lyon had all taken their jobs at the agency in the last days of the Eisenhower administration. Not owing Stolzenbach their position, they saw no reason to compromise their professional methods simply to please him. Even as Stolzenbach was battling the D.C. Highway Department in public, Deen—who had cut his teeth on a freeway plan for Nashville—met frequently with Highway Department engineers to create a traffic model both agencies could accept. In the end, the two agencies reached rough agreement on both the total number of trips that would be made in the metropolitan area and on a model to forecast transit ridership, though they disagreed on some of the numbers to be entered into the model. And the NCTA engineers did accept Stolzenbach’s desire to minimize road construction. While the highway engineers continued to plan their vast web, Deen used his traffic-planning skills to devise a minimal system of roads and rail.53 Stolzenbach did maintain the MTS’s basic goal of reducing downtown traffic congestion by providing new ways for suburban commuters to get downtown, and his call for rapid transit was designed to meet that goal. As the agency explained, “the primary goal was to put subway stations as close to as many jobs as practicable, keeping in mind the desirability of minimizing costly subway mileage and of maintaining relatively high-speed service through the 10-mile square area that is downtown Washington.” Serving tourists, shoppers, and the carless; transporting people from one Washing-
51
The Plans, 1955–1965
ton neighborhood to another; and connecting suburb to suburb were all secondary priorities. Thus, when Stolzenbach presented his agency’s plan to Congress, he boasted that it would “bring 80 percent of the prospective downtown employees to within a 5-minute walking distance of their offices” and would “also provide an efficient economical means of bringing shoppers into town during the middle of the day.”54 Having decided on this goal, the NCTA’s first task was to choose a basic technology with which to transport commuters. Except for Cleveland’s single line, no American city had built a new transit system in a generation, and the NCTA wanted to see if the interval had produced any new technologies. So the NCTA engineers poked into such exotic technologies as conveyor belts, monorails, and some kind of rubber-tired, “hybrid road-rail vehicle” that would act like a bus on suburban freeways and then couple onto the end of a train in a downtown subway. But each technology had flaws. Conveyor belts had not made it out of science fiction magazines, and the NCTA refused to be anyone’s guinea pig. Monorails worked fine at Disneyland, but bringing them underground would require extra-high tunnels, at great expense. Rubber-tired trains made sense in Paris, whose Métro stations were so close together that acceleration and deceleration were more important than top cruising speed, but they would do poorly speeding along the suburban extensions planned for Maryland and Virginia. In contrast to these exotics, the NCTA engineers concluded that a fairly conventional rapid-transit car could serve both suburban and urban functions. On the suburban extensions, with their widely spaced stations, the car’s steel wheels would allow top speeds of up to seventy-five miles per hour, while its air conditioning and large seating capacity would provide some of the comforts of a commuter rail service. Downtown, the cars’ ability to reverse directions (thanks to a control cab at each end of each pair of cars) would obviate an underground turning loop, and its low height, relative to monorails, would reduce the cost of tunnels.55 While the agency’s engineers worked to choose a vehicle, transportation planners Bob Keith and Tom Deen began thinking about which routes would bring suburban commuters into downtown. In the nineteenth century, several railroads had penetrated the city, and their tracks were now lightly used or even up for abandonment. Rapid transit alongside or in place of these rail lines would enjoy an exclusive right-of-way without dislocating homes and businesses, bisecting existing neighborhoods, or requiring subway construction, which costs roughly ten times as much as building on the surface. Similarly, some of the radial freeways could be built with rail in the median strip. After identifying these likely corridors, Keith and Deen entered population, employment, income, and other data into a complex computer model to estimate demand on each route. Eventually, they proposed seven radial lines, some of them separated from the urban trunk routes “to provide ‘express-type’ or ‘limited stop’ service for longer distance riders, with few station stops as the routes approach downtown.”
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The Great Society Subway
Monorail proposal (D.C. Transit System, Inc., Washington, D.C., Monorail Presentation Charts, November 1959)
This spacing of suburban stations ensured that trains would maintain average speeds as high as express trains in New York and Chicago without requiring expensive parallel express tracks.56 Once riders got downtown, they would still need help getting to their offices. Washington’s employment core stretched for miles, from the Capitol to the Pentagon. Bartholomew’s 1959 plan offered four rail routes forming a cross in the center of downtown, but they missed important destinations. The sole east-west line, for example, ran along E Street, rather than the main commercial strips of F and G. The fast-growing area around Farragut Square was not well served, nor was the redeveloped portion of Southwest.57 Stolzenbach wanted more. He turned to a young architect named John Insco Williams, who had studied transit planning in Helsinki, Finland. Arriving in September 1961, he was charged with designing a two-or three-line “downtown distributor” serving as many employment and shopping centers as possible. The 75-foot rail cars specified by the engineers required gentle curves and 600foot straight sections for platforms, while legal considerations forced tunnels underneath streets and other public property wherever possible. Williams developed a two-line system with one line sweeping down from Silver Spring to Virginia, via Union Station, G Street, and the Pentagon, while a second line would come down Connecticut Avenue and end up in Anacostia. After lobbyist Perlman insisted that a station adjacent to the Capitol would win congressional support, Williams rearranged the lines to add a transfer station there.58 When the suburban lines were combined with the downtown distributor, the NCTA had replaced the MTS’s thirty-three-mile rapid transit sys-
53
The Plans, 1955–1965
Alternative downtown routings considered by the NCTA (NCTA, Appendix to November 1, 1962 Report to the President, vol. 5: System Planning, 1963)
tem with an eighty-nine-mile, sixty-five-station system, all but nineteen miles above ground. Even then, the rail could not go everywhere, so the agency filled in the gaps with a fifteen-mile commuter line and five express bus routes totaling fifty-two miles. Seeing the easternmost corner of the District still unserved, Stolzenbach added a dotted arrow to maps as a vague promise of future service.59 While this expansion of transit marked a big change from the MTS, an even larger departure resulted from Stolzenbach’s desire to avoid the destruc-
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The Great Society Subway
tion of homes and neighborhoods by highways. Gone, in the NCTA plan, was Bartholomew’s intermediate loop. Gone was the northern half of the Inner Loop, the so-called North Leg and East Leg, except for enhancement of existing streets. Gone was Bartholomew’s pet Northwest Freeway. Gone too was the Three Sisters Bridge. The NCTA acknowledged the need for some new highways, but only where they could be built with the minimum impact on established neighborhoods. Thus, it combined the North Central and Northeast Freeways of the 1959 plan with a version of the East Leg to create a Y-shaped freeway whose stem would run alongside of the B&O railroad tracks leading north from Union Station. Because these tracks had been in place since the beginning of the century, a highway alongside them would not divide neighborhoods any more than they already were divided, “avoiding the substantial relocation of persons, loss of taxable property, and disruption of neighborhoods” that would result from the 1959 plan.60 Transportation in the National Capital Region: Finance and Organization—or, as it became known, the November Report—was finally compiled in a marathon session from the morning of 30 October until 11 a.m. on 31 October, and presented to President Kennedy on 1 November 1962. Though not as grand as the oversize Mass Transportation Plan of 1959, it was still a handsome book, with dozens of illustrations and two foldout, multicolor maps. A financial plan, endorsed by an advisory committee headed by the chairman of the Executive Committee of Dow Jones & Company, promised the whole rail package for a mere $793 million in capital outlays, with the new service so popular (and parking and highways so limited) that all but $180 million would be paid back from the fare box. And, thanks to Stolzenbach’s slashing of the MTS’s highway map, the report could promise that its combined transit and highway system would cost less than the one proposed in the 1959 report. It confidently asserted that its program offered a plan in which “each type of transportation is assigned to do the work for which it is best suited, and in the sense that people will have a reasonable choice of how to travel.”61 Darwin Stolzenbach was a passionate man, often unable to see things from his opponents’ perspective. As a result, his NCTA was unprepared for the hostile reaction that greeted its report. The city’s newspapers, fearful that Washington would miss the window for 90 percent federal funding of highways, had been critical of Stolzenbach since his calls for delay in 1961. Now, with the report out, they went after the agency again, complaining that it was silly to argue the relative merits of highways and rapid transit when the best thing to do would be to build both. Along with the city’s business groups, the newspapers stayed true to this cake-and-ice-cream approach throughout the 1960s, failing to see any negative impacts to either program.62 Transit skeptics fought back as well. In February 1963 the D.C. engineer commissioner (the parent of the D.C. Department of Highways) issued a report attacking the NCTA’s methodology, followed two days later by a
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The Plans, 1955–1965
The November Report’s transit and road proposals (NCTA, Transportation in the National Capital Region, 1962)
similar report by rail critic Martin Wohl, then working for the U.S. Department of Commerce. The reports insisted that highways could move more people for less money than transit, but either failed to notice or could not understand Stolzenbach’s alternative value system. They devoted dozens of pages to the question of whether highways or transit could satisfy the most commuters for the least cost, but barely glanced at the negative effects of highway construction, especially the issue of destruction of housing. The reports did try to swat away the issue by suggesting that some housing could be built in the air rights over expressways, but without any serious consideration of the magnitude of the problem of rebuilding hundreds of blocks of the city on stilts. One of Wohl’s colleagues pointed out that Wohl had ignored the constraints placed on the NCTA by Congress and other actors, leading the NCTA’s supporters to shrug off his complaints.63 The debate went public in the summer of 1963. In June Congressmen Whitener and Joel Broyhill, a Republican from Arlington, Virginia, introduced legislation allowing the NCTA to proceed with the transit portion of its program. The hearings on their bill, in July 1963, gave the highway lobby its best opportunity for a riposte to the November Report. Highway advocates had a good friend on the committee in Representative William
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The Great Society Subway
Harsha of Ohio, who, Horsky noted, had “been exposed to the full force of the highway lobby as a member of Representative [George] Fallon’s subcommittee on public roads.” (Fallon himself had described the NCTA proposal as a sort of disease, warning that it “could spread all over the country in a very short while and change the thinking of a lot of people.”) Rubber manufacturers and road builders wrote to the president and Congress, panicked that the NCTA plan could set a national precedent. The D.C. branch of the American Automobile Association credited the NCTA with “the worst example of urban transportation planning in the country.”64 The NCTA opponents challenged both the November Report and Stolzenbach himself, painting him as an antihighway zealot. Particularly bitter was Donald E. Gingery, chairman of the National Capital Regional Planning Council and thus Bartholomew’s junior partner on the MTS report. Gingery had been an outspoken proponent of the Northwest Freeway. Now, Gingery accused Stolzenbach of a “blind bias against highways,” calling him “a man who has no engineering degree, has never worked as a professional engineer and has never held any elective office which would qualify him to speak for the people of Montgomery County.” Retired major general Louis Prentiss, a former D.C. engineer commissioner now with the American Road Builders’ Association, demanded that “rapid transit has to stand on its own legs and not stand on legs that are supported by taking away what careful studies by experts have indicated is absolutely essential to the solution of the transportation problems of this city.”65 Critics also claimed that buses or a smaller rail system would do the same job. Delmer Ison of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Commission—the interstate regulatory agency that had been established at the same time as the NCTA—suggested that a bus system would be cheaper than rail, even if it relied on some tunnels. Private bus companies eagerly joined in. D.C. Transit’s O. Roy Chalk—whose relationship with the NCTA had soured in 1961 when Stolzenbach rejected his proposal for a monorail to Dulles Airport—demanded that bus companies be given equal status to the NCTA administrator in planning decisions and derided Stolzenbach’s vision as “an iron-age rail, subway transit system of the 19th century vintage.” The smaller, suburban bus lines followed suit. Most local officials largely stayed loyal to Bartholomew’s plan of something for everybody. Representative Broyhill of Virginia disputed the NCTA’s power to cancel highways, while representatives Carlton Sickles and Charles Mathias of Maryland and former D.C. commissioner McLaughlin argued that the region’s growth justified building transit and highways. Anne Wilkins, of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, emphasized that her county could not wait for rapid transit and wanted immediate construction of all of the highways and bridges in the 1959 plan, including the Three Sisters Bridge.66 Yet the NCTA had its defenders. Local civic organizations, many of them critics of the 1959 MTS plan, continued to see rapid transit as the best chance to avoid destructive freeways. Rowe testified that “rapid transit is
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The Plans, 1955–1965
essential not only to the orderly development of the region, but to the city of Washington itself.” Neil Phillips spoke for the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, a citizens’ planning organization founded in 1923. The committee was increasingly fighting the freeways, and Phillips applauded the NCTA, blaming all opposition on those who sought “a quick dollar out of a mammoth, crash highway construction program . . . regardless of the disastrous tax effect of highway engorgement of real estate, of the monstrous displacement of persons, and of the barbarous spoliation of large areas of our great National Capital.”67 The most important defender was President Kennedy, whose enthusiasm for the NCTA Stolzenbach later attributed to Kennedy’s being the only president to grow up in a city with a subway. In late March 1963, as the Commerce Department and the D.C. Department of Highways released their angry reactions, Horsky—the president’s gatekeeper on all matters affecting the capital—reluctantly realized that the White House and the Bureau of the Budget would have to referee this dispute. Though he “recoil[ed] at the idea of another study,” he suggested that some pressure from the top was needed. The result was a presidential letter to D.C. Board of Commissioners president Walter Tobriner on 1 June 1963, instructing the D.C. government to reexamine the highway program, assuming that the NCTA’s transit system would be built and specifically questioning the Three Sisters Bridge and the North Leg.68 The D.C. commissioners could not ignore so direct an order from their boss, and they established a Policy Advisory Committee with representatives of several federal agencies, including the NCTA, the NCPC, and the Bureau of Public Roads. To some degree, this was good news for transit proponents: it supported their approach of questioning assumptions and, as Horsky had pointed out, ratified the idea that highways were the NCTA’s business.69 But the committee threatened to do to the NCTA what the NCTA had done to the MTS: revisit all of its work and thereby make it irrelevant. To prevent the NCTA plan from dying, Congressman Whitener proposed amputation. In July, Louis Justement had testified that “If you had to do something that was just a partial system I would much rather start with the body and have the downtown distribution system to which you could always add arms, but I would never try to make an arm function without a body.” Whitener took him at his word. Judging that Stolzenbach had failed to rally enough support from Virginia and Maryland for a regional system, Whitener proposed instead a preliminary system with six lines but only twenty-three route miles, mostly confined to the District of Columbia. With less mileage but more routes than the MTS rapid transit plan, this “bobtail” plan, as it became known, offered the possibility of expansion into a much larger system, such as that proposed in the November Report. Transit opponents were suspicious, arguing that if six downtown lines were built, the region would have to extend them all to justify the investment.
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The Great Society Subway
Basil Whitener’s “bobtail plan” (U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, 1963)
For the same reason, Stolzenbach endorsed the plan, deferring to Whitener’s political judgment. On 4 December, the House District Committee passed the bobtail bill.70 President Kennedy, the agency’s champion, would likely have endorsed the bill as well, but he was killed on 22 November, leaving much of Washington in chaos. Moreover, Seeger and Whitener sensed that the NCTA had failed to sell its program to Congress. But they reasoned that, even if the bill failed on the floor of the House, they would learn just where they stood. Without consulting Stolzenbach or Quenstedt, they did just that. On 9 December the House of Representatives voted 276-78 to reject the bobtail plan, sending the bill back to the District Committee.71 Stolzenbach’s critics seized on the defeat. The Washington Post called for Stolzenbach’s resignation, while the Montgomery County Council demanded a complete overhaul of the agency, with the federal administrator being replaced by a triumvirate representing Maryland, Virginia, and the District. Within the agency, staff members struggled to understand. Part of the opposition, they found, resulted from complaints by the AFL-CIO that federal operation of transit would deny labor unions either binding arbitration or a right to strike, leaving them in an even worse position than under the Wolfsons. But the real reason for recommital was that the House
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The Plans, 1955–1965
as a whole had paid little attention, and many members had no idea what the vote was about. When Deputy Administrator Quenstedt talked to some congressmen and their staffs, they assured him that the vote for recommital had been made out of caution, confusion, and a reluctance to make a big decision near the end of a session. Try again, they said.72 This was fine as a legislative strategy, but what was the NCTA staff to do? The agency was humbled by its initial defeat. Stolzenbach morosely canceled his earlier request for tens of millions of dollars for land acquisition and construction. More seriously, the agency’s staff was cut in half. Deen left for a consulting job, leaving transportation planning in the hands of William Herman, who was trained in finance, not engineering.73 All was not gloom. President Lyndon Johnson proved himself supportive. Like Kennedy, he had spent decades in Washington. He retained Horsky as his capital affairs adviser, and he was even closer to Rowe than Kennedy had been, for the Johnsons and the Rowes had been friends since 1938. Moreover, the prospects for transit looked up a little in June 1964 with the passage of the Urban Mass Transportation Act, which squeaked through the House of Representatives, 212-189. The act provided two-thirds federal financing for urban mass transportation projects throughout the country, the first time that cities had been offered matching funds for transit comparable with what they could get for expressways, though the total budget for such programs was limited at $375 million. Meanwhile, across the continent, San Francisco’s BART system broke ground.74 Encouraged, Stolzenbach was ready to go back into battle, but the White House decided to wait out the 88th Congress and try again after the election. Pfanstiehl and Quenstedt put together a slide presentation to build local support for a rapid transit system, then showed it to small groups around the region, with Pfanstiehl covering up to four events in a day. A skeleton staff at NCTA designed a new transit development program to appeal to the new Congress; its unofficial motto became “stay alive ’til ’65.”75 The agency did stay alive, and in January 1965 it released a new report, Rail Rapid Transit for the Nation’s Capital. Unlike the elegantly typeset and lavishly illustrated 1962 report, Rail Rapid Transit broadcast frugality. It appears to have been created on a typewriter, with only a few drawings thrown in. Inside, however, the plan essentially replicates the bobtail scheme defeated in 1963, extending the twenty-three miles of rapid transit to twentyfive miles, with a total price tag of $431 million. Bonds, to be repaid out of the fare box, would cover 65 percent of that amount, leaving $100 million in federal grants and $50 million in D.C. grants, the same 2:1 ratio established by the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964. In contrast with the 1962 report, which advocated either a federal corporation or an interstate compact agency, the 1965 report proposed that a private company be found to operate rapid transit. This provision was designed to placate the labor unions; unlike a federal government, a private operator faced no restrictions against binding arbitration.76
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The Great Society Subway
Rail Rapid Transit scarcely mentions highways. It notes, at the beginning, that “no highway system could be designed for the central area that would be both capable of handling all peak-hour trips and compatible with the city of Washington” and, at the end, that rapid transit “will enable the highway system to function more effectively” by diverting some drivers, but that is all. (Either of these statements would fit in well in the 1959 MTS plan.) It mentions no highways by name and includes no highway map; an ignorant reader might not discern any controversy at all. In 1963 Stolzenbach had described local highway departments as saying, “Just go along with our highway plans and maybe we will go along with your rapid transit.” Now the NCTA was going along. In an open letter to President Johnson, Stolzenbach pretended that he and the highway agencies had reached consensus. In November 1964 Stolzenbach declared his agency to have no opinion on a Three Sisters Bridge. And in February 1965 he assured Congress that he now accepted the need for a “balanced transportation plan” including both highways and subways.77 Even a neutered Stolzenbach had no place at the agency. His stock at the White House had dropped in late June 1964, when civil service inspectors found that, in addition to suffering “uncertain assignments, low productivity, depressed morale, and weak supervision,” half of NCTA employees had been incorrectly graded, resulting in their being overpaid relative to counterparts elsewhere in government. Seizing the excuse to get rid of a troublemaker, the White House asked for Stolzenbach’s resignation, which he submitted three weeks later, effective 15 August. By September, Horsky and other White House aides were actively searching for a new administrator but could not find anyone. Deputy Administrator Warren Quenstedt refused the job himself and vetoed applications from Stolzenbach loyalists, arguing that an outsider was needed. After some months, Horsky began to think that it might be best to keep Stolzenbach until Congress authorized a system. But by February 1965, with the report handed in, the White House staff concluded that Stolzenbach was a liability. Finally, on 6 May, President Johnson accepted Stolzenbach’s resignation. Stolzenbach left dreading that the subway would never be built.78 In fact, Stolzenbach made a magnificent scapegoat, drawing with him all the animosity of the highway lobby and leaving the NCTA with both a workable plan and, with his departure, a clean image. The Johnson administration sought a less controversial figure to succeed Stolzenbach. They found Walter McCarter, sixty-five years old and recently retired from the Chicago Transit Authority after eighteen years as general manager. Like Bartholomew, he was a midwesterner whose qualification came not from Washington political experience but from professional expertise—he had a reputation as the “Dean of the Transportation World.” McCarter had just retired to the Virgin Islands, but President Johnson’s famous arm-twisting brought him back to the mainland.79 As a pure transit man, McCarter was seen as less likely to go meddling
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The Plans, 1955–1965
The NCTA’s humble map of 1965 (NCTA, Rail Rapid Transit for the Nation’s Capital, 1965)
into highway planning than loose-cannon Stolzenbach. One lobbyist recalled him as “a kindly old gent who sat back, pulled on his pipe, and got along with everybody.” Shortly after his appointment on 21 May, the D.C. division of the American Automobile Association, long an antagonist to Stolzenbach, welcomed the new administrator with a gift shovel for ground breaking. Congressman John Kluczynski, the chairman of the Public Works Subcommittee on Roads, testified on McCarter’s behalf at the confirmation hearings, as did the president of the International Amalgamated Transit Union. At the White House, Horsky noted with relief that “the appointment of McCarter to succeed Stolzenbach was well received [in the House of Representatives], and should enhance the prospects for the bill.”80
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The Great Society Subway
Walter McCarter (left), congratulated by the American Automobile Association (WMATA)
Congressional confidence in McCarter was crucial, for in July the stripped-down bill again went before the House. Whitener helped the agency tailor its plan to Congress’s frugal mood; later, after passage, he admitted that “legislative tactics,” more than transit engineering, had determined the shape of the proposed system.81 Responding to the critics of 1963, the new bill proposed a system that cost less, relied on a higher proportion of D.C. rather than federal funds, and specified private operation to preserve the rights of both labor and the existing bus companies. Thanks to such adjustments, the agency found more friends and fewer opponents. O. Roy Chalk, head of the bus company, still ranted against a “socialistic” subway, but the AFL-CIO, which had helped sink the 1963 bill, now endorsed the new version. The Federal City Council, relieved by Stolzenbach’s departure, mobilized its members—bankers, stockbrokers, university presidents, and an archbishop or two. Each visited four or five congressmen, quietly counting votes. Meanwhile, Whitener wrote to every member of the House not on the District Committee. Some were skeptical,
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The Plans, 1955–1965
Basil Whitener pushing through the National Capital Transportation Act of 1965 (Cartoon by Eugene Payne, Darwin Stolzenbach Papers, George Washington University, box 39. Reprinted with the permission of The Charlotte Observer. Copyright owned by The Charlotte Observer)
but they replied that Whitener’s endorsement was sufficient reason to back the bill. Even then, Whitener feared the bill could not pass a roll-call vote. Eventually, he persuaded enough congressmen who opposed the bill but liked him to remain in the House cloakroom, and the bill passed the House on a voice vote.82 The Senate concurred, and on 8 September 1965 President Johnson signed the twenty-five-mile plan into law. In a sense, plans for rapid transit in Washington changed little between 1960 and 1965. The NCTA had returned to its original mission as a small, weak agency, designed to engineer a modest rapid transit system and not rock the boat. In terms of mileage, the authorized transit system was smaller than the one proposed by the MTS plan of 1959. But time would prove that it was not so easy to redefine a transit system. By making public a plan centered on rail, Stolzenbach had set the terms of the debate. He had transformed the idea of rapid transit, first introduced by the MTS, from a mere appendage of a large highway system into a threat to urban expressways everywhere. Once this position was published, it could not be forgotten. Equally important, Stolzenbach had taught Washingtonians that transportation planning is not just a matter of letting the engineers find the best solution to a technical problem, but a political process in which competing
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priorities must be resolved by negotiation among interest groups. The idealism of the Kennedy administration made transit essential to a new vision for Washington and America’s cities. More immediately, the passage of the bill gave the NCTA a lot of work to do. Prior to 1965, rapid transit was essentially an abstract idea to be debated by politicians. Although engineers were needed to give a rough form to the politicians’ proposals, no one expected precise designs or binding decisions. With the authorization of a bobtailed system, however, someone had to determine what the subway would actually look like. Throughout 1966 and 1967, architects, engineers, and another group of Kennedy appointees would passionately debate the role of transit in the rebuilding of Washington.
1965–1967
3
The Stations
No visitor who sees the Washington Metro can fail to react to its appearance. Metro’s underground stations are 600 feet long, each containing about enough space to fit the Washington Monument laid on its side. Unlike the subways of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, whose low ceilings and forests of iron girders recall mine shafts, Metro is built of grand, vaulted spaces mostly free of columns and glowing with soft, indirect light. Walking to the edge of the mezzanine is like gazing from a balcony down to a ballroom below. But that ballroom lacks the chandeliers of Moscow or the gaudy colors of Paris, substituting the Spartan structural elements of orthodox modernism wed to the monumental materials—bronze and granite—of federal Washington. Looking around, the rider sees a coffered ceiling reminiscent of the Pantheon, Corbusian concrete curves, and practical details, such as lights on the platform edge that begin to flash as the train approaches, sparing impatient riders the need to lean out over the tracks and peer down the tunnel. Passengers emerge from trains into a station much like the one they entered, for all the underground stations share similar vaulted roofs and walls, and even the aboveground stations repeat key elements, an effect essentially unique among the world’s transit systems. Three and a half decades after its design, Metro remains, in a word, stunning. Even those who call it inhuman acknowledge its power.1 In early 1975, before the system opened, a real-estate agent given a preview tour of a station remarked, “it’s hard to believe that the much-maligned bureaucrat with whom we’ve come to associate words like ‘unimaginative, dull, utilitarian’ could even consider such a beautiful structure, let alone go through with it.”2 Indeed, the design of Metro took both imagination and boldness, but it was not the work of a single bureaucrat, or of any one individual. Rather, the design was negotiated. On one side were the civil engineers, for whom a subway’s beauty would lie in efficiency and economy. On the other side was a group of architects and critics determined to keep alive the Kennedy vision of bringing federal architecture, especially Washington’s, into the modernist era, whatever the cost. In the middle was a gifted architect who had to please everyone. The final design reflects liberals’ belief in a grand public realm.
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A typical Metro station vault (Harry Weese Associates)
Federal Architecture Debated
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the McMillan Commission had put Washington in the vanguard of American architecture. The design of the Mall—low, white buildings with classical motifs, placed symmetrically around open spaces of green lawns and pools of water—was the most complete realization of the City Beautiful aesthetic adopted in part by cities from San Francisco to Chicago to Philadelphia. At its completion in 1908, Daniel Burnham’s Union Station was utterly contemporary, a model for McKim, Mead & White’s Penn Station in New York. The Lincoln Memorial, begun in 1912, was equally true to its era. But by the time that memorial was completed in 1922, the very success of the McMillan Plan threatened to freeze Washington’s architecture. To prevent future construction from ruining their achievement, members and admirers of the McMillan Commission had petitioned the president and Congress to establish a body to advise the federal government on the design of public space. In 1910 Congress agreed, creating a Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) to advise on the location and design “of statues, fountains, and monuments in the public squares, streets, and parks in the
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The Stations, 1965–1967
District of Columbia.” Later executive orders and legislation expanded the commission’s advisory powers to include public buildings anywhere in the District of Columbia, as well as all buildings abutting major ceremonial spaces and in Georgetown.3 The act specified that the commissioners were to be “seven well-qualified judges of the fine arts” appointed by the president, and the early commissions were composed of men who had participated in the McMillan Plan or its major components. The CFA soon proved more loyal to the neoclassical forms of the McMillan Plan than to the boldness that had created that plan, and by the 1930s Washington risked becoming a stagnant museum of the Beaux-Arts. As other cities turned to other styles—the Art Deco of New York’s skyscrapers or the clean lines of Frank Lloyd Wright—official Washington kept churning out fluted columns of limestone, granite, and marble. The new buildings of Federal Triangle sat behind fluted columns. So did the massive Commerce Department. In the late 1920s and 1930s, architect Paul Cret used his commissions for the Folger Shakespeare Library, the federal Central Heating Plant, and the Federal Reserve Building to apply sparse classical ornament to largely modernist facades. Here was monumentality without columns, and contemporary architecture without skyscraper towers. But Cret’s impact was dwarfed by the new Supreme Court of 1935, designed by Cass Gilbert. At a time when New York already had its Chrysler and Empire State buildings, the Court was a marble Roman temple with an intimidating staircase, a sculptural pediment, and yet more fluted columns. Washington was in a rut.4 The CFA showed its power and conservatism most clearly in 1939, when the Smithsonian Institution held a competition to design a new art museum on the south side of the Mall. Out of more than 400 designs submitted, the jury awarded first prize to a proposal submitted by Finnish-born architect Eliel Saarinen, but largely conceived by his son Eero. The Saarinen design was clad in white marble (as specified by the competition program, which gave the choice of marble, limestone, or granite), but other than that it was a radical departure. It used no classical elements, preferring simple slabs, and was laid out as a balanced but asymmetrical grouping of forms, eschewing the strict symmetry of Union Station, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Supreme Court. The competition jury applauded the design’s ease of movement and possibility of expansion, as well as Saarinen’s willingness to depart from neoclassicism. Joseph Hudnut, the Harvard dean of architecture who had helped select the jury, explained, “although the architects of the [McMillan] Plan desired to impose a general form and system upon the buildings of Washington, it was certainly not their intention—and still less the intention of L’Enfant—to burden all future buildings in Washington with an armature of granite and classic form.” CFA chairman Gilmore Clarke disagreed, calling the design “factory-like . . . offensive” and “totally unsuited to the Mall.” The design was shelved, and the museum was never built.5
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The Great Society Subway
The 1930s had at least benefited from the work of architects with enough training in classical architecture to put their pediments and columns in the right places. By the 1950s a new generation of architects and patrons no longer spoke the pure classical language, and the federal government began building “pastiche Beaux Arts” instead.6 Particularly offensive to architecture critics was the Rayburn House Office Building, which opened in 1965. Architectural Forum complained of monumental stairways that led to locked doors, baffling allegorical sculptures, and inflexible office space. Ada Louise Huxtable of the New York Times bemoaned “flagrant debasement of vestigial classical details, ranging from balconies apparently supporting columns on the numbingly ordinary, overblown facade to coarse classical cornices framing stock modern grid lighting in ludicrous juxtaposition inside. . . . The Rayburn Building is a national disaster.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it “perhaps the most alarming and unavoidable sign of the declining vitality of American government that we have yet witnessed.” Meanwhile, on the Mall, the Smithsonian chose the firm of McKim, Mead & White over the Saarinens to design the new Museum of History and Technology (later renamed the National Museum of American History, and still later the Behring Center). The architects kept the fussy outlines of the Beaux-Arts but left off the ornament. Critics sighed and waited for the trees to grow. Meanwhile, Architectural Forum mocked the Commission of Fine Arts as “one of the principal anachronisms in an architecturally anachronistic city.”7 But just as John F. Kennedy shook up governance in the District of Columbia, so did he change the federal government’s approach to architecture. It was rumored that he and Arthur Goldberg—who was to become Kennedy’s secretary of labor—spent the inaugural parade eyeing Pennsylvania Avenue and pondering improvements. Kennedy could do nothing about the Rayburn Building, which was under the jurisdiction of Congress, but he did use what powers he had to improve federal architecture. In Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, he showed support for both modernism and historic preservation by ensuring that new government buildings were designed in a modernist vocabulary that nonetheless respected the early nineteenth-century structures they neighbored. Goldberg began planning to clear the Mall of the temporary buildings left over from World War II, while Kennedy founded the President’s Council on Pennsylvania Avenue to assure his successors a more attractive parade route.8 In some cases, the president took a personal interest, getting down on the floor to play with architectural models and eagerly reading Architectural Forum’s January 1963 special issue on Washington. More frequently, he lent the prestige of his office to the plans of others. On 23 May 1962 he endorsed the report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space. Although the report primarily dealt with the quantitative need for offices, it included— thanks to Daniel Moynihan and the president—a section called “Guiding
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The Stations, 1965–1967
Principles for Federal Architecture.” Asserting that federal buildings, especially those in Washington, should “provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability of the American Government,” the directive pledged to avoid an official style by hiring “distinguished architects” from outside the government, by competition when appropriate.”9 The National Capital Transportation Agency was born in the middle of this shake-up of federal architecture, but not everyone put the two together. Most people considered a subway—like a freeway, bridge, or railroad—to be a work of engineering, not architecture. Of course, everyone agreed that it had to be nice. However bitter the debate over whether the city should have rapid transit, no one questioned that if a rapid transit system were built, only the best would do for Washington. Certainly the capital needed something better than the infamous New York subway. When it opened in the early twentieth century, the New York system had been applauded for its tile mosaics and bas reliefs. But over the next several decades, the New York subway grew decrepit, filthy, and crowded. Ridership reached a peak of more than 2 billion in 1947. The crush led the New York Times Magazine to call the subway “a mobile torture chamber.” In 1959 a Soviet official used the New York subway as a symbol of the essential rottenness of American society. As late as 1967, Fortune magazine headlined an article with the shocking news, “Subways Don’t Have to Be Miserable.” The article, by architectural critic Walter McQuade, explained to Fortune readers in New York that their subway was not representative of the potential of rapid transit but was, in fact, “quite possibly the worst of the world’s thirty-two underground transit systems,” with Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago not much better.10 Such misery would not do for Washington. The Mass Transportation Survey promised that rather than force commuters out of their cars by limiting parking, it would lure them with a “high-class, attractive transit system.” Its 1959 Mass Transportation plan used photographs of European systems and assured its readers that “the equipment proposed for Washington will be far superior to that now used in most American cities; for example, it will bear little resemblance to the older equipment in use in New York City.” Likewise, Stolzenbach’s NCTA used New York as a model of what not to do.11 Traditionally, making transit nice meant letting the engineers design the system and then calling in architects to “pretty it up.” This had been the case in prewar subways, such as New York’s. It was also true of the Toronto subway, an inspiration for proponents of rapid transit since the opening in 1954. The appearance of that system was largely the work of its engineers: De Leuw, Cather, the same firm that served as consultant to the MTS and the NCTA. Admirers noticed that it was clean, quiet, and temperate, and lamented the lack of architectural imagination no more than they would the lack of a fashion statement by a basement furnace.12 In 1959 the MTS plan considered Toronto quite adequate architectur-
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The Great Society Subway
A proposal for Toronto-like stations (NCTA, Appendix to November 1, 1962 Report to the President, vol. 1: Engineering, 1963)
ally, pledging that Washington’s transit “stations will be made attractive to the patrons by incorporating architectural features of the most advanced design. They will be similar, for example, to the facilities recently built in Toronto” with tile and fluorescent lighting to give them a clean, bright appearance. The early plans put forth by the NCTA shared this vision. In early 1963, for example, the agency released a drawing of a proposed station, showing tiled walls, a low ceiling, supported by columns, and a stairway alongside an escalator. When NCTA publicist Cody Pfanstiehl needed to convince suburbanites that not all subways were as filthy and noisy as New York’s, he took community leaders to Toronto.13 On the other hand, no one would say that Toronto was beautiful. John Rannells of the NCTA later described the system as “little better than a cleaned-up version of New York or Philadelphia,” and some architects would note the low, ten-foot ceilings and the columns that interrupted views. As one critic later put it, the subway was “superbly functional, pathologically clean and as colourful as the gent’s toilets that adorned Victorian England at the time of the Prince Consort.”14 The NCTA’s confidence in a clean, engineered subway began to erode
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The Stations, 1965–1967
in early 1963. In January, De Leuw, Cather submitted a plan for a proposed station at Pentagon City that appalled NCTA staffer Richard Fernbach. In a memo, Fernbach complained that the walk from feeder bus to rapid transit train was far too long, and that the plan was so bad it could hurt the entire program: “[A]t a time when discussion of Washington architecture is very much in the air, this design could well bring the Agency unnecessary unfavorable criticism.” He suggested hiring an architect to redo the study. Rannells, the agency’s city planning expert, read the memo and passed it on to Stolzenbach himself, who agreed, noting that NCTA staffer John Insco Williams (trained as an architect but working as a planner) had sketched a station that would let passengers exit a bus on one side of a platform and board a train on the other. Three weeks later, the NCTA established a Consulting Architect Selection Board with Rannells as chairman and Williams as secretary. But the NCTA still had modest architectural ambitions. Rannells was content to limit the search to firms already within 150 miles of Washington.15 Frederick Gutheim, chairman of the NCTA Advisory Board, wanted more. Gutheim, universally known as Fritz, had grown up in Washington and had lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, since the early 1940s. He had served as staff director to the Bible Committee, and had gotten a seat on the NCTA Advisory Board thanks to Tom Farmer, a Cleveland Park highway protestor with Kennedy connections. Gutheim had been recruited for his expertise in planning, but he saw a chance to wear his second hat, that of an architectural critic. In 1941 he had edited the essays of Frank Lloyd Wright, followed in 1960 by a book applauding the work of Finnish modernist Alvar Aalto. Gutheim was cheered by the policies of the Kennedy administration, predicting an architectural image “of boldness, youthfulness and, I would expect, advancing technical competence.” But he was even more inspired by the embodiment of those qualities in a holdover from the Eisenhower administration, Dulles Airport, then rising from the farms on the border of Fairfax and Loudoun counties, Virginia.16 Dulles was about twenty-five miles outside of downtown, far enough from the Mall to escape the notice, concern, and authority of the guardians of neoclassicism. Moreover, it was an airport—a machine for getting people and goods onto and off of aircraft—and, in the initial conception of its builders, the Federal Aviation Agency, no place for architectural creativity at all. But the FAA hired Eero Saarinen, who had done most of the work on the Smithsonian proposal of 1939 and had made a name for himself with the TWA terminal at Idlewild (later, John F. Kennedy) Airport in New York City. Saarinen sent architect Kent Cooper as project manager for Dulles, and Cooper persuaded the FAA that one of the functions of an airport was to welcome people to Washington, just as Burnham’s Union Station had half a century before.17 With license to build something striking, Saarinen responded with a design at once respectful of Washington’s traditions and utterly contemporary. He used limestone columns, but the limestone came
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Dulles Airport, 1962 (Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority)
in the form of pebbles embedded in concrete, and the columns were not Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian, but smooth, sweeping forms. He designed a curved, catenary roof, less expressive of stable architecture than of dynamic flight, but tempered the terminal’s boldness with a monochromatic palette. Gutheim loved it. In a January 1963 speech, he compared it to the Smithsonian Castle, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial as a splendid exemplar of the style of its day. Two months later, in an address to the Architectural League of New York, he repeatedly praised the airport as an example of excellence in federal building, something he attributed to Saarinen’s salesmanship and doggedness as much as to his architectural imagination. This is just what he wanted for Washington’s rapid transit. Saarinen himself had died in 1961, before his airport opened. But Saarinen’s project manager at Dulles, Kent Cooper, remained in Washington, and Gutheim recruited him to work as a consultant to NCTA.18 John Rannells, to whom Cooper reported, had no objection. Trained as an engineer, Rannells was an architectural dilettante, having worked in the offices of Cass Gilbert in the 1920s and 1930s. Like Gutheim, Rannells believed that Roland Wank’s designs for the Tennessee Valley Administration dams of the 1930s had proved that large, federal engineering projects could benefit from innovative architecture. Gutheim, Cooper, and Rannells now all wanted the same for Washington’s subway.19 At Dulles, Saarinen’s firm had been a subcontractor to the airport’s en-
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gineers, Ammann & Whitney. This arrangement, common to most public works projects of the time, put the architect’s vision at a disadvantage. (Conversely, on office towers, the architect usually hired the engineer.) Only by cultivating the engineer’s employer—the FAA—had Cooper been able to bring Dulles’s architecture to an equal footing with engineering. Similarly, in San Francisco’s BART system, architects’ subordination to engineers led, in Rannells’s opinion, to disappointing architecture and avoidable controversy. To avoid repeating this difficulty, Rannells—with Cooper’s encouragement and Stolzenbach’s approval—decided in 1964 to hire an architectural firm and an engineering firm directly, rather than having one subcontract the other. The two firms would be equals, forced to negotiate a solution acceptable to both.20 Though Stolzenbach himself was more concerned with routing and economics than with appearance, Gutheim, Rannells, and others convinced him to support a drive for top-rate architecture. In 1965 he put his name on a letter to William Walton, the new chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, pledging that “both engineering and architectural talents of a high order” would make the system “worthy of the Great Society.” The next year, the NCTA staff secured a firmer mandate. In a February 1966 letter largely drafted by the NCTA itself, President Johnson officially asked the NCTA “to search worldwide for concepts and ideas that can be used to make this system attractive as well as useful. It should be designed so as to set an example for the Nation, and to take its place among the most attractive in the world. In selecting the architects for this system, you must seek those who can best combine utility with good urban design.”21 The presidential letter was merely high-level approval for work the NCTA was already doing. By May 1965 Rannells and Cooper had drafted criteria for choosing an architect. Cooper “was absolutely convinced on the basis of my Dulles experience, that prior transit experience should not be required.” Instead, “suitable prototypes for station interiors are less likely to be found in the typical subway than in the pleasant public spaces of the best airline terminals and the more successful public buildings. It is not appearance alone that makes these agreeable; it is the total experience of moving through them.”22 Most of all, Cooper pushed for a “system-wide approach” to station design. Subways in London and New York used decor to link one station to the next. New York was famous for its mosaics; London for its sans-serif typography. But several postwar systems, notably Montreal and the new lines in Stockholm, designed each station individually to reflect its relation to its neighborhood. Ernest Born, an architect at work on the BART system, loved Stockholm, noting that “the agent that unifies design of such diversity is not a matter of geometry or color, it is quality.” Downtown stations were distinct from those in the suburbs. Sprague Thresher, BART’s staff architect, noted that variety was appropriate to BART, more of a commuter system than a rapid transit line. Its widely spaced stations serve multiple,
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independent towns and communities. Moreover, San Francisco lacks the monumental architectural identity of Washington. It has no Capitol and White House to define an architectural center for the metropolis.23 Cooper rejected this individual-station approach for two reasons. First, individually designed stations meant a higher up-front cost, as each station’s architect started from scratch. Given the competitive nature of architecture, designers would be tempted to build stations like world’s fair pavilions—flashy structures conceived to advertise their architects rather than work with one another or to last for centuries. And the variety of colors, materials, and designs would make maintaining each station a specialized task. One station might demand polish for chrome, another one would need yellow paint. Forever. With a systemwide design, an architectural or construction problem (such as deterring graffiti or pouring concrete) once solved would largely stay solved, and maintenance would be vastly simplified, with parts, paints, and supplies usable throughout the system. The second reason for a systemwide approach was to serve the riders. As Cooper later recalled, Americans of the 1960s were traveling more all the time. The service industry had responded by offering standardization: McDonald’s menus and Holiday Inn rooms were the same in Oregon, Texas, and New Jersey. A traveler who had once mastered the layout of a Holiday Inn room would never again search for the light switch. Why should a transit rider have to learn each station?24 Cooper insisted on finding an architect who would understand this logic. Rather than limiting the search within 150 miles of Washington, Cooper cast the broadest net that he could, advertising in the national architectural press as well as sending letters directly to a number of firms. He and Gutheim had defined the project in a way bound to appeal to ambitious architects. As he later put it, “here we were in a period of rapid urbanization, and transportation was coming to the fore. . . . And here was the chance to take the nation’s capital and invent from the ground up a whole new transportation system. My god!” A greater challenge was getting the bidders to understand what was wanted. Nat Owings, of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, proposed taking on both architecture and engineering, ignoring the agency’s stated wish to have separate but equal contractors for both tasks. Another finalist’s architects, Cooper recalled, “knew all about subways and knew all about urbanization, but they didn’t know all about prototypicalness. And they didn’t see this as reinventing the idea of urban transportation, and that cost them the job.”25 The Public Approach
In 1966 Harry Weese was a rising name in American architecture. Born in 1915 in a suburb of Chicago, as a boy he spent so much time drawing that his father, a banker, worried that his son would never have a profession and suggested architecture as a way to combine drawing and business. Harry agreed, and after high school he headed east to MIT. There he
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Harry Weese (left) with Walter McCarter, Libby Rowe (front row), Stan Allan, and Bob Reynolds (back row) (WMATA)
encountered Alvar Aalto—the subject of Gutheim’s book—and became a disciple of Finnish modernism. After graduating in 1938, Weese pursued his interest in Finnish design by winning a fellowship in city planning at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The school had been founded a few years before by Eliel Saarinen, and by the late 1930s it was a “Scandinavian Bauhaus,” as Weese later called it. Like the German Bauhaus, it was a center of modernism, but with its own version of the movement.26 Cranbrook’s greatest distinction was its emphasis on context. Saarinen insisted on design rooted in both space and time. A skyscraper, for example, could only work as part of a larger city plan. And while other modernists found little of value in the past, the Cranbrook approach distinguished itself by its sensitivity to history. As Weese recalled in the 1970s, “schools now are barbarized by the fact that when Gropius came he tossed out the history books. I feel that if you don’t know everything that’s been built in architecture, you shouldn’t even draw a line.” Cranbrook was also a place for Weese to meet lifelong friends, including Charles Eames and Eliel Saarinen’s son, Eero, who became a close friend despite a rivalry over Eero’s future wife. When the two Saarinens entered the Smithsonian competition of 1939, Weese helped out, perhaps learning the difficulties of getting approval for designs in central Washington.27
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Weese’s first job out of Cranbrook was with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, a firm known for its modernism. After naval service in World War II, he returned briefly to SOM before opening his own practice in 1947. Looking for alternatives to modernist rigor, Weese drew on the history he had studied at Cranbrook. Although he still insisted on functionality, he began borrowing ideas from such Chicago School architects as Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham. This respect for the past led him to reject Corbusian city planning, the sort that Justement had proposed for Washington. “Urban life must be maintained, improved, and made attractive again,” he wrote in 1958. “But this cannot happen if each generation knocks everything down and starts over.”28 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Weese’s firm grew, and his name appeared with increasing frequency in architectural journals. As befitted a banker’s son, Weese had a reputation for thrift. He was comfortable working beyond the scale of individual buildings, having done planning projects in several cities. He knew Washington from his work on the William Zeckendorf proposal for redeveloping Southwest and for his much-applauded 1959 design for Arena Stage, a theater built in that neighborhood. And he had experience with a federal client, having won admiration for his U.S. Embassy building in Accra, Ghana. Most important, as it turned out, was his experience with prototype design, such as his work on a chain of dealerships for Cummins Engines and supermarkets for Purity Foods. Weese had even designed a prototype skyscraper for corporations that could not afford a flashy signature design. This was just the sort of thinking needed by an agency hoping to build dozens of transit stations quickly and cheaply.29 When Weese received the NCTA’s invitation for a proposal on 15 December 1965, he saw an opportunity to apply the firm’s expertise in both city planning and prototype design. His application emphasized that “the activity of conceptual design programming and monitoring of a prototype is very familiar to us” from the Cummins and Purity projects, in which they had done everything from product packaging to landscaping to building a corporate image. Weese’s letter made him the top candidate; his interview confirmed the choice. Whereas other finalists came into the interview eager to talk about the latest developments in concrete, Weese focused on the people who would ride the system. Moreover, his supermarket experience showed that he knew how to design spaces for people in motion. On 10 March 1966 the NCTA hired Harry Weese & Associates as its general architectural consultant.30 Weese quickly assembled a team from among his firm’s architects. To manage the project, Weese tapped Stanley Allan, who had grown up in Washington and whose experience on projects of this scale included Skidmore’s work on the Air Force Academy. For principal designer, he chose Bob Reynolds, of whom he later recalled, “he could draw like a fool. Smart enough to be able to think in 3-D. Dream up a design in the middle of the night. He’d just scribble it on the bedside table to remember it for the next
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day.”31 Weese would handle the big concepts, Reynolds would translate Weese’s sketches into more refined perspective drawings, and Allan would work with the client. Neither Weese, nor Allan, nor Reynolds knew much about rapid transit. They knew that New York was what not to do, and that Stockholm worked. But several other European and Japanese cities had new subways, or new lines of older systems. So just three weeks after being selected for the job, the architects departed on a world tour. Weese planned one itinerary, Allan and Reynolds another. They planned the most time, all of three days each, in the largest cities—London, Paris, and Rome—and in Stockholm. For smaller cities, they allotted as little as twelve hours between arrival and departure. In each city, the architects made notes, sketches, and photographs, gathering both examples to be imitated and pitfalls to avoid. It was easy to scorn the filth of Madrid, or the profusion of ads in London. More difficult was identifying what made a given system work. Allan and Reynolds were especially impressed by Milan, with its “perfect and identical circulation in all stations,” lack of columns, and bold graphics, and by Hamburg, another new system. And, like so many others, they were awed by overall quality in Stockholm, and the way in which transit was being used to shape metropolitan growth.32 Weese and his architects spent May and June digesting what they had seen. Then Weese made sense of the variety: There are three basic approaches to the design of a transit system: utilitarian, commercial, and public. The utilitarian is the extension of practical developments with only passing notice to the amenities, but has the virtue of simplicity. The commercial approach is to cash in on every square foot of rentable space, often producing it for its own sake, selling access to its mezzanine to abutting property owners, and engaging in spot private development projects along the route. The public approach does not treat riders like a captive audience. Its spaces are treated like public buildings and a certain dignity and even elegance is sought after. . . . In Washington, since this is the system serving all segments of the population, it is particularly important that no stigma of cheapness or of the bargain basement is attached to it.33
Having made the decision for a public approach, the architects had to translate the idea into sketches and a proposal to be presented to the NCTA on 6 July 1966. They used most of their time brainstorming, waiting until the Independence Day weekend to put something final on paper. Weese hoped to make Washington’s system a public system by going far beyond the NCTA’s original hopes for a second Toronto. He sought to combine the best elements of each system he had seen. As in Berlin, passengers would walk or ride escalators directly from the surface to the platform, with no intervening mezzanines. As in Milan, the entire system would have a unified graphic design; newspapers would be restrained to
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tidy vending machines and advertising “controlled as to content and quality to be a visual asset and provide a kind of pop art gaiety to the changing scene.” Fare collection at busy locations would be on the honor system because “zoo-like detention is not compatible with the image or the clientele of this system.”34 It went almost without saying that the stations would be climate-controlled and as quiet as acoustical engineers could make them. As with the Saarinen designs for the Smithsonian Gallery and for Dulles, traditional materials would go a long way toward fitting a modern design into the context of Washington. Though the Weese architects had been impressed by the attractive wood in Berlin and Stockholm, they proposed the monumental materials of granite and bronze for Washington, set among large structural forms of concrete, which Eero Saarinen had popularized for serious architecture and which was becoming a favorite for federal buildings.35 Underground stations, by their basement nature, would be the hardest part of the system to make very nice. Here Weese proposed vaults, turning the stations into underground equivalents of classic nineteenth-century rail stations, with their cast-iron trainsheds. Allan and Reynolds had seen vaults in Lisbon, Rome, London, and Paris, and even the humble New York City subway featured vaults at some stations. Weese proposed them for every underground station in Washington. Vaults allowed him to dispense with columns, improving sightlines and giving the trainrooms a sense of spaciousness. (On one drawing he wrote the word “spacious” curved into the air under a vault.) Both Rannells and Gutheim were pleased.36 Weese now showed his designs to the Chicago engineering firm of De Leuw, Cather & Company, which had been hired as NCTA’s general engineering consultant on 7 January 1966, two months before Weese’s selection as general architectural consultant. De Leuw, Cather had much more experience in Washington and in transit than did Weese. The firm had worked on the Toronto subway and the Congress Street Expressway transit line in Chicago and had done studies for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in California. It had been involved in Washington since the 1940s, when Charles De Leuw had partnered with the J.E. Greiner Company to study the city’s traffic. Since then, it had completed contracts with the D.C. Department of Highways, the Mass Transportation Survey, and the NCTA. Moreover, Howard Lyon, the NCTA chief of engineering, was a De Leuw, Cather veteran, and Walter McCarter knew and trusted the firm from his days at the Chicago Transit Authority. As the established expert on transportation engineering in Washington, it could expect to be listened to. Leading the De Leuw, Cather team as project manager was Jim Caywood, until a few months before chief engineer of the B&O Railroad. He knew tracks, signals, and tunnels and saw a rapid transit system as “a little, faster railroad.”37 The notion of having the architect equal to the engineer was as new to the engineers as it was to the architects. De Leuw, Cather was accus-
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Harry Weese’s 1966 sketch of a spacious vaulted station (Stanley N. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, 1994)
tomed to doing whole projects—railroads, dams, and the like—without any architectural input, or at most leaving only the finishing touches to the architects, as had been the case in Toronto. The engineers saw their job as designing a rapid transit system, leaving room at the stations for the architects to do as they pleased. And they would be happy to lend their expertise to guide the architect in his decisions. After all, engineers had more experience than architects working underground. Unlike most buildings, which must be kept from falling down, subway stations, being air bubbles in fluid soil, must be restrained from rising up. And urban earth is generally more crowded than the air into which architects normally build. In his July sketches, Weese proposed stations so close to the surface that passengers could ride escalators straight to the platform, without mezzanines. That system worked fine in the Soviet Union, where subways were often built in the open countryside, but the De Leuw, Cather engineers pointed out that the streets of Washington covered a thick web of sewers, gas lines, and telephone and electric cables. Avoiding them meant deeper platforms, longer escalators, and, to allow for angled approaches, mezzanines. Weese accepted this point and worked to make the mezzanines as open and straightforward as possible.38
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More significant were the engineers’ ideas about the basic shape of stations. In October 1966 both architects and engineers toured subways in Toronto and Montreal, the latter of which had been hurriedly built to serve the 1967 Expo. The architects found Toronto, with its cramped ceilings and columns, a poor model and became determined to hold out for “column free trainrooms, with the mezzanines within, creating one grand space, combining the movements of crowds of people and the movement of the trains as an overall functional reality held together inside the enveloping structural form.” This priority jibed with the NCTA’s fears that columns would shelter vagrants and criminals. The engineers were proud of De Leuw, Cather’s cost-effective work in Toronto, but they conceded that a Toronto-style design, however economical, might be too drab for Washington. Montreal, in contrast, offered both economy and style. Several of its sleek, attractive stations used long trusses to support the ceilings, eliminating the need for columns. One journal, contrasting it with the “squalid” New York subway, called it “perhaps the best new architecture in Montreal.”39 Montreal showed that engineering and architecture could be compatible. De Leuw, Cather did not want to force Weese to accept columns or deny him the spaciousness he wanted. It simply pointed out that since cut-and-cover stations are dug straight down into the earth, the simplest and most spacious thing to do is to put a flat ceiling across the open space, supporting the utilities and street above on a fifty-five or sixty-foot-long Vierendeel truss or prestressed beam. Moreover, rectangular cross-section stations could be more easily adapted to the crowded underground of downtown, saving the cost of underpinning neighboring buildings that would overlap the edges of a vault. By the end of October, the engineers had prepared cross-section drawings of twelve alternative schemes, including a box-sectioned proposal that, they estimated, would be up to 9 percent cheaper than Weese’s vault design. It would not be as cheap as stations with columns, but it would mean a significant savings. John Rannells of the NCTA was impressed, and he asked Weese to reconsider the notion of vaults for all stations.40 Weese objected to the cheapest column-free proposals, which would have required a hung ceiling—violating his wish that the stations reveal their structure. Nor was he likely impressed by the engineers’ desire to economize. As his project manager, Stan Allan, later explained, “we weren’t trying to save money. That was never entered into the picture.” But Weese did not object to the general idea of a column-free box, for, regardless of cost, it would provide riders with more space than a vault. Even before the trip to Montreal, he had stated his intention to provide “maximum spaciousness,” asking rhetorically, “What is the point of excavating all of the earth and then filling it all back up again? We simply make it a large void where we can.” Montreal and De Leuw, Cather had shown him the most efficient way of realizing that goal.41 The refinement of Weese’s thinking emerged in November, with the
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Harry Weese’s monumental treatment of De Leuw, Cather’s box-shaped design (CFA-NA, box 74)
presentation to the NCTA of a “Synopsis of Concept Design and Policy,” a spiral-bound book of drawings by Bob Reynolds with brief captions and introductory text. Weese and his team now offered their client dozens of views of station interiors, representing several types of station and cross sections. Some stayed close to the July sketches. A vault could be a simple semiellipse, with a flat bottom and curved top. It could be what Weese called a “low vault,” with the walls actually curving back toward the center, giving the station a cross section the shape of a mushroom cap. Or, for cutand-cover stations, the vault could resemble traditional church architecture: straight, vertical walls supporting a curved ceiling. Another set of drawings sketched in long girders to create a trainroom free of columns but with flat walls and ceilings—much as in Montreal. Finally, some of the November sketches show stations with roofs supported with a tangle of columns and diagonal struts as cluttered as anything in New York City. These drawings are so unattractive they seem designed to eliminate interior columns as an option rather than to portray it as an alternative.42 Over the winter Weese refined a more definite proposal based on the underlying structure of underground construction. Cut-and-cover stations would follow the model of Montreal, which, in Weese’s words, “manages at the same time, by use of fine materials, clear spans, and lofty stations
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Harry Weese’s proposal for a station with exposed rock walls (CFA-NA, box 75)
(where cut and cover), to create an architecture of public buildings nearest to the Moscow precedent,” but without “Russian pomposity.” They would be shaped like boxes, with roofs supported by visible girders.43 Where stations were to be blasted through rock (as for the Connecticut Avenue line from Dupont Circle to Van Ness), the physical logic was quite different. With dozens of feet of rock and earth to support, an arch was much more sensible than a flat roof.44 Moreover, because of the expense of drilling an escalator tunnel through rock, the NCTA planned entrances at only one end of the platform, unlike the double-ended cut-and-cover stations downtown. Weese tailored design to conditions. Few entering passengers would walk all the way to the other end of a 600-foot platform, so Weese made the stations slightly wider at the end with the escalator. And, because the stations were to be blasted out of hard schist and gneiss, he borrowed an idea from Stockholm, leaving large sections of rough, unfinished rock visible from the platform. In Weese’s vision of the system, cut-andcover stations would express their cut-and-cover origins, and rock stations would do the same. Holding both types together was, Weese would later explain, a simple principle: “[O]ur whole thrust has been to maximize the volume.”45 For cut-and-cover stations, which began with a rectangular cut in the earth, maximizing volume meant not ceding any space back to the earth, instead preserving it with flat walls and a flat roof. For rock stations, it meant ceilings that lined the structural vault above, and stations that were wider where they could expect more people. This was a reasoned compromise between engineers’ desire for economy and architects’ desire for spaciousness and comfort. It reflected De Leuw, Cather’s work on civil engineering and transportation, Caywood’s deep knowledge of railroad engineering, and Weese’s
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careful observation of the world’s newest transit systems. It would seem to meet the criteria set by Kennedy, Moynihan, Gutheim, and Cooper. But the same federal concern with the District of Columbia that made architecture such a high priority for Washington’s rapid transit became a burden when Weese’s design came before the Commission of Fine Arts. The Commission of Fine Arts
The concept design of July and November 1966 reflected the agendas of two organizations: the National Capital Transportation Agency and Harry Weese & Associates. Both wanted a system impressive enough to be worthy of Washington but also practical enough to function. The Commission of Fine Arts, in contrast, had aesthetics as its only institutional concern, so it pushed for a grand aesthetic gesture. By the time it had won CFA approval, the system’s design embodied a negotiated idea of beauty. The graceful but expensive curves that greet Metro’s riders today are the concrete expression of a particular political system that elevated architectural formality and the image of federal Washington beyond any constraint. The conservative Commission of Fine Arts, still hostile to modernism, melted away in the spring of 1963, as six of the seven members’ terms expired almost at once. (President Kennedy had already appointed Hideo Sasaki of Harvard to fill a landscape architecture seat.) Both John and Jackie Kennedy seized the opportunity to make, in the words of critic Wolf Von Eckardt, “a decisive break with the Beaux Arts minded previous Commission.” One obvious pick was artist William Walton, a former journalist who had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with hand grenades on his belt and a typewriter strapped to his chest. After the war, Walton was posted to Washington, arriving in Georgetown just a few months after the newly elected Congressman John F. Kennedy. The two became close friends, and when Kennedy became president, Walton was a frequent visitor to the White House. With Arthur Schlesinger and August Heckscher, Kennedy’s special consultant on the arts, Walton advised Kennedy on his appointments to the CFA, and got the chairmanship himself. Blaming Eisenhower for “spread[ing] a mantle of mediocrity and middle age over the city” (making an exception for Dulles Airport), Walton was determined to attract serious, contemporary architecture to Washington.46 Other appointees were equally distinguished. John Carl Warnecke of California, like Walton, was a personal friend of the Kennedys, advising them on Lafayette Square and the Naval Academy, and doing private work for Robert and Teddy Kennedy. Aline Saarinen had established herself as a prominent architectural critic before marrying Eero Saarinen in 1953. When Jackie Kennedy asked that a woman be appointed to the commission, she was a natural choice. Moreover, her connection to Eero put her on common ground with other commissioners. Aline Saarinen and Walton served on an advisory board to help complete the furnishing of Dulles Airport, and sculptor Theodore Roszak, another new appointee, had worked with
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Eero on a chapel at MIT and the U.S. Embassy in London. Warnecke had also considered Eero a role model and a friend.47 The commissioner to take the most active interest in the subway was architect Gordon Bunshaft, a partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he had supervised Weese during the latter’s brief time at the firm after World War II. Walton remembered him later as “Gordon the gruff, teutonic with bristly hair and ever-present pipe muffling his words.” A committed modernist, Bunshaft was at the height of his fame. In 1951 he had brought the International Style to New York City with his glass-covered Lever House tower. The popularity of that design had gained him commissions for several more corporate headquarters, as well as buildings on the Yale campus and for the Smithsonian’s new Hirshhorn museum. Bunshaft was known not only for his talent but also for his blunt speech. On the commission, Bunshaft was particularly caustic. His attitude was contagious, and by early 1964 Washington’s architects were complaining that Commission of Fine Arts hearings were becoming vicious hazings in which commissioners traded harsh quips at the expense of the reputations of the architects before them.48 Weese belonged to the circle of the new commission. He himself had been considered for a seat, and Warnecke had been a finalist for the NCTA job, so had things gone slightly differently their positions could have been reversed. Weese had worked for Bunshaft and knew several other commissioners; he later described the process as “rough and tumble between friends.” But commission approval was a serious matter. Although by law the commission could only advise (Franklin Roosevelt had built the Jefferson Memorial without final commission approval), and although the commission’s enabling legislation said nothing specific about underground construction, there were good reasons to seek its approval.49 First, the CFA had been a solid ally to Stolzenbach’s NCTA. Chairman David Finley, Walton’s predecessor, opposed most freeway construction on aesthetic grounds and hoped that a subway would reduce both freeway construction and the number of parked cars on Washington streets. A small agency like the NCTA would be foolish to alienate one of its friends. Second, a nod from the commission would go a long way in building support for the subway among such influential bodies as the National Capital Planning Commission. Third, a presentation before the commission meant a chance for free advice from some of the nation’s leading designers. Finally, the National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, which had created the NCTA, instructed that agency to submit its program to the CFA among other bodies, although it was unclear whether that instruction applied to the station architecture as well as the route plans. For all these reasons, in May 1965, just prior to his departure, Stolzenbach contacted Chairman Walton with the clear intention of including the commission in the design process.50 There were also dangers. Unlike the NCPC or the NCTA Advisory Board, the Commission of Fine Arts had no statutory requirement to in-
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clude even a single resident of Washington or its suburbs, and only Walton and Warnecke resided in the region. Indeed, Saarinen and Bunshaft made a habit of catching the same plane on the morning of the commission’s monthly meeting, always arriving late as a result. And the commission was designed to evaluate memorials and official buildings, not public works. Its members had been artists, architects, sculptors, and landscape architects, with engineers deliberately excluded. Nor did its charter instruct it to consider cost. It had a single institutional mission: to preserve the architectural dignity of federal Washington, no matter local opinion, no matter the price.51 The first formal contact between the NCTA and the CFA came in the fall of 1966. With few specifics to discuss, Walton stated in October 1966 that “Mr. Weese’s approach is thorough and above all imaginative, and we look forward to following the detailed developments.” Over the next few months, the NCTA sent the commission copies of Weese’s drawings, including the November 1966 synopsis. By spring, Weese had developed his first detailed designs for specific stations. Because the District of Columbia’s Redevelopment Land Agency had just gotten approval to use urban renewal funds for the city’s downtown retail area, the locations of the downtown stations were being renegotiated, and the NCTA had instructed Weese to begin work on the Connecticut Avenue stations. For these deep, single-entrance stations Weese proposed the tapering platforms, pointed-arch vaults, and exposed rock. On 18 April 1967 he presented this concept to the commission.52 The CFA hated it. Bunshaft, whose glass-and-steel Lever House had helped define a postwar aesthetic of sleekness, revolted against exposed rock, calling the trainroom “a refined coal mine shaft.” He admonished Weese that “you are talking about the capital of this country, which if nothing else is a very beautiful city of trees and classical and whatnot buildings, but they’re kind of handsome, clean and fresh; and I don’t see why you have to go down into a grotto to get from one part of the city to another.” Aline Saarinen followed his lead, describing the granite as “a little what Eero would call ‘Hansel and Gretel’ I think.” Weese defended the rock on the grounds of architectural honesty: “[T]his is something we welcome as an experience which should be celebrated rather than try to gloss over and pretend it isn’t.” But it was clear that Bunshaft wanted a formality consistent with federal Washington’s traditions.53 At the next presentation, on 20 June 1967, Weese presented his box designs for the downtown cut-and-cover stations, using Judiciary Square as his example. The question of the rock stations remained unresolved, and before Weese entered, Bunshaft again attacked the rock designs: “Here is a formal city, and this folk art of old granite.” Again, Saarinen agreed, “It is awfully folk art. Cutie-pie.” Once Weese arrived, the criticism continued. Bunshaft, sculptor Burnham Kelly, and Warnecke objected to his treatment of the platform as an essentially outdoor space, an underground street. They wanted an indoor environment, more like a building lobby, but Weese shot
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back that “I don’t think of it as a building lobby or even a building. I think it’s unique to itself.” Nor did the commissioners think much of Weese’s box designs. With Weese out of the room, Bunshaft snarled at the trussed ceilings and complained that “what he’s talking about is rebuilding the New York subway. . . . It’s the same old subway construction.”54 The most serious dispute concerned unity. Weese was still committed to the prototype lessons of Cummins and Purity, providing the rider with a sense of unity. At the June meeting he submitted a document listing the “elements of continuity.” All stations would have bronze and granite fixtures on a concrete background. All platforms would be paved the same, with tile flooring and granite edges inset with lights. Escalators, fare gates, signs, attendants’ kiosks—all would be consistent throughout the system. Having established this continuity, Weese believed that these elements had to be adapted to the “controlling geometry” of each station site. In particular, he held to the idea of having three types of roofs for three types of stations: vaults for rock stations, flat roofs for cut-and-cover, and a canopy for aboveground. In all of these, Weese explained, “maximum volume is our principle.”55 But the commissioners—none of them very good listeners—ignored Weese’s quest for volume, focusing instead on continuity. Landscape architect Hideo Sasaki stressed that “this is a system, and there is logic for it being similar, while buildings such as town houses and office buildings can be quite different because they are different; but here I think you have both a movement system, a linear system, continuity of experience, and so forth.” Bunshaft suggested giving every station the same cross section. In June, he mooted the idea of stations “like the inside of a thermos bottle, one station after another.”56 The commissioners showed scant respect for the designers. Bunshaft suspected that Weese had been bossed around by his client and the engineers. “Are you happy or are you doing the best you can?” he asked. “Engineers doing subways tend to do subways like the last subways they did. They’re sound economically but not necessarily inventive.” He accused Weese of surrendering to engineers’ demands for economy; when Weese objected, “I could spend all the money there is,” Bunshaft responded, “Well, why the hell don’t you try? You’re doing this like the engineers are climbing all over you.” The engineers themselves were never invited to a commission meeting.57 Nor did Bunshaft ever fully accept the NCTA’s choice of his former subordinate, Weese, as architect. It did not help that Bunshaft’s own firm had been passed over for the job. At the June meeting, with Weese out of the room, Bunshaft doubted aloud whether Weese was the right man for the job and eventually got Roszak to agree with him. And Bunshaft repeatedly threatened Weese with CFA rejection. Years later, a disgusted Rannells dismissed the whole process as “exercises in upmanship. . . . Bunshaft was competing with Owings (his senior partner) as well as with Harry. All of them were ‘showing off ’ to some extent.”58
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Weese’s relative expertise in rapid transit, gained from his world tour, held little weight with the commissioners, even though they knew little about subways. Over the course of the presentations, the commissioners did make offhand remarks about London and Montreal, but for the most part they seem to have had New York as their image of a subway. In a 1968 meeting, Walton questioned whether Weese had ever ridden a subway, but in 1967 it was Saarinen who admitted that she was too afraid to ride the subways in New York and that she preferred limousines. Perhaps because of the piecemeal approach with which NCTA submitted its plans for prototype stations, the CFA members did not seem to understand that some rapid transit stations would be aboveground or even elevated, and so it would be impossible for all stations to look alike. Nor did they care about the fundamental structural differences between cut-and-cover and tunnel construction. Instead, they talked only about such abstractions as “lineal continuing experience.” Weese explained to his client, “it is true that stations are not identical, but to turn the shallow box into a shallow vault would be to us a sacrifice of a logical variant for a rigid formula with accompanying loss of spaciousness.”59 Communication between Weese and the commission continued to deteriorate. In particular, the November 1966 synopsis proved confusing. Weese intended to display available options for a prototype station, so he had Reynolds include a range of designs. But the commissioners misinterpreted the book: they feared that the varied drawings illustrated Weese’s intent to make each station radically different from the next, making the commissioners all the more anxious to impose continuity. Had Weese included a better text introduction to the booklet, or submitted fewer drawings, or had the commission been more willing to listen to his oral explanation, much of the conflict might have been avoided.60 It was all very good for Weese and his pals to chat about the nature of rapid transit in Washington, but by the fall of 1967 his client had schedules to meet. For months, the De Leuw, Cather engineers had been complaining that they could not do their work without “plans for stations of a usable nature.” The NCTA was about to disappear, to be replaced by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), founded in January 1967. Besides the CFA, Weese now had two bosses—the NCTA’s Walter McCarter and WMATA’s general manager, Jackson Graham. Both were eager to move the approval process along in time for ground breaking in the summer of 1968. Hoping that the CFA would soon approve the prototype stations, WMATA signed a million dollar contract for the design of the first two stations, Judiciary Square and Gallery Place. They chose a partnership with roots in Dulles: Ammann & Whitney, the airport’s engineers, with Kent Cooper as architect. The CFA applauded the choice, but tartly reminded McCarter that Weese was still some distance from approval.61 The showdown came at the third meeting, on 19 September 1967. The session began with stern warnings from Walton and Saarinen that the com-
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mission wanted more formality and felt that Weese was ignoring its opinions. Weese attempted to respond, once more pointing out “the realities involved in an underground station of two kinds,” cut-and-cover and rock tunnel. Finally, an exasperated Bunshaft grabbed one of Weese’s presentation boards and turned it over so he could use the blank back as a tablet. As Walton later described it, Gordon rises from his seat and standing before a great sheet swiftly sketches in what became the subway’s basic design. He was afire, not angry, merely intense, never condescending to Weese, just trying to burst out of our continuing words into the realms of concrete design. As we saw his crayon describe a great arc (the upper side of the subway tunnel) and then a few lines indicate a central platform with trains on either side, a feeling of excitement swept us all. Here was design rising before one’s eyes, something that rarely had happened in a public meeting. Weese and the whole commission were quick to realize that here was something unique, possible, inspired. It’s a moment I’ll never forget.62
Undoubtedly Weese never forgot it either, but he may have been less excited. After all the haggling and rejection, Weese’s old boss had sketched his own idea of an appropriate cross section: a vault with walls curving beneath the level of the platform. Bunshaft obviously thought he had made a great leap forward, but in fact, his sketch was remarkably close to Weese’s concept sketch of the previous July, and even closer to several of Reynolds’s drawings in the November 1966 synopsis. That synopsis (which included both Weese’s and Reynolds’s illustrations of the vault design) had been submitted to the commission in December 1966, with a copy for each commissioner. Bunshaft, who took so active an interest in the subway design, had almost certainly received his copy, although in the intervening nine months he may well have forgotten its exact contents. In any event, after a year of sitting in judgment, Bunshaft had finally arrived at Weese’s starting point.63 Weese had considered the vault for cut-and-cover stations, then rejected it after taking into consideration De Leuw, Cather’s advice that such stations would cost more money for less volume. He had turned to the box in an effort to maximize spaciousness, though he still planned to use vaults in the rock stations. Now the CFA was telling him to make every underground station—cut-and-cover or rock—into a vault. The commission had shown no appreciation of his wish for maximum volume, no concern for the additional cost of vaults in cut-and-cover stations, no awareness of the structural distinction between station types, and no recognition that Bunshaft’s “inspired” sketch had been lifted from Weese’s designs. Weese did not say any of this. Instead, he reacted to Bunshaft’s drawing first with bafflement, exclaiming, “What has this got to do with this or that?” Then, recovering, he told Bunshaft, “That is a pretty exciting thing.”64 Weese now understood what it would take to get the CFA’s approval.
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Bunshaft’s vault, September 1967 (Courtesy of Charles Atherton, Commission of Fine Arts)
That very night, he and his team began drawing vault designs for both cutand-cover and rock stations. Their new design—the design that has become so familiar to Metro riders over the past twenty-five years—kept many of the elements from Weese’s previous designs: lights along the platform edge that flashed as the trains arrived; curved mezzanines; and the balance created by details in bronze and granite against a background of grand concrete structures. Weese held true to his conception of a subway station as an outdoor environment. Defying Bunshaft’s demands for a lobby, he built a street, with granite curbs and with benches and lampposts that would be as at home above ground as below. And, still wanting the stations to reveal their structure, he insisted on building the vaults from poured concrete, which he considered a “natural” material, rather than taking his engineer’s advice to use precast elements as a thin facade over structural ribs.65 Weese did surrender on the issue of volume; though free of columns and vastly more spacious than the cramped stations of New York or Philadelphia, the cut-and-cover stations are significantly less spacious than Weese’s box designs, particularly on the mezzanine level. And he adopted Bunshaft’s suggestion that the platforms be built some distance from the vault, so “nobody would get near the walls.” In the end, it was a hybrid design, a Weese-CFA plan.66 On the Saturday following the CFA hearing, Weese assembled his consultants in Chicago—for the first time the structural, lighting, acoustic, and graphic experts all met at the same time in the same room. The first refinement was the decision to indent the vault with a waffle pattern of rectangular coffers. Structurally, the coffers reduced the weight of the concrete vault
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Cross sections, September and October 1967 (Superimposition by the author, based on drawings in Commission of Fine Arts project files)
without reducing its strength, while also simplifying its construction by breaking it down into manageable pours. Acoustically, they provided space for sound-absorbent panels. Aesthetically, they vastly increased the drama of the long vaults while satisfying the Commission of Fine Arts’s wish for monumentality. Resembling the coffered ceilings in the Capitol Dome and in Burnham’s Union Station, the new vault clearly belonged in federal Washington. The second refinement was an indirect lighting design by William Lam that turned the vault into an underground sky—untouched by mezzanine, signs, or hanging lights. By the end of two hours, they had worked out all the basic details of the coffered vault. Whether or not it was the very best design possible, it was certainly very good, and Weese was pleased enough to report, “we are forced to resume the arched shape which, from all points but acoustics, I like the best.”67 The Weese architects were close enough to a final design to order a plaster model of a cross section of the vault to bring to the next meeting in October. This time, the meeting was all smiles. The CFA had gotten its big idea, and all it now wanted was a promise that yes, this one big idea would be applied to every station. Sasaki was happy; vaults would assure the “continuity of experience” he sought. Bunshaft worried about hiring multiple architects to do all the working drawings, saying, “there shouldn’t be the slightest variation in detail on the entire job.” And Saarinen, who had earlier confessed that she did not ride subways, ridiculed the idea that
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a variety of designs would help passengers identify stations: “I don’t really believe if I’m on a subway I come to and say, ‘Oh, that’s the blue station; I’ve got to get off here.’ ” The commission members congratulated Weese and at last gave their approval.68 Sitting in the back of the room was Jackson Graham, a seasoned civil engineer and WMATA’s new general manager. He had quietly watched the commission insist on a design that could prove much more expensive than the plan his architect devised. There was no time to do a full cost comparison, and Graham realized that stations that were theoretically cheaper would prove a false economy if the CFA’s rejection delayed construction. He asked Sprague Thresher, who had taken over from Rannells as director of architecture, to draft a letter to the WMATA board, which he signed and transmitted on 30 October. In it, he pointed out that while there was no right or wrong answer on a matter of taste, flouting the commission’s clearly expressed opinion would mean controversy and could delay the project. He brought up the terrifying examples of the American Institute of Architects, which had first presented a design for a new headquarters building to the commission in January 1967 and was still waiting for approval (which, it turned out, would not be given until April 1970), and of BART, where controversy over architecture had weakened its political power and its financial outlook. In effect, Thresher and Graham translated flighty questions of architectural theory into the hard facts of delay and political damage that would result if the WMATA board rejected the Weese-CFA design. The letter may have been unnecessary, for much of the board had been won over by the color paintings of the Weese-CFA design, and on 17 November, the WMATA board voted for the vaults.69 Despite the CFA’s wishes, all Metro stations are not alike. At the October meeting, Weese told the commission that, “just for the record, we had boiled down to two kinds of stations and with a certain amount of persuasion we were able to say that one kind would be three times as good as two kinds.” In fact, there would have to be many kinds. Half of the regional system—well along in the planning stage by the time the CFA held its meetings—was to be above ground, where canopies, rather than vaults or boxes, would be needed. Other variables included whether the station would serve one line or two, how deep below or high above ground it was, and whether the tracks would run between two platforms or to the side of one. Indeed, by 1970 Weese’s firm was telling the WMATA board that fourteen “basic station types” would provide an “exciting variety,” though held in check by the “elements of continuity” that Weese had previously worked out. As finally built, there are more types than that, with some stations sporting unique variations. Anacostia, for example, lacks the room for a grand vault, so its ceiling consists of small vaults perpendicular to the platform. At Cheverly, Weese designed a suspended structure, more out of irrepressible creativity than for any other reason.70 Even for underground stations, the question of vaults, boxes, and col-
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umns reappeared several times, as cost overruns forced WMATA to consider economies. In 1969 Weese commissioned a study by Ammann & Whitney that concluded that vaults would be cheaper for stations with more than eighteen feet of earth above them, but many downtown stations are closer to the surface than that. In 1970 the Authority rejected the idea of saving $146 million—close to 5 percent of the estimated cost of the entire system—by adopting a Toronto-style box-and-column design. Calling such a plan “a return to a design of the past at the expense of the future,” it affirmed that “we cannot afford to pursue standards which are beneath the reasonable expectations of today or which deny the aspirations of tomorrow.”71 Eventually, however, WMATA did abandon Bunshaft’s demand “that there shouldn’t be the slightest variation in detail on the entire job.” In 1975, with money again tight, it commissioned a joint study by Harry Weese & Associates and De Leuw, Cather, which estimated that at Glenmont Station, a Toronto-style box station with columns would save 37 percent ($2.8 million in 1969 dollars) of the cost of a cut-and-cover vault. Although the Authority rejected columns for Glenmont, it did economize on two rock stations, building Forest Glen and Wheaton Stations as twin tubes rather than grand vaults. Yet even these “shotgun” stations, as the architects called them, are clearly part of the Metro system, sharing platforms, benches, lighting, and other details with their vaulted siblings. In the end, Weese was correct: unity could be achieved by applying “elements of continuity” to a variety of station shapes.72 Because it takes a long time to build a transit system, by the time Metro opened in 1976 it was no longer a pioneer in federal modernism in Washington. By then, the Smithsonian had built Bunshaft’s Hirshhorn—a concrete doughnut—as well as the National Air and Space Museum, a set of marble monoliths connected by glass, built on the site once slated to host the Saarinen Gallery. Only then did the Weese-CFA design get reviewed in the architectural press. Wolf Von Eckardt of the Washington Post visited a station under construction and praised its “noble spaciousness.” Architectural Review praised the design for its classicism, noting that “coffered Roman vaults offer vistas of dignified spaciousness.” The AIA Journal called the design “awe-inspiring” for its sweeping vistas, yet “manageable” because of the careful placement of fare machines, information, and escalators. Architectural Record wrote that Weese “restored to civil engineering the visual grandeur and might characteristic of the great Roman and Victorian engineering feats,” but also noted the value of clear sight lines to “the passenger’s comprehension of circulation patterns.” Nory Miller had the most succinct evaluation of all: “It works and looks good.” The combination of Weese’s concern with spaciousness and circulation and the CFA’s institutional demand for monumentality had won over the critics. Whether the same could have been achieved with even more-spacious, slab-sided cut-and-cover stations is purely hypothetical.73
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The press suppressed memories of the battle between Weese and the CFA. Architectural Record suggested that Weese had sought the final design all along, claiming that Weese “knew what he wanted. He wanted vaults.” Similarly, the Washington Post reported that “it took Harry Weese nearly a year of titanic struggle to convince the engineers that his Roman vault created not only a more exciting and inviting space for the below-ground Metro stations than the boxes the engineers were used to, but that they are also more economical.” The Post claimed the CFA as Weese’s ally in a battle against the engineers. Stanley Allan, Weese’s project manager, also elided the conflict, telling the AIA Journal that “the vault was more economical, dignified and monumental. We wanted it because we thought the Metro system shouldn’t end up being something cute.” Weese himself was more candid. In the fall of 1967, he endorsed the vault, marking up an earlier defense of spaciousness with the words, “I recant on this, we were wrong. Trying to ride two horses.” But in 1975, he vented some of his frustration with the CFA’s obsession with monumentality, sneering, “at least they didn’t make us put marble on the walls.”74 Unrecorded in these reviews was CFA chairman Walton’s comment to Bunshaft, made before a January 1968 session to work out details of the design. “Well, Gordon,” Walton said to Bunshaft, “since you’ve designed the subway so far, I think you might as well continue with the project!”75 Walton’s remark was met with laughter, though whether at Walton’s quip or at Harry Weese, the transcript does not record. Metro’s appearance embodies two ideas. First was the notion that subways could make a positive aesthetic contribution to their cities. In Stockholm, San Francisco, and Milan, as in Washington, builders of rapid transit systems hired architects and other designers to ensure not only that subways wouldn’t disgrace their homes but also that they would exemplify a modern city beautiful. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Toronto got jazzed up, and attempts were made to redesign prewar systems in Boston and Philadelphia. Washington took the notion of beauty the furthest, for only in Washington did a powerful federal agency have the mission of approving architectural plans without reference to cost. The Commission of Fine Arts may have gone too far in its intervention. Institutionally, it was not set up to judge massive public works projects on the scale of a regional rapid transit system; and individually, its members gave Harry Weese little opportunity to explain his ideas. But the CFA’s interference sprang from the same Kennedy devotion to beauty that hired Weese in the first place. For advocates of an architecturally significant subway, too much attention was better than too little. By making architecture such a high priority, Gutheim, Weese, and the commissioners had made visible Metro’s role in building a grand public realm. The second idea inherent in Metro’s architecture was that of Washington as a primarily federal city. The NCTA, a federal agency, set policy in
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part to upgrade federal architecture. Weese took cues from the federal city of granite, marble, and limestone. He promoted the public Washington, largely ignoring the residential and commercial city. Then the Commission of Fine Arts drove Weese even further, imposing their notion of Washington on the entire system. Even residential Connecticut Avenue needed a formality worthy of the Senate, they believed. And because of the District of Columbia’s federal status, these presidential appointees had their way. But the idea that Washington exists to serve the federal government was crumbling. By the end of 1967, the city, the region, and the rapid transit system designed to serve them would all have new masters.
1966–1967
4
The Region
The National Capital Transportation Act of 1965 provided that Washington’s rapid transit system would be built by the National Capital Transportation Agency, a federal agency. This provision was consistent with the Congress’s traditional image of Washington as a federal enclave, peopled by docile employees, not unlike a large military base. But such top-down governance was incompatible with liberal dreams of maximum feasible participation, and by the mid-1960s it was swiftly collapsing. In the White House, President Lyndon Johnson schemed to return to District residents the voting rights stripped from them in the 1870s. In District neighborhoods, activists grew disgusted with the unresponsive Board of Commissioners. And in the suburbs, elected officials demanded a louder voice in the city where so many of their constituents worked. The challenge for all of them was to shift power from the federal government without shattering the metropolis into pieces too small to carry out big plans. They needed to build a region. The question of governance, embracing both home rule for the District and regional cooperation, touched on many policy matters: taxation, housing, pollution, criminal jurisdiction, and the like. But all of these issues were, compared to transportation, relatively easy to evade and compromise. If D.C. could not have an elected council, it could have an appointed council. If some jurisdictions feared regional government, a relatively weak metropolitan council could be installed. But transportation proved harder, because stakes were much higher. A transportation system—be it rapid transit or highway—would cost billions of dollars and last for centuries. Moreover, transportation in the capital had national significance. Unlike federal rule, a problem unique to the District of Columbia, plans for freeways were bitterly debated in cities across the country. For five years, Washington’s rapid transit system was caught up in the question of who would govern the city. Already a symbol of urbanity, an alternative to highways, and a work of art, transit became the key battleground in the city’s struggle for home rule. And when the battle was done, the subway emerged as a monument to the metropolis’s right to govern itself.
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The Suburbanites’ Compact
Suburbanization made mass transit a matter of interstate concern even before the collapse of Capital Transit. In the 1950s private transit companies in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland were regulated by separate public utilities commissions, while trips between jurisdictions fell to the Interstate Commerce Commission. With four bodies setting rules, no one required coordinated fares and schedules. Suburban commuters often had to transfer buses at the District line, pay double fares, or wait needlessly long periods for a transfer because no single agency could tell a D.C. company to match the schedule of an incoming suburban route.1 One man who saw transportation as a regional issue was Robert McLaughlin. Appointed by Eisenhower as the president of the D.C. Board of Commissioners, McLaughlin sought the help of Maryland and Virginia state legislators from the close-in suburbs. Charles Fenwick, state senator from Arlington, Virginia, proved eager to aid transit, which he termed “a sick industry.” From the Maryland side, McLaughlin recruited his war buddy Edward Northrop, the state senate majority leader from Chevy Chase. Both Fenwick and Northrop had watched their jurisdictions become home to ever more federal employees who depended on good transportation to the District. Both were also lawyers with offices in downtown Washington, so it was easy for them to meet McLaughlin for lunch and plan regional strategies.2 Their first proposal was a presidential commission to regulate transit in the area. Congressmen DeWitt Hyde of Maryland and Joel Broyhill of Virginia, both of them suburban representatives serving on the House District Committee, sponsored a bill to enact the plan, but the Virginia legislature refused to join, prompting President Eisenhower to veto the bill. McLaughlin, Northrop, and Fenwick then pushed their state legislatures and the D.C. Board of Commissioners to authorize a Joint Transportation Commission (JTC), made up of representatives from each jurisdiction, to negotiate a regulatory regime acceptable to all three. By September 1954, both states and the District had given their blessings.3 The commission first met on 10 February 1955, just as the Mass Transportation Survey was getting started. McLaughlin led the D.C. delegation, accompanied by Engineer Commissioner Thomas Lane and Harland Bartholomew of the NCPC. Northrop led the Marylanders, joined a few months after the JTC’s creation by Carlton Sickles. Born in Connecticut, Sickles attended high school, college, and law school in the District, then moved to Maryland where he was elected to the House of Delegates in 1954. Although elevated to the U.S. House of Representatives as an at-large Maryland congressman in 1963, he would serve on the JTC throughout its existence and remain involved with rapid transit for decades after that. Maynard Magruder led the Virginian delegation to the commission, but Fenwick would prove the most influential Virginia member. In lieu of a staff, the JTC hired as its counsel Jerome Alper, a lawyer in private practice. A stint during the New Deal at the Securities and Ex-
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change Commission had made him an expert in utilities regulation, just what was needed for a reform of transit. For the next twelve years, Sickles, Fenwick, and Alper would form the heart of the JTC. Negotiations were touchy, with each jurisdiction not wanting to cede more authority than the others. The Virginia members at first wanted the agreement to cover only interstate trips; that would include every commuter bus that crossed the Potomac. Maryland and the District insisted that the agreement cover intrastate trips as well, allowing the regulatory body to coordinate transfers between bus routes that met at the District-Maryland border. But for the most part, the commission members were able to keep their disputes quiet and to present a united front to the outside, especially Congress.4 Theoretically, the JTC and the Mass Transportation Survey were supposed to work together. Bartholomew was a JTC member, and the JTC had a slot on the Survey’s Joint Steering Committee. In practice Bartholomew kept the transportation engineering decisions for the professionals, giving the local officials and Alper the task of designing a regulatory structure, a task that became all the more urgent with the Capital Transit strike. In December 1955, Alper submitted a fifty-six-page study, “Transit Regulation for the Metropolitan Area of Washington, D.C.,” recommending an interstate compact to rationalize the region’s fragmented system. As provided for in Article I, section 10, of the Constitution, a compact is essentially a treaty between states, sealed with congressional approval. In 1921 New York and New Jersey had used the previously obscure clause to create their Port Authority, and several other pairs and groups of states later imitated this tactic to govern shared bodies of water. Alper proposed the same device for utility regulation, arguing that urban transit was bigger than a single state, because routes crossed state lines, but smaller than a national concern.5 Bartholomew welcomed the Alper Report, noting that real improvement in transit service required “a single administrative organ” across the region.6 Local officials also applauded the idea. As the MTS neared completion, it was clear that some form of new regulatory system would be installed, and backing out—as had Virginia in 1954—would simply mean federal control. From the point of view of the independence-minded state legislatures, this would be even worse than interstate cooperation, and by 1959 Virginia had changed its mind. What started as a response to the simple problem of unnecessary transfers became a much more ambitious program of regional cooperation. In 1957 Congress established the Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems—the Bible Committee—to cover transportation, pollution, water supply, and perhaps other issues that crossed state lines. That same year, McLaughlin, Fenwick, and Northrop institutionalized their lunch meetings as the Washington Metropolitan Regional Conference, still a voluntary organization without official status. The two bodies worked together. For example, when the Bible Committee recommended a metropolitan sanitary board, the Regional Conference implemented the plan.7
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As the MTS plan was debated in 1959 and 1960, local officials pushed a transportation compact as a part of this larger regional effort. Donald Gingery of Montgomery County, Maryland, and the chairman of the Regional Planning Commission portrayed compacts as necessary lest the District “find itself nothing more than another Hong Kong between the motherlands of Maryland and Virginia, and these two motherlands . . . find themselves with a stepchild city over whom they have no control.” Fenwick told the House Judiciary Committee that “we are hoping that this same means will be adopted for water pollution and some other problems we face. It is the first venture in this particular field where, by a compact limited to the metropolitan area, we learn to live with each other and try to accomplish something.”8 The only significant opposition to a regulatory compact came from D.C. Transit System, Inc., Capital Transit’s successor, which feared that a majority-suburban commission would be biased against a company serving the District. Congress dismissed this worry, including approval for the compact in the National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, the same law that created the NCTA. After a few months’ preparation, in March 1961 the newborn Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Commission (WMATC) took over from the individual public utilities commissions the job of regulating transit in the region. Suddenly, suburban riders could save time and money as the WMATC instructed private bus companies to coordinate their operations and accept each other’s transfers. Moreover, the JTC negotiators could congratulate themselves on having used a tristate compact to create a functioning body. Following this success, the prospects for a second compact agency, one that would build and even operate a rail transit system, seemed much richer. Such a body had been proposed by the 1959 Transportation Plan and authorized by the 1960 act. But there was a catch. If the states had not readied a compact by the time the rapid transit system was ready, the federal agency could operate the trains itself or contract out the job.9 The 1960 act thus set up a rivalry and a race. On one side were the NCTA Advisory Board and staff and their allies. By early 1961 this meant the Stolzenbach crowd: a group of people who opposed freeways, favored home rule for the District of Columbia, and owed their power to President Kennedy. Members of this group were suspicious of the Joint Transportation Commission, which included the District’s engineer commissioner (the NCTA’s opponent in the freeway fight) as well as suburban politicians who had dubious sympathy for the disfranchised people of D.C. On the other side was the JTC, which, after 1961, was dominated by suburban voices. McLaughlin left office with the Eisenhower administration, and the D.C. seat on the JTC went to the engineer commissioner, who was not selected by the White House but promoted from within the Corps of Engineers. Soon after, Northrop was appointed to the federal bench, leaving the JTC in the hands of Sickles and Fenwick, both of them wary of federal intrusion
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in state affairs, with Alper acting as the commission’s one-man staff. These were local politicians who regarded appointed experts of any stripe—Bartholomew, Stolzenbach, and Gutheim included—as impractical dilettantes. The JTC feared that a federal corporation in such hands might wield terrifying powers, such as the ability to push trunk lines through jurisdictions without their consent. As if to symbolize their local perspective, in March 1963 the negotiators rejected naming their potential creation the “National Capital Transportation Authority,” in favor of something with the words “Metropolitan Washington,” the latter term having less of a federal ring.10 The rift between the NCTA and the JTC widened after the November Report and Stolzenbach’s antihighway proposals. In February 1963 Alper complained that the NCTA had failed to consult the JTC “on system design or in the formation of any of its plans.” Fenwick wrote to President Kennedy to condemn Stolzenbach’s meddling in highway matters and to support the Three Sisters Bridge. And at the July 1963 hearings, WMATC secretary Delmer Ison (who worked closely with Alper and the JTC members) was among the NCTA’s loudest critics, complaining that an all-bus solution would be preferable to the large rail system proposed by the NCTA. Privately, the report’s publication spurred the compact negotiators to try to get something passed as quickly as possible. By September, Alper refused to have his consultant’s pay routed through the NCTA in part because he perceived Stolzenbach and Seeger to be hostile to him and the compact. In 1964 Gregory Wolfe, the federal representative on the JTC, blandly reported that “the history of relationships between the Joint Transportation Commission and NCTA has not been marked by cordiality or mutual trust.” He asked that the JTC’s drafts be kept secret from Stolzenbach.11 To the suburban compact negotiators, the controversy over highway plans was an unwanted distraction, so they squashed a suggestion by General Clarke to give the proposed compact authority any responsibility for roads. They also shed the more utopian aspects of regionalism. After considering a general-purpose compact that could handle other metropolitan matters, such as water supply, the negotiators soon decided to push for a single-purpose transit compact instead. Even after gaining some time with the rejection of the NCTA bill in December 1963, the compact negotiators needed to act fast if they wanted to have a compact in place before the NCTA was ready to break ground. Otherwise, they feared, the NCTA’s actions would preclude a locally controlled, regional system. For example, the NCTA proposed to sell bonds to finance the first part of construction. Alper complained that such bonds would make it very hard to turn the system over to a local compact authority, for the new authority would have to spend up to 10 percent extra in premiums to buy up the NCTA bonds. Much better, he concluded, to sell authority bonds to begin with, “unless the financing plans for the initial system are presented in the context of a financing plan for the regional system, a regional system may never be developed.”12
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By September 1964 Alper had drafted an eighty-one-page compact, based on the compact he had prepared for the WMATC and the ones creating the New York Port Authority and the Delaware River Basin. The compact called for a new public authority, separate from the WMATC and exempt from its jurisdiction. The authority would be controlled by a tenmember board, with three members each—one of them the head of the highway department—from D.C., Virginia, and Maryland, plus a federal representative. Costs would be divided among the three jurisdictions according to the cost of the facilities within each, with the federal government picking up two-thirds of the net project costs, the same ratio that had been discussed since 1962.13 The draft proved controversial. Stolzenbach’s NCTA complained that the draft compact would leave the federal government with most of the bills but little of the decision-making power. Other federal agencies also feared the provision for a two-thirds federal contribution to whatever system was built amounted to “a blank check on Federal and District of Columbia funds.” They also worried that the inclusion of the highway departments on the authority board would give the highway lobby control over the transit system without any reciprocal influence of transit officials on the road network. And they argued against rushing a hastily written compact through Congress.14 But the JTC did not want to wait. The Virginia General Assembly, which would have to approve any compact, met only in even-numbered years. Moreover, it was not possible to submit to both the Maryland and Virginia assemblies simultaneously. Thus, the JTC needed to pass a compact through the Maryland Assembly in 1965 in order to hit the 1966 session in Virginia. And because all parties had to agree on the same compact, if the Virginia-approved version contained a single clause objectionable to the Maryland legislature or to the U.S. Congress, it would take two years before the amended version reached Richmond. In the meantime, the NCTA or a federal corporation might have a subway under construction.15 To avoid such catastrophe, the JTC needed as bland and unobjectionable a compact as they could imagine. So in February 1965, days before the deadline for the Maryland Assembly, it dumped Alper’s earlier draft compact in favor of one distinguished by its narrowness and conservatism. The WMATC had proved popular, so anything that could heighten the resemblance between the new compact and the old would help slide the bills through the legislatures. In matters of representation, the draft compact followed the footsteps of the regulatory compact of 1960 by giving equal representation—two votes out of six—to Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia, with the federal government left out. This was a good way to reassure the state legislatures, which in 1954 and 1960 had been hesitant to cede any sovereignty. Moreover, while plans could be passed with a simple majority of the board, actual expenditures would require the vote of at least one member from each jurisdiction.16
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To keep decision making as local as possible, the draft called for Maryland and Virginia to choose their representatives through special suburban transit districts, which earlier had been created by the state legislatures. Maryland representatives were to be selected from the Washington Suburban Transit Commission, composed of officials from Prince George’s and Montgomery counties. In practice, each county would get one voting and one nonvoting seat on the authority board. The Virginia side was more complicated; the counties of Arlington and Fairfax and the independent cities of Alexandria, Falls Church, and Fairfax City (the last two of which had seceded from Fairfax County only in 1948 and 1962) all demanded representation. Each jurisdiction would send delegates in proportion to its size to the twelve-member Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, which would in turn send two members and two alternates to the authority board. (Because the whole of the District of Columbia would be served by the authority, it had no need of a special transit district and could simply send its own representatives.) Contrary to earlier proposals, the interstate agency would have very limited powers. It could not levy its own tax but would depend on contracts with its constituent cities and counties. The compact did not cover regional planning or comprehensive transportation functions—the negotiators did not want to risk another Stolzenbach who would claim that highways and parking were inherent parts of transit planning. The agency would not even get full control over mass transit; buses would remain in the hands of private companies, regulated by WMATC. Gregory Wolfe, negotiating on behalf of the federal government, noted that “State members of the Joint Transportation Commission have shown no inclination to negotiate provisions creating an organization endowed with comprehensive metropolitan planning or to include governmental functions implied in the 1960 act. They hold their obligations to their governors do not extend beyond the rapid transit field.” He accepted their judgment, asking only for “a permissive clause that will enable the organization to add new functions in the future.”17 The draft compact was silent on the biggest question of all: who would pay? The Bureau of the Budget had hesitated to take on the two-thirds commitment in the September draft, so Alper simply deleted any specific financing from the new proposal. As Sickles later explained, “the process of trying to negotiate the compact, the process of deciding where the lines would be, the process of deciding what the plan of financing would be, was just so overwhelming a task that it could not be done in the context of a negotiating team. There were too many persons that had to be consulted with, too many governmental agencies that had to be concerned with the problem, and therefore we adopted the compact and in effect left undone those two major functions.”18 This minimal, uncontroversial compact worked; Maryland approved it in May 1965. But when the NCTA got its bill passed in September, the race
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was renewed. If the NCTA spent the authorized $150 million before the JTC was ready to finance for a regional system, Congress might well continue the NCTA’s work by authorizing a public corporation owned by the federal or District of Columbia government. And the NCTA expected it would take only two years to spend that $150 million. If a compact authority were to succeed the agency, it would have to be ready by the summer of 1967.19 Despite the compact’s caution, some people in and out of the NCTA who had worked to pass the 1965 act feared the compact could disrupt the delicate equilibrium that had been achieved, stalling the construction of any rail transit. Walter McCarter, the administrator, proposed that the federal government build the core system, as provided by the 1965 act, and that D.C., Maryland, and Virginia be allowed to add onto it as they wished, at their expense. The agency’s most reliable political sponsor, Congressman Basil Whitener, also opposed the bill. Having been burned by the failure of his bobtail plan in December 1963, he feared “delay and destruction” should the House be presented with anything bolder than the already-approved 1965 plan. “I want to see the subway built during my lifetime,” he moaned. Furthermore, he tended to see Washington as a federal city, not one that belonged “to those who happened to reside here.”20 While McCarter and the NCTA Advisory Board worried about the political practicality of the compact, Stolzenbach’s Cleveland Park loyalists feared the legislation as a surrender to the suburbs. They saw no reason to trust an agreement between the suburban officials and the engineer commissioner, whose office was still promoting the freeways they so despised. In December 1965 the District Democratic Central Committee announced its opposition to an arrangement that would give the District only one vote out of three, when most riders would be city residents. Freeway opponent Peter Craig damned the proposed transit authority as “another limited-interest agency.” He insisted that the only compact worth having was one that could bring taxation, planning, and all forms of transportation under a single regional body. Craig’s former Covington and Burling colleague, NCTA Advisory Board chairman Gerry Levenberg, also feared a sellout to the suburbs and the highway builders. Levenberg opposed both attempts to expand the NCTA board to include representatives of the District Government (i.e., the pro-highway engineer commissioner) and the compact legislation. He and other Advisory Board members hoped to see the NCTA converted into a federal corporation that would build and operate the transit system.21 But the territory had changed since 1963. Stolzenbach was gone, replaced with the less aggressive McCarter. More important, the White House was tired of micromanaging the capital. In 1964, after ninety years of not voting for anything, District residents were able to vote in the presidential election, courtesy of a constitutional amendment. The next summer, President Johnson made strenuous efforts to secure home rule—that is, elected local
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government—for the District of Columbia, calling in personal favors from many House members. He failed to get his home-rule bill passed, but his intentions were clear.22 Johnson found it easier to create home rule on the regional level. The Washington Metropolitan Regional Conference, formed in 1957, had by 1961 become, in the words of the director of the National Capital Regional Planning Council, “the area’s official ‘unofficial’ metropolitan policy-making body, and henceforth—I firmly believe—regional planning policy must emanate from that source.” This happened soon enough. In 1962 the conference renamed itself the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), and in May 1965 the informal body incorporated itself as a nonprofit corporation. Then, in 1966, Johnson abolished the NCRPC, handing its regional planning functions over to COG, a body without a federal representative. He called on “local governments in the Washington Area to undertake a role which is properly and rightfully theirs.”23 The White House included rapid transit in its drive toward devolution. Charles Horsky, who during the Kennedy administration had supported the NCTA as a step toward home rule, now saw a compact authority as an even greater advance toward local control. Moreover, he was a personal friend of Alper. Accordingly, he turned away from his old allies, instructing McCarter “to keep Mr. Levenberg in line,” and, eventually, mooted the idea of replacing the entire NCTA Advisory Board. The administration was especially eager to get out of micromanaging urban transportation, lest it set a precedent for other cities, so Horsky endorsed an early transfer of power to the authority.24 The misgivings of Whitener, Craig, and Levenberg thus had little impact. In June 1966 Fenwick eased the compact legislation through the Virginia legislature with little opposition, leaving Congress as the only remaining hurdle. As if to emphasize the continuity from the first compact to the second, it fell to WMATC executive director Delmar Ison to drive the compact to Annapolis, Richmond, and the District Building to get the signatures of two governors and the president of the D.C. Board of Commissioners. Alper rushed to schedule congressional hearings before the Independence Day adjournment and carefully outlined the testimony to omit any extensive discussion of financing.25 On 17 October Congress approved the compact. That same morning, the interim board of the new authority met for the first time. The board’s first decision was to establish three main positions—a chairman and two vice chairmen—so that each jurisdiction could occupy one officer’s seat, with the positions rotating among the jurisdictions. In deference to the District of Columbia’s centrality, Engineer Commissioner Charles Duke took the first term as chairman. Following the compact’s ratification by the president, the District, and the two states, on 20 February 1967 the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority was officially born. WMATA would build and run the subway. The compact negotiators had won the race.26
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The Regional System
The shift from a federal agency to a local authority reshaped the conditions under which planners drew their maps. Whereas the NCTA had been responsible primarily to Congress, WMATA had to please its eight constituent jurisdictions as well. Rather than sticking to thrifty plans that Whitener could sell to his fellow representatives, the new Authority was tempted to think big in an effort to please as many people in as many places as it could. The transition began in the fall of 1966. The NCTA Advisory Board dissolved, replaced by the new WMATA board, but the NCTA staff remained, and for most of 1967 this WMATA-NCTA hybrid made key decisions about route planning, as well as the architectural decisions discussed in the previous chapter. With the Advisory Board gone, the transition was cordial and gradual. McCarter was happy to return to his interrupted retirement, though he did agree to continue as administrator until the NCTA was fully phased out. He even invited WMATA to share the NCTA’s offices. The rest of the staff, from Deputy Administrator Warren Quenstedt on down, was guaranteed employment with the new authority; more than 90 percent stayed, although some, including Rannells, transferred to other federal agencies to maintain their federal pensions. WMATA also began to build its own staff. As if to underline its difference from Stolzenbach’s controversial NCTA, the Authority hired as its first employee Delmer Ison, the WMATC official who had bitterly criticized the NCTA’s 1962 report. Like the subjects of two antagonistic kingdoms suddenly united by a dynastic marriage, former NCTA and JTC partisans learned to work together.27 The hybrid agency had to rethink the system map. The Rail Rapid Transit Plan of 1965 had been designed primarily for congressional approval, and as a means of moving commuters, it suffered from its reliance on a single trunk line between Farragut Square (at the west end of downtown) and Union Station (at the east). Every train originating at each of the five spur lines would pass through three stations: G and 12th, G and 8th, and Judiciary Square, causing tight scheduling, and potentially catastrophic backups. This bottleneck would only worsen as the five radial lines were extended out into the suburbs. One consultant suggested that the planned trunk’s anticipated volume would require two subway tubes, one on top of the other. Moreover, each branching would require the construction of an underground junction, very difficult to build in a crowded city.28 The single trunk also denied direct service to the enormous federal office buildings being built in the redeveloped Southwest. These buildings were expected to house 85,000 workers in the departments of Housing and Urban Development; Health, Education, and Welfare; and the new Department of Transportation, as well as the Department of Agriculture, long headquartered on Independence Avenue. The 1965 plan would require these workers to walk or take a bus three-quarters of a mile. Given that many riders would have begun their commute with a trip by car or bus to the rail station, an additional bus or long walk at the end was too much to ask.29
Authorized Rapid Transit System, 1967 (U.S. House of Representatives. Amend the National Capital Transportation Act of 1965: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 4, Committee on the District of Columbia, on H.R. 11395. 90th Cong., 1st sess., 1967, Exhibit A)
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Both the bottleneck and Southwest problems could be fixed with a second trunk line along Independence Avenue, as proposed by the NCTA plan of 1962. In 1963 the thrifty bobtail proposal had deleted the second trunk, though the agency hoped to build it someday, and designed its stations to accommodate the future change. Now, beginning in September 1966, the NCTA staff began thinking about adding it back, making the formal recommendation in March 1967.30 To offset part of its cost, they proposed deleting the Connecticut Avenue line’s Columbia Heights spur, which served mostly residential, lowincome neighborhoods. The NCTA planners pointed out that while the construction costs for the Southwest line, estimated at $98 million, were double that of the spur, the former would generate enough fares from all those federal workers to pay for itself eventually, whereas the latter was “uneconomic” and could never pay for itself from the fare box. Moreover, with only 16 percent of inner-city workers using cars to get to work, an innercity line would be less effective at reducing the number of cars on the road. Although the NCTA’s critics, then and later, saw the agency’s emphasis on fare-box revenues and its desire to delete the spur as callousness toward the poor city workers, in fact the real decision was not so much whether to serve Columbia Heights and adjacent neighborhoods, but how. Even as they erased the Columbia Heights spur, NCTA planners were penciling in a third trunk line that would serve the same general area.31 A third, Mid-City line to serve these mostly African American neighborhoods—as well as the department stores farther south—had been suggested as early as 1962, only to be rejected as too costly. In the summer of 1966, for example, top NCTA officials quickly buried a Harry Weese proposal with a Mid-City spur. But by late 1966 the NCTA changed its mind and began advocating a Mid-City trunk line along 7th Street NW and its continuation, Georgia Avenue. As is described in a later chapter, the Reverend Walter Fauntroy of New Bethel Baptist Church was leading a drive to bring urban renewal funds to a part of the Mid-City called Shaw, between North Capitol and 15th Street NW. The Authority later explained to Congress that on hearing of Fauntroy’s grant, the NCTA contacted him and redevelopment chief Thomas Appleby “to suggest renewed efforts for a mid-city line capable of first class service.”32 A leader in these efforts was sociologist G. Franklin Edwards of Howard University, itself located in the Mid-City. Along with several other Howard professors, Edwards was working closely with Fauntroy to plan the renewal of the neighborhood. He also held seats on both the NCTA Advisory Board and the National Capital Planning Commission, and he used both to speak for the Mid-City, decrying freeway dislocations and pressing NCTA administrator Walter McCarter to consider starting construction with those lines serving low-income neighborhoods. In early 1967 he asked McCarter, “Walter, if you eliminate the Columbia Heights Line, do you propose a substitution or some modification along the Georgia Corridor?” McCarter
Modified Rapid Transit System, 1967 (U.S. House of Representatives. Amend the National Capital Transportation Act of 1965: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 4, Committee on the District of Columbia, on H.R. 11395. 90th Cong., 1st sess., 1967, Exhibit B)
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had little choice but to answer that yes, if funds were available, a third trunk line would be desirable.33 In any event, by late 1966 NCTA planners were thinking about a trunk line along one of the Mid-City’s two main commercial streets: 7th and 14th. The NCPC and the District commissioners endorsed the Columbia Heights spur deletion with the understanding that it would make a MidCity line possible, and Congress only ratified the modification after being assured that “the 7th Street line is still an integral part of our regional plan.” Although both the NCTA and WMATA regarded service to the inner city as a lower priority than long-distance commuting, neither agency ever proposed abandoning the inner city entirely.34 While the NCTA/WMATA staff planned the downtown lines, it also began to look beyond the approved system of 1965 to a regional system on the scale of Stolzenbach’s 1962 proposal, as authorized by the 1966 act. Whereas the NCTA’s thrifty proposals had been largely designed to please Congress, the WMATA map would only become a transit system if it pleased enough voters in each suburban jurisdiction for them to pass necessary bond referenda. Such a map had to be, in the words of NCTA veteran Tom Deen, “big, bold, glamorous, fast, extensive, and, above all, [had to appear] to serve as much of the affected area as possible from the day the system first opens.” Given these requirements, Deen observed, “it’s easier to sell a billion dollar project than a hundred million dollar project.”35 Stolzenbach’s dotted arrow pointing toward Prince George’s County would no longer do, and planners began to consider real routes in every direction. On the other hand, the staff had to keep some check on suburban appetites. One Capitol Hill observer noted, “WMATA members from each suburban jurisdiction will be under political pressure to nail down extensive facilities in their own jurisdictions for the home folks who help foot the bill. . . . Thus there arises a two-fold pressure, opposing forces which political leadership must resolve: Building and maintaining support for the system—and the tax money to pay for it—and resisting pressures to expand it beyond what’s practical. If WMATA log-rolling leads to a vastly overblown system requiring an unreasonable request to Congress, we could be in trouble.”36 The most powerful constraint on planners’ ambitions was their knowledge that much of the system would have to be financed by bonds to be repaid from system revenue. From Stolzenbach on, each system designer labored to find lines that would attract the most fares at the least cost. In retrospect, this priority may have been misplaced. For one thing, as Weese and others argued, not all passengers are equal; providing transportation to an isolated, carless ghetto resident may have a higher value than diverting a suburban car pooler onto a train, even if the latter pays a higher fare. Moreover, the focus on bonds required planners to maximize the revenue generated in the thirty-year life of the bond. In practice this meant maximizing projected patronage for 1990, though a subway tunnel would last far
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Railroad rights-of-way (NCTA, Louis T. Klauder and Associates, Appendix to November 1, 1962 Report to the President, vol. 2: Use of Railroad Facilities. Washington, D.C., 4 January 1963)
longer. But planners work with the political realities of their day, and they were apt to strike any segment that was not projected to pay for itself from the fare box within a few decades. Similarly, while planners acknowledged the desirability of serving suburban employment centers, they concluded that service to the urban core would attract more riders and therefore had to be a greater priority.37 As they searched for profitable extensions into the suburbs, the planners did not start with a blank map. Instead, they returned to several of the railroad rights-of-way and freeway medians first examined by the NCTA in 1962. The most attractive route of all remained the Metropolitan Branch of the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O), leading north from Union Station through Northeast Washington, Silver Spring, Maryland, and on to Rockville. This ground-level and elevated route that would bring commuters from booming Montgomery County into downtown was an obvious bargain, and every proposal—from the 1962 November Report to the WMATA alterna-
A, B, and C alternatives, 1967 (Northern Virginia Transportation Commission newsletter, May 1967. Virginia Room, Arlington Public Library)
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tives—included it at least as far as Silver Spring. Other attractive railroad corridors included the B&O Washington Branch, which led toward Baltimore via College Park and Greenbelt, and the Pennsylvania Railroad line to Bowie, via Landover (slated for commuter rail service in the 1962 report). Southern Prince George’s County held no obvious corridors, but county officials asked for a line to the Census Bureau’s center in Suitland, to make sure constituents in the south did not feel totally neglected.38 In Virginia, the most attractive rail corridor was the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac (RF&P) line to Colchester, which passed right by National Airport and just west of Old Town Alexandria. From Alexandria, the RF&P went west toward Springfield, paralleled by the Southern Railway. Another candidate was the Washington & Old Dominion line, stretching from Alexandria to Herndon, near Dulles Airport. Within the Beltway, the planned Interstate 66 would have a median too narrow for transit tracks, but beyond the Beltway it offered a route through outer Arlington and Falls Church and into Fairfax County, passing near Fairfax City. Where cheap rights-of-way were not available, transit was slated for tunnels under major arterial roads, with the hope of serving dense development already arrayed into neat lines.39 Local planning agencies and county and city councils had a great deal of input. As soon as President Johnson signed the 1965 act, suburban planners accelerated their efforts to identify corridors for possible extensions to the authorized bobtail system. The NCTA staff took their maps and narrowed the options, presenting each jurisdiction with two or three choices. Montgomery County, for example, got two alternatives for the two routes it had requested. The “A plan” included one line up the Wisconsin Avenue–Rockville Pike corridor from Friendship Heights to Rockville, with another line from Silver Spring to Glenmont via a Georgia Avenue subway. The “B plan” more closely resembled the 1962 NCTA regional system proposal: the Wisconsin Avenue line would terminate at Pooks Hill, while the Silver Spring line would continue to Rockville via the B&O right-of-way. The local planning body, the Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission, recommended the latter, hoping to deflect development away from the open space north of Wheaton. But the Montgomery County Council, eager for some development in the eastern county, chose the A plan.40 In Virginia, county planning bodies had been pondering rapid transit since the November Report in 1962, and by 1964 their comprehensive plans included rail. Like the WMATA planners, they focused on railroad rights-of-way, so there was little difficulty getting the plans to match. Some Virginia officials sought a subway line along Columbia Pike to serve residential neighborhoods, like the Georgia Avenue subway planned for Montgomery County. They were dissuaded by WMATA staff, who argued that the projected patronage could not justify such expensive construction. For the District of Columbia, choices were more constrained; no one wanted to
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disturb the congressionally approved basic system. The NCPC, for example, flirted with the idea of a Mid-City line linked directly to Silver Spring and Rockville, opening employment opportunities to inner-city residents. But on reflecting that such a change would require another run through Congress, its members declined to rock the boat.41 Everything came together in July 1967 at Airlie House, a conference center in Warrenton, Virginia, in pastoral Fauquier County. WMATA board members and staff and other local officials had first retreated to Airlie in December 1966, so this July conference was tagged as “Airlie II.” The staff and consultants arrived with maps of three alternative systems, two based on rapid transit in both city and suburb, the third composed of commuter rail routes feeding into a downtown subway. They presented maps, with cost and ridership projections, to the political officials who made up the WMATA board and the two suburban transit commissions. Each group of officials caucused to tinker. Finally, the conference pulled together elements from the two rapid transit alternatives to produce a single, consensus system.42 Airlie also decided on a scale. Planners noted that as of 1962, 95 percent of commuter trips took less than forty-five minutes, so few passengers would endure an hour-long rail trip in from Centreville or Laurel. On the other hand, they did want rail to reach beyond built-up suburbs such as Alexandria and Silver Spring. The terminus of each line was planned as a busy transportation hub, with parking garages and bus bays to collect commuters from more outlying areas and, in some cases, yards for the trains themselves, all of which would create a mess in a densely settled area. In practice, a compromise between a system that stretched too far and one that did not go far enough turned out to mean placing most termini near the Capital Beltway, the new highway circling the Capitol at a radius of about ten miles. The distance was about right, and the Beltway itself could be used to funnel cars and buses to the terminal stations.43 A few weeks more produced an “Airlie-IIA” system, which, after another conference in October, was officially designated the Proposed Regional System (PRS). The PRS had something for everybody. The federal core got service—mostly underground—to the Southwest office complexes as well as the Capitol, White House, Navy Yard, State Department, and Federal Triangle. The District of Columbia got the Mid-City line—a $300 million investment in the inner city. Montgomery County got two long lines, one from Silver Spring to Glenmont, the other up the Wisconsin Avenue corridor—once slated for the Northwest Freeway—stretching to Rockville. Prince George’s County, which shares a longer border with the District, got four shorter lines, all of them ending roughly at the Beltway. Overall, 55 percent of the Maryland lines would be aboveground. Virginia got two long lines. By relying on the median strip of Interstate 66 to Vienna and on the RF&P and Southern Railway rights-of-way through Alexandria to Springfield, WMATA was able to project that 77 percent of the Virginia lines would be aboveground.44
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For the most part, representatives from all jurisdictions were satisfied, although some Virginia officials mourned the loss of a third Virginia line along Columbia Pike, which had been part of the B alternative. To mollify them and anyone else who felt left out, the official map of the PRS included several thick, dashed lines indicating “future extensions,” including the Columbia Pike line and various extensions of proposed lines far beyond the Beltway. These lines, recalled lobbyist John Warrington, “meant absolutely nothing,” but they did boost political support for the system.45 At 95.6 miles, the PRS was nearly four times as long as the system approved by Congress in 1965 and three times as long as the two-line system approved in 1967. At first, it did not seem to be vastly more expensive than the 25-mile core system authorized in 1965. In January 1966 the NCTA estimated that a regional system would cost between $920 and $950 million, or roughly double the $465 million projected for the core. The next month, the JTC estimated the total cost at $1.1 to $1.133 billion, and the secretary of the treasury favored a federal contribution of two-thirds of capital costs ($267 to $395 million). But the PRS, even cut back to the Beltway, was estimated to cost $2 billion, not including interest. So far, Congress had authorized only a $100 million federal grant.46 The Bureau of the Budget found itself in the position of a man of moderate income who invites a favorite nephew to lunch, only to watch with growing concern as the lad orders all of the most expensive items on the menu, with a few choices from the wine list as well. Bureau staffers checked their files and found that the bureau had never agreed to pay two-thirds of the net costs of whatever the Authority came up with; in fact, the federal negotiator on the compact committee had specifically requested that no ratio be fixed in the compact. San Francisco and Atlanta were not demanding the same kind of help for their planned systems, and the proposed $866 million grant was more than Congress had authorized for aid to urban transit nationwide. But even if it had not made a specific commitment, the Bureau of the Budget had long championed the NCTA, it still thought a regional system worth building, and the two-thirds figure had been repeated so often that it would be extremely awkward to make a fuss now. The bureau kept silent, and WMATA kept announcing that the federal government would cover two-thirds of net project costs.47 Even with the federal government paying the bulk of the expense, local jurisdictions still needed to divide up the local share of the cost. On the one hand, if each jurisdiction paid only for the portion of the system on its own territory, there would be an enormous incentive not to build, and instead to bus one’s citizens to the county line and let them ride someone else’s train into work. On the other hand, if each jurisdiction paid a fixed proportion of the total system regardless of the amount it chose to build itself, a tragedy of the commons would arise: each would be tempted to build as large and extensive a system as it could, knowing that the additional expense would be diffused across the region.
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To avoid such extremes, in the fall of 1967 WMATA’s consultants proposed a more complicated scheme, which became known as the 40/30/15/15 formula. Each jurisdiction’s capital contribution would be based 40 percent on the construction cost of the lines in its territory, 30 percent on the operating cost of those lines, 15 percent on the number of its citizens projected to ride the system in 1990, and 15 percent on its projected 1990 population. A strict application of this formula would have swamped the District of Columbia, so the consultants designated downtown—with the most stations, the most underground construction, and the most suburbanites getting off their trains in the morning—as “Sector Zero,” removed from D.C.’s responsibility and instead blended into general system costs. As one critic later pointed out, neither this scheme nor the financing formula fully apportioned costs according to benefits; both Maryland and Virginia, whose citizens would save the most time and whose developers would get the largest windfall, would pay less than their share. But even if WMATA’s own numbers suggested that Maryland would get half the benefit, billing it for half the cost was politically unrealistic. The 40/30/15/15 formula passed the board with little discussion.48 Along with the big questions of where the system would run and who would pay for it, the Authority had to make important practical decisions on how to build it. Because Congress had already authorized the two-line basic system from Silver Spring to Van Ness and from the stadium to the airport, those lines had to be built first. Of the two, the Silver Spring–Van Ness line had priority, for it would serve Union Station, both a destination for commuter trains and the only place downtown for a rail yard. (The NCTA had planned to build its first yard east of the Anacostia, on the Benning line, but it jumped at the chance of a more central location.) As a bonus, this first phase would also connect the Senate office buildings by Union Station with the lobbyists’ favorite restaurants at Farragut Square. As for the extensions, the WMATA staff would strive to give each jurisdiction some portion of its line as quickly as possible, while delaying giving it all of its lines for as long as possible. Keeping everyone in the same boat of partial completion, they hoped, would make for better harmony on the board.49 Next, the new authority had to decide on equipment. The NCTA had rejected such fads as rubber-tired subway-bus hybrids, rubber-tired trains (as used in Paris), and monorails in favor of the steel-wheel, dual-rail technology in use since the dawn of railroading, as well as the trusted direct-current electricity delivered via third rail. The Authority adopted almost all of the chief decisions made earlier by the NCTA and its reliance on “proven engineering advances,” with the emphasis on “proven.” As Deputy General Manager Quenstedt put it, they “decided to go with what our engineers call realistic miracles—the latest and best and most modern improvements at the time we are ready to begin buying.”50 On the other hand, WMATA did want to take advantage of some new technology, especially electronic automation. Automated train control
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looked particularly appealing. By controlling train speed from a central computer, with signals sent through the rails to each train, such a system promised smoother acceleration and deceleration than any human hand, resulting not only in a smoother ride but also in energy savings. Unlike many exotic technologies, such systems had already been tried, in Stockholm, on the Long Island Railroad, and elsewhere. Jim Caywood, the De Leuw, Cather project manager, was a strong advocate for complete automation. While he realized that machines could go wrong, he argued that human beings were much more fallible. He was willing to comfort passengers with a human presence, so long as it was not an actual operator. “Dress him up like a Prussian general—boots, and the hat, and the whole bit,” he argued. “Let him walk through that whole train, let everyone on there know he’s the boss, and don’t fool around. But don’t put anybody up in that cab.”51 Automation also promised to ease fare collection. In 1963 the NCTA had left that issue undecided; while automated collection systems appeared promising, until someone else proved that they could work, the agency would stick with old-fashioned cashiers and turnstiles. But by 1967 commuter railroads in New York and Illinois had installed automatic fare gates using magnetic cards. Cards would not only save labor costs but also let the Authority charge more for longer trips, a key consideration for a system that combined elements of an urban subway and a regional commuter railroad.52 Although the Authority sought economies, it maintained the NCTA’s vision of a system luxurious enough to lure drivers from their automobiles. To add to Weese’s station, it hired the firm of Sundberg-Ferar to design the visible parts of the rail cars. The design team, led by Richard Heck, compromised between Metro’s urban and suburban functions. The commuter rail functions could be seen in the cars’ tinted windows and carpeted floors, which Sundberg-Ferar had earlier deployed on BART and the Long Island Railroad. The cars showed their urban tunnel–worthiness with sloped sides (to avoid knocking tunnel walls as the car banked around turns) and brightly colored interiors to offset the tunnels’ gloom. The seating arrangement was a compromise in itself. Fewer doors and more seats were best for the long, suburban stretches. In the downtown area, the priority was reversed, as passengers with short trips cared more about getting in and out quickly. Heck’s team specified three double-doors on each side of the car and spacious standing areas at each entry. Cushioned seats, built in pairs and cantilevered for easy vacuuming underneath, filled the areas away from the doors, giving suburbanites the chance to sit. This hybrid car reflected the hybrid nature of the system.53 As WMATA worked out these technical details, one last political detail fell into place. Frustrated by the defeat of his District of Columbia homerule initiative in 1965, President Johnson tried again in 1967, with a more moderate plan: a presidential reorganization to replace the three-member Board of Commissioners with a single commissioner (a quasi mayor), an
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assistant commissioner (a deputy mayor), and an appointed city council. Johnson got this plan through Congress in the summer of 1967, and it took effect in early August.54 Although the reorganization did not enfranchise the people of the District, it had enormous implications for the physical planning of the city. For one thing, Johnson’s choice of appointed mayor was Walter Washington, the lawyer who had in 1955 told Congress that the city had come of age. As a housing expert—he gave up the chairmanship of the New York City Housing Authority to take the District job—he was skeptical of any freeway plans. In addition, it created a council packed with African Americans, who shared Washington’s distrust of the highway department. Most important, the reorganization abolished the office of the engineer commissioner. In the space of a summer, the District government had been taken away from men who saw their job as building to a group of city residents with far less commitment to highways. Walter Washington’s first month as mayor was the last month of the National Capital Transportation Agency, which officially ceased to exist on 30 September 1967. Walter Tobriner, the president of the Board of Commissioners and the WMATA chairman, lost both his jobs. He was replaced, for the remaining few months of the District’s turn to head WMATA, by Walter Fauntroy, the African American minister who had lobbied for the Mid-City line. Fauntroy had been appointed vice chairman of the new city council, which now took over both the government of the District and its seats on the WMATA board. For a moment, transportation planning in Washington seemed squarely in the hands of the people who lived there. With WMATA fully in charge, in late 1967 and early 1968 the board, the staff, and local governments tinkered with the details of the PRS. Most of the changes were relatively minor, such as converting the Branch Avenue line to Anacostia from a subway to a bridge. Each jurisdiction also made one major change. In the District, WMATA staff rejected pleas from neighborhood advocates that the Columbia Heights spur be retained, but they did agree when the newly appointed council and mayor asked that a portion of the Mid-City line be moved from 7th Street NW to 13th Street. In Maryland, a rapid transit line was added along the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks to Ardmore (later renamed New Carrollton), a route slated for commuter rail service under the 1962 NCTA plan. (It helped that the Pennsy line would pass close to the homes of three members of the Prince George’s County board.) To compensate, the county shortened the Largo branch to Addison Road, within the Beltway. Virginia got a second river crossing, a bridge from L’Enfant Plaza to the Pentagon that would shave several minutes off trips downtown from Alexandria and southern Fairfax County. The final system was as delicately balanced as a china dish perched on a pole. Outside of the twelve-mile Sector Zero, the District, Maryland, and Virginia each got roughly the same number of miles, between twenty-seven and thirty.55
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Adopted Regional System, March 1968 (Cody Pfanstiehl, Papers, George Washington University, box 15; WMATA)
In March 1968 all of this became official. The WMATA board finalized the map, replacing the Proposed Regional System with the ninetyeight-mile Adopted Regional System (ARS). It estimated the cost at $1.828 billion in 1968 dollars, which, factoring in 5 percent inflation and 10 percent contingency, worked out at an estimated $2.525 billion to be spent between 1968 and 1980. (In accordance with federal accounting procedures, the NCTA’s 1962 regional plan, estimated at $793 million, did not include inflation.) One-third of the costs, the Authority projected, would be met by
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bonds to be repaid from fare-box revenues. Of the rest, local governments were to pay $575 million, and the federal government $1.151 billion.56 The Authority also gave the system a name. The NCTA had long resisted using the terms “subway” and “elevated,” for both connoted the noisy, dirty systems of New York and Chicago. Staffers played with alternatives, including “the Rapid” and “the Underground,” as well as monstrous names that only a politician could love, like the District-Maryland-Virginia-RapidTransit-System. One jokingly recommended “Federal Area Rapid Transit,” easily abbreviated as FART. It took Harry Weese’s Italian graphics consultant, Massimo Vignelli, to come up with a more elegant term, “Metro.” Metro, short for Metropolitan, was the name of the Paris rapid transit system, later borrowed by cities from Montreal to Moscow. As the name of so many systems worldwide, it had an international cachet appropriate to a world capital. Technically, it was more accurate than “subway,” for only half of the ARS was planned to run underground. Moreover, Vignelli argued, it reinforced the fact that the trains would serve the entire metropolitan area. Along with the name, Vignelli gave Metro a symbol: a capital M in the Helvetica typeface, to be printed, embossed, and emblazoned on trains, stations, uniforms, and pylons throughout the region. Metro had raised its banner.57 The metropolitan nature of the new system was not simply a matter of names and symbols, for it was inscribed in the system’s routing, financing, administration, and even equipment. The region’s leaders had proved themselves ready to take over the hard work of transportation planning and cooperation among jurisdictions. Building on the work completed by the NCTA, they would be ready to break ground on 1 October 1968.58 But the battle for devolution was not over. Not all members of the House of Representatives were ready to let go of their power over the District of Columbia, and it would take a fierce struggle before the people of the Washington region could be sure of the right to plan their own future.
1966–1971
5
The Bridge
Lyndon Johnson’s reorganization of the District government and the transfer of rapid transit duties to a local compact body might have been expected to remove area transportation from debate at the federal level. The events of the next several years would prove otherwise. Pro-highway congressmen replaced an unconditional gift with a threat and a bribe: Congress would only fund Metro so long as the new District government surrendered some of its power. For five years, Metro’s future was tied up with the city’s intensifying freeway fight, and only an extraordinary clash on the floor of the House of Representatives saved it. Washingtonians fought proposed freeways on several fronts. Pickets, rallies, and the occupation of threatened parkland and housing drew press attention at the time and have attracted the notice of journalists and historians.1 Meanwhile, another freeway revolt emerged within the established power structure, most notably the federal executive branch. This quieter, more deliberate effort by lawyers working within the system did more to block highway construction and ensure Metro’s survival. The Power of the Purse
By 1966 the freeway fight in Washington had become even more polarized. District and state highway departments continued to press for a version of Bartholomew’s highway plan, with an Inner Loop, a Three Sisters Bridge, and at least one north-south freeway to connect the Inner Loop to I-70 and I-95 north of the Beltway. Business groups, the major newspapers, some suburbanites, and, of course, the highway lobby supported their plans. But highway opponents had grown increasingly organized and skilled. In the eastern part of the city, African Americans in Northeast Washington had joined forces with the mostly white suburb of Takoma Park, Maryland, against construction of the proposed North Central Freeway, planned as part of Interstate 95 to Baltimore. In 1964, they formed the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC) to protest “white men’s roads through black men’s homes.” The ECTC’s officers, including Marion Barry of the District and Sammie Abbott of Takoma Park (whose home was in the path of the proposed highway), were brash and uncompromising. For them, even Stolzenbach’s 1962 proposal to route the North Central alongside the B&O tracks was unacceptable, for it would still require razing a line of houses parallel to the railroad. ECTC members
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Frederick
70S
Baltimore y Capital Beltwa 495
Takoma Park
95
Maryland
70S
Washington, D.C. Northeast
Cleveland Park L Inner oop
Three Sisters Bridge
266
95 66
Virginia 295 95 way Capital Belt
495 Richmond
Built Freeway Planned Freeway Built Parkway
Proposed freeways, 1967–1969 (Map by the author)
would shout and stand on furniture during hearings before the city council, the National Capital Planning Commission, and Congress. NCPC chairman Philip Hammer, who succeeded Rowe, was dismayed to see ECTC leaders arrive at his hearings armed.2 On the western side of the city, opposition to freeways focused on plans for the Three Sisters Bridge over the Potomac, the same project that Stolzenbach had opposed in late 1961. Although the bridge itself (designated on plans as part of Interstate 266) would be scarcely a quarter-mile long, it would dump enough vehicles into Georgetown to necessitate a Potomac River Freeway and the North Leg of the Inner Loop. Moreover, its approaches would swallow some parkland on both sides of the river, and the bridge, many of its opponents said, would ruin a view of the Potomac gorge. The bridge’s chief detractors were white professionals, many of them faithful readers of Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book, The Death and Life of
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Artist’s conception of the Three Sisters Bridge (D.C. Board of Commissioners, Three Sisters Bridge, 1963)
Great American Cities, criticized “the saints and sages of modern orthodox planning.”3 They rallied behind the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, a citizens’ planning group formed in the 1920s to protect the L’Enfant and McMillan plans. Despite occasional collaborative efforts, the two wings of the antifreeway movement differed in composition, priorities, and tactics. Unlike the ECTC, the Committee of 100 and its allies did not feel that lack of voting representation required them to work outside of the system. Instead, they continued the tactics that Peter Craig (who himself joined the Committee of 100) and other Cleveland Park residents had used since 1959: research, publicity, detailed testimony before public bodies, and lawsuits.4 Particularly effective were Craig’s own quantitative studies. A longtime baseball fan proficient in statistics, Craig used the highway departments’ own numbers and simple mathematical techniques. For example, by comparing the projections made by the Mass Transportation Survey in 1959 to actual traffic counts in the mid-1960s, he showed the projections to have been wildly inaccurate. Such appeals to numbers could reach ears deaf to appeals for racial justice. And, by showing that freeway opponents could be more rational than highway engineers, he robbed the engineers of some of their mystique. At one meeting, a federal official watched a Bureau of Public Roads representative become “pretty passionate about the rights of
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American people to buy cars and drive them wherever they pleased,” while “Craig kept cool and may have had some impact.”5 In an effort to resolve the controversy, the White House turned to the latest approach in decision making. The planning-programming-budgeting system (PPBS) suggested that before investing in a major project, a government agency should consider alternatives, measure success in goals achieved rather than resources expended, and plan far beyond next fiscal year. Having ordered all executive agencies to adopt this approach in 1965, in January 1966 the White House directed Engineer Commissioner Duke to commission a “review of the freeway plans by a disinterested consultant.” Duke chose Arthur D. Little, Inc., seemingly confident that the consultant would ratify the highway program.6 But the report exploded in his hands. The Little staff read not only official reports but Craig’s studies as well, and on March 22 it submitted a blistering critique of highway planning. The report found that “the history of transportation planning in the Washington Metropolitan Area has not been salutary. It is marred by inter-agency conflict and a lack of coordinated effort and direction. Also, careful study of the planning work of the past ten years discloses only the most superficial attempt at area-wide comprehensive planning for long-range goals.” Concluding that highway planning had been essentially incompetent, and that “freeways have generally created more problems than they have solved,” the report recommended against “a major commitment to the highway system.” Horrified, Duke apparently destroyed most copies, but the damage had already been done. On 24 March 1966, two days after the official publication of the Little Report, the National Capital Planning Commission voted to remove the Three Sisters Bridge from its official plan for the region. Antifreeway activists celebrated.7 Within weeks, however, antifreeway forces found a new opponent: Congressman William H. Natcher of Bowling Green, Kentucky. Born in 1909, Natcher projected the image of a southern gentleman. He kept his hair combed, his gray, three-piece suits crisp, and his car clean. But though personally charming, he was obsessive, stubborn, suspicious, and vain. Having once, as a first-grader, misspelled his middle name as Huston instead of Houston, he continued to misspell it for the rest of his life rather than admit the error. As a law student, he memorized the entire Robert’s Rules of Order. A former prosecutor, he grouched privately about left-wingers, beatniks, and the Warren Court. Most famously, from his arrival in Washington in 1953, he never missed a single roll-call vote, eventually making it into the Guinness Book of World Records with 18,401 consecutive roll-call and quorum votes cast. Even as his wife lay dying in Kentucky, he would shuttle back to the House floor for minor procedural votes, lest he spoil his record, and he himself would be buried with his voting card after serving more than forty years in the House. This was a man who believed in playing by the rules, for whom form was more important than content.8
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Congressman William H. Natcher (Washington Star Collection, DCPL)
In 1961 Natcher found a perfect nest as chairman of the House Subcommittee on District of Columbia Appropriations, a position of essentially autocratic power. Because of the constitutional provision that all appropriations must originate in the House, the House Appropriations Committee was, in some members’ opinion, the most powerful committee in Congress, almost a third House of Congress in itself. Although other members of Congress often grumbled that the committee used its power of the purse to interfere with substantive decisions best left to other committees, its decisions were only rarely overturned by the full House of Representatives. Congressmen regarded it with “a mixture of awe, fear, and envy,” and generally avoided angering its members. Within the committee, decisions on individual appropriations bills were left largely to the relevant subcommittees, whose chairmen were described by one member of Congress as “lords with their fiefs and their duchys.”9 The capital’s lack of congressional representation and budget autonomy further amplified the power of the D.C. appropriations subcommittee chairman. Natcher so dominated his subcommittee that it often dispensed with formal votes. The full appropriations committee rarely overturned de-
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cisions of a subcommittee, which was presumed to have the most expertise, and Natcher’s southern courtesy and loyalty to House norms made him popular throughout the House, further insulating him from fear of being overturned on the floor. A Natcher decision could be expected to stick, so without his approval, the District could not spend a dime.10 Natcher tried to serve what he felt was the “best interest of our Capital City,” but he had little real contact with its citizens. He regarded the black community as generally decent but incapable of self-government. Appalled by the crime rate, he judged Washington “probably the most wicked city in the world,” requiring guidance by the Congress, preferably “hardheaded Southern Members.” He opposed home rule, predicting that it would turn out to be a system of “a few white people . . . controlling the Negroes to be elected and those that will be in charge of operating our Capital City,” his own term for the District. And though he hesitantly voted for President Johnson’s reorganization plan, he hoped for a white mayor, and found nothing positive to say about Mayor Washington or almost any of the council members, white or black.11 The only Washingtonians whose opinions seemed to matter to him were the members of the editorial boards of the city’s three daily newspapers, whose editorials and articles about him Natcher carefully inserted into his journals. But if an editorial went against him, he could easily dismiss it; he accused the Washington Post of “simply laying the groundwork to get back down into the bottom of the garbage pail with their usual mean scurrilous editorials.” He regarded a request by a reporter for an interview or an invitation to lunch with the editorial board as an insult.12 Natcher was no stooge of the highway lobby, as even his opponents conceded. Like many other southern Democrats, he easily won reelection, occasionally without any opposition from either party. His personal needs were equally modest, so he had little need of lobbyists’ money and refused all campaign contributions and honoraria. And he had opposed the earliest proposal for the Interstate Highway System, fearing it “would give the Federal Government dictatorial control over roads in the States for all time to come.” On the other hand, Natcher did have a personal stake in seeing the D.C. highways completed. His popularity at home depended on his delivering tens of millions of dollars’ worth of river projects for Kentucky each year. He had gained that power by cultivating an alliance with the House Public Works Committee, the same committee that had ordered the freeways built. Any threat to that committee’s sovereignty challenged his own ability to provide for his constituents.13 Natcher entered the freeway-subway debate in 1963. Following the November Report, his hearings on the transit plan emphasized his support of General Clarke’s highway program and his distrust of the highway protesters, whom he called “irresponsible intruders.” Because the highways through the District had been mapped as part of the Interstate system, he wanted to see them built. If those plans had been drawn up in error, that
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was of no more consequence than if he had misspelled his own name; what mattered was that once a decision was made, it was confirmed, and by the spring of 1966, Natcher wanted the highway program confirmed. In April he vented his disgust with what he called the “little pressure groups” opposing freeways and with the Little Report, a “farce” in his opinion.14 Natcher decided to strike back at the antihighway forces by attacking the rapid transit system they had championed. In April 1966, he warned, “I am unable to continue recommending . . . that money will be appropriated for the rapid transit system if the highway program is to be brought to a complete halt.” In other words, unless the District built the planned freeways, Natcher would withhold the District’s share of its subway funds. As Duke confirmed, the effect would be to block all construction, since without the District funds, it would be impossible to get federal funds appropriated or bonds sold.15 General Duke mobilized to meet Natcher’s demands. In May he convinced George Hartzog, director of the National Park Service, to approve the Three Sisters Bridge (which would swallow some parklands) as part of a complicated, sixteen-point agreement that promised the Park Service several tunnels under the Mall, helping clear it of cars. He then persuaded McCarter of the NCTA to agree to similar terms, using the Natcher threat as leverage. Duke then had a majority in the NCPC, and at its June meeting the commission voted 6-5 to reinstate the bridge, the North Central Freeway, and a freeway along the west bank of the Anacostia.16 Even then, Natcher was not satisfied. Thinking both the House District Committee and General Duke overly timid, he submitted a fiscal 1966 appropriations bill for the District without any subway funds. Charles Horsky, watching from the White House, wrote that “Natcher’s bulldozer tactics can only further inflame a situation which possibly, and even probably, otherwise would work itself out in time,” but he hoped that a short delay would not substantially hurt the subway. In September the planning commission approved four elements of the highway plan, pleasing Natcher sufficiently for him to release $1.6 million, just enough to keep the De Leuw, Cather and Weese consultants on the NCTA payroll.17 But the city’s freeway opponents were not ready to surrender. In September 1966, following the NCPC vote, the Committee of 100 resolved to file a lawsuit against the D.C. government and the NCPC to block bridge construction. Peter Craig, acting for the committee, turned to his former firm, Covington and Burling. Partner Gerhard Gesell agreed to take the case for a nominal retainer and assigned lawyers Roberts Owen and Gerald Norton to the matter. Owen, the lead counsel, had paid little attention to the highway fight, but he enjoyed suing the government to force it to obey the law.18 Then, having lost in Stolzenbach their federal champion, in April 1967 freeway opponents gained a new one: Alan Boyd, the nation’s first secretary of transportation. The very creation of the Department of Transportation
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signaled a shift. The 1966 act that established the department required it to consider some environmental impacts and avoid harm to parks, wilderness, and historic sites whenever possible. Moreover, for the first time, the Bureau of Public Roads, which in the Commerce Department had enjoyed substantial autonomy, was placed in a structure that gave equal billing to railroads, aviation, and, eventually, urban mass transit. Boyd himself had risen from the chairmanship of the Civil Aviation Board, so he had some independence from the road builders. When Robert Weaver, secretary of housing and urban development and the nation’s first African American cabinet officer, drew him aside to discuss urban freeways, Boyd was willing to listen. Weaver introduced him to a group of black Baltimoreans who had worked all their lives to own houses, which were about to be taken for a highway right-of-way for what they argued was inadequate compensation. Boyd was shaken and began reconsidering the desirability of urban freeways.19 Soon, the upper ranks of the new department swelled with freeway skeptics. For his highway administrator, Boyd chose Lowell Bridwell, a former reporter who Boyd believed would stand up to the engineers. Paul Sitton, deputy under secretary, had monitored the Bureau of Public Roads as an examiner for the Bureau of the Budget. He had grown disgusted with the road builders, so he had used his post to support Stolzenbach and to feed information to Washington highway protestors. He had also served on the NCTA Advisory Board in its last year of existence. Now Boyd turned to him for background information and advice on D.C. highway issues. Most inflammatory was Boyd’s assistant general counsel for litigation: antihighway activist Peter Craig. Craig recused himself from department work involving the Washington region, but by hiring him Boyd had made his sympathies clear. Boyd himself told the pro-highway Board of Trade, “I do not believe Washingtonians will receive the greatest possible return on their investment—returns in service and convenience—if the community tries to resolve today’s problems by the simple expedients of more automobiles, more freeways, and more parking lots.”20 Like Stolzenbach before him, Boyd entered the freeway controversy by questioning the Three Sisters Bridge, reasoning that a bridge and highway through historic parkland over the opposition of residents was the exact opposite of what Johnson’s Department of Transportation was trying to promote. In May 1967, just weeks after his department’s creation, Boyd insisted that the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962 and the Department of Transportation Act required him to study the bridge’s impact. In September Boyd’s representative on the NCPC abstained from a crucial vote on the Three Sisters Bridge, thus delaying the project further.21 Brigadier General Robert Mathe, General Duke’s successor as engineer commissioner, howled at Boyd’s actions, but the ground was crumbling beneath him. That autumn, President Johnson’s reorganization of the District government eliminated his post. Thomas Airis remained as the head
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D.C. highway chief Thomas Airis with Center Leg, 1973 (Evening Star staff photo. Photographer: Wellner Streets. Copyright Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
of the Department of Highways—he was so popular on Capitol Hill that Mayor Walter Washington dared not fire him—and he continued to favor the highways as planned. He dismissed critiques as “innuendo, half truths, threats of violence and amateur engineering,” and included Boyd on his list of people “least competent to make a decision” on his highways. But Airis now got his orders from a civilian council. The new council’s designated transportation man, John Nevius, knew little about highways, but he was impressed by Craig’s research and equally unimpressed by Airis and his staff, whom he found cynical and insincere. On Nevius’s recommendation, the council called for a restudy of freeways. The chairman, John Hechinger, feared Natcher’s wrath, but he too followed Boyd’s lead in rejecting the bridge.22 At stake was not just a few miles of highway in the District of Columbia and Virginia, but federal policy nationwide. Washington had become, in the view of the New York Times, “the Dienbienphu of the long guerrilla war between [the highway lobby] and the anti-freeway forces.” By the fall of 1966 the Committee of 100 had formed links with freeway protestors in San Francisco, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and other cities. The Department of Transportation’s Sitton asked, “How can the President lecture mayors on
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seeking more responsive solutions if the same standards are not made to apply in D.C.?” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized that the bridge, “superficially . . . a local dispute,” raised the question of whether transportation planning would remain entirely in the hands of “highway engineers, the construction industry and the automotive and allied industries” or include “sociologists, economists, housing officials and architects.” The PostDispatch hoped for the latter. Boyd himself told Stephen Pollak, who had succeeded Horsky as the White House’s D.C. expert, that the bridge would have “national implications.” To cancel it would be to assert “that cities are not built for cars alone; that there comes a point when the insatiable appetite of cars for additional roads must be denied.”23 On the other side, the bridge—and its potential as a precedent—attracted the attention of pro-highway members of the House of Representatives. In December 1966 John Kluczynski of Chicago convened his Roads Subcommittee of Public Works to solicit testimony from freeway proponents, especially that of the D.C. Department of Highways. At the hearings, Kluczynski warned Boyd that “this committee has no great desire to lay out, block by block, mile by mile, or bridge by bridge, what the highway construction program for the Nation’s Capital shall be” but threatened “to legislate the highway program for this area and be done with it.”24 After the highway plan stalled again, Kluczynski made good on his threat. On 9 February 1968, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the antifreeway groups, finding that the D.C. Department of Highways had failed to follow proper procedures, including public hearings. The court enjoined the construction of the highways; “to allow the District government to build large expressways without regard for the District highway plan, which was initiated for the express purpose of preserving the L’Enfant street plan, would be inconsistent with history, a strong tradition, and express statutory language.” In response, Kluczynski introduced an amendment to the 1968 Highway Bill, designed to continue the Interstate program nationwide. The amendment required construction of the Three Sisters Bridge, the Potomac River Freeway, and portions of the Inner Loop’s Center and East legs, “notwithstanding any other provision of law, or any court decision or administrative action to the contrary.” As dissenting members of Congress pointed out, such insistence on a specific road project in general legislation was contrary to the rules of the public works committee, but in June the House passed the bill with the amendment.25 The highway bill proved controversial for several reasons. The Senate had largely followed the president’s program, promising better tools to ensure that people displaced by highway construction were quickly and comfortably relocated. But the House took an opposite position. In addition to Kluczynski’s bridge amendment, the bill canceled Lady Bird Johnson’s beautification program, removed provisions protecting parks and private nature sanctuaries from highway takings, and added 3,000 miles to the Interstate Highway System. When the resulting conference produced a
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compromise bill that kept some beautification and relocation measures but still mandated the bridge and added 1,500 miles to the system, President Johnson concluded that the benefits outweighed the flaws. On 23 August he signed the act into law, publicly denouncing the manhandling of the District of Columbia as “by far the most objectionable feature in the bill” and “inconsistent with a basic tenet of sound urban development—to permit the local government and the people affected to participate meaningfully in planning their transportation system.” He stated that he declined to veto the bill only because the proposed highways would still need to meet the 1962 act’s requirement of a comprehensive planning process.26 As all of this went on, WMATA, in the words of one journalist, began “holding its breath, hoping nobody will notice it until the freeway furor dies down.” While Boyd and Airis argued, Authority engineers had built a short test track near the future Rhode Island Avenue Station, north of Union Station, complete with a prototype station vault, only eighteen feet long but full-scale in width and height. The Authority had targeted 15 July as the date on which the first construction bids would be advertised, and WMATA staff watched eagerly as a wall display counted down the days until ground breaking. But without Natcher’s approval, the Authority could not sign a construction contract, and on 10 August, Natcher again tied subway construction to freeways, withholding subway funds from the District of Columbia’s fiscal 1969 budget until “the freeway system gets underway beyond recall.” The countdown clock froze at seventy-five days.27 With expenses mounting and inflation threatening previous cost estimates, WMATA staff and board members privately begged both the D.C. Council and the White House to give in to Natcher’s demands, lest delay drain the funds needed for the subway. Publicly, WMATA officials were careful to say only nice things about the congressman. General Manager Jackson Graham had worked with Natcher on dams in the congressman’s district as a Corps of Engineers district commander. Now he warned his board not to antagonize the prickly Kentuckian, writing that Natcher “would consider it an affront to his Committee and the Congress for the District Government to seek any construction money before it has carried out its end ‘of the bargain’ in connection with the freeway program. He wants to be helpful but not abused in the process.” Two months later, in November 1968, Graham went on record repudiating Stolzenbach’s philosophy that transit could substitute for roads. WMATA, he wrote, “has consistently maintained that rapid rail transit is a supplement to and not a substitute for alternative modes of transportation” and promised that 85 to 90 percent of rail passengers would arrive at the station by bus or car. But the impasse continued, and by February 1969 the Authority estimated that each week of delay cost it $2 million.28 Despite the delay, WMATA had plenty of work to do. In a gesture of compromise, Natcher agreed to release funds for architecture, engineering, and land acquisition, just not construction. In September 1968, the
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Lyndon Johnson with Metro car mockup (WMATA)
Authority unveiled a prototype train car on the grounds of the Washington Monument, later moving it to the South Lawn of the White House so that President Johnson could try out the seats.29 Such publicity helped the Authority win a tremendous victory. That summer, Graham had to decide whether to ask several of WMATA’s suburban jurisdictions to include on the November ballot referenda to issue bonds. These were major commitments—some Arlingtonians pointed out that their county’s share was equivalent to at least twenty years’ worth of school bonds—and most of WMATA’s top officials feared that the controversy in Congress would make Metro seem a shaky bet. Indeed, just three years later, voters in Atlanta’s suburbs would decisively reject plans to join that city’s rail system, showing the risks involved.30 But Washington was not Atlanta. With D.C.’s downtown highways in jeopardy, Washington’s neighbors needed rail in a way that prosperous suburban Atlantans did not. With state borders separating them from the inner city, Marylanders and Virginians did not share Georgians’ fears that merged transportation could lead to merged school districts. Moreover, the Authority’s polls indicated strong support, so Graham called for the bonds
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Poster in support of the 1968 bond referendum (Cody Pfanstiehl, Papers, George Washington University, box 15)
to go to a vote. Thanks in part to intense campaigning by Pfanstiehl’s publicists and downtown business groups, voters in both states approved the referenda in a 72 percent landslide. The suburbs had ratified the WMATA plan, and had the District controlled its own finances as well, the system would have been in wonderful shape. But the only vote that counted there was Natcher’s.31 The controversy heated up again in December 1968, the final weeks of a lame-duck Johnson administration. The NCPC released a new plan, based on its finding that “additional freeways would represent liabilities rather than assets. . . . They would pour additional vehicles on central streets that are already operating at capacity [and] could damage the natural beauty and monumental character of the city. They would generate traffic that would soon exceed the capacities on their own rights-of-way to handle it.” The plan called for a cancellation of the Three Sisters Bridge and the North Central Freeway and a scaling back of other projects, replacing the opentrench design of the North Leg with a four-lane tunnel under K Street. The NCPC did offer an “Industrial Freeway,” which would carry Baltimore-
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bound traffic on a route parallel to New York Avenue through a part of the city dominated by warehouses, printing plants, railroad tracks, and a proposed industrial park, not residences. On 12 December, a defiant D.C. council and mayor approved the NCPC plan. Then, on 17 January 1969, Boyd’s federal highway administrator officially deleted the Three Sisters Bridge and the North Central Freeway from the Interstate Highway System.32 Three days later, Boyd was out of a job, as Richard Nixon was inaugurated president of the United States. Nixon and Natcher
Nixon’s secretary of transportation, John Volpe, was no Alan Boyd. A construction magnate and a firm believer in road building, he had promoted highways as Massachusetts public works commissioner and as the nation’s first federal highway administrator, following the passage of the 1956 Highway Act. Contrary to Boyd’s advice, Volpe chose as his highway administrator Francis Turner, an able engineer but a man unable to see the negative effects of urban freeways. And Nixon himself was not terribly committed to Metro. Asked at a crucial moment to tour a construction site, he refused, shouting, “No, not now or ever!” and replied to the argument that Metro had national implications with a simple cry of “bullshit!”33 But Nixon was determined to continue the Kennedy and Johnson efforts to increase self-government in the District of Columbia. He kept Walter Washington, a Johnson appointee, as mayor and included African American leaders with real standing in their communities as council members. At the White House, he first relied for advice on D.C. matters on Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a veteran of Kennedy’s efforts to rebuild the capital. Moreover, the Nixon White House had its share of highway skeptics and subway advocates. Nixon himself liked firsthand information whenever he could get it, and a rush-hour helicopter tour convinced him that Metro was necessary. Looking down on a city of traffic jams, the president exclaimed, “I’m sure glad I don’t have to drive to work!” The Office of Management and Budget opposed congressional requirements that the District build specific highways as incompatible “with Administration steps to move D.C. toward self-government.” And, with the city still recovering from the violence that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, some in the administration feared that highway construction would start another round of rioting.34 The D.C. committees of Congress stayed loyal to Metro. In June, despite the delay of the already authorized basic system, the House and Senate District committees held joint hearings on financing the ninety-eight-mile regional system. Speaking for the Authority, Chairman Frederick Babson and General Manager Graham used a variety of appeals, from the national glory of a rapid transit system to match the Apollo moonshot, to Congress’s self-interest in an efficient federal work force. They also assured Congress that what looked like a $1.047 billion grant would only cost $438 million,
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because $600 million in fare-box revenue would eventually be returned to the treasury.35 Their brave words disguised deep fears. At the end of the month, Congress would vote on a supplemental appropriations bill, and it looked as though Natcher would continue to block ground breaking. Moynihan at the White House and Babson at WMATA begged the D.C. council to yield to Natcher’s blackmail. The council held firm, and so did the congressman. Natcher believed the District was blackmailing him by refusing to build the highways, and he found reassurance in newspaper editorials blaming the impasse on the D.C. government. On 9 July, he again persuaded the House to withhold the funds. By 6 August, the newspapers reported rumors that WMATA was about to be disbanded, and the next day Babson announced that he had asked the board to contemplate winding down the Authority. The White House urged the council to approve the bridge, at least for the time being.36 Pressured on all sides, the D.C. council surrendered. At 10 a.m. on Saturday, 9 August, the council convened. Knowing what was going to happen, protestors packed the meeting room, shouting that the council members were sellouts and whores. After four minutes, council chairman Gilbert Hahn ordered police to clear the room. Screaming protestors threw chairs and at least one ashtray before being dragged away. With the room quiet, the council resolved to comply with the Highway Act of 1968, making it quite clear that it had voted under duress. Hahn announced, “I believe the building of the bridge is wrong and I am still not convinced that it is in the best interest of the City. However, we do not live in the world we wish; we live in the world as it is. We are forced at times to make rather hard choices—either build the bridge or no subway.”37 Natcher was still not satisfied. He wanted bridge construction to reach the point of no return before releasing the funds. President Nixon stepped in, writing to Natcher on 12 August 1969 that “the District of Columbia Government is firmly committed to completion of these projects as the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1968 provides.” The next day, the Federal Highway Administration again designated the disputed sections as part of the Interstate Highway System, and by 17 September the first bridge construction contract had been awarded. Natcher then stated that all lawsuits would have to be “successfully concluded” before he would release the funds. Despairing, the WMATA board directed Graham “to prepare a plan for orderly phasing out of the program” should the Authority run out of funds. Graham refused to take the request seriously, telling the board, “there is no halfway enclave to which the Metro program can repair.” Finally, after yet another assurance from the D.C. Department of Highways, Natcher yielded. On 24 September 1969 he recommended the release of funds.38 Now the clock could start counting down again, and WMATA rapidly moved forward. The day after Natcher’s announcement, the Authority sent out notices requesting bids from 400 contractors. Seventy-four days later,
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Metro ground breaking, December 1969 (WMATA)
on 9 December 1969, 2,000 people watched WMATA board members, other local officials, and Secretary of Transportation John Volpe scoop dirt with gold shovels for a ceremonial ground breaking at Judiciary Square.39 The event was fourteen months behind the original schedule, but it was still a hopeful moment. And it signaled more than just the start of construction on the basic system authorized in 1965. For on the same day, President Nixon signed into law the National Capital Transportation Act of 1969, passed by Congress one week before. The act approved the ninety-eightmile regional system and pledged $1.047 billion as the federal contribution. In January the local jurisdictions agreed on their shares of the regional system.40 It seemed that the subway was finally to be a reality. But the freeway fight had not yet run its course. Following the city council’s capitulation, highway opponents continued their three-pronged attack. In court, Owen unsuccessfully sought a temporary restraining order to prevent the start of work on the Three Sisters Bridge. In the streets, demonstrators briefly occupied the Three Sisters Islands and blocked bulldozers on the riverbank before being taken away in handcuffs. And on Capitol Hill, antihighway activists waited only for the Metro ground breaking before resuming their courtship of sympathetic senators.41 They would have to act soon, for the 1968 Highway Act, signed into law in August 1968, had given the District of Columbia and the Department of
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Students protest at the Three Sisters Bridge construction site, October 1969 (Evening Star staff photo by Joseph Silverman. Copyright Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
Transportation only eighteen months—until 23 February 1970—in which either to make “recommendations” on the approved highway system or to begin constructing it. Faced with the deadline, in February 1970 the D.C. council did just what Natcher had feared. It did not again try to cancel the Three Sisters Bridge, but it backed away from other roads favored by Kluczynski and his allies. Rejecting the recommendations of its own Department of Highways (still controlled by holdovers from the engineer commissioner days) in favor of the NCPC’s 1968 recommendations, the council endorsed a K Street tunnel and an Industrial Freeway in place of the North Central Freeway. The council’s tunnel-dependent plan was an ambitious and, most likely, frighteningly expensive design for highways that would be invisible to most of the city’s residents.42 Natcher was most displeased. Telling the House in June 1970 that “the intent of the [1968] act has been thwarted at every turn by the District of Columbia government,” he deleted Metro funds from the District’s fiscal 1971 budget.43 WMATA faced the third Natcher impasse since 1966. There was little the Authority could do. It could not control Natcher, nor could it stop the antibridge litigation by the Committee of 100 and other groups of private citizens exercising their constitutional rights. Neither Natcher nor the freeway protestors saw any reason to compromise, leaving both WMATA and the city council essentially helpless.
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The battle showed no signs of ending. Judge John Sirica of the U.S. District Court had in 1969 and 1970 ruled against Owen, granting the government summary judgment the second time. But the appeals court ordered a trial, and Owen devised a stratagem. He had learned that a completed Three Sisters Bridge, with its approaches, would block Sirica’s own commute down MacArthur Boulevard. He could hardly make that argument in open court, so instead he simply laid out the maps, saying, “Judge, I think you need to understand this.” One of the government lawyers broke in, saying, “Ha, ha, ha. Judge, I see what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to persuade you that you will not be able to drive to work if the bridge is built.” Sirica looked stunned, then announced a twenty-minute recess, during which he scrutinized the maps in the privacy of his chambers. Returning to the courtroom, the judge was much more sympathetic to the plaintiffs, and on 3 August 1970 he ruled that city officials had not held the necessary public hearings. On 7 August, he gave the city twenty days to appeal or face an injunction halting work on the bridge.44 The District of Columbia government, which did not want the bridge in the first place, declined to appeal the ruling. On 28 August construction stopped on the bridge, with the piers still below the surface of the river. In December the District tried to comply with Sirica’s instructions by holding three days of hearings on the design of the bridge, but rather than comment on specific plans, most of the 130 witnesses called for the bridge to be canceled altogether. Unimpressed, the House passed the District’s supplemental appropriation without Metro funds.45 Subway construction continued, paid for by a $57 million loan from the Department of Transportation. A classic maneuver of “backdoor financing” (spending that avoided the House Appropriations Committee), the loan was so sensitive that the WMATA staff, even Jackson Graham himself, was kept out of the negotiations with the White House. Combined with the suburban shares, the loan kept the backhoes growling. Through the summer of 1971, construction went ahead, including ground-breaking ceremonies in Virginia. But, as Graham pointed out, “it is Congress from whom all blessings flow,” and Natcher still blocked the District’s $72.5 million share for fiscal years 1971 and 1972. Without the District funds, federal matching funds were also blocked, leaving WMATA short a total of $212 million. Moreover, it would be impossible for the Authority to sell its revenue bonds while the future of the entire project remained in doubt.46 Even as his actions grabbed headlines, Natcher’s thinking remained mysterious. He refused to talk to reporters, and in both his public statements and private journals he gave shifting, contradictory reasons for withholding the appropriation. At times he expressed concern about cost overruns, predicting a total cost of more than $5 billion, rather than the $2.5 billion then projected by WMATA. At other times, he claimed that “there is not a man, woman or child in the city of Washington that is stronger for a rapid rail system than I am,” but he simply felt obliged to defend the honor of the
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House of Representatives. By 1971 Natcher had convinced himself that support for Metro came mainly from “big banks, large brokerage firms and big law firms,” or possibly the Mafia, who presumably were seeking illicit gain. Daniel Inouye, Natcher’s counterpart in the Senate, speculated that Natcher simply feared the shame of a headline reading “Natcher Gives In.” Perhaps most of all, Natcher wanted the highway acts enforced as a matter of law and order. He was an old-time southern Democrat, increasingly uneasy in a majority-black city whose residents were gaining political power by the day. Building the highways would prove that “our Capital City is under the jurisdiction of the Congress of the United States and not under the jurisdiction of the looters and the burners who have no respect for this city.”47 Commenting on Natcher’s varying rationales, Maryland congressman Gilbert Gude told the House, “when a man says he sure does want to meet with you for lunch sometime, but, well, he is not feeling too well today, then you both set a date for another day. But if, later, the man says he is awfully busy, and then later, that he might have to go out of town—and also starts grumbling about the increase in prices at the restaurant—well, then I believe you begin to wonder if the man really is interested in having lunch with you.” At times Natcher’s behavior bordered on the absurd. For example, in September 1971 he promised to release the funds once all the promises in a letter from Transportation Secretary Volpe had been carried out. The only catch was that Natcher and Volpe both refused to release the letter’s contents, leading the Washington Post to complain, “secrecy is one thing, and blackmail another. But when an entire metropolitan region—not to mention Mr. Natcher’s own colleagues in the House—have to play cute games to figure out the current price of a floating ransom, it gets insane.”48 By the spring of 1971 Natcher’s cute games had been going on for five years. He had resisted District officials, the NCPC, the United States Senate, two secretaries of transportation, and three presidents of the United States in his determination to see the highways built. But he was about to be outflanked on his own turf: the House of Representatives. Natcher’s stubbornness had earned the wrath of the White House. Nixon himself had no desire to get entangled in what he saw as a local issue. But daily liaison between the White House and the District was handled by Egil Krogh Jr., a young lawyer from Seattle who had taken over D.C. duties from Moynihan. Krogh had fallen in love with the city and had been impressed by the demonstrations against the Three Sisters Bridge. He did not want to see the District surrender to blackmail.49 More important was a change in the scope of the problem. In 1969 Natcher had roughed up the voteless District of Columbia as the Maryland and Virginia suburbs cheered. Now those suburbs found themselves on the District’s side. They had sunk $133 million into Metro construction in the District, and they wanted some return on their investment. Moreover, by insisting on the District portion of the North Central Freeway, Natcher was
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essentially requiring Maryland to build its portion. As suburbanites turned against that project, their elected representatives turned against Natcher. The vast majority of the Montgomery County delegation to the Maryland legislature proclaimed that the North Central Freeway “involves directly the interests of Maryland and her citizens, more particularly those residing in Montgomery County, and the decision should be made at the state and local levels,” not by congressmen from Kentucky and Illinois. One Prince George’s County state senator wondered if it wasn’t time for local congressmen to start blocking federal projects in Natcher’s home district.50 Unlike the District, the suburbs had congressional representatives, and these, too, turned against Natcher. As Congressman Gude of Maryland later explained, he was all for self-determination for the District, but ultimately he was responsible to his constituents, so he had initially supported Kluczynski’s attempts to force D.C. to build roads for them. Now that those constituents rejected highways, Gude condemned Natcher’s linking of subways and freeways and urged his colleagues on the District Committee to judge each program on its own merit. In the U.S. Senate, Maryland’s Joseph Tydings declared that Natcher’s action “insults the citizens of the Sovereign States of Maryland and Virginia and the District of Columbia; and . . . represents an unprecedented and intolerable interference in the local affairs of these states.”51 Northern Virginia was slower to act. While its residents were increasingly skeptical about plans for Interstate 66, the highway that would feed the Three Sisters Bridge from the Virginia side, their representative, Congressman Joel Broyhill, was an enthusiastic advocate of the road, which would pass by some of his properties. Through 1970 Broyhill continued to scold the District government for not building freeways, but Broyhill had been burned by Natcher’s caprice, and by a close reelection that November in which the freeway issue cost him some votes. Now, in the spring of 1971, even he wanted to separate the issues of subway and freeway construction. Moreover, his key seat on the Ways and Means Committee gave him prestige to match Natcher’s appropriations clout.52 Despite this suburban reversal, the man to pick up the lance against Natcher was not from Maryland or Virginia. He was Robert Giaimo of Connecticut, the second-ranking Democrat behind Natcher on the D.C. appropriations subcommittee. Giaimo knew full well the customs of the committee. “You be quiet,” he was told, “you get along, you go along, you don’t make any waves, you certainly don’t challenge your sub-committee chairmen and your committee chairman with amendments.” Only gradually did Giaimo emerge as a rebel. In August 1969 he wrote a constituent that “the anti-highway people blithely ignored the will of Congress,” and that “Congress, not Mr. Natcher,” had withheld the Metro funds as a means of overcoming “a noisy militant minority.” A year later, at the beginning of the second impasse, he began to tilt. While highways had their place, he wrote, “the citizens of the District ought to be able to set their own public
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policy—making these crucial decisions in accordance with their own view of their best interests—even if they have to make their own mistakes.” And by the spring of 1971, with Metro’s future obviously at risk, he was fed up with Natcher’s blackmail. “Bill,” he told his chairman, “it’s unconscionable. We can’t hold up the Metro. We’re going to need Metro in this town.”53 It is not clear what led Giaimo to take the unusual and dangerous step of challenging his own subcommittee chairman. His greater New Haven district did include both city dwellers and many people who depended on commuter rail service to New York City. But as a supporter of the controversial supersonic transport, he was no die-hard environmentalist. Although he believed in home rule, he also believed that annual federal payment to the District justified close congressional oversight. And it is hard to see how bucking Natcher could have helped his political stature. As one environmentalist wrote, “by defending the rights of people with no votes to offer him he showed a commitment to both environmental and human values. He had nothing to gain, and plenty to lose by antagonizing powerful House leaders.” Giaimo himself described the challenge as based on principle. When it was all over, he dashed off a note to Congressman Silvio Conte, a key ally. “You were the greatest,” he wrote. “Let’s get together and keep working together for what we believe.”54 Giaimo began his challenge on 6 May 1971, offering an amendment releasing the District’s subway funds. Defeated in the Appropriations Committee, he audaciously proposed that the entire House override the committee, arguing that Congress “should be above maneuvering, forcing, and trying to blackjack the people into compliance.” His amendment was defeated, 219-170, but he came much closer to overriding Natcher than anyone had expected, especially given that the House leadership of both parties opposed his challenge. By the end of the month, observers hoped that release was imminent. But Natcher hardened his heart, dismissing Giaimo as “right unusual” and “a man who always represents big business interests.” On 1 August 1971 the last of WMATA’s cash reserves ran out. Work continued on previously authorized contracts, but the Authority could not sign any new ones. WMATA officials now froze the countdown to the first operation.55 Hope of an easy settlement faded that autumn. On 12 October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District ruled on the latest Three Sisters Bridge suit. Writing for a two to one majority, Chief Judge David Bazelon not only affirmed Sirica’s judgment against the Department of Transportation on procedural grounds, but went further, finding that Secretary Volpe had failed to comply with a single applicable statute and stating that the decision to approve the bridge “would be invalid if based in whole or in part on the pressures emanating from Representative Natcher.” Although the opinion explicitly excused Natcher of “any suggestion of impropriety or illegality,” it provoked him to rage. “I am not in favor of the Judiciary Branch of the Government taking over the Legislative Branch,” he dictated
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in his journal, “so therefore I have not changed my mind.” Meanwhile, the clock was running. The Highway Act of 1970, like the act of 1968 before it, imposed a deadline on the D.C. government, this one requiring it to report on the freeway situation by 31 December.56 It was time for a showdown. In the suburbs, frustrated local officials considered terminating Metro payments and spending the money on improved roads and buses. On 17 November, the Washington Post warned that Metro “is as close to death today as it has ever been.” Broyhill arrived the next day, begging Nixon to “pull the rug out from under” Natcher by saying that the District and the Department of Transportation were doing all they could to comply with the 1968 act. Nixon agreed, releasing a statement that day. He warned that “not only do delays in METRO work cost taxpayers heavily; they might even erode confidence and cooperation seriously enough to consign the entire project to an early grave.” He urged Congress “to end the present delay and to prevent any more such derailments of METRO progress.” As he spoke, the White House staff helped Giaimo mobilize a bizarre, bipartisan coalition of liberal Republicans and Democrats, White House loyalists, and the Congressional Black Caucus, all to take on Natcher.57 The showdown came two weeks later, on 2 December 1971, when the D.C. appropriations bill reached the House floor. Again, Congressman Giaimo challenged Natcher, offering an amendment to release the District’s funds. Supporting him were the Maryland and Virginia delegations, and Republicans willing to follow Nixon’s lead. Opponents spoke not of the merits of rapid transit but of the prerogatives of the House of Representatives. Natcher complained that Judge Bazelon had threatened “the American system of government.” Fellow members of Natcher’s Appropriations clan rose to defend him and the committee. Appropriations chairman George Mahon compared the struggle to the battle of Gettysburg. “Please don’t kick in the teeth of the Appropriations Committee,” he begged. Minority Leader Gerald Ford, an Appropriations veteran, put clan loyalty above party affiliation by siding with Democrat Natcher against Republican Nixon.58 But the Appropriations men were losing their grip on the House. They lost it altogether when Giaimo announced on the floor of the House that the U.S. Court of Appeals had rejected, 9-3, a Justice Department appeal for an en banc rehearing. Although a petition to the Supreme Court was still open (and eventually the Nixon administration did pursue it), the decision signaled that the bridge delay represented the consensus of the judiciary. Moments later, the House took a voice vote on Giaimo’s amendment. It lost. Giaimo demanded a recorded teller vote. As Giaimo, Natcher, and two other tellers collected red and green voting cards from each member, party loyalty dissolved, with most Democrats backing Nixon and a slim majority of Republicans behind Natcher. With all votes counted, Giaimo held 196 green cards, Natcher 183 red ones. By a margin of 13 votes the House had released the Metro funds.59 The House vote effectively declawed Natcher. For an Appropriations
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subcommittee chairman to be “rolled” on the floor of the House was a humiliation, one that Natcher was unlikely to risk again. Although he vowed that “we lost the battle but not the war” and remained a critic of Metro, never again did he use his position to attempt to stall D.C. payments. As if to mark his defeat, within weeks the North Central Freeway had again been deleted from the plans of the D.C. and federal transportation departments, and by April 1972 Maryland had followed suit. In June Hurricane Agnes flooded the Potomac River, creating a torrent of rock and silt that destroyed most of the work done on the piers of the Three Sisters Bridge. The bridge remained part of the official highway plan, and in subsequent years Natcher and other House members made additional attempts to legislate its completion. Finally, in May 1977, the District of Columbia received the Department of Transportation’s permission to withdraw the bridge from its Interstate Highway plans. The Washington Post reported that the bridge “officially was killed for the third or fourth time yesterday. This time it looks unusually permanent.” It was. By then, the first Metro trains were rolling.60 No one can say just how much William Natcher’s stubbornness added to the cost of the Washington Metro. In December 1970 WMATA estimated that the fourteen-month delay in ground breaking, from October 1968 to December 1969, cost the Authority $55.3 million in inflation. This figure does not account for the second Natcher impasse or for ripple effects. The true cost of the impasses likely ran in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Equally severe was Natcher’s attack on self-determination and his contempt for the residents of the District. The power of appropriations, granted to the House by the Constitution in order to ensure democracy, had been twisted to put an entire metropolitan area at the mercy of one man.61 If there was any good to come out of the impasse, it was the demonstration of widespread support for Metro. The Nixon administration’s championship of the system—like much of Nixon’s domestic policy—showed that Republicans too could support some strains of Great Society liberalism. At the local level, Metro had become the rallying point for self-determination and regional cooperation. Long before any train would run, Metro had united the region’s leaders around a common goal and against a common enemy. With that enemy tamed, the builders of Metro began to fight among themselves.
1972–1976
6
The Builders
In April 1974 work began on a massive construction project 3,000 miles from Washington. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was designed to carry oil from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Ocean to Valdez on Prince William Sound. The pipeline had to cross tundra, swamps, rivers, and several mountain ranges. Some portions could be buried, but much of the line had to be elevated lest the warm oil thaw the permafrost, allowing the pipe to sink and buckle. Engineers worried about earthquakes, corrosion, and the ability of caribou to cross beneath the pipeline during migrations. Tens of thousands of workers, attracted from across the country by weekly paychecks exceeding $1,000, found themselves bunking in Fairbanks, Valdez, and dozens of temporary camps strung out along the route. When the pipeline was finally completed in 1977, many engineers regarded it as a triumph of human will over natural adversity.1 Metro’s builders faced a challenge equal and opposite to that of their pipeline counterparts. The obstacles they faced were human—both physical artifacts and living opponents. As workers in Alaska built 800 miles of pipeline through wilderness all but uninhabited by humans, workers in Washington took up the challenge of pushing 100 miles of rapid transit through a long-settled region densely populated by lawyers. Leading this effort was one man: Jackson Graham. Longtime WMATA board member Cleatus Barnett described him as “a strong and gifted leader, a professional at the top of his game. He knew the construction business. He allowed nothing to get in his way.”2 Yet that very trait became something of a problem, as some citizens found him haughty and unresponsive. D.C. government officials, during a transition to home rule for the majority-black capital, clashed with Graham as they insisted that Metro meet the needs of their constituents. Advocates for the disabled found Graham callous. And across the metropolitan area, people whose yards and streets were uprooted saw in Graham Metro’s destructiveness personified. These disparate reactions reflect the nature of big engineering projects. A project big enough to benefit a whole city will indeed hurt some of the very people whose taxes and votes supported the project to begin with. And a leader strong enough to make hard decisions may disregard, even despise, some of the citizens he serves, and may make dreadful mistakes. In the Paris of the 1850s, it was Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. In the Washington of the 1870s, it was Alexander Shepherd. In midcentury New York,
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Jackson Graham, 1974 (Washington Star Collection, DCPL)
it was Robert Moses. And in 1970s Washington, it was Jackson Graham. Although Metro was set up as a deeply democratic project, designed to serve all segments of society, to respond to a board of elected officials, and to spare Washington the freeways that most citizens despised, even Metro needed an autocrat, or at least the image of one, to succeed. Breaking Ground
In September 1964, when it became clear that Darwin Stolzenbach would not long remain head of the NCTA, Paul Sitton of the Bureau of the Budget wrote a thoughtful memo entitled “Considerations for selecting a new Administrator of the National Capital Transportation Agency.” The administrator, Sitton wrote, should be someone “who is not identified with either highway or transit factions associated with the program in the past.” With so much engineering and planning already done, expertise in those areas was not critical. Rather, rapid transit needed a promoter, “a person familiar with the political process in the Congress and who is sensitive to the need for maintaining close relationships with key congressmen,” with a “background which clearly establishes his status as one of eminent respectability in the community and in the field of his previous occupation.”3 Walter McCarter had not quite fit this description—though popular in Congress, he was more of a transit expert than a political player. But with Jackson Graham, Sitton got his wish.
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Graham was born in 1915 in Mosier, Oregon. While still in high school he joined his father, a bridge construction foreman, on several jobs, including the construction of the main piers of the Golden Gate Bridge. At Oregon State College, he majored in civil engineering and served in the Reserve Officers Training Corps. Graduating in 1936, he finished in the top 3 percent on an army exam, winning a regular army engineering commission—both a prestigious honor and a good, steady job when many engineers were out of work. World War II sent him to Europe, where he commanded three heavy pontoon battalions at Remagen and gained the temporary rank of colonel at age twenty-nine, just days before VE-Day. In the early 1950s, he served as the Corps of Engineers’ chief of personnel, a sensitive position that gave him contacts throughout the corps’s top brass. In 1960 Graham almost became engineer commissioner for the District of Columbia. Instead, Frederick Clarke got that job, and Graham—now a brigadier general—was sent to Cincinnati to command the Ohio River Division. From there, in 1963, he earned promotion to major general and the post of director of civil works, commanding 33,000 troops and civilians engaged on corps navigation and flood control projects nationwide.4 In thirty-three years in the army, Graham had never missed a day of work. But the demands of the new job, coupled with lingering damage from a childhood case of rheumatic fever, wore out Graham’s aortic valve. In 1966 he underwent open-heart surgery to replace the valve, suffering a heart attack as a complication. Although he recovered, he retired from the army on full disability. He was still convalescing a few months later, when the WMATA board began looking for a general manager. General Robert Mathe, the D.C. engineer commissioner, put Graham’s name into consideration, and Walter Tobriner and McCarter went to see him. Graham and his wife were planning a peaceful retirement in a motor home. Only after repeated pleas did he agree to investigate the idea, and when he had satisfied himself that the subway was at last really going to be built, he took the job and was sworn in on 17 March 1967.5 Graham’s manner remained so soldierly that his staff called him “General” and a reporter was reduced to describing him in military clichés: “ramrod-straight . . . broad shouldered . . . square-jawed . . . his hair is so closely cropped that he looks bald.” He stood six feet tall, stayed slim, and wore brown suits as the closest civilian equivalent to his old army uniforms. As Carol Caywood, the wife of the De Leuw, Cather project manager observed, “he was a general and you never forgot it.” He was used to exerting authority and being obeyed. Having run the Corps of Engineers’ entire civil works program, he was used to the scale of the project, able to think in billion-dollar terms. Indeed, hiring a retired general to supervise a massive public works project was nothing new; the New Jersey Turnpike had done the same. Graham admired men who, in his words, “got things done,” including generals Patton and MacArthur and the somewhat dictatorial planner Robert Moses. He too wanted to get things done.6
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Yet Graham was more complex than these stereotypes suggest. He had come up in the corps through personnel, and therefore had more personal skills than the average general. Before meeting the NCTA’s top staff, for example, he memorized not only all their names but also the names of their children. Although his weakened heart prevented him from fully participating in the Authority softball team, he would occasionally take a turn at bat, leaving his wife, Mabel Lee, to run the bases. Architects found Graham cultured and able to discuss color theory and graphic design. More significantly, he could work with politicians. As Graham himself later put it, “the reason I was hired . . . was not because I was a master builder or a manager of public works, but because I’d been successful at getting over $1 billion a year out of Congress for the civil works program.” And he recognized “the social and cultural aspects” of large public works projects, telling a reporter, “the days when there can be a Robert Moses shaping a community to his own vision are over.”7 With his bird’s-eye view as general manager, Graham was one of the few people who could see Metro as not just an engineering and architectural project, a construction project, a public relations project, or a political project, but a complex whole. Yet he refused to let his holistic understanding insulate him from the details. He would constantly astonish his subordinates with his knowledge of their particular duties. And he awed them with his example. He slept five hours a night and spent six days a week in the office, using Sundays to tour Metro construction sites. As tunnels progressed, Graham roared through them on his Yamaha dirt bike, often with Mabel Lee clinging behind him. On Monday morning he would summon to his office any contractor in whose section he had spotted a flaw. Yet if he found a problem with a subordinate’s work, he would always try to correct the mistake and shield the errant staffer from the board of directors’ questions, rather than demoting or embarrassing him. Unsurprisingly, his deputies responded with intense loyalty. “If he had told us to march up to the roof and walk off with him,” recalled his assistant, John Warrington, “I think many of us would.”8 While Graham would always defer to the board in public, in private he could usually have his way. If a board member wanted an added entrance or some other system modification, Graham would often pacify him by promising to build a “knock-out panel,” a lightly constructed section to allow for the modification sometime in the indefinite future. At other times, WMATA engineers could hear Graham chewing out a board member behind closed doors. Deputy General Manager Warren Quenstedt later explained that he and Graham shared a common, cynical attitude toward we’re going to move these guys along. We want to get as much under construction as we possibly can, so it would cost more to cover it up than it would to finish it. Always we wanted to give the board . . . an unacceptable alternative, so that we would take them
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down the road we wanted to go. If we hadn’t done that, everything would have bogged down into bureaucratic debate, and quibbling, and so forth that goes on all the time.
Even the layout of the meeting room was said to contribute to Graham’s command. With the board lined up along one wall, and the staff behind tables along the other wall (their seats assigned by Graham according to the day’s agenda), a board member with a question faced an intimidating battery of expertise. By 1975 one Metro critic suggested that some board members had simply adopted a new religion, “Quadrutarian,” defined as one who “believes in the old three plus Jackson Graham.” But Graham’s key levers were simply his longevity and knowledge of the system. With many local politicians spending only a few years on the WMATA board, few could amass the detailed knowledge necessary to challenge Graham on the big decisions. Graham quietly encouraged this high turnover, both to make the board more pliable and to increase the proportion of local politicians who felt personally connected to Metro.9 WMATA itself could not amass all the expertise, workers, and machinery it needed to build Metro. Instead, the Authority relied on a few key consultant firms (among them De Leuw, Cather for engineering design, Harry Weese & Associates for architecture, and, after 1971, Bechtel for construction) and hundreds of contractors employing thousands of workers to survey the lines, tear up streets, excavate earth, drive piles, pour concrete, and complete hundreds of other construction tasks. To manage this complexity, Graham turned to the men he trusted most. Soon after his arrival at WMATA, Graham began recruiting senior officers of the Corps of Engineers for top posts in the construction and engineering sections. These men brought experience with systems engineering as well as the corps’s reputation for (in Graham’s words) “squeaky-clean” procurement and bidding. No kickbacks or political pressure would make them favor a particular contract. Even a recommendation from Vice President Spiro Agnew’s office was coolly ignored. Nor did Graham tolerate misbehavior; one staffer took home a microwave oven and was promptly fired.10 The first construction contract was awarded on 9 December 1969, the day of ground breaking. Work began in Washington’s downtown, in order to give that most difficult section the earliest start. Geologically, this area is part of the Atlantic coastal plain and is composed of compact sands and gravels, punctuated by irregular lenses of clay. Faced with this relatively soft material, and wanting to keep the busy downtown stations as close to the surface as possible, WMATA engineers planned most of the work as “cut-and-cover” construction, the same technique that had been used for most of New York City’s subways at the beginning of the century. Put simply, cut-and-cover meant closing off a street, digging a wide trench down the middle, lining the sides with wooden walls, building a two-chambered concrete box within the trench to hold the tracks, then filling in the trench
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Cut-and-cover construction (WMATA)
with earth and topping it off with street pavement. Soon after digging the trench, builders placed a temporary street of steel plates and wooden planks above their work sites. Drivers complained about the slick, jagged plates, but at least they could progress through downtown.11 In some cases, cut-and-cover under the streets just wouldn’t do. Metro’s long railcars, designed for long suburban straightaways as well as the downtown routes, could not make the same tight turns as automobiles. To minimize wear and tear, noise, and the need to slow down, it was best to give them gentle, large curves. In some cases, WMATA planners had to condemn corner buildings so they could dig cut-and-cover trenches through the cleared lots. In other cases, they took advantage of L’Enfant’s many small parks, such as Lafayette Square, as places for turns. Not daring to tear up the president’s front lawn, they turned to a second technique: soft-earth tunneling. A 150-ton machine, known variously as the “cookie cutter” and “Big John,” bored cylindrical tunnels through the earth below the parks, dumping the spoil onto a conveyor belt behind it.12 To the north and west of the L’Enfant city, the coastal plain gives way to the hard schist and gneiss of the Blue Ridge piedmont. With bedrock closer to the surface, engineers turned to rock tunneling for the Connecticut Avenue route and for the tunnel beneath the Potomac. In some cases they deployed tunnel-boring machines similar to the cookie cutter, but more commonly they used the less capital-intensive, and more proven, drill-and-
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Rock tunneling, Dupont Circle Station (WMATA)
blast method. Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, Metro tunnelers drilled holes, usually six to ten feet deep, in the rock face, then filled them with explosives. After evacuating the tunnels, the miners would detonate the charges, then go home for the day because it could take all night to vent the headache-inducing dynamite fumes. The next day, they would scrape away the pulverized muck and install rock bolts, lattice girders, and sprayed concrete (known as “shotcrete”) to the walls and roof. Then they would map out new holes to be drilled and start over.13 Even this early phase of construction required some aboveground work. At Union Station, Metro trains were to emerge into the open air, then climb onto a viaduct shared with the B&O railroad. Although WMATA staff had to negotiate with the railroad to secure rights-of-way and coordinate construction, the technical work was relatively simple. One engineer more accustomed to underground construction dismissed the challenge of building in the open. “You throw the tracks on the ground and go home.”14 Underground construction, by contrast, proved full of unpleasant surprises. When workers excavated G Street in front of the National Portrait Gallery, they found that the building was beginning to crack for want of support. The simplest thing would have been to buy and demolish it, but the Gallery—a Greek temple built between 1836 and 1851 to house the Patent Office—was one of the city’s oldest buildings. So engineers carefully underpinned the building with 296 piles, letting it rest securely on bedrock.
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Smaller-scale efforts to underpin historic buildings took place throughout the downtown.15 At least historic buildings were visible; much more disruptive were the surprises revealed only when digging began. Some were natural obstacles— hidden underground streams and disappointingly hard rock. More common, and more difficult, were booby traps left by two centuries of settlement. No underground map was perfect, and workers constantly came across forgotten electric and telephone conduits, gas lines, steam pipes, and sewers. In some cases Metro had to be rerouted; more commonly the utilities had to be rerouted, or suspended from wires as the earth around them was removed. Downtown, many sidewalks covered old coal bins that had been converted to storage or office space as buildings switched to oil or gas heat. At Friendship Heights, workers ran into abandoned underground service-station tanks that had saturated the ground with gasoline. Near the White House, engineers were warned away from secret communications links, including the famous Hot Line to Moscow. The worst surprise was the discovery that, rather than removing the sturdy old Capital Transit streetcar tracks and conduits as promised, transit baron O. Roy Chalk had simply buried them under pavement.16 Added to these ongoing difficulties were notable disasters. In October 1972 a section of cut-and-cover excavation along Connecticut Avenue collapsed. Fortunately, the cave-in gave enough warning to allow workers and cars to be evacuated minutes before, and no one was injured. Weather could also be a problem. In June 1972 Hurricane Agnes damaged construction and threw off the schedule. Then in September 1975, with operation just a few months away, Hurricane Eloise caused Rock Creek to overflow its banks and pour into the unprotected tunnel to the south. Water reached the mezzanine of the Dupont Circle Station, delaying its opening and causing $4.5 million in damage overall.17 And construction remained a dangerous job. Thousands of workers deployed massive machinery and explosives to move hundreds of thousands of tons of earth and rock. Almost inevitably, some were hit by trucks and machines, electrocuted, injured in falls, and, in one case, crushed by falling rock. By the end of 1974, at least a dozen were dead. In 1973 workers building the tunnel under the Potomac briefly struck to protest what they felt were unsafe working conditions that exposed them to silicosis. District and union officials complained that Graham and WMATA were insufficiently concerned about safety, but the federal government’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration was more forgiving. As one reporter explained, “Accident rate figures are broken down in various ways and depending on which ones you use the Metro record can be made to look fairly good, about average, or fairly bad.”18 None of these physical challenges presented impossible barriers to the experienced engineers directing construction. More inspections and improved procedures could mitigate the danger of construction. A build-
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ing could be shorn up, rock stabilized, a sewer rerouted, a flooded tunnel pumped out. However inconvenient, heavy, or wet, inanimate objects respond predictably to engineers and machines. People are another matter. The first human obstacle the builders faced was the authority’s fellow government agencies. By the 1970s the challenge of negotiating with other agencies was nothing new to WMATA veterans. Not long after Stolzenbach issued the November Report of 1962, for example, George Stewart, the architect of the Capitol, objected to a planned transfer station under the grounds of the Capitol and eventually killed the idea. The planners then proposed to place the station south of the Capitol, but to close off a block of South Capitol Street to build a park with an entrance in it. Congressional staffers would have an easy walk to the House office buildings, including Stewart’s Rayburn Building, and tourists would rise out of the ground to see the Capitol dome. But in 1969 Stewart killed that plan, and WMATA reluctantly moved the entrance one block east.19 Such complications multiplied as system planning progressed, for several agencies had some claim to the physical turf in and around the city. In the District of Columbia itself, each station needed the approval of the National Capital Planning Commission. The commission mostly accepted WMATA’s plans, with some suggestions about where entrances should go. The highway departments presented another hurdle. With the North Leg and other highway segments still on the books, WMATA planners had to weave their stations and tunnels around projected highway tunnels as well as existing utilities, sewers, and other underground hazards. The University of Maryland rejected plans for a station on campus, forcing a complicated redesign that later caused commotion in College Park. In contrast, negotiations with the Department of Defense over the Pentagon Station went fairly smoothly.20 From WMATA’s perspective, the most difficult relationship by far was that with the National Park Service (NPS) and its parent, the Department of the Interior, which together controlled the Mall, Rock Creek Park, and dozens of smaller parks and squares. As part of his concept that Metro would be a “public” rather than a commercial or utilitarian space, Harry Weese had suggested prominent entrances in many of the federal city’s downtown squares—Farragut, McPherson, Judiciary—as well as on the Mall itself. But the NPS directors, first Conrad Wirth, later George Hartzog, had spent years fighting to keep highways out of parklands and commercial vehicles off parkways. Hartzog had also sparred with Graham, then still in the Army Corps of Engineers, over the Everglades and redwood forests. Now Wirth and Hartzog saw Metro as just one more incursion into parklands. In one NCPC meeting, Wirth compared a proposed Metro entrance in Farragut Square to the highway department’s earlier plans for an underground garage beneath the square. Weese believed that parks should be full of people, and a machine to deliver people to parks would be a blessing.
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Wirth, by contrast, did not distinguish between the delivery of pedestrians by escalator and the delivery of vehicles by ramps.21 WMATA officials spent months in correspondence and talks with their NPS counterparts without reaching agreement over construction in parklands. Eventually, the chairman of the Authority and the secretary of the interior had to personally negotiate on individual parks. This process delayed some segments for months. In several cases, WMATA had to promise not only to tidy up any mess but to leave parklands even better than they were prior to construction. For example, the Authority built the Park Police a new stable in Rock Creek Park as reparations for temporary disruption and the permanent installation of five manhole covers.22 In other cases, WMATA planners had to sacrifice the convenience of the riders to Park Service demands. Partially for engineering reasons, but in part due to the Park Service’s objections, a planned bridge over Rock Creek became a tunnel underneath. This change forced WMATA to lower the Dupont Circle and Woodley Park stations, leaving them with agonizingly slow, albeit majestic, escalators. It also precluded a stop between those two stations, one that could have served the Adams-Morgan neighborhood. On the Mall, Weese had planned an entrance precisely on the axis between the Capitol and the Washington Monument; the Park Service told him, as he put it, to “get back under the trees” along the edge of the monument grounds. Grumbling that he had lost “the most exciting entrance to the Federal area that one could imagine,” Weese complained that the Park Service had “decided that people are a nuisance on the Mall.” WMATA and NPS then got into a spat over who should pay for the entrance. Graham maintained that WMATA’s duty was to provide service for commuters to the Department of Agriculture to the south of the Mall and that if the Park Service wanted a second, northern entrance for tourists, the Park Service should pay. The Park Service responded by threatening to withdraw permits for the station entirely.23 Two battles between NPS and WMATA did particularly significant damage. The first was over Farragut Square, a small park a few blocks northwest of the White House, in Washington’s booming “new downtown.” Two trunk lines crossed here—the Eye Street line from Virginia and the Connecticut Avenue line from the northwest. Although the two lines would cross at 12th and G streets in the old downtown, WMATA planners wanted a second transfer station at Farragut. This extra transfer point would ease crowding at 12th and G and save riders several minutes each day should they want to travel from the Connecticut Avenue line to the line serving Rosslyn, the Pentagon, and National Airport. Building the transfer station would mean temporarily moving the statue of Admiral David Farragut and tearing up his square for a few years. Moreover, it would mean an escalator rising in the park itself, something that the Park Service regarded as an intrusion. By rejecting the station, the Park Service instead forced WMATA to build two stations—Farragut North and Farragut West—within a few hundred feet of
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Harry Weese’s proposal for Metro entrance on Mall (Harry Weese Collection, Chicago Historical Society)
each other but without the possibility of transferring. Weese called the split Farraguts the “worst station in the system.”24 The second key battle involved Washington’s only major intercity rail station. Union Station had been specified in the National Capital Transportation Act of 1960 as a key feeder to rapid transit, so NCTA and WMATA planners had always included a transit station there. But with the collapse of the intercity passenger rail industry in the 1950s and 1960s, the railroad companies had let Daniel Burnham’s grand terminal decay. In an attempt to save the structure while boosting tourism in Washington, in March 1968 President Johnson signed legislation authorizing the Department of the Interior and the Park Service to use the building as a national visitor center. But Vietnam-era inflation and a resurgence of rail transportation by the newly created Amtrak forced repeated redesigns. With visitor center plans changing every few months, WMATA could not design or build its station on the site; from 1971 to 1973 engineers waited.25
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Nor was this any ordinary station. According to construction plans, the rails for the system were to arrive by train in quarter-mile lengths. Each twenty-seven-ton segment would be taken underground at the Union Station portal and then delivered via tunnel throughout the system. But with plans for Union Station unresolved, no portal could be built, leaving WMATA with trackless tunnels. The first rails could not be delivered until June 1974, delaying the first operation by several months.26 Throughout these battles, Graham held that it was better to make an imperfect decision than to tolerate delay. Just months after becoming general manager, he had advocated the vaulted station design approved by the Commission of Fine Arts on the grounds that choosing any other design might slow down the program. At National Airport, when the Federal Aviation Administration could not decide on plans for a new terminal, Graham simply built the airport station some distance from the existing terminal and let the FAA, and airline passengers, deal with the consequences. (For twenty years, passengers endured a long walk from the Metro station to the terminal, until 1997, when the airport opened its new terminal adjacent to the rail station.) In one extreme case, WMATA planner William Herman complained that the system’s main transfer station was badly named. He argued that “12th and G” was both confusing (several entrances would be on other streets) and too undistinguished for so important a station. Ever reasonable, Graham agreed to let Herman choose a better name. “I’ll let you know,” responded a relieved Herman. “No,” Graham explained, “I’ll give you twenty seconds.” Stunned, Herman blurted out the first words that came into his head: “Metro Center.” “Fine, that’s it, go on to the next one,” replied the general. And they did.27 The Neighbors Complain
Graham’s tough line worked well with WMATA’s staff, board, and sister agencies, but it irritated many private citizens who became disenchanted with the subway as it evolved from a sleek set of drawings into an enormous pit. Despite NCTA and WMATA promises that cut-and-cover construction would disrupt traffic for only two or three weeks until a deck could be placed over the cut, funding delays, strikes, unmapped utilities and all the other problems with construction tended to stretch the disruption into months and years.28 Even with decking in place, cut-and-cover construction turned downtown streets into dusty, muddy, noisy, crowded work sites, hardly the place to shop for a jeweled necklace or a tailored suit. Jackson Graham had little experience with such concerns. He was no stranger to public hearings, which were standard in Corps of Engineers projects, but most corps projects involved relatively unpopulated bodies of water, and only a few conservationists spoke for the fish. He ignored his assistant’s warnings that pushing a subway through downtown was more complicated than flooding a Nebraska cornfield.29 Merchants, once enthusiastic about the business the subway would bring,
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Downtown disruption, early 1970s (WMATA)
began cursing Metro when construction blocked access to their stores. The large department stores could survive the lean years, but small business owners faced the loss of their livelihood. Some were evicted directly, their stores condemned and demolished to make way for station entrances, temporary roadways, or storage lots. In 1970 the owners of two Connecticut Avenue businesses learned their building was to be demolished to make way for the planned Farragut North Station. They sued WMATA, demanding the right of first refusal for retail space in any replacement building. They lost their chief demands, but the court did insist that WMATA hold public hearings on all decisions that would affect private property—another source of delay.30 The disruption from construction was almost as bad for retailers as outright eviction. As shoppers fled, one G Street businessman suggested organizing a Committee of Merchants to Encourage Business and Consumer Confidence, or, rather sadly, “COMEBACC.” Others sought help from above. Noting that “Metro is to serve everyone, but only the 75 to 100 small merchants are being called upon to absorb the business losses without one cent of recompense,” one shopkeeper called for government aid like that given “other disaster areas.” Another group sued WMATA over the disruption.31 Cody Pfanstiehl’s Office of Community Services did what it could to mitigate the damage. Pfanstiehl’s staff pleaded with contractors to turn
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their portable toilets to face away from shop windows, and with store owners to accept the fact that not all construction could take place at night. And Pfanstiehl tried to ensure that the papers ran some good news by staging ceremonial openings to resurfaced streets. When a stretch of Eye Street was finally ready, he had the barricades gracefully opened by two trained bears on loan from the circus. As a result, both Metro and the circus got good press. Even then Pfanstiehl could not please everybody; a labor representative berated him for giving work to nonunion bears.32 Ultimately, neither staunch unionism nor merchants’ complaints could do much to affect construction downtown, where no one could deny that the subway was needed. In residential neighborhoods, the case for transit was more ambiguous, and the inhabitants fought harder. Now, as in the 1970s, there is a legend about Metro among the people of Washington. Many believe that WMATA planned a station for Georgetown, then withdrew its plans in response to opposition from politically influential residents who feared that the subway would bring undesirables—the poor, the criminal, the nonwhite, and the tacky—to their exclusive neighborhood.33 In fact, although Georgetown residents did oppose a transit station, their attitude was essentially irrelevant, for a Georgetown station was never seriously considered. While it would have been possible to build a subway line to Georgetown, it would have been difficult. Georgetown’s commercial center, the busy intersection of Wisconsin Avenue and M Street, lies quite close to the Potomac River. Any tunnel under the Potomac (such as the one that today connects Foggy Bottom and Rosslyn) would have been so deep at the river’s edge as to render a station there impractical. Thus, the most serious proposal to put a station in Georgetown, a 1963 sketch by NCTA planner John Insco Williams, depended on a combined highway-transit bridge across the river. According to Williams, highway planners, not Georgetown residents, vetoed this option. Moreover, Williams’s map shows that the curve up to Georgetown could not have followed the street grid, but would have to be bored under private property. And “if you get under buildings,” planner Thomas Deen recalled, “you get into all kinds of problems, digging under foundations, and settlement, and liability, and lawsuits.”34 These technical problems could have been overcome had planners felt a compelling need to serve Georgetown. They did not. They intended to serve as many rush-hour commuters as possible, which meant connecting suburban parking lots, bus nodes, and clusters of apartment buildings with dense collections of office buildings in downtown Washington and Arlington. Under this logic, Woodley Park, with its hotels, apartment blocks, and bus routes, was one obvious site for a station, as was the Pentagon, with its 20,000 employees. Georgetown lacked apartments or office buildings or parking, and much of the area within walking distance of Wisconsin and M is under water. “We were building the system for the commuters,” planner William Herman recalled, “and there were not many people commuting
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to Georgetown. So why spend money on something that didn’t meet our goals?”35 Still, the Georgetown legend has a kernel of truth. Residents of many neighborhoods did protest planned Metro stations, and WMATA was forced to respond, even canceling one station. But the residential protests lacked the clear-cut class and racial connotations of the Georgetown story, for the protests were common to black neighborhoods and white, to poor neighborhoods as well as to rich ones. A rapid transit system that had promised to spare neighborhoods by obviating freeways now found itself fighting many of the same people who had protested those roads. For the most part, these neighborhoods had been quiet when the regional map was first brought to public hearings in 1967. At the time, rapid transit seemed to be an entirely benign alternative to freeways; if anything, neighborhoods asked for more of it. Few would object to a thin line and a small dot on a map, one that promised easy access to the rest of the metropolitan area. Still, there were whispers of conflict even at that point. As planning progressed, and condemnation notices caught the attention of previously placid neighborhoods, complaints spread. A 1971 study reported that “everyone [wants] feeder buses to be nearby, but to stop in front of somebody else’s house.” The same could be said of rapid transit; everyone wanted a station close, but not too close.36 Some residents worried about the disruption caused by construction. But even if construction took a couple of years, it would eventually end, and many people decided to wait it out. On D Street SE, close to the Capitol, a woman whose front yard had been torn up conceded that her children were thrilled by the parade of machinery and that she herself was getting to know her neighbors as they chatted about the dirt. One of those neighbors was Congressman Robert Giaimo, who just two years before had saved Metro from Natcher’s blackmail. WMATA rewarded him with an eighty-foot ditch two feet away from the front of his house, but he took it in stride.37 Some Metro opponents feared the inner city. Pfanstiehl, WMATA’s longsuffering chief of community services, recalled that to many people familiar with New York, a subway meant nothing but “rape, spit, and grime.” Racial divisions intensified this fear. As one local newspaper explained, “high-rise apartments near subway stops make commuting easy for people without automobiles, and they usually attract lower-middle income people—and in suburban Washington that means blacks.” In Atlanta, just such fears had contributed to the decision of two suburban counties not to join the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. WMATA’s leaders did their best to calm constituents’ fears. Idamae Garrott, a Montgomery County representative, told a reporter, “A lot of people here are scared to go into the District. Now they think that rapers and muggers will be able to get on the subway for very little money, rape and mug me, and get on the subway and go back. I can’t guarantee it won’t happen, although it’s puzzled me why more criminals don’t come out here now in cars.”38
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More frequent fears involved not the inner city but the outer suburbs. As mentioned in the previous chapter, during the Natcher delays, Graham had tried to calm the wrath of the highway lobby by promising that 85 to 90 percent of subway riders would get to a station by bus or car. For this reason, many stations—especially those near the ends of the lines—were designed less for the convenience of people living in their vicinity than for automobile and bus commuters arriving from more peripheral points. Such stations featured vast parking lots and multiple bus bays, sparking fears among people living near these stations that they were about to be overrun. David Sanders Clark, the veteran freeway protester, asked for “assurance that parking facilities adjacent to transit stations in thickly built-up neighborhoods (for example, Tenley Circle, or Van Ness and Connecticut) will be as compact and unobtrusive as possible, with entrances and exits placed so as not to channel traffic down narrow residential streets.” Innercity neighborhoods had the same concern.39 Another concern was noise. Although WMATA spokespersons carefully avoided the term “elevated” lest it evoke the noise of trains in New York and Chicago, its proposed “aerial structures” proved unpopular. A resident of Chillum, in Prince George’s County, told WMATA representatives, “you’re putting a steel monster above ground to destroy our neighborhood, to take away our parks, destroy our tranquility. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do—fight like hell.” Residents of the Locust Hill area of Bethesda spoke for many neighborhoods when they objected to aerial tracks. “We believe the subway should remain underground from Bethesda at least to north of the Beltway,” they resolved, “in order to preserve the aesthetic integrity of the Bethesda area, just as the aesthetic integrity of the District of Columbia has been chosen to be preserved by keeping the subway underground there. Surely Bethesda and her citizens deserve the same consideration.” In Northeast Washington, WMATA planners told residents that an aerial structure and a bridge, rather than a tunnel, across the Anacostia were necessary for engineering reasons. One resident replied, “Mister, we don’t believe you.”40 Another cost-saving measure that sparked conflict was the early decision to follow railroad lines or new highways, which often resulted in stations planned for places that would not otherwise have been considered. Takoma Park, Maryland, just across the street from the Takoma Station on the B&O tracks, became one hot point for protest. So did Chillum, in Prince George’s County, where a station planned for the median strip of I-95 was left stranded when that highway segment was canceled. In Alexandria, both citizens and officials had second thoughts about the 1960s decision to follow the railroad, which only skirted the most developed part of the city. And in Fairfax County, stations along the median strip of I-66 became controversial because they did not serve any developed commercial clusters, and thus had no constituency to support them.41 WMATA proposals to take houses for construction touched nerves still
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raw from the freeway fights. Some residents suspected WMATA of buying land that would be used to revive the North Central Freeway, and activists who had cut their teeth protesting the North Central or I-66 applied their skills to fighting the Metro. The Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis had only a few years before called Metro “a key element in all existing and conceivable plans for the future of the National Capital Area.” In the early 1970s, published accounts of the group’s agenda depicted it as much pro-subway as it was antifreeway.42 With Metro a reality, ECTC’s members changed their minds. Sammie Abbott, one of the committee’s leaders, in August 1969 had led chants of “Subway, yeah! Freeway, no!” in an effort to block the Three Sisters Bridge. A few years later, with the freeways safely dead, he denounced WMATA at numerous public hearings, and in a petition to President Ford demanded that Metro be cut back to forty miles. Citizen groups once devoted to fighting freeways now complained that “Metro is being built like Sherman’s March through the South with little concern for those in its path” and accused WMATA of “interpreting wide citizen support for mass transit as a means of ramming the system through, much in the tradition of highway engineers.” Although they continued to insist that rapid transit was “much needed,” these antihighway groups found little to love in the real Metro and began asking if expanded bus service might not be better.43 Angry citizens resisted WMATA in many ways. The Farragut North precedent required WMATA to hold public hearings on each station, rather than on whole routes at once. But the hearings produced scant listening. WMATA representatives perceived most residents as hecklers who wanted only to shout into the microphone. For their part, neighborhood residents suspected that WMATA intended the hearings more as a show of concern than as a sincere attempt to solicit their input. Their suspicions were well founded; while WMATA staffers did try to explain what they were doing, they did not want to change their plans in response to the complaints of a handful of people living near each station site. The staff ’s usual response to a citizen suggestion was to point out that it would cost another half million dollars and leave it at that. As the protest movement crested in 1975— with conflicts around stations at Chillum, Forest Glen, and Vienna—many residents gave up on hearings and instead called Jackson Graham at home. After enduring the barrage for a while, the general ordered an unlisted number.44 Other citizens took WMATA to court. The 1969 National Environmental Policy Act required agencies planning “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment” to prepare “environmental impact statements,” to measure any potential harm. A court found that as a local, rather than federal, agency, WMATA was not bound to prepare the statements, but in 1973 the authority agreed to follow the requirements in order to settle a lawsuit by Takoma Park residents. The staff estimated that each study would take eight months to prepare and present,
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North Cleveland Park, 2000. Yuma Street is at left. The entrance to an emergency stairwell is hidden among the azaleas in the center of the photograph. (Photo by the author)
followed by another four months for the authority to respond to what it had learned—thus doubling what had been a one-year design phase for each segment. Graham grumbled that the new requirement would add at least $120 million to the total cost of the system and delay new segments by at least a year. But there was little he could do.45 In the most extreme case, a small group of D.C. homeowners stalled a segment for two years. As they mapped Metro in 1967, WMATA planners wanted to tunnel beneath Connecticut Avenue as far north as Van Ness Street, then cut across to Wisconsin Avenue, where they could intercept car and bus commuters from Montgomery County, as well as serve the growing Friendship Heights and Bethesda retail areas. To get from Connecticut to Wisconsin, Metro would have to cut through a residential neighborhood, just north of the Cleveland Park area that had killed the Northwest Freeway in the early 1960s. The same activist streak that had stopped that road soon materialized in opposition to a Metro tunnel beneath Yuma Street, WMATA’s favored route for the Connecticut-Wisconsin crossover. Testifying to Congress in 1969, the president of the Yuma Street Citizens Committee (who just happened to be a member of the editorial board of the New York Times) vowed to “fight to preserve the city neighborhood by insisting that it not be spoiled by a subway system routed through [our] neighbor-
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hood solely for the benefit of those suburban commuters who have already fled the city.” Residents feared both the temporary inconvenience of construction—noise, dirt, even blasting—and the permanent nuisance of ventilation shafts, which they dreaded would become “open conduits for the transmission of noise from the subway tunnels to the otherwise tranquil surroundings of Yuma Street.”46 The Yuma Street controversy may have resulted from a simple misunderstanding. Planners and engineers start a subway line with maps indicating only general routes, which can be modified later on as more precision is needed. Pfanstiehl, the WMATA official in charge of community relations, later blamed the Yuma Street battle on the lack of tact and thick accent of one WMATA engineer, who failed to explain to a resident that an air shaft on one map only indicated that a shaft was needed in that general area, not a definitive statement that her house would have to be destroyed to make room for it. Joseph Saunders, a Yuma Street resident who became one of WMATA’s fiercest adversaries, first became a Metro skeptic after seeing a WMATA file that, he believed, indicated that the engineers were further along in their decision making than they had admitted at a public hearing. His suit against WMATA made much the same allegation. It is possible that he mistook a preliminary map for a more advanced one.47 The fact that the misunderstanding was not cleared up suggests that the conflict had a deeper origin: WMATA’s—and particularly Graham’s—reluctance to give neighborhoods a significant role in decisions about subway routes, or to change a decision once it had been made. Saunders later remembered how WMATA engineers dismissed his concerns. “I was very, very burned with the dishonesty . . . of Metro officials,” he recalled. “Whatever we might say, they would make some sort of a rejoinder in meetings. . . . They didn’t even make the slightest concession.” When he finally met Graham, the general refused even to shake his hand.48 Joseph Saunders was the wrong person to leave with his hand sticking out; he was a senior antitrust lawyer for the Department of Justice and accustomed to respect. Moreover, he was an able litigator, who now deployed his skills against WMATA. Arguing that the Authority had failed in its duty to hold meaningful public hearings, Saunders won a series of injunctions and other court decisions. He even used the Three Sisters Bridge case as a precedent. And time was on his side, for each week of delay cost the Authority $125,000. Eventually, the suit delayed construction of the segment, and therefore all portions of the Red Line north of Van Ness, for two years— from 1973 to 1975. WMATA got the Yuma Street alignment it wanted, but only after a series of expensive promises. It installed vastly more acoustical insulation than its engineers thought necessary, and minimized disruption by digging vent shafts from the bottom up. When it needed to condemn a house to dig a shaft for emergency access, it paid the owner handsomely, then hid the top of the shaft with rows of azaleas, to be trimmed in perpetuity. The Yuma Street delay cost only about $6 million, but the precedent
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it set was more significant. Each new segment would require a public hearing, an environmental impact statement, and then another public hearing before final design could begin.49 Residents could also turn to their elected officials, who tended to be softhearted, at least compared with Jack Graham. This tactic was especially effective in the District of Columbia, where even before the institution of home rule, politicians were eager to please a soon-to-be-enfranchised electorate. In 1973 the D.C. Council asserted its power to approve or reject individual station proposals, rather than giving blanket approval to WMATA. Montgomery County officials were, at first, a bit firmer, explaining that they might have to sacrifice a few houses for the benefit of the county as a whole. But no politician likes to be booed by hundreds of angry voters, and the officials began to call for compromise. Graham later complained about board members’ unwillingness to stand up to voters, but he had little choice. At the National Institutes of Health, in Montgomery County, county officials repeatedly changed their minds about the location of the station, not realizing that with each change, engineers were scrambling to redesign the structure to match the particular soil conditions. Eventually, the Authority required that a jurisdiction requesting restudy bear the full cost of both the study and any change, a move that dampened local enthusiasm for revisions.50 The greatest concessions involved automobiles. In several cases, planners modified station access to prevent cars from driving down residential streets on their way to the station. Elsewhere, the Authority scaled back or even eliminated parking lots. Between 1968 and 1978, the number of peakhour parking spaces planned for District stations gradually dropped from 4,925 to 1,646, even as models projected a demand for 18,706 spaces. The most impressive victory for opponents—the cancellation of a station in response to community uproar—came not in Georgetown but in a working-class, African American community just north of Robert F. Kennedy Stadium. Not wanting a large, 1,000-space parking lot for commuters in their neighborhood, residents persuaded the D.C. government to delete the Oklahoma Avenue Station from the map. Moreover, the line itself, originally planned as an aerial structure, was rerouted underground.51 The peak years of Metro construction—1973 to 1976—highlighted the difficulties, and expense, of macroengineering in a crowded city.52 Every park, every historic structure, every sidewalk could become an obstacle. In one case, engineers had to shift the route to spare a single, historic oak tree. And amid fights over individual segments, broader debates highlighted the tensions inherent in any public transit authority. Whose Metro?
In 1969, looking forward to victory over Natcher, Cody Pfanstiehl wrote, “Since 1962 we have been the under dog . . . brave little David being attacked by the highway man Goliath. . . . Shortly many people will come to realize
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that we are now king of the hill. David has become the giant. . . . We will be attacked simply because we are the biggest thing in town.”53 Pfanstiehl was premature; into 1971 Natcher held fast to the Goliath role. But by 1972 the prophecy had come to pass. Natcher was out of the way, and WMATA was indeed the biggest thing in town. Washingtonians looked to the new giant with high expectations. Over several years, through stormy board meetings and drawn-out lawsuits, the people charged the Authority with new missions distinct from the task of transporting commuters. WMATA entered the 1970s resembling a publicly owned business, charged with maximizing revenues and patronage while minimizing costs. Within a few years, it would be forced to take on some of the responsibilities of a public welfare agency, concerned with civil rights and economic justice. District of Columbia African Americans led this fight. The city council represented a city and, to a large degree, a race only beginning to possess political power. Schuyler Lowe, WMATA’s comptroller, found this out quite suddenly. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the District had still been run by the Board of Commissioners, Lowe had been its director of general administration, in charge of the city bureaucracy. Now, when he sought a permit from an African American former subordinate still working for the District, the man drew himself up and replied, “Mr. Lowe, it used to be yes, Mr. Lowe, no, Mr. Lowe. But it’s different now. I’m in charge!” The District council, including its members on the WMATA board, shared that attitude. District officials were especially solicitous to inner-city residents opposed to large commuter parking lots, leading Graham to complain that a “black matriarchal system” paralyzed male decision makers. But nowhere did their agenda become clearer than with the issue of minority hiring and contracting.54 In the late 1960s unemployment was a severe problem for the city’s blacks, all the more so after the 1968 riots gutted several commercial streets in the inner city. Because Washington had little heavy industry, construction was the city’s largest source of blue-collar jobs, but it had long been dominated by segregated unions. Moreover, few construction firms were owned by minorities. Metro did little to change this pattern; when WMATA began signing contracts, more than 98 percent of construction dollars went to white-owned firms. And while a sizable majority of workers on Metro projects were black, they were clustered in the lowest skilled positions, laborer and miner. Those few minority firms that did get contracts were mostly employed in the low-paying, unglamorous task of hauling dirt away from excavations.55 District leaders wanted more. Sterling Tucker, executive director of the Washington chapter of the Urban League, was a seasoned civil rights activist; he had helped organize the march on Washington in 1963 and had been gassed in Mississippi. Locally, he had worked since the early 1960s to integrate D.C. building trades, especially on federal construction projects. Jerry Moore, a Baptist minister, agreed that Metro should provide jobs and
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D.C. Councilman Jerry Moore (left) listens to transit union representative Rodney Richmond (Washington Star photo by Pete Schmick, 31 October 1974. Copyright Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
careers for impoverished minorities, even if that meant Metro would cost more to complete. As members of the appointed D.C. City Council and as its representatives on the WMATA board, Tucker and Moore had a chance to achieve their goals. Moore wanted minority firms to get at least 25 percent of all contracts, but he knew such a plan would be a hard sell.56 Politicians from the majority-white suburbs held to the WMATA compact’s requirement that contracts go to the lowest qualified bidder. As one state legislator put it, “the people of Fairfax [County] voted to pay Metro for transportation and they hope to get it someday. We must oppose use of Fairfax Metro bonds for purposes of social justice in the District of Columbia, however worthy.” They also feared that any weakening of the low-bid procedure might open the door to the sort of cronyism that had inflated the costs of public-works projects since the days of Boss Tweed and before. Both the Maryland and Virginia legislatures rejected bills that would have allowed for the set-asides. The staff also resisted. In May 1970, for example, the Authority’s assistant comptroller warned of a potential “collapse of budgetary integrity” should conflicts over “broad sociological aspects of the District of Columbia” distract the Authority from its “basic mission.”57 At first, compromise seemed possible. The federal government had embraced affirmative action, and in April 1970 the Nixon administration supported Moore and Tucker by making its support for Metro contingent on WMATA’s ability to meet federal standards for minority hiring or work out
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some acceptable equivalent. The WMATA staff set up an affirmative action program to employ blacks as apprentices in several skilled jobs—carpenter, operating engineer, pile driver, plumber, surveyor. Graham had no objection to boosting minority participation as long as it did not require too much additional time or money. In late 1971 he established—somewhat reluctantly—an Office of Minority Development to recruit minority firms, with Charles Dowdy, an African American engineer, as its head. WMATA boasted in 1971 that minorities constituted 57 percent of the construction work force.58 But there were barriers. Unions could not, or would not, find enough minority skilled workers to meet their quotas. “I’ve been beating the bush, man,” one union officer lamented, “and I can’t find them . . . not the right ones. You can’t just scoop down and find the guy, whether he is black, pink, or yellow.” Many minority firms were reluctant to accept union labor, significant debt, the risk of underbidding, and competition with established white firms, all of which would be necessary for Metro work. Breaking contracts down into smaller tasks—more easily managed by smaller firms—could help, but this too had its limits. As one construction industry executive sarcastically put it, “a cubic yard of concrete theoretically could be mixed by having each piece of rock aggregate carried to and placed in the mixer by individual workmen with others bringing the sand, water and cement to the mixer by the cup full. This would provide employment for thousands of people each having no particular skill or any previous experience. But it would not provide concrete at a price or in a time frame that would be acceptable.”59 Throughout 1972 and 1973, Graham’s compromises held, albeit shakily. Moore complained that the WMATA staff was failing to do enough, and protest groups threatened civil disobedience. Graham continued to ease pressure with small moves. For example, rather than a single contract to sell advertising on both buses and subways, the board agreed to split the task into one contract for each mode.60 By the fall of 1974, Graham was losing his power to reconcile the two philosophical approaches. Part of the strain came from the increased assertiveness of the District board members on the eve of home rule. Home rule had for decades been frustrated by the white southern Democrats in charge of the House District Committee, but that committee was reshaped in 1973. Thanks in part to the efforts of those promoting D.C. home rule, Chairman John McMillan of South Carolina and his ally Representative Thomas G. Abernethy of Mississippi had lost their 1972 reelection bids, and the committee’s third most senior Democrat, John W. Dowdy of Texas, had been convicted of perjury. Their departure left the committee in the hands of Representative Charles Diggs, an African American from Michigan, who promptly passed a home-rule bill. The bill had significant caveats. District residents still lacked voting representation in Congress (they had been granted a single, nonvoting representative in 1970), the administration kept
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power over the courts, and the city was forbidden to tax suburban commuters. At Natcher’s insistence, the House Appropriations D.C. Subcommittee retained oversight of the city’s budget. Moreover, Congress rejected proposals to abolish the NCPC, leaving the commission some oversight power over city planning agencies. Nevertheless, after a century without a local election, the achievement was enormous. In December, President Nixon signed the Home Rule Charter, setting up elections for November 1974.61 As these elections approached, Moore and Tucker grew impatient. By September 1974 they could point to a report showing that in a metropolitan area whose population was 26 percent minority, only 1.8 percent of WMATA’s committed construction dollars had gone to minority contractors. Moore and Tucker wanted to break more contracts into pieces that small businesses could manage and to set aside 30 percent of contracts. The WMATA staff estimated that these steps would add $209 million to the system cost. Rebuffed by their colleagues, on 29 August 1974 Moore and Tucker turned to the most powerful, and most destructive, weapon in their arsenal: the “jurisdictional veto.” Because the WMATA compact required at least one board member from each jurisdiction to approve any contract, any jurisdiction whose voting members agreed could stall new contracts. In five years of the Authority’s existence, no jurisdiction had yet used this power, but Moore and Tucker were ready to deploy it. Tucker, an alternate board member, could only vote in the absence of D.C. City Council chairman John Nevius, but given the opportunity, he voted with Moore to block new contracts, hoping to force more aggressive affirmative action. Though hesitant, Nevius agreed to go along.62 As with the Natcher impasse, such stalling would hurt the authority through delays and inflation, but the District representatives could live with that. Moore commented, “Maybe the system needs to be brought to its knees to get some things straightened out.” Warned that further delay could reduce the mileage open for the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations, Moore rejected the oft-repeated position that Washington belongs more to the nation than to its residents, stating, “I am not interested in building a rapid rail system for visitors at the expense of minorities.”63 Virginia was furious. Congressman Broyhill called the proposed setaside plan “stupid economically, fiscally irresponsible, and harmful to the public,” adding that “Metro involves transportation construction. It is not a social welfare program.” He even injected the issue into his own reelection campaign, accusing his challenger, who had served on the WMATA board, of scheming “to substitute social workers for hard hats.” In the farther suburbs, politicians fretted that Metro would run out of money long before it reached their towns.64 Moderates called for compromise. In the District, Nevius, a self-described “WASP Republican,” worried about the Bicentennial. Despite instructions from the city council to vote with Moore, he threatened to vote for some contracts, thus removing the District veto. In Virginia, WMATA
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board member Herbert Harris castigated Moore for indulging in “the kind of brinkmanship that regional cooperation cannot stand.” WMATA staff estimated that each day of delay cost the authority $220,000, only slightly less than the daily amount attributed to the Natcher delay of 1969. Graham begged both sides for moderation, acknowledging minority contracting as a valid goal but pointing out the difficulties of many of the remedies proposed by the D.C. board members.65 Days before the 1974 election, the board suddenly worked out a compromise. Tucker and Moore agreed to abandon their quest for set-asides in return for a promise that the board would set quantifiable goals for minority participation. Acknowledging that the large, structural contracts (such as the excavation of tunnels and stations) were often best handled by large, established firms, the board set a minority-firm goal of only 10 percent. For smaller, finishing contracts, such as installing tiles, plumbing, and electrical lines within stations, the goal would be 20 percent. While rejecting a firm quota, WMATA would give preference to bids pledging minority participation and speed payments to compliant contractors. On 31 October the WMATA board accepted the compromise and awarded six contracts. Work could begin again.66 The debate that best illuminated the tension between Metro’s business and public roles, and Graham’s own problems dealing with civilians, came over the issue of handicapped access. By the late 1960s, disabled Americans had watched African Americans, American Indians, gays and lesbians, and other groups assert their rights, and they began to make their own demands. As both a guarantor of rights and a builder of buildings, the federal government was a good place to start. In 1966 the President’s Committee on the Employment of the Handicapped called on both public and private employers to grant the handicapped “the same consideration as all other workers, and that they be placed in jobs where their abilities count.” Soon after, Senator E. L. Bartlett of Alaska, whose legislative aide used a wheelchair, pushed through the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968, requiring that new buildings financed with federal funds be accessible.67 It was in the middle of this transition that Harry Weese and his team began to design transit stations for Washington. Thanks in part to pressure from the president’s committee, the Weese architects’ contract directed them to consider the needs of the handicapped, and they did. They added a strip of rough, white granite along the platform edge, intended to contrast with the texture and color of the platform’s dark-red tile and thus help visually impaired passengers avoid falling onto the tracks. For the deaf, they installed blinking lights at the edges of the platform to announce the arrival of a train. For the old and for others too weak to climb long flights of steps, the architects promised that every significant change in level could be made on escalators; elsewhere, floors would have a gentle slope at most. As designed, Metro was for its time perhaps the most disabled-friendly subway system in the world.68
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Altogether, the Authority bragged, the system was ready for passengers in five of the American Standards Association’s six disabled categories: semiambulatory, sight, hearing, incoordination, and aging. The sixth category, nonambulatory/wheelchair, soon became the sticking point. Stan Allan of Harry Weese & Associates feared that elevators for this group would interrupt travel patterns (disrupting navigation for visually impaired passengers, among other negatives) and provide refuges for criminals in a station otherwise free of dead ends and dark corners. Moreover, he stated, he had “never seen data or clear arguments to convince us that a significant number of especially handicapped persons, i.e., those requiring wheel chairs, would be expected to use this system,” nor had he seen wheelchairs anywhere in his grand tour of subways worldwide. Weese himself, who ironically had been on crutches from a skiing accident when his firm first heard about the job, was equally unsympathetic. To him, disabled advocates were just another lobby. “They wanted all kinds of fancy gadgets,” he later recalled.69 NCTA, and later, WMATA staff and board officials shared the Weese architects’ inclination to provide for some disabled riders while drawing the line at wheelchairs. Mel Siegel, of the architecture staff, reported that “there have been no demonstrations of the compatibility of these non-ambulatory persons with high performance systems such as proposed by WMATA. The introduction of these people into the normal pedestrian flow could be hazardous to both the non-ambulatory and large numbers of other patrons.” Moreover, he suggested, anyone who had trouble using the system as designed would also have trouble getting to and from the station. Comparative studies were absent since at the time only BART was pondering wheelchair access. Within the agency, Pfanstiehl strongly advocated handicapped access, arguing for wheelchair access both out of “just plain human compassion” and to avoid “a public relations black eye,” but the architects ignored him.70 Three years later, on 9 December 1969, Metro got its black eye. On the same day that ground was officially broken and President Nixon signed the bill to authorize the regional rail plan, the House Committee on Public Works’s Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds heard several advocates testify that escalators remained a significant barrier to many potential patrons. Disabled passengers who could stand and walk a bit would not be able to step on and off of escalators. One witness described her son, who depended on a crutch. “We have seen fear on his face—and have feared for him—as he stood before escalators, paced too fast for his stiffened legs, crutches, or canes. He has stood there petrified, and no matter how we urged to assist him on and off, he has never been able to take it yet.” Deputy General Manager Warren Quenstedt, representing the Authority, predicted that only four or five patrons per station would be able to use an elevator but not an escalator, and that this small number could be served by radio-dispatched bus.71 All that saved the hearings from collapsing into a bitter debate over val-
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ues was the promise of a simple technological fix. At the hearings, all present expressed support for an inclinator. Such a device would transport people in a standard elevator cab, but rather than moving vertically on cables, it would travel up and down inclined tracks parallel to the regular escalators. Wheelchairs would roll on at the top and roll off at the bottom. Unlike an elevator, which would require its own vertical shaft, an inclinator could share an inclined shaft with the standard escalators, thus simplifying construction and keeping down expense. But they could not offer the continuous flow of escalators, the machines best suited, Graham wrote, to move “the greatest number of people with the greatest efficiency at the least cost.”72 There was another hitch: inclinators existed only on the drawing board, and moving them from idea to reality could cost millions of dollars in prototype development before the first machine was installed. So in late 1970, WMATA applied for federal grants to develop the prototype, as well as to study Dial-a-Bus service in case the inclinator failed. But in December 1971 the Urban Mass Transportation Administration rejected the grant request on the grounds that Metro’s architecture was so unusual that an inclinator developed in Washington could not be copied elsewhere.73 Graham abandoned the idea of inclinators. At first he supported the idea of elevators, but soon became hostile to them as well. The staff estimated that elevators would add $65 million to the cost of the system, plus $1.25 million in annual maintenance. Even once it was clear that the federal government would pick up most or all of the tab, Graham remained opposed to elevators, which had come to offend his engineer’s sense of efficiency. He simply hated the idea of making an expensive investment for the sake of what he believed would be a tiny minority of passengers, insisting that Metro would provide access to anyone who could move unaided, and that only a “small percentage” (later estimated at half of 1 percent) would be left behind. The same decisiveness that served him so well in keeping the system on schedule now kept him from fully understanding any other point of view.74 Graham’s conviction led him to what was almost certainly the least distinguished moment of his career. Hoping to settle the wheelchair matter once and for all, Graham dragged his chief of construction, his chief of architecture, and a film crew out to Dulles Airport, whose escalators were approximately the same width as those planned for Metro. There he produced a variety of braces and crutches. As the cameras rolled, Graham rode up and down the escalators using one aid after another, climaxing by riding both directions in a wheelchair, facing up each time. Graham clearly believed that he had proved beyond doubt that “it is entirely possible, easily and safely, for wheelchair travelers to use escalators.” His aides watched in disbelief; a fit and fearless major general in his fifties hardly represented the disabled population, whatever braces he strapped to his legs. All he had proved, concluded the WMATA architect Sprague Thresher, was that “if everybody who had to use a wheelchair was Jack Graham, we wouldn’t need elevators.”75
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Richard Heddinger was equally unconvinced by the film—in fact, he saw it as perfect evidence that WMATA and Graham were not serious about providing wheelchair access. Dependent on a wheelchair since contracting polio at age seventeen, Heddinger was now, in his thirties, a government statistician and computer programmer, employed just blocks from two planned stations. In the late 1960s he had gradually grown more active in the local chapter of the National Paraplegia Foundation, concentrating on issues of access. He rejected Graham’s proposal to train wheelchair users to ride escalators, explaining that “riding down an escalator in a wheelchair [is] not impossible, but it’s like walking a two-by-four board suspended 50 feet in the air—not something to do several times a day.”76 More significantly, Heddinger and his allies rejected Graham’s cost-benefit analysis. For them, the matter was not one of engineering efficiency but of civil rights. It might indeed be cheaper, in theory, to offer wheelchair users a dedicated dial-a-bus service, or taxi vouchers. But such “separate but equal” accommodation would not do. On a practical level, a separate service could prove as unreliable as regular taxis or be deleted entirely during the next budget crisis. And Washington’s disabled wanted to be seen in the same places as everyone else. As one senator put it, “the handicapped want to compete as individuals, to be judged by their abilities and motivations, and they want self-sufficiency and dignity. They do not want to be ‘charity cases,’ totally dependent upon specialized services, including a specialized transit system. The handicapped are not asking for a special system but for equal access to the system.”77 Some advocates for the disabled were willing to trust WMATA’s claims that it planned inclinators, but Heddinger was suspicious. At several public hearings on the design of individual stations, he asked where exactly the inclinators would go, only to be given vague, noncommittal responses. Concluding that the authority was planning to build the system without inclinators, he recruited pro bono counsel and, in April 1972, filed suit in federal court against the Authority on the grounds that it was violating the 1968 act. WMATA fought back, but in June 1973 Judge William Jones ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Jones ruled that WMATA would not be allowed to open any station that lacked wheelchair access.78 Fearing another delay, the WMATA board decided not to appeal. Such an appeal would likely have been futile, for Congress was clearly moving toward mandating handicapped access to federally funded transportation systems. In June President Nixon had signed the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, whose section 504 stated that no individual could be denied the benefits of a federally assisted program “solely by reason of his handicap.” Moreover, Congress offered a carrot as well as a stick; the 1973 highway act provided for 80 percent federal funding of elevators for Metro.79 Even with the federal aid, elevators remained a burden to WMATA. At stations already under construction, workers had to hack elevator shafts through the vaults of reinforced concrete that had been designed to last for
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centuries. Within the stations, architects labored to figure out how to place elevators without disrupting the flow of foot traffic. But Metro did not belong to the engineers and the architects. Richard Heddinger and his allies had asserted that as taxpayers, citizens, and potential patrons, they too had a voice.80 Years later, in retirement in California, Jackson Graham remained convinced that the best way to provide full handicapped access would have been to train wheelchair users to ride the escalators. But though he never could see through the eyes of a polio victim, he may have gained some understanding of how ordinary citizens see big engineering projects. He had come to Palm Springs to relax and play golf. One day he learned that the city planned a new road and bridge alongside his country club’s golf course. Jackson Graham knew exactly what to do. He organized his neighbors, raised money, gathered evidence, and took the city to court. He won his fight, getting the road redesigned at a cost to the state of $1.5 million. Asked how his conduct differed from the actions of the Yuma Street residents he had so despised, he smiled and answered, “They were unreasonable. We were never unreasonable.”81 Reasonable or not, Metro’s neighbors, from the Park Service to the District board members to the handicapped, all took part in shaping the system. On one level, their intervention was a triumphant example of democracy in action. Individuals and institutions fought for their self-interest, for their neighborhoods, for their parklands, and for their civil rights. Using the democratic methods of protest, elective government, and the law, they made Metro theirs. Due to their efforts, brute efficiency yielded to fairness and compassion. While the battles over Metro construction in many ways resembled the fights over planned freeways, in the end they were more easily resolved. Despite years of effort and consultation with top architects and engineers, highway advocates could never devise a freeway design that businesses, preservationists, and residents could accept in an established neighborhood or historic district. In contrast, while subway construction brought temporary pain, in the long run people found they could live quite happily along a subway route. The National Park Service could abide a tunnel bored beneath Lafayette Park itself. Even litigious Yuma Street had few complaints when the trains started running in 1984. Indeed, residents there only learned of the event from a reporter, for they had not heard any noise.82 But democracy has its costs. Several changes to the system, such as reduced parking and the loss of the Farragut transfer, reduced Metro’s ability to serve its riders. And more ominously, each change and delay, along with each unexpected underground obstacle, added to the time and money needed. By the mid-1970s many people had begun to ask if Metro would be worth its price.
1972–1980
7
The Money
When Congress authorized the regional Metro system in December 1969, it approved a financial plan based on the hope and expectation that the system, once completed, would generate enough revenue from fare-box collections to cover all operating expenses and pay back at least some capital costs. Rapid transit kept the financial structure of a profitable business. Perhaps it would not provide enough direct return on investment to attract private capital, but it would not be a long-term drain on public coffers. That model died in the mid-1970s, the victim of inflation, delay, and political realities. Although Metro has never in its history enjoyed a sustained period of financial stability, the years from 1974 through 1979 were particularly grim, and the threat of truncation very real. With capital costs of Metro increasing by billions of dollars even as projected revenue fell, critics were given every chance to make their case against completing the system. But in the end, the people of the region and the Congress decided that Metro merited funding as a public service, just like roads, parks, fire protection, and sewer connections. Although it would take several more years for the original, 100-mile system to be confirmed, by 1979 it was clear that Congress and the region were committed to Metro, for richer or for poorer. In the bright light of morning, with starkly realistic projections that Metro’s revenues would never cover its operating costs, much less its construction cost, elected officials from the region and the nation decided that it was still a fine investment. Some of the same factors that made the system so expensive also made it too popular to kill. Rising Costs, Frozen Revenues
On 7 February 1969 WMATA released a revised Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program, known as the “bronze book” for its metallic-colored cover. Along with supporting technical documents, this report, endorsed by the WMATA board and the Congress, provided an official statement of what Metro was supposed to accomplish, from creating jobs and real-estate value to enriching the region’s social and cultural life. And it estimated the system’s price tag: $2.4946 billion, including $535.4 million in escalation, another term for inflation.1 By the end of 1970 the estimate was up to $2.9802 billion. By the end of 1976 it had more than doubled from the 1969 figure, reaching $5.0178 bil-
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lion, plus $378.1 million for contingencies. By the end of 1978 the estimate was up to $6.8 billion. The total cost by the time the 103-mile system was completed in January 2001 was around $10 billion in nominal dollars. This enormous sum has earned Metro its most enduring criticism, as well as such epithets as “the Solid-Gold Cadillac of Mass Transit” and “the biggest boondoggle in the history of all mankind.”2 Why did Metro get so expensive? First, the original estimate of Metro’s capital cost—$2,494.6 million—was never terribly realistic. Its very precision should have shown that it was not meant as an accurate estimate, for a project of that magnitude could not possibly have been budgeted down to the last hundred thousand dollars. Jackson Graham’s own assistant suspected that Graham had pulled the figure out of thin air. WMATA’s chief financial planner, William Herman, later explained, “we used the most optimistic forecasts. We didn’t lie, or cheat; we just used the most optimistic of the forecasts. It came as no great shock that we didn’t achieve what we had projected.”3 A lowball price was hardly unusual for a major government project. As Lyndon Johnson told his aides, “Congress is like a whiskey drinker. You can put an awful lot of whiskey in a man if you just let him sip it. But you try to force the whole bottle down his throat at one time, he’ll throw it up.” Interior secretary Stuart Udall put it another way: “Congress was more likely to buy something if you gave them a low figure rather than a high figure.” The Bureau of the Budget concurred, seeing its job as putting together a budget that would plausibly support the president’s program. Although the bureau would never condone outright fraud, a bit of financial optimism was perfectly acceptable. In this culture, no one could be too surprised if Metro’s total costs rose beyond the original projection: Americans pay for big things one sip at a time.4 Second, building Metro proved harder than anticipated. Underground construction is always full of surprises—rock that is too hard, earth that is too soft, all those unmapped utilities. Strikes, storms, and lawsuits could delay construction and add to the cost. The original cost estimate had included a 10 percent “contingency” item to cover such mishaps, but all of that fund was eaten up by Congressman Natcher’s withholding of the D.C. contribution in 1968 and 1969. Perhaps the worst surprises of all were the bids by potential contractors. When the Authority was able to offer contracts in 1969 and 1970, it was dismayed at low bids up to a third higher than its engineers had expected. By 1972 WMATA and its consultants had gotten much better at predicting how much each contract would cost, but “estimating” remained a large source of overruns (Table 1).5 Third, the system built was not quite the system planned; the need to mollify agencies, businesses, and citizens drove up costs a few million dollars at a time. Burying the line near the stadium to meet neighbors’ demands added $18 million. Diving under a road, at the insistence of the Virginia Department of Highways, cost $8.5 million. In settling the Yuma
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Capital Cost Increases, February 1969 to December 1978
Description Original cost estimate, February 1969 Increases Route alignments System additions Estimating Escalation Schedule delays (escalated costs) Design and engineering Contingency Other System reductions Total Capital cost estimate, December 1978
Amount (millions)
Percentage of Total Increase
$2,494.6 210.4 652.0 647.2 976.2 1,054.0 10.0 85.5 870.0 (167.4)
4.8 15.0 14.9 22.5 24.3 0.2 2.0 20.1 (3.8)
$4,337.9
100.0
$6,832.5
Source: U.S. General Accounting Office, Issues Being Faced by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Washington, D.C., 10 April 1979), 17.
Street controversy, Authority officials had agreed to follow new procedures for each subsequent segment. By 1984 this practice had cost $120 million. The changes may have benefited the region as a whole, but they destroyed engineers’ projections. As Jim Caywood of De Leuw, Cather put it, “there’s no way in this world that you can build a mammoth public works project such as Metro within a reasonable budget with all the outside influences. They won’t let you do it.” By the end of 1975, “changes in scope of work” had raised the cost of the system, in constant 1969 dollars, from $2.0 billion to $2.7 billion.6 Fourth, and by far most significant, were the interlinked issues of inflation and delay. The original financial plan of March 1968 allowed for inflation of up to 5 percent, a “conservative” estimate, in Graham’s opinion. Experts had watched prices rise throughout the late 1960s, but they attributed the increases to the Vietnam War, which boosted demands for both men and material. With Nixon’s promise of peace, they expected the war to end by 1971, easing inflationary pressure. But the war dragged on, keeping prices high, and by January 1972 Graham found himself hoping that inflation would hold at 7 percent, allowing him to complete Metro for under $3 billion. Even after the last American troops left Vietnam in 1973, the inflation remained, reaching 10 percent by June. By September, with Graham trying to hold the line at $4 billion, his staff warned that it could not predict economic trends and therefore could not project the ultimate
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cost of the system. Their fears were realized: inflation hit 12 percent by early 1975. At 12 percent annual inflation, prices double in six years.7 Some of WMATA’s biggest expenses rose even faster. As one February 1975 magazine article described it, It cost $15.5 million to build a mile of subway in 1969 using the “cut and cover” construction method. Assuming eight per cent inflation per year, this cost will reach $31.9 million per mile by mid-1978. Material costs have skyrocketed. To purchase the steel a dollar would buy in 1969, Metro must now spend $2.12. Asphalt was then $15.80 a ton; now it costs $54.18 a ton. In like fashion, labor costs have risen tremendously. At the outset of construction, a Metro laborer earned $3.50 per hour. The same laborer earns $8.06 per hour today. Heavy equipment operators earned $5.57 per hour in 1969. In 1975, their hourly rate is $10.75. And so it is with virtually all material items and labor categories.
Between 1970 and late 1974, the cost of reinforcing steel rose from 15 cents to 34 cents a pound. For 273 million pounds, that increase alone meant a $52 million hit. Cody Pfanstiehl noted wryly that the only cost that wasn’t so rapidly escalating was the cost of escalators.8 Metro supporters pointed to similar cost overruns in other projects, including the Interstate Highway System itself, whose estimated cost rose from $25 billion in 1956 to between $80 and $100 billion in 1976. In the early 1970s, all federal highway construction projects put together escalated at a rate of 12 percent annually, while Metro’s costs rose only 11 percent per year. The estimated cost of the Lake Pontchartrain hurricane project in New Orleans more than quadrupled from $85 million in 1965 to at least $352 million by 1975. The Alaska pipeline was over budget. The space shuttle—originally supposed to pay for itself in commercial satellite launches—was over budget. The renovations of Union Station and Yankee Stadium were over budget. The General Accounting Office, having looked at overbudget projects nationwide, found that inflation (sometimes euphemistically termed “economic growth”), not malfeasance or incompetence, was the culprit in every case.9 When inflation is high, investors demand higher interest rates. The inflation of the 1970s thus ripped through WMATA’s plan for 5 percent interest bonds, which were supposed to finance about a third of the system’s capital cost. By December 1970 WMATA’s financial consultants were warning that they could not sell the bonds. Only a June 1972 congressional bailout—a federal guarantee plus an interest subsidy—made them marketable. Inflation also threatened labor relations, as contract workers watched the real value of their wages melt away. In 1974, and especially in the summer of 1975, several strikes disrupted construction.10 Inflation meant that each delay not only deferred any fare-box revenue but became an added expense itself. As Graham explained in September 1973, “a project scheduled to go under structural contract today estimated
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at $20 million will likely have increased to $22 million if awarded a year from now. . . . Ultimately the impact can be in the range of $4 or $5 million before the ripple effect has run its course, much greater than the 7 percent per annum allowed for escalation in the Authority financial plan.” Thus, a slowdown for any reason—from an extra public hearing to a hurricane—could become a multimillion dollar expense. By 1975 Authority staff estimated that delays had cost $572 million, or 30 percent of the total increase.11 Theoretically, WMATA could have countered inflation by raising its fares. Indeed, from the early 1960s through the early 1970s this was the official plan. In the 1960s, rail advocates had told Congress the Authority might be able to pay back not only its bonds but even some federal grants from fares. As late as January 1972, the Authority predicted that the fare box would pay all operating and some capital costs. If costs went up, fares would simply be raised by the same percentage, neutralizing inflation.12 That idea died in 1973, with WMATA’s takeover of the metropolitan area’s buses, which had previously remained in private hands. WMATA gained this honor not by choice but as an emergency response to the collapse of the region’s four private bus companies, particularly D.C. Transit, Inc., owned by the infamous transit baron O. Roy Chalk. Chalk’s Washington career had started out optimistically enough in 1956, with Chalk himself hopping aboard several streetcars to hand out gold-plated souvenir tokens. But as early as 1957, Chalk was looking for ways out of his promise to rid Washington of streetcars. Congress insisted on buses, and by 1963, the last of D.C.’s streetcars would be sold to cities as far away as Barcelona and Sarajevo. Chalk himself remained in New York, traveling to Washington once or twice a month to check up on operations. Many in Washington speculated that his true interest in D.C. Transit lay in selling off its valuable real estate: streetcar barns that could be converted to offices, shops, and even apartment buildings.13 Throughout the NCTA and WMATA planning, Chalk had been a font of unpredictability. In 1959, inspired by Disneyland, he proposed a monorail as an alternative to a subway. Two years later, he proposed a D.C. Transit–owned monorail from Georgetown to the new Dulles Airport. Rebuffed by Stolzenbach, whose appointment he had originally endorsed, he denounced the NCTA, contributing to the defeat of the 1963 bill. Next, he attacked rapid transit plans by proposing an all-bus alternative, with express buses connecting downtown stations to Rockville, Maryland, and Falls Church, Virginia. Later still, he accepted the notion of a subway, provided that he got the franchise to operate it. Most significantly, no sooner had WMATA begun than Chalk began knocking on its door, hoping to be bought out; public agencies had taken over private companies in many other large American cities. Only this last proposal was taken seriously.14 According to the original plans, Chalk’s buses were none of WMATA’s business. The compact prohibited the Authority from operating a bus ser-
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vice and even required it to contract out the operation of its trains—a provision added in response to the union uproar over the 1963 bill. So at first, the Authority swatted Chalk away. By the late 1960s, however, D.C. Transit’s finances began to melt, and WMATA had to consider a takeover more seriously. Metro needed a healthy, attractive bus system to deliver commuters to rail stations, but a bus takeover would cloud the Authority’s finances at a vulnerable time. Caught between these imperatives, the Authority awaited congressional instruction.15 The waiting lasted until the spring of 1970, when District of Columbia leaders, whose constituents made up the vast majority of bus riders, pushed to give the Authority the ability to operate both buses and rail service and, if necessary, to acquire private transit companies. It took a year and a half to get the necessary compact amendment through the Virginia and Maryland legislatures and both houses of Congress; on 21 October 1971, President Nixon finalized the change. By then Chalk was desperate. As one observer put it, “declining ridership, increasing fares, and widespread deterioration of service combine to produce unmistakable symptoms of impending death.” Throughout 1972 WMATA and Chalk negotiated, while Chalk skimped on maintenance and ridership declined. Most ominously, the company’s union contract would expire on 31 October, and everyone feared a repeat of the 1955 strike. Although many congressmen dreaded paying anything to an unscrupulous tycoon, the Maryland and Virginia congressional delegations pushed for a takeover. On 14 October, just days before its members returned home for the last days of the 1972 election campaign, Congress passed the bill. In the end, WMATA gave up trying to negotiate with Chalk and instead simply condemned his bus companies, leaving compensation to be worked out later.16 The takeover finally came on 14 January 1973, as WMATA seized Chalk’s D.C. Transit System (serving the District and Montgomery County, Maryland) and WV&M line (Virginia routes, including express buses to D.C.). Three weeks later, the Authority acquired the assets of the two unrelated bus companies: the AB&W of Virginia and the WMA of Prince George’s County, Maryland. These two companies, which together served about 20 percent of the region’s bus riders, had been in slightly better financial health, but they too were losing passengers. Rather than compete with a publicly owned bus system, they requested a takeover and were purchased by negotiation rather than condemnation. WMATA had metamorphosed from a subway builder with no passengers to the third largest bus operator in the country.17 To combine both the four bus companies and the rail system into a single, hopeful image, WMATA dubbed its new service “Metrobus,” using the same capital-M logo it had chosen for the trains and adding red, white, and blue stripes to the buses it had acquired. Underneath the paint, however, little changed. Although by purchasing assets rather than whole companies WMATA had avoided taking over the companies’ financial debts, it inher-
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A D.C. Transit bus is renamed, 1973 (WMATA)
ited other troubles. Along with equipment, managers, workers, unions, and contracts, it acquired rust, acrimonious labor relations, and a poor public image for buses. If it did not drastically improve bus equipment and service, it would soon earn the wrath of the same people it hoped to convert to rapid transit riders. Rather than the shiny prototype rail cars, the public face of the authority would be defined, in the words of one staffer, by busy signals on the information phone line, by crowded, unairconditioned buses in one of Washington’s hottest summers, by ancient vehicles that seem determined to retire at rush hour loaded with perspiring people, by an intricate maze of routes that takes an expert to figure out, by some drivers with poor attitudes or ineptness in dealing with the public, and by a host of other large and small details such as failures of buses to run, being passed up at a bus stop, dingy bus interiors that look dirty even though they have been cleaned, by torn seats, graffiti, and a hangover influence of prior owners.
Besides general decrepitude and surliness, the hangover took two forms. The first was fares. Between 1963 and 1970, Chalk had raised fares in stages from twenty-five to forty cents, despite a one-day boycott in 1966 that kept 90 percent of riders off his buses. While only a few District activists chose civil disobedience—paying only twenty-five cents and allowing themselves to be arrested—the majority would not tolerate a further increase. In June 1973 a court ruled that the raise to forty cents had in fact been improperly granted by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Commission. WMATA’s board agreed to freeze fares at their 1970 level.18
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Second, Chalk had alienated his employees, and in his very last days of ownership, he had averted a strike only by giving his unions guaranteed cost-of-living adjustments every three months. With labor accounting for close to 85 percent of the bus system’s cost (typical for the industry), and with inflation ever increasing, this concession meant that operating expenses would automatically increase for years. Moreover, because both D.C. Transit managers and workers made the move to WMATA, so did their mutual dislike, which grew even worse as former D.C. Transit employees saw buses playing second fiddle in a subway agency. Despite the raises, in May 1974 bus drivers struck. Old WMATA hands were no happier: the Authority’s payroll had grown from 300 to 4,000 employees overnight. No longer could Graham expect to know each employee’s name; no longer was everyone focused on the single goal of building a rail system.19 By pumping money into the system, WMATA revived the buses. After declining 22 percent in only four years, ridership stabilized, and it would increase for the next several years. Moreover, the Authority began to rationalize the area’s bus map, creating routes that had previously been unthinkable due to the divisions between rival companies. But with fares frozen and wages automatically rising, by November 1974 the fare box was paying only half of bus expenses. Soon, a board committee reported, “local government officials, private citizens of the area, editorial writers and, on many occasions, Metro Board Members” began speaking of “mushrooming, runaway, spiraling, out-of-control” deficits.20 The bus deficit threatened the financial logic of the rail system. By the summer of 1973, real experience with buses showed that raising fares was not so easy and that a business-like attitude could conflict with WMATA’s mission of public service. As the Washington Post editorialized, “Metro ought to realize that the object of good public transportation is to provide frequent, reliable service at rates that will encourage bus ridership everywhere. That is not a money-making mission, but an effort to move people where they want to go; to cut down on air pollution, gasoline usage and traffic congestion.” The same logic would demand low fares on rail.21 The bus takeover, however necessary, was a disaster for WMATA. By showing just how hard it was to raise fares, the takeover threatened the financing of the rail system—by July 1973 the Nixon administration warned that its backing of rail bonds would depend on the jurisdictions’ willingness to subsidize bus operations. Moreover, the bus takeover, and the resulting deficits, strained regional cohesion. Thinking of their constituents, many of them poor and carless, District of Columbia board members generally supported high subsidies and lower fares. In 1972 Walter Fauntroy, now the District’s delegate to Congress, had even suggested free transit service. Suburban members, particularly those representing Virginia, knew that their voters would swallow a fare increase better than a tax increase, so they fought to keep deficits low by raising fares. (Ironically, Fairfax County’s auto-dependent land use forced the county to operate one of the largest
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school-bus fleets in the East.) By the late 1970s, Authority financial plans assumed that fares would rise at only half the rate of inflation.22 Finally, the bus takeover directly threatened WMATA’s image as the public champion. When the Authority first considered a takeover, in 1970, Pfanstiehl warned that it “would be about the worst community relations calamity possible.” He was right. In buying Chalk’s buses and hiring his managers and employees, WMATA also acquired much of his unpopularity. The worst insult came from the head of a citizens’ group organized to fight air pollution, who disparaged the WMATA chairman as “a public O. Roy Chalk.” For him and others, the takeover had raised expectations beyond what could be met.23 Reconsideration and Reauthorization
Nasty surprises, inflation, and the bus takeover required a rethinking of Metro finances. When, in the fall of 1974, that rethinking took place, the accountants reported some very bad news. In January 1970 the WMATA jurisdictions signed a Capital Contributions Agreement that, among other things, required the Authority to update its financial estimate within five years. So, in November 1974, the Authority produced a “Net Income Analysis,” an official estimate of total capital cost and likely operating costs and revenues. The staff replaced the capital cost estimate of $2.98 billion with a new figure of $4.454 billion, attributing almost all the increase to inflation. Moreover, it predicted that fare-box revenues would not cover operating expenses, much less pay off bonds.24 The analysis was not a huge shock. As early as 1971, Maryland officials had concluded that “Public transportation is coming to be regarded as a public service, like the police and fire departments. As such, we cannot expect it to be self-supporting at the fare box. . . . If the Metro fare were set at a breakeven point, it would probably be so high that people would climb back into their automobiles, even if the actual, though less visible, costs were greater.” With the November analysis made public, the D.C. government noted its lack of surprise and its belief that fares should maximize quality of life, not system revenue. Officials could still hope that once the entire system was in operation, economies of scale would let fare-box revenues cover operating expenses plus some debt service.25 On the other hand, without more money from the federal government, WMATA could not complete the planned ninety-eight-mile system. At the request of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB, the successor to the Bureau of the Budget), WMATA staffers sketched out various shorter systems, including one limited to the forty-seven miles then under construction. Even with the $3 billion already promised by the federal government and the local jurisdictions, WMATA could build at most seventy-six miles. Such a system would eliminate the Mid-City trunk and Anacostia branch, along with extensions past Silver Spring and Huntington. This plan, the
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staff argued, would eliminate service to the region’s poorest neighborhoods, force all sorts of operational improvisations to compensate for missing yards, and, in the long run, prove more expensive, should the ninety-eightmile system eventually be completed after several years of inflation. Perhaps most seriously, no suburban jurisdiction would pay its share unless it got its promised lines. As OMB later noted, “local financing is a house of cards, each jurisdiction expecting METRO to be constructed as advertised in the 1960’s.” Even a hint of truncation might blow the house down.26 In December 1974 WMATA faced the music, asking OMB for an additional $1.26 billion to cover the new estimate.27 But the new president, Gerald Ford, had less enthusiasm for Metro than did his three immediate predecessors. As House Minority Leader he had been one of Natcher’s greatest allies in 1971, and some, including Graham, believed he still held a grudge. As a congressman from auto-building Michigan, he had generally been cool to federal support for transit. In 1973 his biggest break with the Nixon administration had been to oppose legislation allowing cities to transfer some Interstate highway funds to mass transit. He later softened on that issue, but within weeks of ascending to the presidency, he announced his dismay that federal policies had skewed local transit planning toward subway construction. Ford also lacked his predecessors’ fondness for the District of Columbia. Although he had spent a quarter-century in Congress, since 1955 he had lived across the river in Alexandria, rather than in the District itself.28 Even as the White House distanced itself, the financial thunder of November startled local governments into taking a closer look at Metro. Suburban officials began worrying that they would never get the extensions for which they had already paid. In Maryland, transportation secretary Harry Hughes threatened to cut off further contributions until more ground was broken in his state, and Montgomery board member Idamae Garrott proposed that some lines be built from the periphery toward the center to guarantee their completion. Prince George’s County worried it would never see Metro. Throughout the region, county and city governments began tightening the leashes on their WMATA representatives, making sure they cleared their votes at the county seat before casting them at WMATA headquarters. As one suburban councilman observed, the jurisdictions dismantled WMATA as an independent, decision-making body and turned it into a United Nations.29 On the bright side, the first elected D.C. City Council convened in January 1975. And Thomas Airis, the holdover highway chief from the precouncil government, had finally been eased into retirement. His successor, D.C. transportation chief Douglas Schneider, now suggested a new source of capital funds: the long-contested urban Interstates.30 In 1973, in response to freeway protestors nationwide, Congress had allowed cities to cancel authorized Interstate segments and use the money instead for mass transit projects. The transit projects would be matched with
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Rising inflation, 1975 (Cartoon by Bill Garner, Washington Star-News, 30 January 1975. Copyright Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
four federal dollars to every local dollar (rather than the 9:1 ratio used for highways), and transfers were subject to the approval of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Despite these conditions, the act was a tremendous victory for expressway opponents. Maryland and Virginia planned to cancel some of their disputed segments, including the North Central Freeway in Prince George’s County and I-66 in Arlington. But the District proposed transfers on a much larger scale. In January 1975 Councilman Sterling Tucker proposed wiping out all the planned freeways—the South Leg, the Industrial Freeway, the North Central, the Potomac River Expressway, and the Three Sisters Bridge itself—at a savings of about $1.25 billion.31 Such a move would have three results. First, it would allow Ford to fund a full ninety-eight-mile system—thus keeping faith with Nixon’s support of Metro—without increasing total transportation spending in the region.32 Second, the transfers would drive a final stake through the heart of the freeways and the bridge; once the money was spent, it would be gone forever. Third, the proposal proclaimed the District’s aspiration to self-determination. After a hundred years of powerlessness, the District’s first act as a selfgoverning community was to defy the will of those in Congress who had tried to dictate to the city. Best of all, the funds were largely immune from inflation. The same escalation of construction costs that so hurt Metro’s finances also raised the hypothetical costs of the unbuilt highways, so the amount of funds eligible for transfer steadily increased.
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For several months, the White House deferred its decision on the highway transfers. President Ford himself, despite his skepticism, wanted to see the whole ninety-eight-mile system built. But he was appalled by the cost overruns, which he blamed in part on WMATA’s failure to get tough with the bus unions, and he feared that a generous payout to WMATA would set a national precedent. White House aides concluded that “the Metro cost overrun issue [is] controversial and a no-win matter. We should move quickly to put some distance between it and the President,” delegating decisions to the secretary of transportation. Nevertheless, in June 1975 Ford himself chose Interstate transfers as the centerpiece of a Metro financing plan. To WMATA comptroller William Boleyn the money was “manna from heaven.” With the administration allowing D.C. and its suburbs to transfer money at a faster rate than could other urban areas, WMATA soon became the nation’s heaviest user of highway transfer funds, and by January 1976 WMATA was counting on $875 million.33 But the Interstate transfer funds brought their own complications. For one thing, they threatened the symmetry of the compact. The unbuilt highways in the District were by far more extensive, more costly, and less popular than the unbuilt segments in Maryland and Virginia. Moreover, though Maryland and Virginia were willing to scrap certain controversial segments (such as I-95 within the Beltway and the Three Sisters Bridge), unlike the District they had other roads they wanted to build. The District therefore would make a greater financial sacrifice than its neighbors, and Mayor Walter Washington could be accused of selling out to the suburbs. Conversely, the District’s eagerness to transfer funds led the Ford administration, Graham, and the suburban WMATA representatives to worry lest the District claim to own the football and make the rules.34 Highway transfers also threatened Metro’s special status as a federal ward. True, Metro’s funding formula—two federal dollars for every local dollar—was less generous than the 4:1 formula authorized in the national transit legislation applicable to other cities. But other cities did not get federal guarantees for their bonds, nor did they get nearly as many federal dollars in absolute terms. For this reason, Graham had long urged the board not to bite the apple of national transit aid. By asking for highway transfer funds, WMATA bit that apple. Metro’s friends in Congress immediately gave up on trying to save the system with special legislation, and the Urban Mass Transportation Administration asserted its obligation to assure “that Departmental METRO decisions are reasonably consistent with nationwide mass transit policy.” Having surrendered its claims to special status, Metro now shared a fate with San Francisco Bay Area’s BART, Atlanta’s MARTA, and every other urban transit system in the nation.35 Part of that fate was increased scrutiny. By 1975 enthusiasm for rail transit was ebbing. Academic economists, including some who had criticized Stolzenbach’s plans in the 1960s, argued that rail transit could not be justified in terms of diversion from automobiles or energy savings and
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that buses could move commuters more cheaply. These rail critics found plenty of ammunition in San Francisco’s BART, which had attracted far less than its projected patronage since its opening in 1972. Ford’s Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) resolved that other cities should not follow the lead of San Francisco and Washington and plan massive, comprehensive heavy-rail systems, designed to serve for decades. Rather, they should think small, cheap, and short-term, emphasizing incremental improvements, planning horizons of five to ten years, and a range of technologies, including bus and light rail. UMTA did not rule out heavy rail for heavily traveled corridors. But it wanted cities to build their systems one operable segment at a time, so that they could change course if necessary. And it asked applicants for federal funding to conduct an “alternatives analysis,” considering options other than rail.36 WMATA thus found itself financially dependent on an agency that had rejected WMATA’s basic approach of achieving regional consensus by promising every part of the region the same rail service at roughly the same time. This philosophical dispute only aggravated disagreement over Metro’s eventual capital cost. By November 1975 OMB was fed up, complaining that Metro was taking up too large a share of all federal transit aid and recommending a “stretch-out” of construction, as well as possible truncation. “Commitments made in [the] 1960’s are no longer fiscally prudent,” OMB warned; “lessons learned from BART and Atlanta must be applied in Washington.” Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia asked the General Accounting Office to look into Metro finances, and later the House District Committee ordered its own study. Even some local officials, notably Francis Francois, the new chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, asked if regional governments should rethink their commitments to completing Metro when so many other needs seemed equally pressing. Just as proponents of the Three Sisters Bridge had frequently protested that enough studies had been done, only to face demands for additional studies by unconvinced critics, so now did Metro’s planners complain that previous studies were sufficient. But WMATA had crossed an invisible line between rosy optimism and wishful thinking, and its staff could not escape.37 Jackson Graham saw his job falling apart. He was disgusted by any suggestion of studying alternatives to the complete system, arguing that a truncated system could never lure commuters out of their cars, and that additional studies would only delay construction in some counties, which would then envy their more decisive neighbors. He was frustrated with his deteriorating ability to control WMATA’s fractious board, which was forming executive committees to steal some of his power. He was dismayed that President Ford was less supportive than his predecessors. He was sixty.38 Graham had given Metro the start it needed. Having recruited an immensely talented staff, he worked with his charges on the contracting and engineering procedures that the system needed, and then held them together through a series of bitter political controversies during which his
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departure might have led to a mass resignation. He had gotten the first, and more difficult, half of the system under construction and brought the first 4.6-mile segment to where only a lack of working rail cars stood between it and operation. He had brought Metro within sight of the Promised Land and was ready to leave it at that. On Thanksgiving Day 1975, he sent a resignation letter to the WMATA board, its tone neither wholly bitter nor wholly cheerful. “Suffice to note that my family does not consider me neglectful,” he wrote. “I am not out of gas or humor (‘Illegitimi non carborundum’!), nor complaining of you my 12 apostles and the 38 Board members afore you. . . . I am grateful to all my associates who make it possible for me to leave with head up, on straight, or even on.” His resignation took effect two months later, leaving many members of the staff and board feeling “discouragement and doom.”39 Graham left just in time to avoid dealing with the most threatening study yet, a January 1976 report by Damian Kulash of Jack Faucett Associates, a small consulting firm. The report, commissioned by the Congressional Research Service, argued that WMATA’s projections for patronage were far too high. Based on the experience of older rail systems in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, as well as land use and population trends in the Washington region, Kulash rejected WMATA’s forecast that 34 percent of area workers would take transit to work and substituted 20 percent as a more realistic figure. Arguing that WMATA’s projections for nonwork trips were even more inflated, he suggested that rail patronage would likely amount to only half of the Authority’s projections. Given these concerns, the report suggested that the federal government deny funding to any segments beyond the forty-one miles then under construction until it had undertaken “a thorough alternatives analysis” that would consider cutting Metro down to sixty-eight or even forty-one miles.40 Kulash felt that he had merely put into print what everyone familiar with the project had been whispering in the hallways, but even that action had consequences. By February, Congressman Silvio Conte, who in 1971 had helped pry Metro funds loose from Natcher, was citing the Faucett report as evidence for truncation. Only the local delegation stayed firm behind completing the system. “To stop Metro now is to seriously jeopardize its eventual completion,” warned Congressman Gilbert Gude of Maryland. “If there are interests who wish to kill this system, we can’t think of a better way to do it than to stop in mid-stream for a ‘re-study.’ ”41 Under these circumstances, the beginning of actual rail service was only small consolation. At the time of the ground breaking, WMATA officials had still hoped to have the first segment of Metro in operation by July 1973 and the system complete by the end of 1979. Natcher’s final round of blackmail in 1971 destroyed that hope. Interruptions in funding, indecision over Union Station, strikes, hurricanes, and court-ordered public hearings all had pushed back the opening date. Ironically, when WMATA finally had all the track and stations ready for the first 4.6-mile segment, it still had to
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Opening Day, 27 March 1976 (WMATA)
wait for working rail cars. The Rohr company, an aerospace firm that was also building cars for BART in the San Francisco Bay Area, had found the rail business more difficult than it had anticipated and was soon in trouble on both coasts. In San Francisco, it spent months trying to understand why its car motors caught fire. In Washington, the company delivered its first pair of cars in January 1975, half a year late and creaking with defects. The emergency brakes tended to go on unexpectedly, the air conditioning was noisy, and the cars swayed violently. For the next year, WMATA worked to coax forty working cars out of Rohr’s Georgia factory and underneath Washington’s streets, while Rohr coped with close to $50 million in losses on the contract.42 Finally, on Saturday, 27 March 1976, WMATA chairman Sterling Tucker stood on the elevated platform at Rhode Island Avenue Station and told a crowd, “It is time to stop talking and start riding.” Joined by the rest of the board, federal and state officials, as well as Walter McCarter, Darwin Stolzenbach, and Jackson Graham, Tucker cut a ribbon and invited the people of the region to take their long-promised free ride to Farragut North and back. Fifty-one thousand people accepted the offer, many of them clutching sample fare cards handed to them by Cody Pfanstiehl years earlier. They jammed into cars so tightly that the floors warped from the weight, preventing the doors from closing. Engineer Howard Lyon, who had spent fifteen
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years on the project, was mortified, but most of the crowd was elated, lining up for hours for a chance to ride, singing out loud, and greeting strangers. Operators begged repeat riders to let others have a turn. On Monday, 29 March, the Authority began actually charging money for rides, yet it still attracted 25,000 riders a day to the tiny stub of a rail line. The subway was a hit.43 The elation did little to distract WMATA officials from the gun pointed at their heads. Despite the crowds, each day WMATA spent $75,000 more to run the system than could be collected from fares. On Independence Day, the long-awaited Bicentennial, WMATA was humiliated by its failure to marshal enough buses to serve the crowds of fireworks spectators on the Mall. A few days later, it released a new cost estimate of $5.512 billion, including $487 million in contingency funds. Meanwhile, within the administration, officials from the Department of Transportation and OMB had agreed on a $4.65 billion ceiling for the project. If the entire system could be built for that amount, fine. If not, OMB advocated “shrinking the system to stay within that commitment.” Secretary of Transportation William Coleman, warmer toward Metro than OMB’s budget hawks, moderated that position only slightly, announcing that any federal assistance for a system costing more than the ceiling would only come after WMATA demonstrated “extraordinary efforts” to contain costs.44 In short, Metro was at least $800 million in the hole. To lead it back into daylight, the WMATA board chose a new general manager: a thirty-oneyear-old budget analyst named Theodore Lutz. After getting a master’s degree in management from Syracuse University’s prestigious Maxwell School in 1968, he had found a job at the Bureau of the Budget (later, OMB). Among his other duties, he was given the task of reviewing the District’s budget, so he found himself working with Mayor Washington and other local officials. Lutz’s work also impressed Nixon staffer Egil Krogh, responsible for D.C. affairs at the White House. When, after the 1972 election, Krogh moved to the Department of Transportation, he brought Lutz—still only twenty-seven—with him as deputy under secretary of transportation for budget and program review. In this capacity, Lutz had chaired a committee on Metro financing, in effect becoming a federal representative on the WMATA board, despite the compact negotiators’ earlier decision not to have one. In 1975 he had compiled the department’s report on Metro funding. He understood the problem as well as anyone.45 Lutz was no Jack Graham. He was not an engineer, he had never managed more than a dozen people, and he was a generation younger than the many veterans of World War II who had done most of the work bringing Metro from idea to reality. But the board understood that Metro no longer needed a builder as much as it needed a bean counter. Board members had found him to be skilled, well connected, and, as a Minnesota native, neutral among the jurisdictions. His skills as a diplomat and financier would soon be put to the test.
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Lutz arrived at his post to find it already under siege. On 24 September 1976, the very day that news of Lutz’s appointment appeared in the Washington Post, Urban Mass Transportation administrator Robert Patricelli spoke to a joint meeting of WMATA, the Council of Governments, and the Transportation Planning Board. After expressing general support for Metro, Patricelli reiterated the administration’s insistence that the system’s capital cost be capped at $4.677 billion, the March 1976 estimate, including inflation. “We must pick a figure and stay with it,” he argued. “No financing plan can be constructed around a moving target.” Most important, he invoked the “alternatives analysis” policy, which since 1975 had applied to every other new transit system in the nation. Standing before the assembled representatives of the region, he ordered just such an analysis—including “a full range of rail and non-rail alternatives”—of the forty miles of Metro not yet under construction. Everyone understood that such a study meant that the administration was considering truncation. WMATA board members grumbled that more study only meant more delay and higher costs, but Patricelli and Secretary of Transportation William Coleman held firm.46 Nor did the 1976 presidential election change policy. Not long after his inauguration, President Jimmy Carter wrote that “I suspect that many of the rapid transit systems are grossly over-designed” and that more offstreet parking, bus lanes, and one-way streets could take the place of subways. Carter’s secretary of transportation, Brock Adams, actually took a harder line than his predecessor. Patricelli had been willing to exempt the Glenmont route from the analysis, but Adams reversed the decision. After intense lobbying by Montgomery County executive Jim Gleason, Adams relented, though he did insist on a study to reduce the costs of the line, even if it meant canceling the traditional vaults in favor of columned, box stations of the sort that had been so vigorously rejected ten years earlier.47 With Glenmont off the block, four routes remained to be studied. Two of them—the E route to Greenbelt, Maryland, and the F route to Branch Avenue—together composed the Mid-City line and its Prince George’s County extensions. Because this trunk route had not been part of the originally approved basic system, it had lagged the other routes in design. Except for the short tunnel between Gallery Place and L’Enfant Plaza, no construction had begun. The J-H route, a forked route to Franconia and Springfield in southern Fairfax County, had flunked an environmental impact study. Finally, the K route to Vienna, Virginia, had been delayed because of uncertainties over Interstate 66, whose median was to serve as its right-of-way. The Authority devoted the November issue of its newsletter to suburban construction, emphasizing that “more than a dream of the future—more than a political promise—more than a site plan or the skillful rendering of an artist, Metro is literally locked in concrete for many miles of stations and line in suburban Maryland and Virginia.” But the E, F, J, H, and K routes were not locked in, and everyone understood that the alternatives analysis study could end up recommending their modification or deletion.48
A
Shady Grove
B Glenmont
Grosvenor
Silver Spring
E Greenbelt
MONTGOMERY COUNTY
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
New Carrollton
D
PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY FAIRFAX COUNTY
ARLINGTON COUNTY
G
FALLS CHURCH
K Vienna
Addison Road
Ballston Anacostia
FAIRFAX CITY
ALEXANDRIA
F Branch Ave
King Street
H
Franconia
C Huntington
In operation, 1977 Under construction Funded, or exempted from analysis Alternatives analysis
System status, 1977 (Map by the author, based on WMATA, Annual Report, 1977)
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Rather than force WMATA to study its own potential truncation, Patricelli had given the job of analysis to a committee composed of members of WMATA, the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, and the Transportation Planning Board, all of which had some overlapping membership and functions anyway. For each corridor they considered six or seven alternatives, including the route planned in 1968 and a much shorter line. On the E route, planners pondered cutting the long line to Greenbelt back to a short stub terminating at Columbia Heights. On the K route, they considered changing the terminus from Vienna (where citizens had resisted it) to the growing cluster at Tyson’s Corner. They followed Patricelli’s orders and examined express buses and commuter rail options. They drew alternative maps, held hearings, and made patronage forecasts. In short, they recapitulated the entire physical and financial planning process of 1967.49 Over a year and a half, the committee narrowed more than 1,700 permutations down to 72 and then four possible maps, one of which was essentially the system currently planned. The consultants found that while Metro was indeed very expensive, it was not necessarily a bad value. Although a less extensive system would be cheaper to build, it would attract fewer patrons and thus run higher operating deficits. A system of roughly the same scope as the 1968 Adopted Regional System, but with a terminal at Tyson’s Corner rather than Vienna, would lure the most drivers out of their cars, but it would also have the highest capital and operating costs of the final four alternatives studied. Local and federal governments would get what they paid for.50 With the reports in hand, on 11 May 1978, the joint committee met and recommended some changes. The biggest was to reroute the Green Line’s “F” branch in southern Prince George’s County, from the original terminus at Branch Avenue to a more westerly route to the Rosecroft racetrack. (Ironically, this, the largest change of the alternatives analysis, was later reversed by a court decision.) The committee also slightly modified alignments on two other branches, and increased parking at a few stations. Other than that, the 1968 system was intact.51 It was not just the alternatives analysis study that had no impact; since early 1976, Metro had been besieged with studies. The Faucett study had argued that Metro’s patronage would be so low that it would be only a “drop in the bucket” in the solution to regional problems like air pollution. A think-tank study, applying BART’s disappointing numbers to Metro, called for buses instead of trains. A town planner in Vienna had a pet idea for light rail. With the official alternatives analysis itself thrown in, the mid-1970s appears to be as fertile a period for amateur and professional transit planning as the 1960s, when Metro was still being sketched out. The only thing missing was yet another monorail proposal by O. Roy Chalk. Yet none of these studies seriously altered the Metro system as approved in 1968. Why?52 First, no policy maker entered the study process with an open mind. Local officials, who were in charge of the alternatives analysis, still had a strong
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incentive to choose a big system. Despite the Ford administration’s threat not to contribute to any system cost beyond $4.7 billion, local leaders remained confident that the federal government would pay at least two-thirds of capital costs, so almost any system was a bargain. Arlington County Board chairman Joseph Wholey frankly admitted that he had supported study of the Vienna route in the hopes of showing the alternatives to be more expensive, thus building support for Metro among Arlington and Fairfax voters. Even Frank Francois, who in early 1976 had called for a reevaluation of Metro, believed that that task had already been completed by the time of Patricelli’s mandate in September of that year. Damian Kulash, whose January 1976 study was among the first to reexamine Metro, had tried to view the system’s whole cost, not its subsidized, local price tag. He later lamented that politicians had “sandbagged” the alternatives analysis by insisting on unrealistically low estimates for bus patronage. “It was a joke,” he concluded. “It was not a serious alternatives analysis.”53 The second reason the studies had so little impact was that Metro had been planned as a whole, both physically and financially. Amateur critics believed each route could be clipped at any point. But WMATA planners knew that a terminal station required vast space for parking and for rail yards. The low patronage projected for the ends of each line might tempt a budget cutter to propose amputation, but it was not easy to turn a more central station into a terminus. As Lutz explained, “several communities have never envisioned themselves as being a terminal point, and all of a sudden if that was the decision, the idea of a big parking structure . . . will be over their dead bodies and they will use every tool they have to stop it.”54 As for finances, Metro’s red, orange, yellow, green, and blue lines were like colored wires on a B-movie time bomb: clip one and the whole thing explodes. Deleting any route would provoke the affected jurisdiction to demand tens of millions of dollars back from the Authority, with interest. It was easier for WMATA to keep borrowing, especially since each cut would only save a small percentage of the system cost.55 The third reason that the studies failed to harm Metro was that by 1978 Metro was enormously popular. Even in the dark days of 1975, polls showed that local residents still supported completing the 100-mile system, even if it required more local funds.56 With real trains running, that popularity grew. In July 1977 Phase II had opened from RFK Stadium to National Airport. Congressmen could now get from the Capitol to the airport in less than half an hour, regardless of congestion on the streets above. In February 1978 Phase II-a marked a more important milestone. The trains of Phases I and II had gotten most of their riders from former bus passengers, so that mass transit ridership (bus plus rail) remained at a weekday plateau of 400,000. With the opening of Phase II-a to Silver Spring in February 1978, total system ridership began to climb, proving that Metro could really lure commuters out of their cars. Two-thirds or more of Washington-area residents favored completing the system, “even if costs go
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Ridership, 1976–1980 (Thomas B. Deen and Robert E. Skinner Jr., “Second Generation U.S. Rail Transit Systems,” Transportation 9 [1980]: 24. Reprinted with kind permission of the authors and Springer Science and Business Media)
higher.” The Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade remained in favor too. Even Fairfax supervisor Jack Herrity, perhaps the region’s fiercest critic of “Metrocrats,” called himself a Metro booster when he ran for Congress in 1978. Meanwhile, rail transit was growing stronger nationwide. In 1975 the federal government approved a subway for Baltimore. In 1977 Miami won approval for an elevated system, and the next year Buffalo began work on a light-rail system. Truncating Metro would have seemed a great step backward.57 Fourth, and most important, the studies compared a completed Metro with possible alternatives, and no study could offer a serious alternative to heavy rail as a mode of transit. Buses, light rail, and even cars could provide better numbers in the right economic models, but not in the real world. Economist Henry Bain, for example, proposed that heavy rail be replaced
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with buses given special privileges, like exclusive lanes and traffic signals timed to their benefit, but he admitted that such an idea had never been tried anywhere. To hardheaded WMATA planners, he might as well have proposed that Prince George’s County commuters be brought downtown on the backs of flying pigs, and they dismissed his report as the efforts of a man hoping to show that he had been right to criticize rail in the 1960s. George Wickstrom, the alternatives analysis’s technical director, noted that on average a commuter takes around fifteen minutes of walking and waiting to get on a transit vehicle, and another five minutes from his last stop to his destination. The only way to overcome that twenty-minute deficit, to make transit a realistic alternative to driving, is to give transit its own right-of-way. The study therefore could not accept buses on surface streets as a realistic alternative to rail.58 Rail critics often ignored the region’s basic geography. The most expensive areas of future Metro construction, those most tempting to a cost-cutter, included the very corridors in which freeways had been canceled due to the citizen protests of the 1960s and 1970s. Replacing rail in those corridors with buses or cars would require bringing the freeways back, a fact never quite acknowledged by Metro’s critics. Not only was this politically unthinkable, but it also would have been as or more expensive than rapid transit. One board member estimated that if Metro were cut back, serving those corridors would require 300 more lane-miles of freeway, at a cost of $4.5 billion. In contrast, trimming the aboveground extremities of the system would greatly reduce the mileage without proportionately cutting the cost. Other suggestions were just as unhelpful; when armchair engineers like Patricelli proposed ways that Metro could save money on construction, the civil engineering experts on the WMATA staff quickly dismissed most of their ideas. Construction chief Roy Dodge, on hearing President Carter’s criticism of the new rail systems, wondered, “how the hell does he know it’s overdesigned?”59 Authority officials acknowledged that they could not guarantee their patronage or cost projections. But, they noted, “critics of the 100-mile rail system for the National Capital Area seem to overlook . . . the consequences of not achieving the ridership forecasts or of not completing the 100-mile system.” Less Metro would mean higher operating costs, more congestion and air pollution, and the sacrifice of more downtown land for parking.60 As if to seal the deal, Metro suddenly got help from a surprising source. On 16 January 1979 the Shah of Iran fled his country, ceding power to Ayatollah Khomeini, who immediately nationalized Iran’s oil industry. Oil companies and motorists around the world panicked, driving oil prices from $13 to $34 a barrel, while American refineries tuned to Iranian crude struggled to adjust to oils from other sources. By spring, drivers around the country found themselves on hour-long lines when they sought to fill their gas tanks. In Washington, tens of thousands of frustrated drivers tried mass transit (bus as well as rail) for the first time. By June 1979 four out of ten
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Virginia commuters to Washington used transit, up from three out of ten in 1977, and average weekday ridership surged from 250,000 to more than 275,000 per day. In this context, a rapid transit system whose electricity could be generated from good old domestic coal began to look increasingly attractive.61 For all these reasons, the alternatives analysis proved to be a dud. WMATA officials and area congressmen were happy to blame the analysis and the Department of Transportation for delaying construction and adding up to $100 million in the total cost of the system. But their gripes could not hide their relief. Local politicians crowed that the study had affirmed the region’s wish for a 100-mile system in the most emphatic terms possible.62 Those local officials might have been less enthusiastic had they expected to pay for Metro’s completion themselves; instead, they based their support for Metro on the assumption that the federal government would contribute from two-thirds to 90 percent of the system’s capital cost. By the spring of 1979, the cost estimate was up to $6.8 billion, $7 billion if the federal government dribbled out its contribution slowly, or $7.4 billion if interest costs, system add-ons, and handicapped facilities were thrown in. Local governments reached the $2 billion mark in canceled highway plans by early 1978, but unbuilt highways were a finite resource. So when the Authority adopted a new financial plan, early in 1979, it had to assume that the federal government would kick in $400 million a year to complete the 100-mile system by 1987. Because the administration had promised no aid (except for highway transfers) beyond fiscal 1981, Metro was short a billion dollars, maybe two.63 To bridge the gap, Metro’s advocates needed Congress to do something it had never done before: provide a massive grant for capital construction, without hope of direct repayment and without compensating Interstate highway cancellations. Moreover, whereas Metro had enjoyed solid White House support in the previous legislative battles, now it confronted opposition from President Carter. Facing rising budget deficits and a tough reelection bid, the last thing he needed was another multibillion-dollar federal obligation. Leading the fight for Metro was Congressman Herb Harris of Virginia, one of several area politicians who had passed through the WMATA board on his way to the House of Representatives. At the start of the new Congress in 1979, he introduced legislation calling for a $1.7 billion federal contribution to Metro, plus the adoption by the federal government of two-thirds of WMATA’s outstanding bond debt. Rather than even trying to change minds at the White House, he instead planned to outflank the administration. He compiled a list of the hundred or so remaining members of Congress who had voted against Natcher in 1971, and wrote each a letter addressed, “Dear Father of Metro.” One recipient was Robert Giaimo himself, now powerfully positioned as the chairman of the budget committee. When Carter’s representative approached Giaimo to ask him to oppose
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Harris on grounds of economy, Giaimo responded, “Good Lord, I’m the father of Metro! How can I fight it?”64 Harris continued gathering support. He passed out maps showing that a completed Metro—with its second crossing of the Potomac—would cut congressmen’s own time from the Capitol South Station to National Airport to thirteen minutes. He found procedural techniques to bring up the bill for debate when the administration was not expecting it. He won cosponsorship from District Committee subcommittee chairman Pete Stark of California, whose own district was served by BART. Most important, he made sure that his bill came out of the District Committee, not the Committee on Public Works. That let him assure hesitant members that dollars for Metro were not being taken away from transit elsewhere. Quite the opposite—by supporting Metro, congressmen would keep it from competing with their own districts for scarce Urban Mass Transportation Administration funds.65 Harris’s efforts paid off in July, when the House of Representatives approved the Stark-Harris bill, 261 to 125. Faced with this popularity, and the continuing energy crisis, the Carter administration in September announced that it would no longer oppose the aid. With White House endorsement, or at least acquiescence, the bill passed the full Congress on 20 December 1979. On 3 January 1980, the president signed the bill, ruefully handing the pen over to Congressman Harris.66 The Stark-Harris bill did impose a new obligation, requiring that each jurisdiction in the compact dedicate a “stable and reliable” source of revenue for Metro operations and debt service. BART and MARTA, each confined to a single state, had long relied on regional sales taxes, and since the early 1970s some local politicians had advocated a similar tax in all jurisdictions served by Metro. In 1977 both Transportation Secretary Adams and General Manager Lutz endorsed either a regional sales or payroll tax, in large part to end the yearly uncertainty over whether each of the eight jurisdictions in WMATA would actually pony up. But the jurisdictions could not agree on a uniform tax, in part because their financial structures were so distinct. Since 1972, the state of Maryland had assumed all of Montgomery and Prince George’s counties’ Metro construction costs, as well as most of their Metro expenses for operations, rehabilitation, and debt service. The Virginia jurisdictions got at best a trickle, and often had to fight for even the right to tax their own citizens. The District of Columbia, of course, had no state it could turn to at all. In the end, the region responded to the Stark-Harris demand for “stable and reliable” revenues with a hodgepodge of measures, including gasoline and other excise taxes at various amounts depending on the jurisdiction.67 Nor was Stark-Harris the last word on Metro financing. Over the next ten years, additional cost overruns threatened plans to complete the original system, which slight modifications eventually stretched to 103 miles.
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Moreover, Congress and the Reagan administration were slow to provide the funds authorized by Stark-Harris, allowing their value to be eroded by inflation. In the early years of the Reagan presidency, analysts concluded that there was not enough money in Stark-Harris to complete the system, though they still expected it to be completed eventually. In 1990 WMATA had to ask Congress for another $1.3 billion; General Manager David Gunn had to fight for the funds to cover the completion of the final 13 miles of the 1968 system. And by the time the end of the massive construction phase was in sight, WMATA board members had to worry about increasing maintenance costs. As of this writing, WMATA managers still fret about getting money from Congress to maintain the existing network, add rail cars, and extend further tracks.68 But Stark-Harris was an important transition. The 1965 and 1969 authorization acts had justified Metro largely as a publicly owned business needing only minor subsidy. The alternatives analysis and Stark-Harris abandoned that logic, looking at Metro for what it had become: a massive government program serving a diverse range of functions, from protecting parklands to training minority workers to placating angry neighborhoods to reducing dependence on foreign oil. In the midst of the alternatives analysis, one Arlington County Board member complained, “the project was sold as a revenue-producing system. It is now a deficit-creating monster we may not be able to feed.” Indeed, by the summer of 1978, consultants predicted that by fiscal year 1990 the completed rail system would run an annual deficit of $193.9 million in 1990 dollars. But after careful, deliberate consideration, federal and local leaders decided that the monster was worth nurturing. After 1980 no one would again challenge the system’s basic legitimacy.69 En route to their victory, Metro’s supporters had confronted two facts: their system was growing very costly, and its critics were watching like coyotes, waiting for their prey to weaken. Among their strongest defenses was the argument that as offices, shops, and residences clustered around stations, Metro would become ever more convenient, generating more fares and saving more energy. But that clustering was not automatic. Across the region, planners, developers, and citizens found themselves arguing over just how much effect Metro would be allowed to have.
8
The District
From the first discussions of bringing rapid transit to Washington, advocates of rail knew that they would have to make the case that transit could shape land use in the metropolitan region. In the 1950s jobs and people were rapidly moving from central Washington to the suburbs. If this trend continued, the people of the region would soon be scattered so sparsely that no transit system could hope to gather enough of them to fill a bus or rail car. In contrast, if transit planners and local governments could find the right mix of incentives and sanctions, they could steer development into dense clusters around transit stations. People living, working, or shopping in such clusters would find transit a convenient alternative to driving. Only by attracting dense commercial and residential development to its stations could Metro’s planners achieve significant ridership and constrain automobile-oriented sprawl.1 Thirty years after ground breaking, it is still early to judge their efforts. Just as it took the capital a century and a half to fill in all the avenues laid out by L’Enfant, so it may take several decades for the region to add flesh to the Metro skeleton. But one thing is clear: it will not just happen. In 1988 Juri Pill of the Toronto Transit Commission explained that visitors to his city often expressed “a fervent desire to get back home and start a-building transit lines so that new buildings will start poppin’ outa the ground like toadstools. It ain’t that simple, folks.”2 Nor was it simple in Washington. From the early 1970s through the present, planners have labored to determine both their goals for Metro and the best means to them. Theoretically, since 1966 regional planning has been the responsibility of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG), the descendant of Robert McLaughlin’s regional club of the 1950s. In practice, COG gathers data, distributes federal funds, and provides a forum for intergovernmental discussions, but it has done little to constrain its member jurisdictions’ land use plans. Thus, key decisions on Metro were left to individual cities and counties.3 Some local policies helped produce bustling, mixed-use clusters. Others produced dense, wealthy neighborhoods and business districts while sacrificing diversity of uses and people. Elsewhere, Metro stations are surrounded by nothing but parking lots and vacant land. These mixed results prove Pill’s point: transit-oriented development is not a wild toadstool. It is a human cultivar, demanding care, foresight, and political will. In 1971 one
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planner noted that “it is within our collective power to make the massive fall-out from Metro benign or malignant. All we need to cure or prevent a basketful of current or impending ills is guts, honesty, cooperation, innovation, energy, and good sense. And all we need to convert a technical masterpiece into a social disaster is apathy.” Over the next three decades, officials would display every quality.4 Metro has eighty-six stations, each with its own story of station-area development. To suggest the complexity of those stories, this chapter and the next focus on planning efforts in five parts of the region: the downtown and inner-city neighborhoods of the District of Columbia, the Rockville line in Montgomery County, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in Arlington, and the Vienna line in Fairfax County. Together, these stories suggest that in large part, local planners got what they wished for in development around stations. Whether their goals were appropriate is subject to debate, but it is clear that rapid transit is an immensely powerful tool for shaping development.5 Downtown: Transit-Oriented Renewal
When the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority adopted its regional system in March 1968, the District of Columbia was already losing both residents and jobs to the suburbs. Five weeks later, the situation was much worse. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., several African American neighborhoods erupted into rioting, looting, and arson that killed several people and destroyed an estimated $24 million in property. The riots burned out large stretches of inner-city neighborhoods and blasted the image of the city’s old downtown. Recovery would depend on dramatic action.6 In the 1960s the accepted tool for such a task was a process called urban renewal, described by the federal government as “the diversified efforts by localities, with the assistance of the Federal Government, for the elimination and prevention of slums and blight, whether residential or nonresidential, and the removal of the factors that create slums and blighting conditions.” In the popular mind, urban renewal was largely synonymous with redevelopment, the process by which city governments could use federal money to condemn large parcels of land, then sell them at a loss in the hopes of attracting new investment. In its most extreme form, as in Southwest Washington, urban renewal meant evicting tens of thousands of people and razing neighborhoods flat before trying to rebuild.7 Redevelopment was highly symbiotic with freeway construction, and planners saw a chance to kill two birds with one stone. Federal highway funds could help pay for renewal, while a cleared slum district provided right-of-way for land-hungry highways. Both programs accepted the destruction of historic buildings and the displacement of businesses and residents as the price of progress. For all of these reasons, many of America’s largest urban renewal projects adjoined or flanked wide new highways. Even
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renewal projects built over rail transit—such as Boston’s Scollay Square and New York’s Penn Center—mimicked the form and destructiveness of highway plans.8 Yet there was another, less radical form of urban renewal, one based on rehabilitation and conservation of existing structures and neighborhoods. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, several cities, starting with Baltimore, combined the carrot of government investment with the stick of steppedup code enforcement to nudge private property owners into repairing their buildings. With the passage of the Housing Act of 1954, Congress offered federal funds for this gentler approach. Unfortunately, many cities found that conservation alone was simply not a very powerful tool. It could slow blight but not reverse it.9 In Washington, planners hoped to find a method of renewal with the power of the bulldozer but without its destructiveness. Though tapping the same federal kitty as previous renewal efforts, the District’s planners aimed to avoid wholesale demolition and the “seemingly endless repetition of a single pattern, the cookie-cutter slab with row houses.”10 Instead, they would preserve diverse buildings and historic structures, retain residents, and welcome pedestrians. To do so, they replaced the highway-oriented redevelopment of previous renewal projects with a transit-oriented plan. Metro could bring people back to the center of town without bringing highways, garages, pollution, and noise. In both the commercial and residential areas of the center city, officials planned and rebuilt around Metro, inventing a new kind of urban renewal. The commercial phase of this new renewal focused on Washington’s “old downtown,” a portion of Northwest bounded by New York and Massachusetts avenues on the north, 15th Street on the west, North Capitol Street on the east, and Pennsylvania Avenue on the south. Just under a square mile in area, this district lay directly north of a chain of federal buildings from the White House and the Treasury Building to the Capitol. Though hardly old by European standards, it was the heart of the historic city. It was Abraham Lincoln’s Washington, encompassing the New York Avenue church where he worshiped, the 10th Street theater where he was killed, and the H Street boardinghouse where the assassination was planned. From the 1880s through the 1920s, downtown blossomed. Department stores clustered along 7th, F, and G streets, and banks built ornate branches near the Treasury Building on 15th. Throughout the downtown, threestory Victorian facades gave way to taller, more substantial office buildings. But in the mid-1950s, downtown lagged behind other parts of the region. Retailers began to follow their customers to the suburbs, while law firms and trade associations sought offices near Farragut Square, especially along Connecticut Avenue, Eye, and K streets. In the boom years of the 1960s— as Kennedy’s expansion of federal employment pushed office vacancy rates to record lows—developers placed 123 new buildings in this “new downtown,” west of 15th Street, compared with only 44 new buildings east of
GEORGIA AV
Howard University
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Adams Morgan
Mid-City
N CO VE TA
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TS A VE
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White House
MCI Union Station
Old Downtown PEN
NSY
LVAN IA
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Capitol
The Mall
Southwest
Old downtown and Mid-City (Map by Matthew Gilmore and the author)
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Old downtown (11th Street), 1967 (Photo by William E. Barrett, Barrett Collection, Kiplinger Washington Collection, Washington, D.C.)
that boundary. Indeed, most of the new office space planned for the old downtown consisted of government buildings close to the White House.11 The rest of the area quickly declined. By 1963 one architectural journal complained, “Washington’s downtown is not only unworthy of the nation’s capital; it would be just as unworthy of any of the state capitals, which is saying a great deal. It is a rather grubby collection of honky-tonk façades hung on the lower edges of heavy masonry structures, most of which had neither distinction nor character in the first place. . . . Its physical defects reflect the fact that it is declining fast as a strong retailing center—its share of metropolitan-area retail sales has dropped from 75 per cent in 1950 to 45 per cent in 1960.”12 Determined not to let old downtown die completely, in 1959 the presi-
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dents of the two leading department stores teamed up to form the National Capital Downtown Committee, better known as Downtown Progress. Working closely with the District’s urban renewal agency, the Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA), Downtown Progress envisioned a city rebuilt with the automobile in mind. In places, the group’s director acknowledged, “the automobile and the pedestrian must live together.” But for the most part, he hoped to separate the two, giving the automobile its freeways and large parking structures, while pedestrians were steered to streets that were either closed to cars completely or more mildly pedestrianized with wide sidewalks, building canopies, and street furniture.13 The boosters had some success. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, signed in August, authorized the District to use urban renewal funds for the commercial downtown. In 1966 a stretch of F Street was pedestrianized, its streetcar tracks torn up and replaced with a wide median. At its annual meeting in January 1968, Downtown Progress distributed a map with photographs of the thirty-eight buildings in old downtown built or expanded between 1961 and 1967—a leap from the ten built between 1951 and 1960—and promised more to come. But just three months later came the riots. Although police barricades limited the rioting in downtown, rioters torched three downtown stores and looted several more.14 This physical damage could be repaired, but the riots bruised the old downtown’s already damaged image. Whites who had witnessed the destruction of stretches of 14th Street just north of downtown feared a repeat of the disorder and became that much more sensitive to the soaring crime rate in the old downtown itself. They had one more reason to put their money and their offices in the new downtown or the suburbs, especially the booming Rosslyn district of Arlington, just across the Potomac. Furriers, shoe stores, and even drugstores abandoned the ornate buildings of old downtown to discount stores, topless bars, and pornography shops, which in turn scared away even more investors. Some buildings were abandoned or demolished, replaced with surface parking lots. The president of the Washington Board of Realtors called old downtown “a dead horse.” Washington Post architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt found the area “gripped by a strange death urge” and reported one architect’s facetious suggestion that the entire district be bulldozed into an airport. If nothing else, it would be convenient for the workers of the new downtown to the west.15 Old downtown still had its friends. In the early 1970s, President Nixon weighed in. Although he banished the Navy Department from its offices on the Mall to Virginia (allowing the World War II “temporary” buildings to be at last demolished), the president soon acted to bring federal employment back to the center. In February 1970 he issued an executive order requiring federal projects to be located where the economic need was greatest. After some experimentation, a General Services Administration (GSA) directive in September 1971 required that future federal offices in the Washington area locate in leased private buildings in the District of
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Columbia itself, rather than moving ever farther out in search of office space available at five dollars per square foot. GSA paid less for office space than did private tenants, but the experience of the Rosslyn and Jefferson Davis Corridor areas of Arlington showed that private tenants often clustered around government agencies, thus building an office district. Quasigovernmental financial institutions, like Sallie Mae and the Inter-American Development Bank, made even better tenants for downtown office developers. They needed to stay close to the Treasury Department on 15th Street, and though they could not match the budgets of private law firms and trade associations, at least they paid higher rents than the GSA.16 As the GSA compelled federal agencies to remain in the city, the federal and District governments, along with Downtown Progress, envisioned a series of public facilities intended to lure private developers back downtown and to hold the interest of the millions of tourists expected in the 1976 bicentennial year. Federal funds restored Ford’s Theatre, the site of Lincoln’s assassination, and the old Patent Office, remodeled to house two Smithsonian museums. On G Street, catercorner from the Patent Office, rose a new central public library. Despite Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago-style shoebox design, the library helped promote downtown as public space to be enjoyed by all Washingtonians. East of old downtown, the Interior Department planned to convert Daniel Burnham’s Union Station into a Visitor Center where tourists could park their cars before exploring the city by foot and public transit.17 And to the south, the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, established by Congress in 1972, sought redevelopment of the avenue between the Capitol and White House, thus fulfilling President Kennedy’s old wish. Less definitely, District planners talked of a sports arena and a convention center. Meanwhile, in January 1969 the D.C. City Council designated all of the old downtown as an urban renewal area in the hope of adding 72,000 new jobs to the 90,000 already there. Renewal would not be easy. Having seen the clear-cutting of Southwest in the 1950s, downtown’s small businessmen—whether owners or renters—feared eviction and inadequate relocation payments. On the other side, big developers accused RLA of paying too much for land. They worried that, compared with other projects, developing downtown renewal sites would mean higher costs—due to design reviews, perhaps even by the dreaded Commission of Fine Arts—and lower revenue, due to old downtown’s “poor image” as a low-rent district suitable only to government tenants. They were distinctly unimpressed by the economic potential of devoting ground floors to small businesses, suggesting that the space would be better turned over to major tenants and that the real game was in the offices upstairs. The RLA’s own consultants warned that developers’ fears of red tape would take at least 25 percent off the price they would pay for any land in a redevelopment area.18 The RLA was sympathetic to both sides. Early on, its staff had resolved not to follow only the traditional urban renewal goal of “the highest eco-
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nomic use of available buildings and land” but to balance that goal with housing for low- and moderate-income families, preserving small businesses, and protecting retail specialty areas within downtown, including the row of furniture dealers on 7th Street and the city’s small Chinatown, around 6th and H. Rather than the massive demolition, they envisioned public improvements throughout downtown, coupled with “spot action” to remove pockets of blight. For the developers, RLA promised a range of services, from finding tenants and financing to shepherding a project through the approval process to blasting away blighted buildings.19 Downtown’s champions needed to achieve economic development without destroying what was good about downtown. They needed to attract private investors and employers, leave room for nonoffice uses, restore the core’s image, and provide access to the planned amenities without repeating the trauma of Southwest’s renewal. Searching for a machine that could perform such wonders, they turned to Metro. Transit planners had always expected to serve old downtown; a stretch of track along E, F, or G streets from 7th to 12th streets was one of the very few constants to appear on every proposed system from Bartholomew’s 1959 plan through the adopted regional system of 1968. As the NCTA planners sketched out a downtown distributor in 1961 and 1962, they consulted with the Downtown Progress staff. Later, WMATA cited Washington’s concentration of jobs downtown as evidence for the suitability of a rail system.20 As finalized, the map included two stations in the heart of old downtown, plus several on the edge. The most important was Metro Center, serving the Red Line from Montgomery County and the Blue and Orange lines from Prince George’s and Virginia. Just 1,000 feet east of Metro Center, along the Red Line, lay a second transfer station: Gallery Place. On the periphery of old downtown lay Archives, Mt. Vernon Square, Judiciary Square, McPherson Square, and Union Station, though the last station was cut off from downtown by the Center Leg highway. These stations proved essential to redevelopment. By the early 1970s, the newly established Environmental Protection Agency was sniffing Washington’s polluted air and demanding that the city encourage transit use and carpooling by scaling back commuter parking. As for retail, only the glitz and ease of Metro could compete with the glitz and ease of a suburban shopping mall. One consultant warned that “the ‘on-time’ completion of METRO is critical to downtown retail prosperity.” Similarly, the many individual improvements planned for downtown depended on Metro. Neither the new library nor the Patent Building museums were planned with significant patron parking; even the 300,000-square-foot convention center would be served by only ninety parking spaces—and Metro. Plans to convert stretches of main shopping and museum streets into pedestrian-only malls depended on Metro to deliver the pedestrians. More generally, Metro would restore to downtown some of its glamour. As Joseph Yeldell, city council vice chairman and a WMATA board member, put it in late 1969,
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many people perceived Washington to be collapsing into an all-black slum; he believed that the trend “can be reversed, using Metro as the impetus.”21 The clearest statement of Metro’s importance was the Redevelopment Land Agency’s choice of parcels for direct acquisition. The agency had neither the funds nor the desire to seize hundreds of acres of city land the way it had in Southwest. Rather, it hoped to use a few strategic investments to “improve the environment and image of downtown” enough to lure private developers. In 1969 and 1970 it chose its targets, selecting four parcels around entrances to Metro Center and a larger, block-size parcel adjacent to Gallery Place. With the addition of some land near Mt. Vernon Square, the city’s major downtown redevelopment efforts would all take place at station sites.22 In 1971 one RLA consultant pointed out that “the entire concept of the downtown renewal activity assumes that increased centralization, or at the least, maintaining a certain level of centrality . . . is a basic goal [and] the creation of a rail rapid transit system provides important transportation service potential to make such increased concentration workable.”23 Of all the many improvements planned for old downtown, Metro was the keystone. The plan did not work out quite as hoped. Though an asset in the long run, Metro was a curse during construction, and only in 1974 did WMATA’s contractors begin repaving the streets they had torn up.24 Developers signed up for renewal sites and then pulled out. The economy remained shaky, three department stores closed, and downtown’s boosters did not come close to their original goal of cleaning up the area in time for the national Bicentennial. But in the late 1970s downtown began to bustle. At first, the action remained in the new downtown, including major projects around the Farragut North and West stations. Then, the new downtown filled up, and developers—hemmed in vertically by the city’s decades-old height limitation and horizontally by zoning restrictions to the west—began returning to the older section. In 1978 alone, $1 billion worth of new building projects east of 15th Street was completed, started, or announced, including the $100 million convention center. That November, the election of Marion Barry as mayor solidified the trend. As a candidate, Barry promised “an exciting mixed-use core in the urban center of the city,” but as mayor he put few restrictions on developers, letting them build what they wanted. Almost inevitably, that meant boxy office buildings, built right up to the height limit. By 1981 downtown was booming; the office occupancy rate in downtown (old and new) reached 99.5 percent.25 Barry was happy to take credit, but other observers pointed to Metro. One planning official put himself in the role of a business CEO. “Ask my employees where they would want to be. They’d want to be right here. The metro stops here. . . . The central city is back . . . because you want to be able to walk around the block.” A leasing agent agreed. “The first question from every tenant you talk to is, ‘Where’s the closest Metro station?’ ’’
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A builder explained, “If you don’t have a Metro stop nearby, you’d better have a view of the river or something better to attract tenants.” One study found $360 million of investment already committed to the areas around stations in the District, with perhaps another billion dollars on the way. Nationwide, scholars found that cities with rail systems were adding downtown office space faster than those without, though they conceded that fast-growing downtowns could be a cause as well as a consequence of rail transit expansion.26 Testifying before Congress in May 1978, the city’s transportation director bragged of private developments throughout the old downtown: museums, the Pennsylvania Avenue redevelopment, and the convention center all were important, but “it seems to me that all of those things had to presuppose Metro and included that as a major part of their thinking in that development.” And no one, he added, had even predicted the “third rush-hour” of downtown workers hopping on trains to shop during lunch hour. Just think of the sales tax revenues, he marveled. A real-estate developer who had watched investors and lenders flee after the riots believed it took Metro to overcome that legacy. “I think that downtown would not have come back if it wasn’t for the subway,” he concluded. In 1990, a seasoned real-estate reporter was even less equivocal: “No Metro, no East End.” Without all the new office space in the old downtown, it is hard to imagine that the District could have found room for the 112,000 new jobs (a 30 percent increase) added to private employment rolls between 1974 and 1989.27 Even if Metro did not cause the boom, it certainly shaped the boom’s physical form, as dramatic projects clustered around station entrances. The showcase was Metro Center itself. The planners’ most ambitious proposal—a 130-foot tall, glass “galleria” built over the intersection of pedestrianized 12th and G streets—was never built, but the intersection turned spiffy nonetheless. The Woodward & Lothrop department store, at 11th and G, had been an early supporter of Metro. Once the Metro Center Station was ready, the store spent $6 million to remodel, adding a direct entrance from the station into the store’s basement level. By 1980 a quarter of its customers arrived by Metro, and revenue in the remodeled area was up 40 percent. Rival department store Hecht’s responded even more dramatically, building an entirely new facility on the north side of G Street, with its own direct interface with Metro Center—the first full-size, free-standing department store to be built in the downtown of any major American city since World War II.28 Other downtown stations got development as well. At McPherson Square—between old and new downtowns—developers had to overcome 14th Street’s stigma as the center of the city’s sex trade, but by the mid-1980s offices had largely displaced porn shops.29 Archives Station, part of the redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue, got the Market Square development, combining a Navy Memorial, restaurants, offices, and, in a faint effort toward bringing housing downtown, 200 luxury apartments. Union Station
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Old downtown (11th Street), 2004 (Photo by the author)
lagged, as the visitors’ center project ran massively over budget. Despite $117 million in public spending, the parking garage was left unfinished and the station’s roof leaked so much that in 1981 the building closed for safety reasons and the visitors’ center was abandoned. But Congress agreed to finance another round of renovations, and in 1988 Burnham’s masterpiece reopened, its public spaces lovingly restored by Harry Weese. Half train terminal, half marketplace, the station served as a symbol of what downtown might be: commercially viable, respectful of tradition, and automobile-optional. Gallery Place was a tougher sell. There, the RLA had acquired an entire city block, bounded by F, G, 6th, and 7th streets. Just south of Washington’s small Chinatown, with its restaurants and housing, the site seemed better suited for mixed-use development than a traditional office block, and the RLA sent out its requests accordingly. Moreover, the agency hoped to attract a joint venture with significant minority participation. But the site was several blocks away from the redevelopment frontiers of 15th Street to the west and Pennsylvania Avenue to the south, and no developer was eager to make the leap. In 1979 the RLA thought it had a winner with a minority-controlled joint venture, but the deal fell through. During the 1980s, the agency tried dividing the parcel into phases, deferring payment, and offering a $43 million discount for housing. By 1987 the site was one of the last downtown sites adjacent to a Metro entrance without a major
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development. Meanwhile, a WMATA-owned site at 7th and H lay vacant while various factions of the city’s Chinese community argued about how to develop the site in a manner both commercially viable and respectful of Chinatown’s history.30 Only in 1994 was the RLA site developed. When Abe Pollin, owner of the city’s basketball and hockey teams, began grumbling about their arena in Prince George’s County, District officials and private investors saw a chance to lift downtown out of its 9-to-5 rut by bringing the teams there. Such an effort would be counterproductive if it required devoting precious downtown space to provide parking to go with all 20,000 seats, so once again the planners turned to Metro. All the sites they scouted for the arena were close to Metro stations, and when they finally settled on the Gallery Place site, they could brag that only Madison Square Garden in New York City had comparable access to transit. The final plan counted on more than half of the patrons using Metro, a level that was reached when the arena finally opened in 1997.31 Although the patronage numbers held up, the MCI Arena did not spur an immediate retail revival, nor did it bring Gallery Place its long-sought housing. In the late 1990s, planners tried again to bring mixed-use development—including housing and movie theaters—to Gallery Place, this time on the still-vacant site above the Metro entrance at 7th and H. But once again, the financing proved a challenge. Even with subsidies, developers struggle to make money by renting apartments on land priced for offices.32 Indeed, despite the new Hecht’s and the arena, the bulk of downtown’s new development consisted of an office-building monoculture. Few would find a monotony of office buildings worse than a monotony of vacant lots and pornography shops. Yet as early as 1975, the Washington Post, commenting on the cancellation of a proposed office tower at the Metro Center Station, editorialized that “office buildings that are occupied only eight hours a day can deaden a neighborhood the other 16 hours of the day,” and found more potential in the rehabilitation of charming, low-rise Victorian townhouses nearby.33 In addition to aesthetics, a diversified downtown made financial sense. Monocultures are vulnerable to sudden catastrophe, and in 1990 the downtown real-estate and retail markets crashed. Garfinkel’s department store, only a block from Metro Center, died, and downtown’s lead developer, Oliver T. Carr, almost went into personal bankruptcy. By the mid-1980s, planners did hope that replacing downtown’s office monoculture with a mix of uses would moderate the impacts of market swings. And housing might help the District of Columbia’s tax base. The District’s home-rule charter prohibits it from taxing the income of nonresidents, so the half million Marylanders and Virginians who work in those shiny boxes and other District locales take their taxes (worth about $1 billion annually) home with them. Only by building housing could the District persuade some of these commuters to become residents.34
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For all of these reasons, the District government repeatedly adopted increased downtown housing an official goal. In 1986 a mayoral Commission on Downtown Housing declared its intention to attract 7,200 housing units by the year 2000, in part by adopting zoning measures to limit office development. But the city’s developers have never been enthusiastic about such plans, claiming that with land prices as they are, it is simply uneconomic to make up the difference between commercial and residential rents.35 Another complaint concerned historic preservation. The District government had embraced historic preservation as a consideration in its plans, but preservation means different things to different people. For some, it meant maintaining only the facades of buildings, such as the gorgeous Art Deco Greyhound station on New York Avenue, now stripped of its traffic-clogging buses. Others wanted buildings to retain their original floor plans and interiors. The loudest round in the debate over preservation concerned a remnant of a 1799 building called Rhodes Tavern, which sat across 15th Street from the Treasury. In 1977 Oliver Carr proposed demolishing the building—much degraded from its eighteenth-century state—to make room for his Metropolitan Square development. Carr’s plan preserved several nineteenth-century facades, which, in the opinion of the architectural cognoscenti, were vastly more worthy of preservation than the decrepit tavern. But preservationists used lawsuits to stall the tavern’s demolition for seven years, until it finally came down in 1984.36 Finally, there was architectural taste. To critics of downtown redevelopment, the new office buildings were bland boxes. To others, they were exemplars of form following function. As Edwin Weihe, architect of several downtown office buildings explained, “I do not endorse eyesores or extravagance in private buildings. I’d rather be dull and efficient than frivolous.” And many downtown buildings respect their older siblings’ ornament and materials. Throughout the old downtown, one sees modern and postmodern reinterpretations of the columns, stone, brick, and arches of Gilded Age and Beaux-Arts Washington.37 Concerns about monoculture, historic buildings, and architectural mediocrity are all valid, and Metro must take some of the blame in each case. But to dwell on that would be to miss the larger picture: the transit-oriented redevelopment of Washington has produced a reasonably lively, pedestrian-friendly downtown. The boldest plans to pedestrianize downtown streets never went through, and even the pilot pedestrian malls on F and G streets were eventually returned to cars. But cars do not own downtown. Unlike the freeway-divided downtowns of Philadelphia, Detroit, or San Diego, Washington’s old downtown invites the pedestrian to walk from one end to the other, at least until she gets to the Center Leg freeway. While some buildings remain vacant, for the most part the walk is seeded with ground-level retail, museums and libraries, historic buildings (or at least facades), and complementary contemporary architecture. In 1971 Secretary
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of Transportation John Volpe told a Washington audience, “it must be our plan to restore some sense of humanism to our downtown streets. Not his automobile, but man himself must continue to be the measure of all things. The city must be a gathering place for people, not vehicles.”38 Using Metro as a base, Washington’s planners and builders achieved that, at least during the day. As for housing, the real fight would take place not in the predominantly retail core but in the neighboring residential areas. The most dramatic of those debates would take place along the Green Line, the subway underneath the city’s racial frontier. The Mid-City: Renewal with the People?
In 1989 Walter Fauntroy, the District’s nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives and an aspirant to the office of mayor, boasted of his role twenty years earlier in bringing rapid transit to inner-city neighborhoods. “Thanks to the brilliant leadership of our planning staff,” he noted, “we forced the building through our area along a path that best met the needs of our inner city residents, what has become known as the ‘green line’ of our Metro subway system. This was renewal ‘with the people.’ ” Indeed, the planning and building of the Green Line was a departure from the usual patterns of grand plans for Washington, which did little to serve the innercity poor. The same Metro that would serve the Capitol, the suburbs, and the office buildings of K Street would extend to the Mid-City—a portion of the inner city directly north of downtown, comprising the neighborhoods of Shaw, Cardozo, and Columbia Heights. Planners worked hard to give the residents of the Mid-City a voice.39 But there were also pitfalls. Planning does require making decisions, and no decision will satisfy everyone. The Green Line fell far behind schedule; at the time of Fauntroy’s speech, it only existed as a series of muddy trenches disrupting traffic and threatening Mid-City businesses. Finally, when the Green Line was in fact opened, Mid-City residents faced the threat that they might be forced out by rising property values. Planners who had worked so hard to bring transit to the inner city would need to work hard to tame its power. As described in chapter 1, urban renewal came to Washington as largescale bulldozing in Southwest. Those in charge of the project hoped to replace not only the neighborhood’s structures but its people. As Robert Mathe, then assistant engineer commissioner, explained, “our objectives were not to recreate this area for the blacks who lived there, that would have been patently impossible, because the dregs of the community had migrated to this particular area, because this was the cheapest housing in the area. You couldn’t possibly rebuild the area and put these same people there and permit them to live there.” Indeed, residents displaced were not allowed to return, and by 1965 88 percent of the residents of newly built private housing within the renewal area were white.40
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Critics demanded a more humane approach. Nationwide, city dwellers read Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, which lumped together urban renewal, highway construction, and other government programs: “[T]his is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.” In Washington, African Americans were particularly skeptical. As Professor G. Franklin Edwards of Howard University wrote, “by and large, our urban renewal programs . . . have not succeeded in providing better accommodations in the renewal areas for most Negroes, the majority of the displacees. They have succeeded very largely in having Negroes move into public housing and blighted areas.” Even displacees who found themselves living in physically superior dwellings mourned the community they had enjoyed in the old neighborhood. By the mid-1960s the District of Columbia government itself admitted that “in spite of careful handling of relocation, the problems that cropped up during the necessary moving of several thousand lower income Negro families created fear of urban renewal within the District.”41 As an alternative, planners tried a gentler form of renewal in Adams Morgan, an area of mixed incomes and races, east of Connecticut Avenue in Northwest. Between 1958 and 1960, the District sponsored a demonstration program, using federal funds, to renew the Adams Morgan neighborhood while emphasizing community involvement and replacing demolition with rehabilitation of existing structures as the key tool of physical improvement. Planners congratulated themselves on encouraging real citizen involvement and in breaking down distrust between black and white residents of the neighborhood, and between residents and city agencies. They conceded, however, that the project had effected only mild changes in the neighborhood. The private investors responsible for the most impressive rehabilitation would have acted anyway, the worst blight remained untouched as the city debated widespread demolition, and the most radical plans to emerge from the bottom-up planning process—such as a proposal to turn the major commercial street into a pedestrian mall—were shot down in bitter meetings. In 1965 the NCPC recommended canceling the urban renewal program for the area, an embarrassment to the Johnson administration.42 Trauma in Southwest and inaction in Adams Morgan highlighted tensions inherent in urban renewal. As one analyst put it, “the more extensive the physical changes intended by the renewal program the smaller the role of local citizens in their implementation,” and the less likely such a plan would win neighborhood approval.43 Residents sought a middle ground. Among them was the Reverend Walter Fauntroy. Fauntroy was a true local, having grown up in the Mid-City and graduated from the famed Dunbar High School. A scholarship from the New Bethel Baptist Church at 9th and S streets sent him to Virginia Union University; he went on to divinity school at Yale before returning to New Bethel as pastor in 1958. In 1960 he became active in Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, both in Washington and in the Deep South. Only with
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the Voting Rights Act in 1965 did he feel able to turn his eye from the national civil rights struggle to New Bethel’s neighborhood.44 The Mid-City had a proud past. The home of Howard University, the nation’s preeminent black university, it attracted not only professors, but doctors, lawyers, and business owners. In the decades of segregation, blacks made U Street their own entertainment strip. But with integration in the 1950s, many of the neighborhood’s professionals began to leave. By 1966 the Mid-City housed less than 6 percent of the District’s people, but more than 12 percent of its families with incomes under $3,000, and many were frustrated with the lack of government help. Yet, as Fauntroy noted, there remained a chance to keep that frustration from boiling over into violence. He told the NCPC, “People don’t explode when they have legitimate reason to believe that help is coming.”45 The help, he suggested, would be a renewal program run from the bottom up. Fauntroy had long opposed urban renewal programs. While a Yale divinity student, he had watched planner Ed Logue’s programs ravage black neighborhoods in New Haven. Back in Washington, in 1960, Fauntroy had called urban renewal “the removal of Negroes from the choicest sections of town.” But with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and its demonstration cities program, Fauntroy saw a chance for what he later termed “a new kind of renewal.” Relying on the War on Poverty’s principle of “maximum feasible participation,” this renewal would be run by the community itself. Fauntroy called it renewal “with, by, and for the people. With the people, in that the planning of it would be done with them, by providing them with the professional competence to, in fact, plan. By the people in that we would train people in the skills required for renewal, so they would make the money. And for the people, in that we would have a number of people—what would be rebuilt would be affordable by low and moderate income people.”46 To organize the planning, Fauntroy founded the Model Inner City Community Organization (MICCO) and hired planner Reginald W. Griffith, born in Harlem and educated at MIT. Griffith would not dictate plans. Rather, MICCO would send staffers to go door-to-door, soliciting opinions and only later working them into a physical plan.47 The NCPC liked Fauntroy’s proposal, and in April 1966 it recommended MICCO for the administration’s “demonstration cities” (later, Model Cities) program. In October 1966 it designated the Shaw Urban Renewal Area, naming the neighborhood after the Robert Gould Shaw Junior High School at 7th and Rhode Island Avenue. Touring the neighborhood in March 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. told his hosts, “because of you and what you propose to do in Shaw, I still have a dream.”48 But King was killed thirteen months later, and the riots following his assassination devastated that dream. The riots began in the heart of the MidCity, at 14th and U, and spread along major streets. Fourteenth Street was particularly hard hit. Dozens of stores, as well as many apartment buildings
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Mid-City, 1969. On the first anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, architect Herbert McDonald (left) and Walter Fauntroy survey damaged lots (Star photographer Pete Schmick, 4 April 1969. Washington Star Collection, DCPL. Copyright Washington Post; reprinted by permission of the D.C. Public Library)
above them, were damaged or destroyed. Seventh Street, the area’s other major commercial axis, also burned. When National Guard and army troops were called in to stop the violence and patrol the streets, the sight of helmeted soldiers striding past charred shells of buildings resembled the American occupation of Germany immediately after World War II.49 During the rioting, Fauntroy—now vice chairman of the appointed city council—shuttled between the street and the White House, trying to calm people in both places. When the riots finally subsided, he tried to put the best face on things, calling the fires a form of “instant renewal” that had cleared space for redevelopment. The RLA agreed, designating the burntout 14th Street commercial strip as another renewal area. Fauntroy continued soliciting citizen input. In July 1968 MICCO distributed a booklet entitled What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want? True to MICCO’s philosophy, it sought to mix professional expertise with democratic consensus. Fauntroy himself promised readers, “over the next five years or so our community will be fixed up and rebuilt. And I don’t mean the way Southwest and Georgetown were renewed—where we were moved out.”50 Rapid transit had figured in plans for Shaw from the beginning. As described in chapter 4, the designation of Shaw as an urban renewal area,
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Model Inner City Community Organization, What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want? (booklet), July 1968 (Walter E. Fauntroy, Papers, George Washington University, box 26)
plus pressure from Howard’s Professor Edwards, assured a Mid-City line. Now, with the ravaged Mid-City needing all the help it could get, Fauntroy proposed rerouting the Mid-City line from a two-station straight shot along 13th Street to a three-station route along 7th, U, and 14th streets, following the worst of the riot damage in an attempt to spur rebuilding. Each station area would become a hub of shopping and employment, and the three together would, in MICCO’s plan, house almost all of Shaw’s commerce. Moreover, Fauntroy predicted, the realignment would serve 10,000 more people, though its additional station would cost $3 million more than the original scheme. In 1970 the D.C. council approved the proposal and agreed to absorb the additional expense, making the change official.51 As in downtown, Metro was only part of a broader redevelopment strategy, but it was a central part. Just as Fauntroy and others hoped to make redevelopment of the Mid-City as responsive to the residents as possible, so did they hope to bend Metro to their needs. Unfortunately, the Mid-City was in for a long wait. It would be more than two decades until the opening of the first stations in May 1991, and the Green Line—as the Mid-City line was later named—would take still another decade to complete. That some of Washington’s poorest neighborhoods were the last to receive service has been seen as evidence of the callousness of those in power. In fact, the delay resulted as much from extreme sensitivity to inner-city demands as from official disregard. From its conception, the Mid-City line was scheduled for a late start.
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The G Street line, now known as the Red Line, had remained largely the same since its authorization in 1965. The trunk through Southwest Washington, serving both the Blue and Orange lines, had been approved by Congress in the 1967 amendment. The Mid-City line had not been authorized until December 1969, by which point NCTA and WMATA designers had already done substantial work on the other two trunk lines, so it was scheduled to be the last of the three trunk lines built. In the 1960s both Edwards and Fauntroy had complained about wealthy, white Connecticut Avenue’s being served before transit-dependent inner-city neighborhoods. But NCTA and WMATA planners had a congressional mandate to serve Union Station early, and they needed at least one maintenance yard, which could be located on land just north of that station. For these reasons, planners saw no chance to rework the schedule, and even Edwards seemed resigned. Moreover, the phasing decision appeared relatively inconsequential. Although the Mid-City line would open late, late meant September 1977, less than four years after the projected opening of the first rail segment in December 1973.52 But Metro did not hold to schedule. Across the city, physical obstacles, lawsuits, and the Natcher delay slowed down construction. The Mid-City line produced its own delays as well, due to the D.C. government’s determination to avoid the top-down planning style that had displaced tens of thousands of people in Southwest. As the Office of Planning and Management explained, “it is important that planners start with a blank sheet of paper. It is evident that planners cannot force preconceived notions on residents and owners. The most effective planners are those who enter the process without preconceptions or draft plans. The process can be time consuming, but it will also save time by avoiding otherwise inevitable false starts.”53 No doubt this approach was more compassionate than the renewal schemes of the 1950s or than Jackson Graham’s determination to ram through a subway line, but it did not save time. Rather, it opened the door for endless reconsideration. After the realignment of the basic route in 1970, D.C. planners kept trying to shift the alignment to avoid residential neighborhoods, thus delaying the start of design for a Georgia Avenue Station. In 1975 Columbia Heights erupted in protests after a soil study suggested that more than 100 houses might be affected by construction. One homeowner insisted at a hearing, “it’s not going through my house; it’s not going by [my neighbor’s] house and therefore it’s not going up Park Road.”54 Farther north, the Mid-City line had been planned to run in the median of the North Central Freeway. When that freeway was canceled, planners scurried to find a substitute. When they suggested a $113 million tunnel, the suburbs balked. By August 1976 WMATA warned that the failure of both the District and Prince George’s to set alignments for the line would delay operation by at least one day for every day of indecision. If the county and city chose an entirely new alignment, the resulting work would take at least fifteen additional months. Moreover, each month of delay would cost
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about $2.6 million. Indecision on the line was just one of many headaches faced by the WMATA engineers, but it was the only one that was solely the responsibility of member jurisdictions.55 Even when an alignment had been settled, planners agonized on station platforms and entrances. In Shaw, they spent years considering whether to have an entrance adjacent to the Howard University campus or to serve the burnt-out commercial strips of 14th and U streets, finally choosing the latter.56 Early indecision made the Mid-City route ripe for the alternatives analysis of the late 1970s. Although the analysis did not long consider the elimination of the Shaw, U Street, and Columbia Heights stations, it did study terminating the line at Columbia Heights, which would have required routing many more buses to the Shaw and Columbia Heights stations. Eventually, the alternatives analysis did little to change the map of the Mid-City line, but much to change the construction timetable. In 1977, prior to the alternatives analysis, planners hoped to complete the system in 1984. By June 1980—thanks to the reconsideration and continued inflation—they had pushed that date back to early 1990. Moreover, the Mid-City segment of the Green Line, once slated to be completed before most of the system’s outermost branches, was now behind them all.57 It got worse. District and WMATA officials found themselves unable to satisfy all of the neighborhoods’ varied residents and businesses. At community meetings, low-income residents spoke of fears that rising land prices would displace them, whereas higher-income residents explained that they had bought houses in the neighborhood for the very reason that they expected Metro to boost property values. Into the 1980s planners wrestled with conflicting priorities and alternative locations for the Green Line stations. By 1981 WMATA engineers warned that the District’s refusal to select an alignment between Columbia Heights and Fort Totten was bound to delay that segment. The District government insisted on a restudy, pushing back the start of construction by at least two more years. Officials’ determination to give the Mid-City a first-class line was threatening the line’s very existence.58 The delays caused by the District’s indecision were aggravated by the election of Ronald Reagan. Within weeks of the inauguration, administration aides leaked word that they were no fans of Metro and were considering cuts. And cut they did. In March 1981 WMATA officials testified that they could complete the 101-mile system at a total cost of $8.2 billion by 1989, but only if the federal government were willing to appropriate $511 million per year from the funds authorized by Stark-Harris. If the federal contribution were dribbled out at $275 million per year, the system would cost $11.8 billion and not be finished until 2002. The Reagan White House budgeted $275 million. The cuts fell the hardest on the D.C. portion of the Green Line, which had finally reached top priority on WMATA’s list. After the announcement of the Reagan budget, WMATA cut design spending
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for that line by 22 percent. In budgets for fiscal years 1985, 1986, and 1987, the administration again held back authorized funds. Evoking Ecclesiastes, Fauntroy warned the administration, “He has no pleasures in fools, who vow to pay, but do not pay.”59 Meanwhile, portions of the system that were started before the alternatives analysis kept coming on line. As each segment opened, WMATA took out ads in the newspapers, sponsored parades, and handed out pennants at gleaming new stations. By the end of 1985 the map in each train and station showed a system largely complete, with bold, solid lines from Shady Grove in Gaithersburg, Maryland, to Huntington in southern Fairfax and from New Carrollton, in Prince George’s, to Ballston in Arlington. Only the Green Line was marked entirely in the dashed lines that indicated a “future extension.” Construction had not even begun. Frustrated critics suggested that the delay was the product of a racist political system that cared less about poor, black neighborhoods than wealthy suburbs. One columnist argued, “there is something perverted about a subway system that provides fast, convenient and inexpensive service to wellto-do communities such as Vienna and Wheaton yet in 14 years has failed to provide service to the part of the nation’s capital that needs it most.” Given the city’s real racial divisions, and the long history of bullying by white congressmen, it was all too easy for District residents and even officials to imagine that shadowy “outside forces” were deliberately trying to block a line that might link rich and poor.60 In fact, Metro had long been serving working-class African Americans; predominantly black areas near such Red and Blue line stations as Rhode Island Avenue and Potomac Avenue were among the first residential neighborhoods to get Metro service in 1976 and 1977. Moreover, the causes of the Green Line delay were widespread, and many forces were more inside than out. The District’s protracted routing studies, Prince George’s County’s indecision about the termini, Reagan’s budget priorities, and WMATA’s management decisions all slowed progress on the line. Well-intentioned choices, such as the decision to investigate contractors for links to South Africa’s apartheid regime, took time. Planning well had become the enemy of building quickly.61 Shaw’s renewal crept ahead. The Redevelopment Land Agency terminated its contract with MICCO in 1973, but it kept the emphasis on avoiding displacement of the neighborhood’s current residents. Most renewal focused on high-rise and garden apartment complexes, sponsored by neighborhood churches and reserved for low- and moderate-income families. In place of the freeways of old-style renewal, Shaw got brick streets and elegant streetlamps intended to give black residents of the inner city the same public amenities enjoyed by white Georgetown. But commercial development lagged, and after 1973 federal housing money came slowly. In 1986 the city opened a major government building, the $25 million, 500,000-square-foot Reeves Center. Illicit drug markets and other crime displaced by the project
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simply moved a few blocks away, leaving the neighborhood’s children to step carefully around the bloody syringes.62 When WMATA finally broke ground on the Green Line, in August 1985, residents learned that the only thing worse than lack of construction was construction itself. With bedrock too deep below the surface to employ rock tunneling, WMATA engineers specified the same cut-andcover construction that had proved so disruptive downtown and on Capitol Hill. In the long run, this would provide the neighborhood with better access than that enjoyed by the wealthier neighborhoods on Connecticut Avenue, because each station would have more entrances and shorter escalators. In the short term, though, cut-and-cover meant pain. Virginia Ali, whose Chili Bowl restaurant had served U Street since 1958, had endured riots and illicit drug markets, but subway construction was worse. With U Street itself blocked off, customers had to find their way through alleys. If construction workers hit a gas line, diners would have to evacuate, and frequently Ali found her restaurant’s floor inches deep in dirty water that ran off the wooden planks that served as U Street’s decking. A block-long stretch of 7th Street turned into a twenty-foot-deep garbage pit; residents fretted that children might climb through the shoddy fences and fall in. By the eve of completion, a neighborhood resident mourned, “after five years of construction, the name of the game right now is survival.”63 In May 1991, fifteen years after the opening of Metro’s first segment, the Shaw and U Street stations finally opened, with Fauntroy officiating. At the Chili Bowl, Virginia Ali unfurled a banner reading, “We Survived Metro.” It seemed to be a glorious moment for the Mid-City. The Reeves Center had, as promised, increased pedestrian traffic and property values in its immediate vicinity; the city followed up that success with a pedestrian-friendly rezoning that banned drive-through retail and required plentiful windows on new facades. In 1993 WMATA agreed to contribute $1 million to the African-American Civil War Memorial at an entrance to the U Street Station—a sort of reparation to the neighborhood for the trauma of construction. The Mid-City had at last been rebuilt. It had been spared the bulldozers, its landmarks and its row houses stood erect, and, with the gleaming new Metro stations providing quick access downtown and throughout the metropolitan area, the Mid-City neighborhood could be as desirable as any in the region.64 As residents soon learned, perhaps too desirable. In other historic Washington neighborhoods—Georgetown, Southwest, Dupont Circle, and Adams Morgan—physical rehabilitation had either preceded or closely followed the displacement of African American residents. The same pattern had always been possible in Shaw. In 1971 one consultant noted that “Shaw has the locational qualities that would ordinarily make it highly suitable for high-income, downtown-oriented households.” Fauntroy’s planners condemned this conclusion for ignoring the “human side of the equation” and treating poor people as a problem, but
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it was hard to ignore supply and demand. By the mid-1970s, a handful of middle-class whites with large dogs were renovating ornate Victorian townhouses around Logan Circle.65 In the late 1980s the process sped up. The Reeves Center attracted private office developers, while white singles and childless couples—many of them gay—started pushing east from Dupont Circle. In 1987 Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy observed a “white tornado” of gentrifiers sweeping Shaw clean of litter and junkies. By 1988 at least half a dozen small theater companies looking for cheap space had moved into old body shops and other buildings along 14th Street. Vacant lots next to future Metro stations were among the first to appreciate.66 The arrival of Metro in 1991 accelerated the transformation. One neighborhood activist noted that houses priced at $80,000 or $90,000 the year before were now selling for $150,000. By the early 2000s, U Street was lined with furniture stores selling $3,000 couches and nightclubs serving $30 steaks. And with the opening of the Columbia Heights Station, in 1999, investment and middle-class home buyers came to that neighborhood as well.67 Perhaps the boldest symbol of Metro’s effect on the Mid-City is the 2.4-acre Harrison Square development, at 13th and V streets, just north of the U Street Station. The development occupies an entire city block, the former site of Children’s Hospital. Vacant since 1975, the Children’s Hospital building had long been on planners’ lists of sites for potential Metro-related development. But without Metro, nothing happened. Only in the late 1990s, several years after the opening of the U Street Station, did the block find a developer ready to move earth. Eakin/Youngentob, which specializes in urban infill and transit-oriented development, bought the site when it still adjoined crack houses. To achieve density without resorting to a high-rise, the firm planned a ring of brick townhouses—built to resemble their Victorian neighbors—containing a second ring within. Each unit has space for a two-car garage, though with Metro so close, most buyers preferred a one-car garage and extra living space. As urban design, Harrison Square is a triumph: respectful of the architectural context of the neighborhood, friendly to pedestrians yet accommodating the car, thrifty with urban land. As urban policy, a block of houses ranging from $240,000 to $650,000 in the middle of an inner-city neighborhood is quite a departure from the dreams of the 1960s. Harrison Square alone could coexist happily with housing for lower-income residents. But if all of the Mid-City becomes Harrison Square, the transit-oriented renewal of Washington may closely resemble the Negro removal of the past.68 While a boon for the neighborhood, the Green Line has been a threat to the neighborhood’s residents, and a source of ambivalence, even frustration, for its leaders. By 1994 Jerry Moore, the onetime WMATA chairman and champion of affirmative action on Metro contracts, lamented, “You can’t do anything economically with a handful of poor folks—no matter
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Eakin/Youngentob advertisement, 2000 (Reproduced with permission of Eakin/ Youngentob)
what kind of line you run by them . . . all the subway does is carry people.” Veteran U Street merchants are enthusiastic about the new business that Metro and gentrification have brought, but they fear what will happen if white professionals come to dominate the neighborhood. Fauntroy himself is frustrated. “I always said that it would be double-edged, a mixed blessing,” he explained. “We’d get out there, but they’d get a chance to get in here. I don’t know if we can fight economic forces. Those economic forces are powerful, now. They are very powerful.”69 Some Washingtonians see the long delay in constructing the Green Line as evidence of discrimination against the poor and the black. There is some merit to the claim; had the Mid-City possessed the same clout as Cleveland Park, it might well have gotten a line mapped earlier in the planning process. And had the District possessed the sort of bold leadership that resolved so many disputes during the building of the Red Line in Montgomery County, the Green Line could have been built faster, with fewer studies. Poorer neighborhoods do lack the resources to make themselves heard as effectively as wealthier areas. And in a capitalist system dedicated to matching supply and demand, any improvement to the physical city may displace many residents.70 But it is equally valid to see the Green Line as a victory of civil rights activism. Determined action by Fauntroy, Edwards, and other activists won a first-class trunk line for central Washington. MICCO and other organizations ensured that the planning would be sensitive to neighborhood concerns, even to the point of indecision. Nor is the Green Line the only
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service Metro offers to African Americans. Portions of the Red, Blue, and Orange lines have served black neighborhoods in the District of Columbia and Prince George’s County for decades. And more generally, Metro spared inner-city neighborhoods from freeway bisection while keeping jobs concentrated in the District. Only a holistic view of Metro can reveal its service to black Washington. The experiences of the old downtown and the Mid-City neighborhoods taught planners and residents important lessons about technological solutions to social problems. They learned that rapid transit can be an immensely powerful tool for attracting people and capital to previously decaying neighborhoods. Moreover, it is a more precise tool than traditional urban renewal, allowing cities to restore neighborhoods without flattening them. But because it is so powerful, planners must decide on precise objectives, lest they produce a monoculture of offices downtown or luxury housing in close-in neighborhoods. However great the resources at hand and however flashy the technology, still central is MICCO’s question of 1968: “What kind of neighborhood do you want?”
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The Suburbs
In 1997 Michael Bernick, a director of the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, and Robert Cervero, a planning professor at Berkeley, published Transit Villages for the 21st Century. Their book argued that mass transit could only succeed if settlement patterns put tempting destinations within walking distance. “Too many recently built light rail, heavy rail, and commuter rail systems in the United States feature stations enveloped by parking lots, vacant parcels, open fields, warehousing, and marginal activities,” they observed. “This stands in marked contrast to the colorful streetcar suburbs that sprung up along trolley lines around a century ago, or to much of urban Europe where apartments, shops, cinemas, and offices continue to cluster around rail transit stops.”1 Bernick and Cervero could find both ends of the contrast in the Washington area. Their book highlights stations in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Arlington County, Virginia, which serve as focal points for dense, mixed-use development in the European style, making them literally textbook examples of how to plan around transit. But the authors could easily have found stations amid parking lots and vacant lots, particularly in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and Fairfax County, Virginia. Conversely, some of the hottest real-estate markets occur remote from any Metro station. In the suburbs as in the District, local policy was enormously influential in shaping development around Metro stations. Although WMATA’s transit plan of 1968 included as one of Metro’s functions the “promotion of orderly growth in suburban areas along well-defined and carefully planned lines,” and the Council of Governments in 1977 called for “significant expansion of planned employment and residential development into Transit Centers,” it was up to the counties to draft the ordinances and zoning codes to make that happen.2 And the suburban jurisdictions varied in their commitment to transit-oriented development. Of the seven, three—Arlington, Montgomery, and Fairfax counties—provide the most striking contrasts. All three counties needed to lure dense development to transit stations, even at the cost of angering some voters already there. And they had to discourage development where it could not be served by transit, regardless of the developers’ promises of jobs and tax revenues. The stakes were high. Suburbs led the region in the growth of both population and employment; rail transit must serve them if Washingtonians are to have real transportation choices.3 And while Metro could never be as important to spacious
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suburbs as it was to compact Washington, it could still play a role. After decades of effort, Arlington and Montgomery succeeded in matching transit to development because of the determination and foresight of a long series of planners and public officials. Conversely, Fairfax County officials showed little understanding of the potential of Metro to shape and serve development, with the result that their county’s largest employment center was left without Metro service. The contrast shows that making rail transit work in the suburbs is neither hopeless nor simple. Arlington and Montgomery: To Build a Corridor
Prior to World War II, both Arlington and Montgomery counties had served primarily as bedroom communities, with plenty of local stores but no major employment or retail centers. That had changed with the move of the National Institute (later Institutes) of Health to Bethesda, beginning in 1938, and the construction of the Pentagon in Arlington during the war. As thousands of families moved out of the District and into these counties in the 1950s, both jurisdictions began considering more commercial development. More specifically, both counties took to heart the recommendation of the National Capital Planning Commission’s 1961 Policies Plan for the Year 2000 that suburban growth should be concentrated in dense developments along major transportation corridors, reserving the wedges between those corridors for less dense development, especially open space and neighborhoods of single-family homes.4 Arlington officials began with Rosslyn, a 100-acre district just across the Potomac River from Georgetown. Though named for a farm, the area had been home to breweries, slaughterhouses, and saloons since the late nineteenth century. As the New Deal and World War II inflated Washington’s construction industry, Rosslyn became the city’s staging area, with storage yards and firms dealing in lumber, millwork, and asphalt. Then in April 1957, the Marriott company took a 99-year lease on a former brewery to use as a hotel, and in November county planner Dorothy Muncy suggested redeveloping Rosslyn with office buildings and tourist hotels. With the expansion of federal government employment in the early 1960s, investors thought this a fine idea, and by 1963 four office buildings were under construction, with plans approved for ten more.5 It was just as this boom got underway that the National Capital Transportation Agency began planning a regional transit system, and in January 1962 the Arlington Planning Commission discussed Darwin Stolzenbach’s proposals with a mix of skepticism and excitement. Some commissioners saw rapid transit as a powerful tool to help Arlington; others feared it would do little but speed Fairfax and Alexandria residents to the District, while doing little for Arlington itself. Planning director Richard E. Arms argued that given the automobile’s popularity, “rapid transit for the Washington Metropolitan Area simply will not work.” Dismissing rail transit as too expensive, slow, and inflexible, he suggested transporting workers and stu-
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Shady Grove
MONTGOMERY COUNTY
Silver Spring
Bethesda
Dulles Airport
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
Tysons Corner FAIRFAX COUNTY ARLINGTON Vienna FALLS CHURCH
n-B Rossly
on allst
PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY
FAIRFAX CITY
ALEXANDRIA
Metro lines, 2004
Montgomery, Arlington, and Fairfax counties (Map by Matthew Gilmore and the author)
dents by helicopter as a more practical alternative. Despite Arms’s skepticism, booming Rosslyn was an obvious site for a station, and from late 1961 on, NCTA plans included a station there. Less certain was where the routes should go from there.6 As noted earlier, Stolzenbach’s November Report of 1962 sought to minimize costs by routing most suburban extensions as surface lines alongside railroads or in highway medians. Arlington was no exception. The report plotted one line heading south in the railroad right-of-way owned by the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad and the Southern Railway, and a second line, heading west, in the median of the planned Interstate 66. This “Route 66–Rosslyn” line would have four stations in Arling-
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ton County, plus one in Fairfax near the point where Arlington, Fairfax, and Falls Church meet.7 But I-66 was slated to pass through a neighborhood of single-family homes. A transit line in the median would either wither for lack of patrons within walking distance of its stations or tempt high-density developments to the highway area, in contradiction to Arlington’s plan. Conversely, an I66 line would not serve the dense clusters of apartments, shops, and offices that the county planned for Wilson Boulevard, an arterial road running parallel to the Interstate, about half a mile to the south.8 At some point in the early 1960s, Arlington officials complained to the NCTA that the I-66 proposal would not work. In November 1962 the NCTA was deliberately vague about the Arlington alignment, stating that it would follow the Interstate median “in Fairfax County and portions of Arlington” and emphasizing that “the precise location of the route in Arlington is a matter requiring further study and consultation with Arlington officials.” In early 1963 an appendix promised that “the Agency is continuing to study the possibility of locating the route along Wilson Boulevard from Rosslyn to Glebe Road (rather than in Route 66).” It is impossible to reconstruct the exact negotiations, but this language suggests that Arlington officials were already insisting that a transit line had design constraints distinct from those governing highways.9 Certainly within the next few years Arlington planners carefully studied both the alignment and transit’s role in their broader plans. By 1966 one report noted that “because the freeway’s alignment through Arlington did not suit the county’s future land use plans, the county and NCTA later agreed to realigning the rapid transit through high-density commercial-officeapartment areas in the vicinity of Wilson Boulevard instead of the freeway’s median between the river and Glebe Road.”10 Arlington so strongly favored this scheme—five stations below the old commercial spine (and former trolley corridor) rather than three stations in a highway median—that the A, B, and C alternative maps of 1967 included no other option. Arlington thought carefully about what it wanted and got it. Montgomery County did the same. In the early 1960s, the county had been bitterly divided over development and transportation, with such developers as Donald Gingery calling for highways while growth skeptics, including Stolzenbach, opposed them. The Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s 1962 report, On Wedges and Corridors, only further polarized matters. The report attempted to apply the NCPC’s Year 2000 plan to Prince George’s and Montgomery counties, denoting intensely developed corridors in which sections would be reserved as wedges of relatively open space. That November, pro-development Republicans swept the elections for county council, and on taking power in 1963 they pushed through pro-growth measures. Most dramatically, they withdrew the county from the Council of Governments, determined not to let COG interfere with development. Although the new council did adopt a ver-
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Proposed transit nodes (MNCPPC, On Wedges and Corridors, 1962, page 27)
sion of the wedges and corridors scheme in 1964, it was watered down and poorly enforced.11 The 1962 council’s pro-growth, antiplanning platform aided its opponents in the long run. The growth advocates had overplayed their hand, and in 1966 voters, rallied by the Montgomery County Citizens Planning Association, threw them out of power. A new, pro-planning council elected in 1966 was standing watch when, in early 1967, the NCTA-WMATA hybrid agency turned to the counties with regional alternatives. Having just come through an election all about planning, every council member knew the significance of the decisions to be made, and the council fiercely debated whether the eastern branch of Montgomery’s rail line should curve west from Silver Spring to Rockville, or head north to Wheaton. Both alignments had their merits, and in the end, the most important result of the debate was that officials on both sides came to understand the importance of transit planning. One council member, Cleatus Barnett, who would serve on the WMATA board for decades, later explained the gravity of the decision as he experienced it at the time. “We were building these lines for eternity,” he recalled. “You’re not going to pick them up and move them if you put them in the wrong place. They are there forever. And don’t tell me anything about the cost. If it costs more, it costs more, but that’s what we’re going to do.”12 Having settled the alignments by March 1968, Arlington and Montgomery then faced the station areas. WMATA planners had their own ideas, dating back to the NCTA. In 1962, for example, NCTA planner John Williams had embraced the Scandinavian model of clustered development—with both housing and employment—around suburban transit
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stops. Imagining a completed system of the future, he wrote, “When the rapid transit was built through Takoma Park, the old railroad embankment was replaced by a viaduct, bridging over a pedestrian mall lined with stores serving the new apartment buildings and offices that have clustered about the station. . . . A number of passengers from Kensington and Rockville get off at Takoma Park to go to their jobs in the new federal office building next to the station.”13 As imagined by Williams, and practiced in Stockholm, clustered development and rail transit could be symbiotic. Both Arlington and Montgomery largely agreed with this vision. With the Pentagon and Rosslyn dominated by offices, Arlington officials early on decided to promote more varied development of the county’s major corridors, especially Wilson Boulevard. In 1975 the county board adopted a policy of targeting station areas for dense but mixed-use development; in 1977 this policy entered the county’s General Land Use Plan. Montgomery followed a similar path. In 1975, at the urging of the county council, the Maryland legislature passed a development district bill, allowing the county to assemble land around Metro stations.14 There were, of course, dissidents. In 1971 Arlington residents, some of them veteran freeway protestors, formed the Committee on Optimum Growth, or Co-Opt, to advocate what they called “controlled growth.” Within a year, the group had joined residents from other jurisdictions in a Coalition for Optimum Growth (also called Co-Opt) to oppose projects throughout the region. The activists insisted that they did not oppose all growth, nor were they trying to keep out minorities. But they fiercely opposed the dense station-area development that most professional planners thought would be necessary to make rapid transit a working alternative to the automobile. Rather than high-rise apartments, department stores, and office buildings, Co-Opt called for suburban stations “where feeder bus service, kiss-and-ride and automobile parking can serve as nuclei for commuting.” By 1975 Co-Opt president Ted Weihe was calling for a downzoning around every Metro station in the metropolitan region, the precise opposite of the official policy. The Co-Opt critique was vague and often self-contradictory; Weihe demanded a system that would rush suburban commuters downtown with few stops in his beloved Arlington, yet simultaneously insisted that “Metro’s purpose should not be to bring droves of new suburbanites back to the city if only for an eight-hour work day.” To the extent that Co-Opt produced a coherent vision of rapid transit, it sought a no-impact Metro that would serve existing neighborhoods of single-family homes.15 County governments could not entirely ignore their constituents, and in some cases they agreed to mitigate Metro’s impact. Both Arlington and Montgomery adopted zoning to ensure that building heights and densities would taper rapidly as one got farther from a station, thus providing a buffer between residential neighborhoods and the commercial spine of the Metro corridors. The Montgomery County Council downzoned the area
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Bethesda height limits (Montgomery County Planning Board, Sector Plan for the Bethesda Central Business District, June 1976)
around the Takoma Station to single-family residences, although it reserved the right to allow a few townhouses close to the station. Developers called the notion of decreasing density around a station “unreal,” but at a public meeting they were shouted down. Takoma residents got the best of both worlds—easy access to Metro without high-rise encroachment. By the end of the decade, many Takoma homes had doubled in value.16 Elsewhere, both Arlington and Montgomery stayed the course, staring down the protests of Co-Opt, whose base of support may never have been that large. Faced with angry residents demanding that the Forest Glen Station be canceled, Montgomery council members calmly stated that the needs of the county as a whole outweighed the desire of one neighborhood. As county councilman and WMATA board alternate Norman Christeller later recalled, “It was a case of looking communities in the eye and saying, Help us work out the best thing for you, but we are going to have a station here.” When protestors continued to hold to their slogan, “No Build,” Christeller reasoned that they had forfeited their right to help determine how the station would be built. Similarly, Arlington officials held to their
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policy of steering dense development to station areas. Risking defeat at the polls, they ignored Co-Opt’s pleas that the five stations in the RosslynBallston chain be reduced to four.17 Having made up their minds, the counties had little difficulty attracting developers. As early as 1970, developers planned an “uptown center,” with retail, apartments, perhaps even its own tiny rail circulator, for the Friendship Heights Station on Montgomery’s border with the District of Columbia. By 1973 the Northern Virginia Planning District Commission reported that most office and hotel development was clustering around future stations at Rosslyn and Crystal City, with other development near the Ballston, Eisenhower Avenue, and Huntington station sites. Extension of actual Metro service to the suburbs only heightened developer interest. Metro reached Arlington in the late 1970s, serving Rosslyn and Pentagon City in July 1977, and reaching west to Ballston in December 1979. A year later, Arlington property values had risen by $1 billion.18 Like downtown Washington, the suburban station areas benefited from the General Services Administration’s preference for office space near Metro stations. Arlington’s three-mile-long Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, for example, got State Department and Marine Corps offices at Clarendon, a large Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation building at Virginia Square, and the National Science Foundation at Ballston. Montgomery’s Red Line nodes attracted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to Silver Spring and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to White Flint, in addition to the National Institutes of Health and other medical agencies already in place before the line was planned. In each case, counties hoped that the federal offices would in turn attract restaurants, cleaners, lobbyists, contractors, and taxpaying residents.19 But there was plenty of private interest as well. While Rosslyn remains Arlington’s densest district, the other four stations on the county’s portion of the Orange Line have all been developed, largely according to plan. The westernmost station, Ballston, has seen the most dramatic transformation. Famous in the 1950s as an automobile-oriented shopping center with the world’s largest garage, Ballston has been rebuilt around Metro, a bus terminal, and pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and malls. Along with the Ballston Common Mall, which opened in 1986, and dozens of multistory office buildings, by the early 1990s the station area boasted thousands of residential units. For young professionals, easy access to bars, restaurants, movies, and Metro were more important than a spacious house. Firms employing young professionals figured that if they could not afford the District, a suburban Metro station was the next best thing. By the early 1990s developers had built a total of 2,500 residential units and 3.7 million square feet of commercial space, and Ballston was well on its way to meeting the planners’ goal of street activity up to eighteen hours per day.20 The stops between Rosslyn and Ballston—Court House, Clarendon, and Virginia Square—have not developed as intensely, nor were they in-
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The Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor (Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Metrorail Station Area Planning: A Metrorail Before-and-After Study Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, August 1983)
tended to. County planners designated Court House as a government center. They slated Clarendon and Virginia Square for cultural and educational institutions, including the George Mason University Law School. Like Ballston, however, these station areas were also planned to have a mix of uses, including apartments, offices, and shops. By the early 2000s, they had all of these, as well as active nightlife.21 Montgomery County’s showpiece is Bethesda. Through the 1950s, Bethesda was just a crossroads, though by the end of the decade Montgomery County was growing enough for planners to consider a highway there—the same highway that first attracted Darwin Stolzenbach to transportation planning. The crossroads got its first high-rise in 1963, when father-and-son developers Roger Eisinger Sr. and Jr. leased the air rights over the B&O railroad tracks just east of Wisconsin Avenue and built the Air Rights building. By the late 1970s they had added two more buildings, banking more on the availability of space over the old railroad tracks than on new subway tracks to come.22 Then, in 1980, the Montgomery government and the WMATA board approved a $100 million proposal by developers Allan Rozansky and Alan Kay to build on 3.5 acres of WMATA-owned land above the planned Bethesda Station. The Rozansky-Kay proposal, called Bethesda Metro Cen-
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Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor (Copyright 2003 Sky High Studios)
ter, was just what planners had always wanted. A 400-room Hyatt hotel and 60,000-square-foot retail arcade along with a seventeen-story office tower, promised more even use of land and transit than an office-only complex. The developers agreed to build a bus terminal, easing transfers from feederbus to rail. The county looked forward to the tax revenue, while WMATA itself—which retained ownership of the land—was promised at least $1.6 million in annual rent. Bethesda Metro Center opened in 1985, and by 1989 it was 99 percent occupied. Though 82 percent of workers employed in the project’s office tower arrived in automobiles, that still meant that close to one-fifth did not—pretty good for a building in an affluent American suburb.23 Nor was Bethesda Metro Center all. In 1983 the county government announced plans to restrict development in downtown Bethesda to those projects offering the greatest public amenities, such as flashy architecture, public plazas and art, and enough hotel rooms or apartments to satisfy planners’ wish for a mixed-use downtown. Developers who might otherwise have balked at the extra design and construction decided that proximity to
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Metro was worth the hassle, and in their rush to comply they created the so-called “Bethesda Beauty Contest.” The Montgomery County Planning Board approved nine proposals, requiring construction starts by the end of 1986. By the late 1980s, the stretch of Wisconsin Avenue closest to the Metro station was populated with high-rises, with condominiums and restaurants radiating from the center. As in Arlington, the county set building height limits to taper from eighteen-story buildings adjacent to the Metro station to two- and three-story buildings 1,500 feet from the avenue.24 Other Red Line nodes were slower to develop. Silver Spring had been a commercial center since the 1920s, the site of one of the region’s first suburban department stores. In 1975, citing the opportunity presented by Metro to make Silver Spring “a major focal center in the down-county area,” the Montgomery County Planning Board called for a high-density area around the station. Over the next twenty years, however, plans fell through due to lack of developer interest and citizen opposition. Most notably, citizens killed the proposed 2-million-square-foot American Dream megamall, which was finally rejected in 1996. Only in the late 1990s did Silver Spring seem ready to become a second Bethesda, combining apartments, employment, retail, and entertainment, all within a few walkable blocks.25 Farther out the Red Line, density came in the form of apartment buildings rather than office blocks. While houses also appreciated near stations in Alexandria, Arlington, and parts of the District, Montgomery’s Red Line stations were particularly popular. Near the Grosvenor Station, where in the early 1970s residents had feared Metro’s potential, houses and condominiums appreciated rapidly by 1980. Even Shady Grove, originally added simply to avoid placing rail yards in Rockville, was slated for its own New Urbanist development, emphasizing, in one promoter’s words, “a mix of uses, a network of interconnecting streets, amenities within easily walkable distances, controls over house style, a sense of neighborhood, and a de-emphasis on automobiles.”26 The transit villages of Arlington and Montgomery counties are hardly perfect. For one thing, they have taken far longer to build than is envisioned by the toadstool conception. When Silver Spring Station opened in 1978, a reporter sneered to WMATA spokesman Cody Pfanstiehl, “you have been saying that there would be development around the station sites. I don’t see any here.” “The station just opened,” Pfanstiehl replied. “You can’t expect the egg to crow.” At Rockville, developers counted on Metro to help them find tenants for a redeveloped mall, but soft demand in the mid1980s doomed the project. Even into the 2000s, cranes still surrounded the Virginia Square Station. Nor are station-area developments all architectural masterpieces. Ballston, Clarendon, and Bethesda have neither the unified appearance of a Rockefeller Center nor the texture that develops when a downtown grows over decades or centuries. And developers still find it far easier, and therefore more profitable, to build on farmland in the sprawling outer suburbs, where there are fewer neighbors to complain.27
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Ballston, 2004 (Photo by the author)
That said, it is not difficult to understand enthusiasm for Metro’s transit villages. The Ballston–Virginia Square area is a salad of mixed uses, with apartment buildings, office towers, hotels, a supermarket, library, university classrooms, and restaurants, all within a mile-long strip. On summer evenings, people really do gather for dancing on the plaza at Bethesda Metro Center. Fiscally, the development is a blessing. The Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, for example, pays almost a third of Arlington’s real-estate taxes, keeping county tax rates among the lowest in Northern Virginia.28 Most important, the areas provide a real alternative to the car. None of the station areas were designed as car-free zones. Bethesda is studded with county-owned parking lots and garages, while Ballston depends on one mammoth, 3,200-car garage. Ballston benefits from easy access to I-66, and Bethesda is still, at heart, a crossroads where Old Georgetown Road, East-West Highway, and Wisconsin Avenue converge. But neither district is dominated by the automobile. Whether they arrive by Metro or park in a garage, visitors to Bethesda can easily and pleasantly stroll from one shop to another, along wide sidewalks and interesting, populated streetscapes. If one spouse works downtown and another must commute to a transithostile office park on the Beltway, the couple may settle in Ballston and get by on one morning automobile commute rather than two. The RosslynBallston corridor as a whole generates the region’s highest rate of walking, and as many as 69 percent of residents of apartment buildings adjacent to stations ride Metro to work. When a reporter using a lower estimate notes that “only” half of residents of towers at Rosslyn and Ballston use transit to get to work, he is indeed looking at a half-empty glass. In a nation
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where the term “auto-dependent suburb” is generally redundant, the planners’ goal, and achievement, of pedestrian-friendly transit nodes is truly remarkable.29 The achievements of Arlington and Montgomery become all the more impressive set against the experience of their neighbor, Fairfax County, Virginia. Fairfax: The Missing Tysons Metro
If Montgomery County is the textbook example of suburban transit-oriented development, Fairfax County, Virginia, is the opposite. Although the county’s Franconia-Springfield Station does serve an area rich in retail and jobs, in the northeastern portion of the county development and transit diverge. Fairfax’s three Orange Line stations—West Falls Church, Dunn Loring, and Vienna—abut little but parking lots for commuters who begin their workdays by driving to the stations. Only a few miles to the north, approximately 90,000 people work in the edge city known as Tysons Corner, making it one of the nation’s largest employment centers.30 Lacking a Metro station, Tysons Corner was built for cars, with wide, fast roads, vast distances between buildings, and few pedestrian crosswalks. And Tysons has been choking in traffic for a quarter century. Though planners are now considering extending Metro to Tysons, they are decades too late. With its basic physical pattern fixed, Tysons Corner will not easily reorient itself to a rail line. The mismatch between rail and development in northern Fairfax has led some observers to dismiss rail transit’s potential to shape the suburbs.31 Indeed, even superb coordination would not have turned Fairfax County into an automobile-free, ecological utopia. But the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors could have done much more to provide an alternative to automobiles. The board’s failure to do so, especially in comparison with its counterparts in Montgomery and Arlington, affirms transit-oriented development’s dependence on political leadership and will. The first test came in the mid-1960s, as jurisdictions throughout the region began to consider alignments for rapid transit routes. In Fairfax, this was a special challenge, because the county’s geography was changing so quickly. Through the 1930s, the county had remained primarily agricultural, with its few residential subdivisions overlooking dairy farms. But like the rest of the region, it was transformed by World War II. The county’s population doubled during the war years themselves, then soared after victory, as developers took advantage of sewer lines and other infrastructure built in the name of defeating Hitler. Growth continued for decades, with the population rising from 96,000 in 1950 to 455,000 in 1970. With no large employment centers within the county, and with developers building wherever they could find a sewer hookup, transportation planners deciding on a rail alignment would have to guess where growth would take place.32 Planners did have some solid clues. By 1960 the Federal Aviation Administration had begun work on Dulles Airport, at the western edge of the
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county, and had planned an access highway leading toward Washington. Also by that year, planners had settled the alignment of the Capital Beltway. The Dulles Road and the Beltway were to cross just northeast of the intersection of Routes 123 and 7, a country crossroads known as Tyson’s Corner. With four major roads converging at this spot just ten miles from downtown Washington, attentive planners and developers could smell Tyson’s potential. In April 1962 the National Capital Transportation Agency noted that “there is much development to occur in the Tyson’s Corner Area as well as Vienna.” Three months later the county Board of Supervisors rezoned Tyson’s for a regional mall. And in February 1963 the board approved a land use plan, calling for the largest part of the area to be zoned industrial, with residential and commercial development taking roughly equal shares of the remainder, enough space for 39,000 jobs and at least 20,000 residents.33 The pace picked up in 1965. In that year the board ruled on nineteen rezoning applications, 7 percent of applications countywide, in the small triangle between the Dulles Road, the Beltway, and Route 7. The county planning staff enthused about the district’s potential. In February 1965 it called Tyson’s “the ‘gateway to Washington for the jet-age.’ . . . With its prime location and accessibility from all directions . . . it could become . . . a regional shopping center, a regional business district, a cultural center, a convention and/or civic center, with multifamily and single-family housing developments forming a complete regional center of activities.” It proposed a dense minicity, with apartments, industrial parks, and some office buildings surrounding the planned mall, with an ultimate total of as many as 85,000 industrial and commercial jobs.34 When, in 1966, the NCTA began asking counties where they might like rail to go, the Fairfax Board of Supervisors might have been expected to mention Tyson’s Corner. It did not, for as a body it was scarcely paying attention. While the Montgomery County Council passionately debated alternative alignments, and while the Arlington County Board insisted on a Wilson Boulevard routing, the seven-member Fairfax board delegated the matter to those four supervisors who sat on the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission (NVTC), charged with working out a map acceptable to Fairfax, Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, and Fairfax City.35 Much more than their counterparts in Arlington and Montgomery, these Fairfax officials of the NVTC emphasized cheap right-of-way as the prime consideration. And rather than imagining rail transit as a tool to shape future land use, the Fairfax officials treated it only as a means to serve existing residential concentrations. The two Fairfax board members on the commission with the strongest interest in transit, Frederick Babson and Joe Alexander, mostly wanted to serve their districts in the southeastern part of the county. John Beerman, whose Providence District covered what would become the Orange Line through Fairfax, devoted his attention to the town of Vienna. With limited funds, he reasoned, it was more important to serve
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Plans for Tyson’s Corner, 1965 (Fairfax County Planning Division, A Land Use Plan for the Tyson’s Corner Area (Adopted February 7, 1963) with First Amendment Proposals, February 1965)
real, populated towns than a potential hub at Tyson’s, a struggling new town at Reston, and an underused airport at Dulles. A Vienna route would also reach closer to Fairfax City, which had seceded from the surrounding county in 1962. The city had its own representative on the NVTC, and the Vienna option could count on his support.36 Both the Board of Supervisors and the NVTC ignored the far-seeing Fairfax Planning Commission and its hopes for Tyson’s. Indeed, NVTC’s detailed report outlining eight potential rail corridors in Northern Virginia did not even mention Tyson’s Corner. Instead, the commission staff prepared a detailed report on how, rather than whether, to bring rail to Fairfax City.37 In 1967 the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority staff ratified the NVTC’s passive dismissal of Tyson’s. Although it noted that “The Dulles Highway Corridor has a proposed node at Tyson’s Corner located at the intersection of the Capital Beltway and the Dulles Highway,” WMATA
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dismissed it as only in the planning stage.38 Taking their land use projections from the Council of Governments, WMATA’s consultants predicted that only 4,617 people would work in Tyson’s Corner in 1990.39 When WMATA narrowed the NVTC’s eight corridors into three alternative alignments, it did not even consider serving Tyson’s directly. Instead, it evaluated the medians of Interstate 66, to the south of Tyson’s, and the Dulles Airport Access Road, skirting the north of Tyson’s. At the point when alignments were most plastic, neither NVTC nor WMATA planners seriously considered bringing rail to the place Fairfax planners designated as the future crossroads of the county. Unwilling to bring rail to its largest growth center, Fairfax County could still bring some development to its rail. Coming from Washington, the first two Orange Line stations in the county were West Falls Church, close to the intersection of the Dulles highway and I-66, and Dunn Loring, near the intersection of the Beltway and I-66. Both would seem likely candidates for commercial development, but neither had much vacant land. Instead, they were surrounded by subdivisions of recently built single-family houses. Nor did Fairfax City, past the end of the line, seem promising. In 1972 voters threw out the entire city council after it endorsed a cluster of high-rises.40 The third and last station on the line, Vienna, was another story. The station site was not actually in the town of Vienna, but in fairly undeveloped territory to the south. In 1974 consultants found 270 acres of developable land around the station; Metro itself would need only 40. They reported that the Vienna Station area could support 2,750 to 5,200 dwelling units within a half mile, 100,000 to 500,000 square feet of office space, 30,000 to 100,000 square feet of retail space, perhaps even a small hotel. The next year, a second consultant found that “the Vienna Station presents an excellent opportunity to coordinate a variety of land uses as an integral part of the transit station development. This opportunity is created by both the availability of much vacant land adjacent to the station, and the ease of pedestrian and vehicular access to the station.” This consultant recommended even more development: 5,420 housing units, 11,000 residents, 700,000 square feet of office, and 250,000 square feet of retail, plus a 300-room hotel. The report included artists’ conceptions of the node, complete with such urban amenities as balconies, a flower stand, and a flutist.41 Developers were eager and willing to join in such visions. In 1969, soon after the station was designated on official maps, the developers began buying land. By 1973 they were ready to announce their plans. Developer DeLuca Enterprises planned three fifteen-story buildings, two thirteen-story buildings and three ten-story buildings, though it was willing to consider fewer, taller buildings. Even Til Hazel, the legendary builder of Tyson’s Corner, supported the project.42 As plans for these towers became public, the neighbors complained. In May 1973 the Northern Virginia Sun reported that “the overwhelming majority of Northern Virginians—regardless of party—are anti-growth and
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anti–high rise. In a nonpartisan election last week, the Town of Vienna selected three councilmen, and growth was not even an issue. All six candidates were against it.” In June the new council declared that the planned station was “wholly inconsistent and incompatible with Vienna’s long history and repeatedly expressed desire to avoid high density land use, and incompatible with existing and planned land use in the area of the proposed site.” The Vienna town manager complained that “Metro has developed into a complete fiasco and I think anyone who considers the matter with any degree of sanity will admit that the situation is completely out of hand.” Vienna residents did not want high-rises in their backyard.43 This was nothing unusual. Wherever WMATA planned stations with large parking lots, the neighbors complained. They complained in the District of Columbia. They complained in Maryland. They complained in Arlington. The difference was that those other jurisdictions, while willing to scale back stations, for the most part insisted that some residents must suffer for the greater good. Not so in Fairfax. Faced with angry voters, the Board of Supervisors crumpled. For the Vienna Station, where consultants had recommended anywhere between 130,000 and 950,000 square feet of commercial space, the county plan zoned none. It did zone one parcel for mixed use, with perhaps enough retail space for riders to stop for coffee and a newspaper before transferring from car to train.44 While Fairfax rejected dense development for the Vienna Station area, Tysons (by now losing its apostrophe) continued to boom. Throughout the early 1970s, it was one of the region’s hottest areas for commercial development, and the only one not slated for Metro. By the time Vienna was rezoned in 1976, Tysons was clearly destined to be the dominant downtown of northern Fairfax County. Tysons Corner Center and two nearby malls together accounted for 15 percent of all sales in Northern Virginia. Research and development firms moved into Westgate, “the only major office park in Northern Virginia,” which contained “approximately 1.4 million square feet of office space with residential and retail development nearby.” Most of the land yet to be developed had already been planned for offices. By 1977 15,000 people worked in Tysons, with planners predicting a total of 60,000 by the year 2000. (In fact, by 1988 about 70,000 people worked in the area.)45 Like many a boomtown, Tysons Corner was, physically, a mess. The Fairfax Office of Comprehensive Planning called the area “ ‘hostile to pedestrians.’ Guests at the Holiday Inn have an extremely difficult time walking to Tysons Corner. Shoppers at the Giant Department Store cannot walk next door to Dart Drug. Neither sidewalks, crosswalks, nor other pedestrian ways are conveniently located to encourage pedestrian movement across Route 7 or Route 123.” Shoppers would walk 750 feet to their cars, then drive to another parking lot, and walk another 750 feet, rather than walking 1,000 feet. Such habits quickly clogged the roads. Realizing that desperate times require desperate measures, the planning office suggested requiring sidewalks.46
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Meanwhile, the West Falls Church and Dunn Loring stations lacked vacant land for development, and Vienna Station, which had vacant land, had been zoned as noncommercial. Some in the county began thinking that it made more sense to route Metro to Tysons, which already had dense development, than to Vienna, which did not want it. In 1972 Fairfax Planning Commission chairman George Lilly argued that “development around West Falls Church would jeopardize the County’s plans to restrict high-density development in the McLean–Falls Church area to the highway interchange around Tysons Corner.” The next year he called for a Metro station at the heart of Tysons, the intersection of Route 7 and the Beltway. In 1975 Supervisor Rufus Phillips, a professional planner himself and a WMATA board alternate, persuaded at least two of his fellow supervisors to consider the idea. WMATA refused to reopen the issue.47 Then, in September 1976, the Metro map became suddenly more fluid, as Urban Mass Transportation administrator Robert Patricelli ordered the alternatives analysis. One of the purposes of such an analysis was to “adjust routes to changing patterns of land use,” and nowhere had land use changed more rapidly than in Fairfax. The county would get a second chance. By this time, however, the pendulum of Fairfax politics had swung away from controlling sprawl. In November 1975 voters ousted Phillips and his strongest growth-control ally, leading to the resignation of the county executive and deputy executive. Eventually, the county planning director, hired to implement growth control, left as well. When it came time to reexamine the rail routes, the strongest potential advocates for a Tysons alignment were gone.48 A Tysons realignment faced nonpolitical obstacles too. Short on time, planners did not go back to the blank slate they had faced in 1967. Instead they reconsidered the Dulles Access Road alignment rejected in 1967, adding a dip to the south to get slightly closer to the densest part of Tysons. This station would still have been some distance from the mall and most offices; given the area’s ample parking, workers might not have been willing to ride a train and a shuttle bus. An alignment straight up Route 7 would have been difficult or impossible due to steep grades; Tysons Corner is the highest point in the county. Because the proposed station would be in a relatively undeveloped portion of Tysons, the state or county would have to build new access roads to allow buses and cars to get there.49 Another consideration was scheduling. Planners estimated that because some of the preliminary work had been done on the Vienna line, including the all-important environmental impact statements, the Tysons alignment would take five years longer to build. That would leave the Ballston or West Falls Church Station as an interim terminus, something that both Arlington County and Falls Church did not want at all. During the year of decision, 1978, the WMATA board chairmanship rotated to Joseph Wholey of Arlington, who was most reluctant to see Ballston swarmed by parked cars during the four or five years it would take to reroute the line.50
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Yet another factor was the historical accident that, though home to only 22,000 people, the City of Fairfax was an independent jurisdiction and WMATA signatory, whereas booming Tysons remained unincorporated. A small and shrinking town had the powers and title of a city, while a large and growing city was not even legally recognized as a town. And though small, the City of Fairfax could bite. In 1976, fretting that it would never get the Vienna line, it sued WMATA for breach of contract. Finally, and perhaps most important, the alternatives analysis seems not to have compassed the real potential of a Tysons station. The county had not commissioned a station impact study, and a two-day charrette, sponsored by the planning commission, scarcely considered reorienting Tysons to rail, preferring to take as a given continued construction of office towers separated by parking lots. Moreover, the planners were flying blind. They knew that the county plan allowed up to 6 million square feet of commercial space in Tysons, but not whether it would be built or whether it would be close enough to any station to generate ridership. The Council of Governments’ land use projections, which had not been updated since 1972, had predicted that by 1992 Tysons would employ only 24,000 people, none in offices. Fairfax County could have insisted on revised employment projections, as had Montgomery County, but it did not.51 Deprived of up-to-date projections, the planners responsible for the alternative analysis projected fairly low patronage on the Tysons alignment. They estimated that in 1990 a Tysons station would attract 3,000 boarding passengers each weekday morning, 6,700 each weekday. In other words, out of the 60,000 people that the 1977 study projected would work in millions of square feet of offices and shops, at most 3,700 or so people were expected to ride Metro home from Tysons. The consultants who wrote the report no doubt got their math right, but the numbers they plugged into their models did not match the scale of the transformation. As a result, the study found that, while the Tysons alignment would indeed attract more riders, it would not attract enough to justify the $60 million additional expense.52 Fairfax County was big enough to stare down its smaller neighbors and insist on a change, had it wanted one. The District of Columbia and Prince George’s did make several changes in alignment during the alternatives analysis process. But Fairfax County did not want a fight. Changing the map would have required negotiation, perhaps additional payments. As one Board of Supervisors member later explained, “we were more rigid and stuck with our plans than we were when we first started. . . . I don’t think anyone wanted to monkey with that.” So the supervisors did nothing. They resolved to send Metro off to the parking lots of Vienna, acquiring some right-of-way to keep the Tysons option open.53 And that is how the situation remained for decades. Following the alternatives analysis, there would be no real chance to reconsider a Tysons route until the original 103-mile system was finished. At Vienna, Metro built
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Vienna Station, 1990s (WMATA)
more garages. Plenty of people used the station, but almost all drove there, many from less than a mile away. A few hundred or thousand short automobile trips each morning might not seem significant, but experts point out that most auto pollution results from just starting the car. At Dunn Loring, developers did build a mixed-use office park, dependent in part on tenants who needed space near Metro as a requirement of their government contracts. Meanwhile, at Tysons, the Board of Supervisors continued to grant rezonings without demanding better transportation. And planners, architects, workers, and residents continued to complain about the edge city clogged with traffic, lacking in grace, and hostile to pedestrians.54 As the 103-mile Metro system neared completion in the late 1990s, planners at WMATA and in Fairfax County again took up the issue of how best to serve the Tysons-Dulles corridor, making a new rail line in that alignment a real possibility. But even in the early 2000s, with some Metro planned for Tysons, developers continued to orient their buildings to highways rather than to future stations, while the Fairfax supervisor representing the area proclaimed his helplessness. In May 2001 the Fairfax board did vote to zone areas around future rail stations on the Dulles line for higher densities. But even these higher densities would be just half those seen at Arlington’s Orange Line stations, and in June Fairfax supervisors sneered at a proposal by New Urbanist planner Andres Duany to build a dense, truly urban settlement around one proposed station. And proposals for a “mini-
Tysons Corner (Copyright 2000 Sky High Studios)
Tysons Corner, 2004 (Photo by author)
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city” at the Vienna Station remained as controversial as ever. For the third time in forty years, Fairfax seemed unable to match high-capacity mass transit with dense development.55 Even if it had been planned there from the beginning, Metro would not have been a magic wand for Tysons, or for any area so distant from downtown Washington. A rail line going in just one direction, with ten miles to the closest transfer station, would have struggled to compete with highways radiating in several directions and plenty of parking. Driving would still have been much easier and would have attracted the vast majority of workers and shoppers. Developers, dedicated to the bottom line, would still have built primarily to serve those drivers.56 Finally, the volatility of Fairfax politics made it hard for any single official to stay in power long enough to learn the issues and establish long-term plans. But Fairfax County leaders still faced important decisions. They could have paid closer attention to development trends in their county. They could have said some unpopular things to people who lived near the Vienna Station, or raised taxes to pay for the Tysons alignment. They could have zoned Tysons to require more density and sidewalks. Tysons might still not have looked like Ballston, but it could have looked different from the purely auto-oriented center it became. In 1974 longtime Fairfax supervisor Anne Wilkins noted that “Fairfax County has never had a transportation plan, because it takes political fortitude to adopt a transportation plan.”57 It also takes political fortitude to sculpt the suburbs. Transit can be a powerful tool to shape development, but only if people agree on the goals. Just as planners imagined in the 1960s, rail transit can promote dense settlement, as it has in downtown Washington, Arlington, and Montgomery. Metro can deliver thousands of pedestrians to a single point in a manner that permits plans impossible when the only high-volume transportation systems are freeways. But density is not the only goal of public policy. Public officials may determine that economy, sensitivity to neighborhood concerns, historic preservation, or economic justice are more important priorities than dense clusters around each station. Or they may ignore the role of rail in shaping development, vastly diminishing its impact. Whatever their decision, station-area planning is an inherently political decision, reflecting a community’s aspirations and values. For transit to have the effect imagined by its promoters of the 1960s and today, a community must subscribe to the vision of urban life imagined by the promoters of the Great Society.
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The Riders
Planners, politicians, engineers, architects, construction workers, neighbors, and litigants brought Metro from a vague frustration with rush-hour traffic to a rail system stretching more than 100 miles. But an empty Metro would be no Metro at all, and it takes hundreds of thousands of riders to bring Metro to life each day. Each passenger has her own reasons for riding, and her own definition of Metro’s function. Yet all riders share a single, vast machine. In their diversity and its unity, these riders make Metro a city in microcosm. It is on Metro’s trains and platforms that the Great Society is most real. Quality or Quantity?
The designers of Metro promised three things. First, they promised to carry many people, almost 1 million rides per day. Second, they promised to serve passengers in style, offering a system so luxurious that affluent Washingtonians would leave their plush automobiles at home or at station parking lots. Third, they promised that Metro’s operating costs and some of its capital costs could be recouped from fares. Theoretically, all of this could have come true: a luxurious system would have attracted riders and easily justified high fares. In practice, these goals conflicted. A crowded system brings more money but abandons luxury. A luxurious and uncrowded system has trouble matching revenue to costs. And a system with minimal service may save money but lose riders. For the quarter century since Metro’s first operation, managers have struggled to balance concerns of patronage, service, and finances. For the first few years of Metro operation, the WMATA staff concentrated on getting things right rather than the cost. They had always planned the first phase of operation as a “a field engineering phase for the testing and ‘debugging’ of cars and equipment under service conditions.” Thus, the cost of running the system in its first eight months was considered part of the system’s capital budget, rather than part of regular operations. Only gradually would the system shift from testing to operations intended to be paid from the riders’ fares.1 These riders quickly made Metro their own. By September 1977 the rail system carried about 125,000 riders per weekday. Most were headed to or from work in a commute that included a bus ride on the home end. Some, however, used Metro for midday trips within downtown, producing
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a “three-peak pattern” with another spike in ridership around noon. This “lunch bunch” patronage meant bonus revenue in a system built for rush hour.2 The presence of actual riders reshaped old debates. For example, in the original design Harry Weese and his graphics consultant, Massimo Vignelli, specified that station names would appear only on the vertical pylons along platforms. The concrete vault itself would be pure, free of signs. But once riders began complaining that the pylons were too hard to read, the WMATA board quickly voted to add horizontal signs to the vaults. The riders, too, needed adjustment. Some abused the system, leaning on doors or shoving in briefcases to hold a train in the station so a friend could get on. With the opening of the first stretch of the Blue Line in July 1977, riders faced a new challenge: automated fare equipment. Rather than dropping coins in a slot, riders now had to purchase magnetically encoded cards from a machine, then feed the cards into fare gates at both ends of the ride. Long lines formed as baffled Washingtonians stared at the instructions, but WMATA staff found that students and “youngsters” had no problem.3 By the early 1980s Metro was beyond the initial, experimental phase of operation. Between 1978 and 1981, the number of riders entering the core of the city on a typical weekday morning almost doubled, from 27,000 to 52,000. And the system was used pretty much as planners had expected. During the morning rush hour, a good 9 out of 10 riders were commuting from home to work. Although half of riders surveyed said that were it not for Metro, they would have made the same trip by bus, the other half would have traveled by car or not traveled at all, suggesting that the system was indeed luring Washingtonians from their automobiles and adding to the region’s accessibility. At suburban terminals like Silver Spring and the Pentagon, most riders arrived by bus or car. In contrast, 79 percent of riders boarding at Metro Center arrived on foot. None of these patterns was out of line with the visions of National Capital Transportation Agency planners twenty years before.4 But Metro operation remained a complicated task. One repeated irritant has been the Authority’s policy of reducing bus service with each new rail extension. Doing so allows the Authority to use both bus and rail most efficiently—the former on peripheral streets with less traffic, the latter for high-capacity, traffic-free passage into the core. For some passengers, however, the forced transfer adds expense and even time. Nor has the burden fallen equally. Because buses are slow and cheap, they tend to attract people for whom money is more valuable than time, which in practice means poorly paid workers or people without jobs. In 1977 one local politician feared “a largely segregated transit system, with the poor and black squeezed into sweltering buses while the rich and white use the fancy new suburban railroad.” WMATA itself acknowledged the “the potential creation of at least the image of a two class system, Metrorail for the rich and Metrobus for the poor.” As one critic has noted, “the bus
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doesn’t serve the political elite the way Metro trains do,” making it easier for that elite to cut back bus service than to skimp on rail expenses.5 Yet the notion of class segregation should not be overdrawn. Rail passengers are not universally rich. While they are less likely to be unemployed than the general population of the metropolitan area, they are also less likely to own homes. Nor are they universally white; white faces are rare on Blue Line trains traveling east from Eastern Market, into African American neighborhoods of D.C. and Prince George’s County. Overall, blacks and whites use Metro at similar rates. Among residents of the eight jurisdictions composing WMATA, 9.6 percent of African American workers rode Metro to work in 2000, as did 9.2 percent of whites, so the racial makeup of Metro riders reflects the racial makeup of the region fairly closely. (In contrast, African Americans were almost four times as likely to ride buses to work as were whites.) Moreover, the mixing of classes and races helps keep funding secure; politicians cannot cut Orange Line service to the African American neighborhood of Potomac Avenue without also cutting it to wealthy Vienna. As a public benefit that crosses class lines, Metro, like Social Security, is politically robust.6 And because it serves both rich and poor, Metro may help both groups to understand common interests. Complaining in the Washington Post of “salmon-packed” cars in the week following the opening of the Branch Avenue line in 2001, rider W. G. Robinson alleged, “this never would have happened had it been the Red Line or Blue Line or Orange Line.” A few days later came the reply from Arlington: “Many of us who use the Orange, Blue and Red lines have been enduring this for years. More than once I have seen platforms so crowded that I literally feared for my life. . . . So to all the folks on the Green Line enduring this misery, I say, ‘Welcome to Metro.’ Isn’t it great?” Metro riders may not be on the same train, but they are all in the same boat.7 Another operational concern is safety. Planners, and the National Transportation Safety Board, had long pondered catastrophes and how to avoid them. But the issue emerged with urgency on 13 January 1982. It was a day of heavy snows, the kind that Washingtonians never quite learn to handle because they only happen once or twice a winter. At 2 p.m. the federal government let its employees go home, creating an instant, early rush hour. At 4 p.m., Air Florida Flight 90 took off from National Airport. With ice on its wings and inexperienced pilots in the cockpit, the jet crashed into the 14th Street Bridge. Seventy-eight people were killed, including four motorists on the bridge. With the bridge closed and emergency vehicles fighting to get to the crash site, traffic jammed throughout downtown.8 Metro had its own problems. A stalled train at Federal Triangle forced controllers to detour six trains around it by switching them to the opposite track. Trying to get another train around a wrongly positioned switch, a supervisor reversed the train, causing it to derail. The lead car swung diagonally, striking the wall that separated the two tracks. The car’s alumi-
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num walls crumpled like a soda can. Three passengers in the packed car were crushed to death; twenty-five more injured. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the accident largely on inadequate training. The board found that Metro’s automated train control was not reliable enough to run the growing system, yet WMATA had not trained its staff how to communicate by radio, establish chains of command in the central control room, or operate trains in manual mode.9 The accident was an anomalous disaster for a generally safe system, but it did show that running the railroad would get ever harder as the system grew. Even before the accident, reliability had been dropping, and by January 1982 only 96 percent of scheduled trips were completed, down from an earlier average of 98.5 percent. The accident only made things worse; cautious operators now took malfunctioning trains out of service at the first sign of trouble. There were longer-term problems as well. Between 1980 and 1983, despite the opening of new stations, total transit ridership actually dropped. Fares were up, reliability down, and gas prices lower; many commuters returned to their cars.10 By 1986 Metro’s managers had to face a new problem: the prospect of an aging system. In February the Federal City Council released a report full of bad news. Ridership would not reach the levels predicted in 1974, due largely to slower regional population growth, a trend for new jobs to locate beyond the Beltway, and less bus and rail service than projected. Rehabilitation of rolling stock, track, and stations would prove expensive. And, because Metro’s fares could not cover costs, each expansion of the system would hurt the Authority’s balance sheet. The region’s operating subsidy to Metro—measured in constant dollars—would nearly double between 1986 and 2000. The WMATA staff was not terribly surprised, but some board members were, fearing that maintenance would swallow scarce capital at the expense of those lines still unfinished, especially those in Prince George’s County. Meanwhile, an audit of a rail car purchase found that the procurement process had been poorly handled and inadequately documented. For an agency once free of any taint of scandal, this was a keen embarrassment.11 Nevertheless, WMATA persevered. In 1988, the Authority won the American Public Transit Association’s award for the best system in the United States and Canada. With almost seventy miles in operation, Metro was now carrying more people than Chicago’s MTA, making it the nation’s busiest rail transit system after New York’s. By 1994 the rail system was carrying more than half a million riders per day. And it was luring some people away from their cars; 79 percent of riders lived in households with at least one automobile.12 As predicted, maintenance costs increased sharply in the 1990s. For the average rider, the most visible wear showed on Metro’s 557 escalators, once the pride of the system. Harry Weese and his team had originally planned all vertical movement by escalator. In the course of 1970s cost-cutting, some
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escalators were replaced with granite stairs, but every station entrance and mezzanine had at least two escalators.13 Some observers blamed increasingly frequent breakdowns on the lack of canopies at station entrances, which allowed rain and snow to fall on the escalators. But the Weese architects had seen uncovered escalators working fine in ill-climed Hamburg and Stockholm. They had been informed by Otis Elevator that leaving the escalators exposed would add only 7 to 12 percent to the maintenance cost. A canopy was incomplete protection against “sand, salt and general grit,” which would still arrive on passengers’ shoes, and “the greater the hours of operation, the less it matters.” Given that the system was planned to run twenty hours a day, the architects may well have concluded that canopies would make little difference. And there were reasons to avoid canopies. Weese explained that building elaborate covers would turn entrances into “sheep runs.” Passengers would pause at the tops of the escalators before braving the rain, causing potentially dangerous backups.14 The fundamental problem with the escalators is not that they are uncovered, but that they are complicated machines with hundreds of moving parts, run for nineteen hours a day and stepped on by their users. Like helicopters and photocopiers, they are inherently maintenance-intensive. As the architects planned the stations, the nation’s leading escalator manufacturers warned them to expect each escalator to be out of service for a ten- to twelve-day stretch each year. Based on this advice, the architects made room for three escalators at most street entrances, so that two could provide down and up service while the third was repaired. But a spare escalator cannot guarantee adequate maintenance. WMATA has struggled to find enough skilled mechanics to work twenty-four-hour shifts, and it has lacked funds to overhaul aging escalators according to schedule. Unsurprisingly, deferred maintenance has resulted in breakdowns, with up to one out of every five escalators out of service on any given day. In 2000 WMATA managers found that covering exposed escalators would shave between 9 and 10 percent of maintenance costs, within the range predicted by Otis. Overturning their predecessors’ decision, they decided to build canopies at all stations.15 Metro’s automatic operation has also been less reliable than the designers hoped. As noted in chapter 4, WMATA’s engineering consultants had hoped for a system so automated that trains could run without operators. In 1979 one train left its operator behind and continued making stops—though not opening its doors—until a passenger jimmied the cab door with a barrette and stopped the train herself. But automated operation denied train controllers and operators the chance to practice manual operation. This deskilling contributed to the 1982 accident, as well as a 1996 accident, in which a train running on automatic failed to brake on a slippery stretch, crashing into a stationary train and killing its operator. In 1999 faulty computer relays forced the Authority to depend on manual
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operation. For eighteen months, passengers endured jerkier starts and stops while operators did their best to mimic computers’ smooth handling.16 Despite such mishaps, ridership continued to grow, especially in the late 1990s. A number of factors were at work, including additional stations, the new National Airport terminal (just across from the Metro platform), and the opening of the MCI Arena on top of Gallery Place, as well as booming local and national economies. Another incentive to ride was the Metrochek, the transit equivalent of an employer-provided parking space. Starting in early 1993, employers could buy these special fare cards to distribute to their employees. Some employees receive the cards in addition to their salary; in other cases, the fares are deducted from salary, but exempt from payroll and income taxes. The program got its biggest boost in 2000, when President Bill Clinton’s Executive Order 13150 required all federal executive agencies to participate. That move alone may have added up to 20,000 new riders per day.17 Theoretically, this increase should not have been a problem. By 2004 average weekday rail ridership stood at 653,000, still a good bit lower than the 959,000 projected in 1969. But Metro was not built as planned. Station parking, for example, has long been a limiting factor. As early as 1978, planners compared a projected demand for 100,000 spaces with plans to build only 30,000. Two decades later, the Authority operated 44,000 spaces at stations, with another 3,600 spaces nearby at meters or county-operated garages. Even lots with thousands of spaces could fill by 7:15 a.m.—some by 6:45.18 Another bottleneck has been a perpetual shortage of rail cars. Throughout the 1980s, extensions were delayed by up to a year when the Authority lacked enough cars for the new track. By the time of the completion of the 103-mile system, the Authority owned 762 cars, short of the 811 called for in the 1968 plan, and many were overdue for maintenance. The 1969 plans called for an eight-car train every two minutes during rush hour—every ninety seconds if necessary—and every platform in the system was built to accommodate an eight-car train. But with track capacity outstripping rolling stock, by 1984 the Authority had to cannibalize its last eight-car trains to serve the latest extension. In 2001 managers stated it could take billions of dollars to make eight-car trains common again by 2014.19 Increased ridership and decreased reliability raised the chance that a single malfunction would trigger a chain reaction. That is exactly what happened. By the spring of 1999, Metro was in a slump. Delays due to system problems were up 64 percent from 1994. Regular riders complained about commutes that could, without warning, stretch from a normal forty minutes to two hours. In April 1999 dozens of riders, told that their train would be taken out of service at Smithsonian, improvised a sit-down (or standup) strike, refusing to leave the cars. Eventually they relented, but only after one arrest for disorderly conduct and a twenty-five-minute delay that further snarled the evening rush hour. One rider commented, “I am dumbfounded that commuters haven’t revolted before now. As much as I enjoy
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riding Metro, I found yesterday’s experience almost intolerable.” WMATA announced an emergency repair program, focusing on railcars. But repairs would be slow, and even then the system would remain crowded.20 The crowds would have seemed insignificant to weathered commuters from New York, Moscow, or Tokyo. But Washingtonians want to ride with dignity. Nor do they tolerate breakdowns and incompetence. Both were displayed on 20 April 2000, when trash caught on fire in the tunnel between Foggy Bottom and Farragut West. Violating several safety procedures, WMATA train controllers allowed a train full of people to continue into the tunnel, then botched communications with the D.C. Fire Department.21 It was only a matter of luck that that no one was killed. “I rode the Metrorail when it first opened,” wrote one rider, not long after the fire. “It was wonderful, very clean, uncrowded, I felt like I was in the movies. That was then, this is now. If Metro can’t get it together any better than it has, I fear the quality and quantity will hit zero. It appears to me that the system has become unmanageable with the lines we now have. Unless we have the money, good management and the will I suspect the whole idea of the system will turn into a dump.” But who will pay? Despite rising ridership, the portion of operating costs paid by passenger fares decreased from 68.5 percent in fiscal 1998 to 65.5 percent in 2000.22 Most officials understand that, like fire protection and public libraries, transit need not be financed through user fees in order to justify its existence. But a failure to break even does mean that Metro cannot recoup its expenses through volume, and Washingtonians appear unenthusiastic about paying for improvements. Postings to the Washington Post’s website demand more parking spaces, more railcars, and more maintenance, yet with few exceptions, they argue that fares and parking fees are too high. Raising the money to restore the existing system may take as great a political effort as the 1960s campaign to build it. By 2001 managers called for a twenty-five-year, $12.3-billion overhaul. Elected officials from the District, Maryland, and Virginia all shook their heads and doubted they could find the money. Looking ahead only ten years, an expert panel projected a $2.36-billion shortfall.23 Some commuters will tolerate a great deal of mistreatment without becoming disenchanted. In the summer of 2000, in the midst of a series of negative press reports about maintenance, General Manager Richard White took top staff to Metro stations, planning to apologize to riders. What he found, however, was that most of the riders he talked to shrugged off Metro’s faults as inconsequential compared with its virtues. Invited to gripe, most passengers did, about crowds or dirt or confusing announcements. But others declined, filling their comment cards with a three-word statement: “I love Metro.” Such riders also tolerate human flaws. “Every now and then there’s a loony onboard,” one rider observed, “but I don’t reckon it would be cost-effective to install Loony Detectors at the station gates. Loonies are just a part of life, and besides, it provides a diversion after a
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long, frustrating day at work.” A poll taken in 2005 showed that “four out of five people in the region have used the system, and 88 percent of those have a positive view of it.”24 Other commuters avoid Metro no matter what. A Fairfax County man explained his decision to drive to his downtown office every day, though he understood that Metro would save money and perhaps time. “You know, I grew up in the suburbs, and I never rode a subway as a kid,” he told a reporter. “Somewhere, in the back of my head, I think of subways as being for places like New York and Philadelphia, not for wide-open suburbs like Centreville.”25 Perhaps nothing can change so profoundly suburban an outlook. But most commuters make choices about where to live, where to work, and how to get between home and work. For this vast middle, Metro must prove its worth again and again. One breakdown too many, and the system loses a seven-year veteran rider. Carol Burnett, one of the Smithsonian Station mutineers, had been on the trains for ten years. “I’ve had it,” she told a reporter. “I’m back in my car. At least in your car, you can go somewhere else. On Metro, you’re just stuck there. . . . I think the system has broken.” A fifteen-year Metro commuter found the challenge of parking at Shady Grove, the long lines for fare cards and parking tickets, and train delays enough to make him think about driving to work.26 In a perverse sense, these defections are unimportant, because each disgusted commuter who abandons Metro makes room for another, or eases pressure on the remaining riders. In Yogi Berra’s terms, nobody takes Metro anymore; it’s too crowded. But each rider lost diminishes Metro’s glory. The Map
For those who endure its flaws, Metro can change the experience of Washington. In his influential 1960 book, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch argued that a major contributor to a city’s beauty and delight is its “legibility,” or “the ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent pattern.” After mapping the cityscapes of Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles, and interviewing residents, Lynch found that legibility depended on five classes of physical elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. If planners, architects, and builders highlighted such elements, they could improve legibility, and “our cities will be a source of daily enjoyment to millions of their inhabitants.”27 Washingtonians hoped that legibility would arrive with Metro. In April 1975 Washington Star reporter Frank Getlein imagined that the system would revolutionize the way Washingtonians experience their region: Suburban kids will be liberated from lawn-land, enabled to explore the big town, take in its pleasures and enlightenment as people, not merely as members of bused-in crowds. Now brought up as pseudo-sophisticated hayseeds, they will be able to grow up wise in the ways of the world as New York kids have always done, thanks to the subway.
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Beyond such particular advantages and many more, a rapid transit system gives a city a certain form for the resident and even the visitor. . . . Skeleton and circulatory system rolled into one, Metro will give us a far greater command of our city than we have known since horses and trolleys. Once again, the city will become our familiar home, no more the infernal maze of blocked progress, dead time and foul air.
Getlein was perceptive. Washington’s bus service did little for legibility. When WMATA took over the buses in 1973, for example, it found that D.C. Transit had not published a bus map in four years. Route structures were so complicated that a map was impossible; only an atlas would do. A bus map (or atlas) portrays a complex city, built of specialized routes changing by the hour and serving narrow constituencies. The typical bus user knows only a few routes, or stuffs his shirt pockets with schedules, trusting paper for a task beyond any mortal’s memory. Bus routes hardly qualify as the bold paths Lynch identified as crucial to urban legibility.28 In contrast, Metro encompasses the vital core of the Washington area, yet its layout is simple enough to be taken in at a single glance, even memorized. It cannot replace a complete mental construct of Washington—people, events, impressions, smells, and sounds—but it can serve as a guide. When it does so, Metro becomes a way to get around Washington not only physically but mentally. As Getlein hoped, it makes the city familiar again. As a map, Metro provides both route and destination. In Lynch’s terms, Metro’s five lines are bold paths through the metropolitan area, their linearity expressed by uniform design. In contrast, the eighty-six stations serve as nodes, “the strategic spots in a city into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling.”29 Unlike paths, nodes must be differentiated, each one rich with its own associations. This tension between generality and specificity has long animated Metro’s role as a guide to Washington. The most literal expression of Metro’s cartographic function is its system map, a schematic diagram showing all lines and stations, as well as a few, stylized features of the Washington landscape. The map is easily one of the most frequently seen representations of the metropolitan area: it appears not only in Metro cars and stations, but on orientation signs in D.C. and Arlington, in the phone book, and in every tourist guidebook. Moreover, it functions as a symbol of Metro, instantly recognizable to anyone who has used it even once. The map was designed in the early 1970s by Lance Wyman, known for his earlier map of the Mexico City metro. Like many of the world’s metro system maps, the Wyman map descends from Henry Beck’s London Underground diagrams of the 1930s. These maps are not accurate, topographical representations of station locations. Rather, they are diagrams, designed primarily to show the ordinal sequence of stations along a given line, as well as transfer opportunities between lines. Curved tracks are simplified into
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Lance Wyman’s system map, 1976 (WMATA)
straight horizontal, vertical, and 45 degree diagonal lines. Circles representing stations generally occur at regular intervals, regardless of actual distance between stations. And visual clutter is reduced by limiting the map to a few primary colors, simple shapes, and a single sans serif font. In each of these choices, Wyman followed established conventions, many dating back to Beck himself.30
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Wyman’s map also expresses qualities unique to Metro. Bold lines in primary colors denoted routes that would bind neighborhoods to downtown and to one another. Rivers and jurisdictional borders, suddenly less significant obstacles, faded to pale blue and gray. Shortening suburban branches to fit the frame, Wyman understated the distance to Rockville, Vienna, and New Carrollton, just as Metro promised to bring their residents effectively closer to downtown. Both a commuter rail service for the suburbs and a subway for the city, Metro was truly a metropolitan system. And looking at Wyman’s map, riders could see that they were no longer just suburbanites or city dwellers but citizens of a region. The Wyman map also recapitulates some debates that went into Metro’s creation. In 1965 the NCTA’s Rail Rapid Transit report included a map entitled “Rail Rapid Transit for the Motorist,” showing the modest bobtail system overwhelmed by arterial roads, as if to assure Congress that rail transit would be no threat to highways. Similarly, Wyman’s map depicted no people, but it did include thirty-three iconic cars, each denoting a park-and-ride lot. Local officials had sold Metro to Congress as “America’s Subway,” with a special federal role, and, indeed, the only buildings on Wyman’s map were federal landmarks: the White House, Capitol, Washington Monument, and Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Finally, Metro’s promoters spent the 1970s trying to get funds to complete the system. The Wyman map argued inevitability, for it showed a completed 100-mile system in solid lines, with only an absence of black circles denoting those parts which had yet to be completed, or even designed. (Eventually, pragmatism trumped optimism, and beginning in late 1977 the system maps denoted unfinished segments as dashed lines.) A London-style system map may perplex the uninitiated. As geographer David Lewis has observed, such diagrams are as abstract as the bark-painting maps of Australian Aborigines, and require just as much explanation. Schoolchildren may have trouble understanding that the Orange Line to Vienna does not in fact run due west, nor are all its stations spaced at exactly even intervals. Tourists, whose only sense of the city may come from a pocket-sized Metro map, are particularly vulnerable. For example, on the schematic the circles closest to the White House icon denote the Metro Center and Federal Triangle stations, when in fact the McPherson Square station is considerably closer to the real White House. Tourists would be better off with a map that simplified geography on the distant extensions, where there is rarely doubt about the station closest to one’s destination, but followed the city’s actual geography downtown, where stations are sufficiently close together to give travelers a choice.31 Such visitors are many—in 2003, 17 million people visited D.C.32 Since 1969, these tourists have had their own mass transit system: the aptly named Tourmobile. Administered by the National Park Service and operated by a private concessionaire, Tourmobile consists of a fleet of rubber-tired trams with open sides. Although they are not cheap—an all-day adult pass costs
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$20—they are otherwise ideal vehicles for tourists determined to see Washington’s most famous sights. With open sides, expert narration, free reboarding, and routes that pass by every major monument and government palace from Union Station to Mt. Vernon, Tourmobile serves those visitors for whom the ultimate Washington experience is a color snapshot of a neoclassical facade. For the slightly more adventurous visitor, Metro can be a blessing. Just about every guidebook warns visitors away from the city’s complex bus system, then recommends early and frequent acquaintance with Metro. The Unofficial Guide to Washington follows a two-page section called “Driving Your Car: A Really Bad Idea” with fifteen pages on “Riding the Metro: A Really Good Idea.” E. J. Applewhite’s Washington Itself, perhaps the most intelligent guide to the city’s built environment, begins with a six-page paean to Metro as an architectural landmark. Others devote less space, but praise Metro as clean, efficient, and convenient to tourist destinations. Political scientist Kenneth Kolson goes even further, finding Metro “more inspirational than gazing at the U.S. Constitution through translucent glass at the National Archives. . . . Kids can only see the Spirit of St. Louis at the Air and Space Museum, or money being printed at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. But they can ride the Metro.” And they do, happily. In a 2000 survey of visitors on the Mall, nearly three-quarters agreed strongly that they were “comfortable” riding Metro, with 70 percent or more finding it safe, dependable, and easy to navigate.33 Metro was designed for commuters, not tourists, and in several spots that priority shows. The Woodley Park-Zoo-Adams Morgan Station (originally called Zoological Park) was sited for bus lines and business hotels, not panda bears, so it dumps passengers almost half a mile from the National Zoo’s pedestrian entrance on Connecticut Avenue. At the time the station was named, there was discussion of opening a new zoo entrance on Calvert Street, much closer to the Metro, but that was dropped, leaving thousands of disoriented visitors to push their strollers up the long hill. Capitol Hill’s two stations are more convenient to the House and Senate office buildings, where the real work of Congress gets done, than to the Capitol itself, with its tourist crowds. Only rarely did officials build with primarily tourists in mind. In the early 1970s the NCPC persuaded a reluctant Jackson Graham to add a second entrance to the Smithsonian station, making it as useful to visitors in search of the Washington Monument as it is to workers at the Department of Agriculture. And in 1972 the board added a station serving Arlington National Cemetery to the stretch of track north of the Pentagon. In both cases, the federal government picked up the cost. Visitors to the Smithsonian or to the cemetery were coming on national, not local business.34 For local governments, this was the problem. Observers now decry the conversion of working urban landscapes—Times Square in New York, Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, the Inner Harbor in Baltimore—into sani-
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tized playgrounds, “tourist bubbles,” for visitors to stroll and shop. These critics complain that American cities are turning into theme parks. Their warnings come far too late for Washington; its center became a theme park a century ago, thanks to the McMillan Plan. Now the challenge for local governments—particularly that of the District of Columbia—is to burst that bubble, to get visitors to see a city where people live and work. An outof-town visitor who conceives of Washington as a collection of museums will pour little money into the District’s business, will fail to understand the District as a majority-black jurisdiction, and will have no reason to support the aspirations of District residents to full citizenship. With the opening of Metro, local officials saw a way to lure tourists off the Mall, into the city itself.35 The first efforts coincided with the National Bicentennial in 1976. In 1975 the D.C. Municipal Planning Office launched the “Metro Places” initiative as “part of the Bicentennial strategy to expand the visibility of Washington as a city, to include more than just the monumental attraction area of the Mall and the major public buildings.” Downtown Progress published a walking guide to downtown Washington. Ranging from Thomas Circle to Union Station to the Treasury, the tour began and ended at Metro Center.36 With the start of service in 1976, WMATA began its own efforts at encouraging visitors to make Metro their map of the city. Not only has it always printed free guides to the system, available at any Metro station; it has also produced dozens of maps for special groups or events, especially events that flood the Mall with people. Papal masses, presidential inaugurations, the Million Man March, and Independence Day fireworks have all been met with maps designed to spread people among the many stations close by. In the early 1990s inner-city students enrolled in a work-readiness program prepared to explore the city by playing a game with the Metro map as a board.37 In 2000 the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the D.C. Heritage Tourism Coalition, and WMATA jointly produced Washington, D.C.: Beyond the Monuments, a cheerful, two-sided folding map that encourages tourists to venture beyond the most heavily visited destinations. On this map, the White House and Capitol appear only as reference points, and the Smithsonian’s Mall museums are ignored. Instead, the map highlights nine District neighborhoods and their local landmarks, such as the Lincoln Theater in Shaw and Eastern Market on Capitol Hill. Seven of the featured neighborhoods are Metro-accessible, with bus lines to the others (Adams Morgan and Georgetown) clearly marked. The message is unmistakable. The intelligent tourist will explore beyond the Mall and will do so by Metro.38 In addition to telling you where you are going, maps can tell you where you are, giving identities to places. Not for nothing did the Library of Congress spend $10 million on the 1507 Waldseemuller map, the first to label
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Washington, D.C.: Beyond the Monuments (Historical Society of Washington, D.C. / City Museum, 2000)
a land mass as “America.” Neither Metro nor its map have named whole continents, but they have given names to parts of Washington. This power of identifying places has made station names contentious. The earliest National Capital Transportation Agency proposals relied heavily on existing street names (i.e., Taylor Street, 19th and Florida), with a few neighborhoods (Silver Spring, Anacostia) and major buildings (Pentagon, Union Station) thrown in. But Metro’s designers decided that street names were not good enough. In his July 1966 presentation, Harry Weese argued against using intersections to name stations, noting that “zoo, rock creek, dupont, farragut, portrait gallery, judiciary square, the capitol, l’enfant plaza, airport, are evocative of more than a point on the map.” Jackson Graham concurred, and in 1969 he listed four criteria that would “indicate location, distinctively and briefly”: a. Some names come naturally: Rosslyn, Pentagon, DuPont Circle, Bethesda, Prince Georges Plaza.
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b. Others indicate location by at least one coordinate: Backlick Road, Monroe Avenue, Georgia Avenue, Suitland Parkway. c. We have used, where possible, traditional and/or colorful words (Foggy Bottom, Navy Yard) rather than mechanical terms (23d and I St., N.W., 3rd and M, S.W.) d. We have limited names to two words, preferably only one.39 Over the next few years, the WMATA board refined the station names, gradually moving away from federal Washington and toward local Washington. “Marine Barracks” became “Eastern Market,” “Federal Center” became “Suitland,” and “Zoological Park” became “Woodley Park–Zoo.” In part this was done for a pragmatic reason: federal agencies move. A station at 4th and D streets SE might find itself stranded with the name “Voice of America” should that agency relocate. But the shift also mirrored Metro’s transition from federal project to local affair.40 In choosing neighborhood names, Metro revived historic ones, such as Tenleytown, Brookland, and Ballston. Elsewhere it invented names, like “Gallery Place” (chosen to highlight the move of the National Portrait Gallery to the old Patent Building). Both types of names helped name whole neighborhoods. Conversely, developers pay tribute to Metro’s prestige by including “Metro” or a station name in the names of their projects: Ballston Metro Center, Bethesda Metro Center, Rockville Metro Center, and Metro Place at Dunn Loring.41 Left out of the process, once again, are the tourists. Visitors to the Mall crowd the Smithsonian Station—with its comfortingly familiar name— unaware that L’Enfant Plaza would get them closer to the Air and Space Museum or that Archives is closest to the National Gallery. Perhaps most pathetic are the tourists who show up at Mount Vernon Square Station in central Washington expecting George Washington’s plantation, which lies fourteen miles south in Fairfax County.42 Nothing reveals the power of naming better than local and national officials’ strenuous efforts to rename stations. Initially, the Authority hoped to limit station names to one or two words, as Graham noted, and to keep to nineteen letters and spaces, thirteen for transfer stations. This policy held, with a few modifications, for the first decade of Metro operation.43 In the late 1980s, WMATA all but abandoned its restraint. In 1989, at the request of the foundation building the Navy Memorial, the memorial’s name joined Archives. A District developer paid $115,000 to transform Gallery Place into Gallery Place–Chinatown. Howard University, American University, and the University of Maryland all got their initials added to stations a half mile or more away from campus. Envious of Falls Church, which has two stations named after it, the City of Fairfax paid $50,000 to change the name of Vienna to Vienna-Fairfax / GMU, though George Mason University lies two miles from the station. The District of Columbia was by far the worst offender, requesting the renaming of stations to
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Woodley Park–Zoo / Adams Morgan, Mt-Vernon Sq / 7th St–Convention Center, Archives–Navy Memorial–Penn Quarter, and U St / African-Amer Civil War Memorial / Cardozo, which, at forty-four characters exceeded the original limits by 130 percent.44 Renaming costs money, requiring modified signs at every station on the line, and new maps everywhere. Usually the institution or jurisdiction requesting the change picked up the tab. But renaming also bore nonmonetary costs. Washingtonians ridiculed new names as both inelegant and misleading. Columnists sarcastically proposed further changes to create “Columbia Heights / Home of John Jacob Jingleheimerschmidt,” and “Huntington-Everglades,” because, after all, the Huntington Station “is just 1,082 miles from the famous Everglades swamp and its natural wonders.” Board member Carlton Sickles, one of Metro’s founders, confessed that he too feared the trend: “I shudder every time we do this.” Tellingly, some official WMATA documents abandon the politically mandated accretions in favor of the more practical, original names, such as Woodley Park and U Street.45 Despite the clutter, the power of names is too great to resist. Jim Graham, a member of both the D.C. council and the WMATA board, believed that adding “Adams Morgan” to the Woodley Park name would persuade thousands of weekend visitors to his ward to take Metro rather than driving in. Right or wrong, he got his way. E. Jake Jacobson, chairman of the Greater Merrifield Business Association and champion of adding “Merrifield” to the Dunn Loring station name was equally clear in his intentions. We are trying to create an identity,” he explained. “Part of that is changing the name of the Metro stop.”46 Finally, in a farcical repetition of the Natcher blackmail episodes, a southern Congressman threatened to withhold Metro funding to force a name change. In 1998 Congress renamed Washington National Airport as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, and Congressman Robert Barr of Georgia wanted the Metro station named for Reagan as well. The WMATA Board calmly but firmly repeated that renaming could only occur by request by the affected jurisdiction, in this case Arlington County— home to tens of thousands of the federal bureaucrats whom Reagan had blamed for causing most of America’s ills. On 30 November 2001 Barr convinced the House of Representatives to go along with his scheme, forcing the Authority to obey him.47 Even Metro’s seemingly innocuous scheme of naming lines after primary and secondary colors raises problems. Washington is hardly unique in having Red, Green, and Blue lines—Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities name rail lines in similar fashion. But color-blind passengers have trouble distinguishing the Red and Green lines, and even the Orange Line can look red to them. And because each line runs in two directions, knowing the color of one’s train is not enough. That requires knowing the names of the terminal stations: unofficial maps, designed for tourists, some-
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times highlight terminus names. A color-dependent scheme may prove problematic if Metro adds lines. It is easy enough to envision a Purple Line, the color generally accepted in proposals for a circumferential Metro line. But what comes next? Will race-conscious Washingtonians endure a White, Black, or Brown line?48 All of these problems could be erased by naming the lines for the terminal stations, as was originally proposed. But that design also had a grievous flaw. As a 1974 District of Columbia planning document pointed out, such a scheme would name all lines after places in the suburbs, for example, Franconia-Greenbelt. To avoid covering the map with suburban names, the Authority turned to colors.49 One imaginative map proposal was never implemented. Lance Wyman’s Mexico City Metro map had to serve polyglot visitors to the 1968 Olympics. Wyman designed a pictogram for each station. Thus, the sign for the Sevilla Station was the old Spanish aqueduct in a nearby park, and Station Merced, at the city’s market, got a pile of apples. Wyman chose a grasshopper to represent Chapultepec Park, because Chapultepec means “Grasshopper Hill” in Nahuatl. But such associations were ornamental, not essential. Wyman explained, “a visitor can be told to get off at the ‘Grasshopper’ station without having to remember or read the name ‘Chapultepec.’ ”50 For Washington’s Metro, Wyman suggested a similar scheme, with pictograms for the 82 stations then planned. Minnesota Avenue featured a plow extracted from the seal of the State of Minnesota, while Wheaton’s pictogram was a sheaf of wheat. Other icons showed landmarks: the Capitol Dome, the Dupont fountain, and, for Rosslyn, the Key Bridge. Institutional insignia inspired a University of Maryland terrapin for College Park, a scroll for Archives, and a caduceus for Medical Center. For suburban communities without obvious landmarks, Wyman invoked the agricultural past: a tobacco barrel (Springfield), a windmill (Forest Glen), cherries (Clarendon), a cow (Glebe Road).51 Wyman’s icons never made it, but the idea of tempering the uniformity of systemwide architecture and graphics with design elements for specific station areas eventually won out in the realm of public art. As designed, Metro had no place for art. The system’s founding architects—Harry Weese, Stanley Allan, Massimo Vignelli—were minimalists, finding beauty in austere forms and limited colors. They had seen art in other cities’ systems—especially Paris’s new Louvre station—but had rejected the idea for Washington. As Weese later explained, in the United States “the art is going to be bad art. I can guarantee it. If you have a replica of the Winged Victory in Samothrace that’s one thing. But not some cockamamie artist who’s cadging onto their one percent for art.” “Applied art has no place in the functional environment of transit,” Weese argued. A system laden down with distracting graphics might as well earn money from advertising, rather than pay money to artists.52 Local officials had other ideas. In 1975 one D.C. report complained that
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Wyman’s proposal for station icons (Reprinted with permission of Lance Wyman and Bill Cannan, Wyman + Cannan Ltd.)
“Blending [the Metro Center] entrances into the city has been done a little too successfully. There needs to be some free-standing sculpture or other art to give these entrances a better visibility and some pizzazz. Colorful banners above the parapet around the escalators would enhance the festive quality of the station and the surrounding center city shopping district.” “The premise,” explained one critic,” is that while Metro underground stations . . . are basically all alike, the surface surroundings should be as differentiated and unique as possible.” Their Metro Places program foundered when local artists learned the District had raised money for administration but not for commissions. “We’ve been diddled once again,” one sighed.53 Only in 1983 was the first art installed in a Metro station, and even that was temporary. In 1987 WMATA teamed with the First Union National Bank to sponsor a “MetroArt Consortium,” placing art in stations, subject to both institutions’ veto. And veto they did. One sculpture gave the illusion that a tunnel wall had been punctured, not the image the Authority hoped to project. Another included old shoes, incompatible with Metro’s image of cleanliness and newness.54 The MetroArt pieces that did pass muster tended to brighten the stations with neon tubes or backlit stained glass but did little to signify place. In 1997 WMATA launched a second arts program, Arts in Transit. Rather than giving local artists a vague mandate to decorate, the new program sought to mediate transitions between the universal space of the system as a whole and the particular space of a station. That meant art primar-
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Sculptor Foon Sham’s Glory of the Chinese Descendents, Gallery Place–Chinatown Station (WMATA)
ily at entrances and focused on the neighborhood. Community Rhythms, a mural by Howard University Professor Al Smith, depicted both its U Street neighborhood and the joy of music. At Tenleytown, the corridor leading to the fare gates showcases paintings by students at nearby Wilson High School, most featuring the school’s mascot tigers riding trains to Tigertown. At Gallery Place–Chinatown, Foon Sham’s Glory of the Chinese Descendents combines chopstick and fan motifs. And at Metro Center, the hub of the entire system, Byron Peck’s fifteen-by-fifty-foot painting, Scenes in Washington, appropriately shows a range of Washington locales.55 Where a station area did not have an obvious iconic vocabulary, station art can give it one. At Silver Spring, Sally Callmer’s 1989 mural shows hundreds of busy penguins riding Metro on their morning commute. Intended to be displayed for just one year, the mural remained and became an enduring part of the town’s identity; penguins appeared in store windows, parade banners, even official street signs.56 Callmer’s penguins have become a symbol for a small place, Silver Spring, while the trains they ride stand for the metropolitan area as a whole. In them, and in Metro’s map, the specific and the general are forever intertwined. The Commons
On the afternoon of 23 October 2000, Ansche Hedgepeth finished a day of seventh grade at Alice Deal Junior High School in Northwest Washington. After stopping at a nearby restaurant for an order of french fries, to go, she
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rode the elevator down to the platform of the Tenleytown Metro Station. Moments after passing the station kiosk, she was intercepted by a plainclothes officer of the Metro Transit Police. Ordered to watch for violators of Metro’s no-eating policy as part of a systemwide crackdown, the officer handcuffed Hedgepeth and took her into custody.57 The arrest of a twelve-year-old for eating a snack made the front page of the Washington Post and was picked up by newspapers from Los Angeles to London, where the Guardian had Hedgepeth eating “chips” in the “underground.” Columnists from car-dependent cities found it easy to mock the Metro police, sarcastically suggesting that “82 percent of all teens eating french fries in subways are also major pushers for the Colombian drug cartels.” In contrast, a New York Times columnist, accustomed to sticky, rodent-infested subways, reacted with more envy than outrage.58 Back in local Washington, the case was the latest spark in a long debate: how should people behave on Metro? Few would wish all violations to be met with the same stern treatment faced by Hedgepeth. On the other hand, Metro is not a private automobile, in which drivers are free to eat, drink, smoke, sing, or belch as they see fit. Rather, it is a commons, a place where individuals have the right not to be excluded, but only so long as they obey the rules.59 Riders do not always agree on rules or obey them, but when they do, Metro can serve as the great public space of Washington. The great public space of Washington might seem to be the Mall itself. The site of countless protests, celebrations, and pilgrimages, the Mall is indeed one of the world’s great commons. But it is national space, not local space. In his book, The Debt, Randall Robinson imagines a District youth who feels unwelcome on the Mall, “surrounded by monuments and memorials” that “don’t seem intended for him. They do seem, from the looks on their faces, intended for the white family of four from Nebraska standing near him.”60 Robinson expresses the unease of an African American in a mostly white environment. But the boy’s sense of trespassing might also reflect Washingtonians’ displacement from the center of their city. Tourists from Nebraska and other distant locales do dominate the Mall, visually and functionally, just as federal functions dominate the city’s core. In central Washington, the Secret Service can close off streets over the objections of local officials; the Wilson Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, the center of city government, is surrounded by federal offices. At the bottom of a Metro escalator, however, the locals are clearly in charge. Few powerful federal officials, for example, ride Metro. First Lady Rosalyn Carter twice rode in 1978, but for security reasons, no president has. Aboveground, presidential motorcades disrupt traffic, but below ground, Washingtonians are free from the intrusion, except in fantasy. In 1992 President George Bush staged a crack-cocaine arrest in Lafayette Park, then bragged about it on national television. Regardie’s, a local magazine, mocked his ignorance of the real city with a cartoon strip depicting the president— in blackface—on an incognito tour of the town. Confronted with a bronze
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pylon and its glowing “M,” the president is perplexed. “What’s this?” he asks himself. “M Street? . . . An underground mall? . . . Ah . . . A men’s room!”61 Locals do not keep out ordinary tourists, but they do put them in their place. The hazing begins at the station entrance, where visitors find automated fare card machines, complicated fare schemes, bus transfers, and the challenge of exiting with insufficient fare. One guidebook devotes a whole page to the system’s complexities, and even then omits the 10 percent bonus (since revoked) for depositing at least 20 dollars at a time.62 For a commuter making forty or fifty trips a month, the system is soon learned and the cards refilled as is convenient. For a tourist in Washington for the first and perhaps last time, the process requires a lot of work for just a few trips. More noticeably, tourists do not know the unspoken etiquette of riding. They push forward unnecessarily; not knowing, for example, that in the morning rush hour two-thirds of a Glenmont-bound Red Line train will debark at Farragut North. More commonly, tourists stand still when they ought not, notably at the tops and bottoms of escalators. Some Washingtonians scheme about bad advice they could give: “Flashing floor lights in the Metro signal an oncoming earthquake. Run for your life!” Others suggest aggressive responses. “Crowd the stubborn stranger who will not allow you to cross the car width,” counseled one magazine in 1978. “You must shout, ‘going through,’ ‘make way,’ ‘must leave by next stop,’ ‘i have size 13 feet,’ or, simply, ‘please let me out, i am an old native resident.’ ”63 Such advice might suggest that Washingtonians wish tourists did not ride, but the surface hostility may overlay a native satisfaction that Metro is one downtown environment in which residents can assert ownership. Although Metro riders rarely talk to strangers, reserved Washingtonians will sometimes give directions to an obviously lost tourist. In doing so, they perform a kindness, yet assume an air of authority. Even when they do not exchange words, Washingtonians interact on Metro. One lawyer made a hobby of watching his fellow commuters read, and took heart at the persistence of the classics—The Scarlet Letter, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Madame Bovary. Stephen Nordlinger, a journalist, used his time on the Red Line to sketch his fellow riders, later turning his sketches into paintings. The most tender result of the mixing of people on Metro is erotic longing. In its premier issue in 1978, Subway Magazine listed “51 Ways to Use the Subway,” including “1. Get married, 2. Get a divorce, 3. Go have a baby . . . 47. Watch the people . . . 48. Fall in love with a stranger from Foggy Bottom.” Clearly step 47 may lead to step 48. And in a system whose riders are significantly more likely to be single than the general population, steps 1 and 3 are also possibilities.64 Every week, Washingtonians see attractive strangers, then fail to muster the courage to ask them out on dates, only to regret their timidity within hours or days. One rider, finding Metro more pleasant than a singles’ bar,
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asked a Washington Post columnist how he could approach women on Metro without scaring them. This being Washington, the columnist suggested offering a business card, preferably with a whitehouse.gov e-mail address on it. Other bashful admirers take out ads in the “I Saw You” section of the weekly City Paper, describing an incomplete encounter and begging for another chance. Every week, several of these ads describe sightings on Metro trains or in stations; fully a third in a given week may refer to Metro one way or another. “Why don’t we see if our trains collide?” asked one advertiser of a “tall and sweaty” person glimpsed at Woodley Park. “Or I’ll keep riding the Red line until I see you again.” In late 2000 one issue featured ads from two Dupont Circle passengers: a man in a Nader-for-President T-shirt smitten by a “gorgeous redhead,” and a redhead who had tried to signal a man in an Armani suit “but only attracted the dweeb next to you in the Ralph Nader shirt.”65 The responses to these ads are private, but connections do happen. One woman found herself intrigued by the passion with which a man was reading Dante’s Inferno. She agreed to meet him for coffee and bought new shoes for the date, only to have him admit, “I just read ‘heavy’ books in the Metro as a way to meet women.” Perhaps more fruitful are encounters between people with similar commuting routes, who can survey each other repeatedly before actually speaking. In Edward Jones’s short story, “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” Marvella Watkins, a single mother, is still wary of men after a bad experience with a “doofus she met at the club.” Only after she sees an attractive stranger on the Orange Line several times does she resolve to give him her telephone number if asked. Some glances lead to a permanent bond. One junior high student spent hours gazing out the classroom window at the emerging Fort Totten Station; years later, he met his wife on the Red Line. At the other end of the system, Robert Pietropaoli saw Lori Kurek on the King Street platform for weeks before mustering the courage to speak. Lacking a White House business card, he assured her that he worked for the Department of Justice. They were married a year and half later, celebrating part of the wedding back on their lucky platform. Metro has also reshaped the erotic vocabulary of the region. One disk jockey on a Baltimore radio station told her listeners that she had no use for a lover unwilling to “take the Red Line to Shady Grove.”66 As far as is known, no babies have been delivered on Metro, but plenty of children ride. Like needy tourists, babies in arms or strollers can break the customary silence of Metro riders. For slightly older children, riding Metro can be an adventure. Mary Quattlebaum’s delightful children’s book Underground Train narrates the journey of a little girl to see her grandmother. Rather than traipsing over the river and through the woods, the protagonist (accompanied by her mother) hops on the Green Line at Waterfront, changes trains at Gallery Place, and greets her grandmother at the top of the escalator at Cleveland Park. On her way, she waves to a baby, swings on a pole, and navigates the fare gate, all the while imagining the
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The child’s view (Mary Quattlebaum, Underground Train. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1999. Illustration by Cat Bowman Smith. Reproduced with permission of the author and illustrator)
life of the city above. For this alert child, Metro is a rich and stimulating environment.67 Adolescents too young to drive, or simply lacking wheels, use Metro to get to concerts, dates, and even senior proms. Others play hooky to ride Metro to visit the giant pandas at the National Zoo. One carless teenager first took Metro at age four on a trip to the circus; he spent the summer of 2001 riding Metro to malls and movies from Pentagon City in Arlington to White Flint in Rockville. While he wished for direct service to Georgetown and Adams Morgan, he concluded that “metro might be showing its age, but some things get better with age.”68 In practice, teenagers’ misbehavior is likely the greatest source of conflict. Stephen Nordlinger’s sketches of Metro include teenagers rolling dice in the aisles and sprawling across seats reserved for the elderly and disabled. In the District, many teenagers, like Hedgepeth, take Metro to and from school. Freed at the end of the school day, and testing their power, they occasionally shout and curse at adults. Some teen rowdiness represents a clash not only between generations, but between races and classes, as when black public school students find themselves on the mostly white and bourgeois Red Line. Sometimes they are arrested for disorderly conduct; more frequently, no doubt, they leave fellow riders angry and silent.69 Homeless people also ride Metro and cause controversy. Despite features meant to keep them out (such as the absence of public toilets), homeless people do ride Metro. One Fairfax County teenager, left without options after her state support expired, took to riding the Orange Line back and
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forth from Vienna to New Carrollton, catching sleep along the way. A District man found that if he rode Metro for more than three hours, his $1.10 fare card expired, leaving him at the mercy of the station attendant when he wanted to exit.70 By the late 1980s, many homeless people began using Metro as overnight shelter. Although iron gates blocked them from entering stations at night, homeless Washingtonians found that the bottoms of escalator wells offered protection from wind, rain, and snow, with the added benefit of warm air from the tunnels. At several downtown stations—Farragut North and West, Metro Center, and McPherson Square—they spent winter nights huddled just outside the mezzanines or on the motionless escalators.71 Tired of cleaning up cardboard, garbage, and human waste each morning, WMATA officials placed barriers at the tops of escalators, thus denying entrance to the escalator wells. The decision opened a citywide debate, as WMATA insisted that it had no mission to shelter the homeless, while advocates for the homeless argued that “all of us have a role to play in responding to the needs of the destitute.”72 Activist Mitch Snyder physically attacked the barriers. WMATA offered to let some men sleep in a surplus bus, but the barriers remained. The homeless found other ways to use Metro, many of them unpleasant to the riders. Some used bicycle lockers as storage lockers. Others urinated in elevators. More commonly, they panhandled around station entrances. “I’ve been riding it twice a day, every day, every week since Virginia service started,” wrote one rider in late 1991. “But this fall, my attitude changed. I feel threatened on Metro for the first time. A distance needs to be reestablished between the bystanders and the passengers. I now find that I must walk around small groups of men as I approach the station. . . . Now there is more movement, more aggressive behavior and a breakdown in civility.” In early 1992, transit police began shooing beggars away from station entrances. “People pay money to ride our system without hassle,” explained General Manager David Gunn. “It’s not to say we’re not concerned, but we are not equipped to be a social agency.” He warned that tolerating panhandling would let Metro become like his previous post, the New York City subway, where beggars routinely walk down car aisles, gathering donations.73 Although most riders get along surprisingly well, some people simply fail to understand their responsibilities in a commons. One rider dumps his newspapers on the floor of the car, confident that his taxes have paid others to pick up after him. Another clips his fingernails. Another applies heavy makeup. Others deny a seat to a woman so pregnant she describes herself as “looking a bit like Olive Oyl with a 30-pound ball stuffed up her shirt.” Sometimes, riders honestly disagree over what constitutes acceptable behavior. Is it all right to sing hymns? And most riders obey the rules. Soon after the opening of the first segment in 1976, two Washington Star reporters traveled all five stations without finding a smoker or a cigarette butt.74
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Metro riders have the luxury of worrying about litter, for the system is largely free of crime. Crime had been a concern from the earliest planning of the system; in 1965 two congressional opponents of the NCTA warned that “in most cities the criminals are using the subway as their main base of operation. Look at New York.” And crime does happen: in a three-month span in late 1993 and early 1994, Metro saw its first fatal shooting of a passenger and its first fatal shooting of a police officer (both outside of stations), as well as its first shooting of a passenger on a train.75 Nevertheless, such events remain exceptions. “When the system was being planned,” the Authority reported in 1977, “many citizens expressed apprehension and fear that subway stations would be a breeding ground for crime and vandalism. Since operations began, these fears seem to have faded. Crime has been minimal and vandalism virtually non-existent.” In the 1990s, a researcher found crime rates on Metro both lower than those in station areas and lower than on other subway systems. As a former WMATA spokeswoman observed, the best indicator of Metro’s safety is the occasional prominent headline about violence on it. If such crime were common, it would not make headlines.76 Moreover, the system is perceived as safe. Out-of-town visitors bracing for a dangerous environment feel relief as soon as they enter a station. One disabled Vietnam veteran, who chose to save money by staying in a College Park motel and then riding Metro to the Mall, wrote, “The Metro was wonderful. Clean, on time, no boom boxes blasting you out of the car. And, best of all . . . understandable and safe, safe, safe! We really enjoyed the daily ride in, always felt safe, even had people smile at us. The ride in was multicultural. Shades of terror a la New York City were always present in my mind but were never seen or felt.”77 Several factors create both the perception and reality of safety. One of the most important is a lack of places for evildoers to hide. Harry Weese designed stations to be free of blind corners. (In order to provide such a blind corner for a key event in his thriller Absolute Power, David Baldacci had to convert a short, bright passageway at Farragut West into a long, dark tunnel.) WMATA rejected vendors in the stations, to avoid both litter and lurking places for criminals. For similar reasons, station restrooms are unmarked and can be unlocked only by attendants. To complete the sense of surveillance, each station has several video cameras monitoring platforms at all times.78 Station architecture also discourages graffiti, placing most surfaces out of reach of passengers and specifying easy-to-clean materials. Train exteriors were vandalized only thirteen times in the system’s first twenty-five years. But without high maintenance standards, graffiti would accumulate, especially on car interiors, which are not as well defended as the stations. Believing that “graffiti is infectious,” WMATA has tried to remove any vandalism within twenty-four hours. By the mid-1980s, maintenance crews were replacing 160 seat pads a week at a cost of $30 each, and spending
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$1 million per year to erase graffiti. Crews also swept out “sunflower and pumpkin seeds, dirty diapers, newspapers, liquor bottles, underwear, gum, hypodermic needles and even used condoms,” and applying “chewing gum remover,” “vomit cleaner,” or “blood cleaner.” Their efforts paid off; a novel’s protagonist enthuses, “I came out of the Metro . . . feeling cleaner than when I’d gone in.”79 Riders also police one another. From the beginning of operation, WMATA worked hard to persuade riders to think of Metro as their own. Just before the system opened, the Authority produced an “Owner’s Manual,” telling riders, “Be proud of it! It is yours. You paid for it. It was built by you and for you. But, like anything else of value, it can be destroyed all too quickly—like that new home or sleek car that takes so much saving to buy. A dropped cigarette on the carpet, a spilled drink, scribbling on the wall by children of all ages, or the remainder of a sandwich on the floor—you wouldn’t permit it in your home or car, don’t permit in your Metro—by anyone!”80 Riders agreed. In 1977 a neighborhood flyer announced the opening of the first stations of the Blue Line and stated, “We need suggestions as to how to protect our Potomac Station and how to keep it in good and serviceable condition.” A delighted WMATA official noted, “I have finally convinced the community that the Potomac Ave Station is theirs.” In 1978 a journalist observed, “only Washington Subway People on a 10:00 o’clock morning gather in a group to silently watch a girl deface the printing on a column with a penny. In less than five minutes, they were a half-circle around her and the post. Without expression, a leader or a spoken word, they inched closer moving forward by half-steps. Others joined as they came downstairs. Suddenly the girl looked up, threw her penny on the tracks, broke through the half-circle and ran up the still escalator. The people had spoken about their subway.”81 This image suggests that strangers can peacefully band together to protect the commons. How often that happens is impossible to say. One frequent rider cautioned against any approach to strangers after witnessing an incident on the Red Line in which a woman repeatedly slapped a child. When a passenger of a different race tried to distract her, the whole car began to divide along racial lines. He concluded, “subway etiquette mandates as little contact between people as possible, an ugly reality of urban life in this racially diverse metropolis.” The official WMATA advice for passengers who see someone else eating on the trains is to move to an adjacent car and contact the operator on the intercom or the police on a cell phone, rather than confront the violator directly. Because riders alone cannot provide all security for the system, WMATA has had its own police force since shortly after Metro’s opening. Metro’s officers were instructed to arrest, not warn, riders who broke the rules.82 With its carefully controlled environment, Metro can at times resemble a shopping mall. Critics of malls have pointed out that malls and skyways
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discourage the free speech that once characterized urban streets. Similarly, some have charged that Metro is overly controlled. But Metro is not a shopping mall. There are no signs—like those in some malls—warning against gang colors or reserving the right to break up groups of teenagers. Photography is permitted (tripods require permits). Political advertisements are unfettered, despite repeated reconsideration of this policy (and some litigation) after ads about gay rights, Reaganite callousness, the Palestinian intifada, and the decriminalization of marijuana.83 Most significantly, Metro’s downtown stations are pedestrian places. Riders coming off Metro do not slip into sealed automobiles, as they would at a shopping mall, but instead emerge into plazas that are among the liveliest urban environments in the metropolitan area. Panhandlers remain at the tops of escalators, along with street musicians playing flutes or drumming on plastic paint barrels, political candidates buttonholing voters, and schoolchildren selling doughnuts. Newspaper vending boxes crowd escalator parapets. Painted or molded in a rainbow of colors and featuring outof-state dailies and alternative weeklies as well as the mainstream press, the boxes are the antithesis of the uniform architecture and furnishings in the stations themselves. It is as if the pent-up energy of a complex city explodes from the pressurized Metro into the freedom of the real street. In comparison to station entrances, Metro station interiors are indeed sterile and controlled. Yet even in that sterility, there is a kind of freedom. Confident that they are not about to be grabbed or harassed, Metro riders can treat each other as equals, with courtesy. As the system ages and gets more crowded, every experienced rider can, with some cause, lament the passing of the good old days. But the new days are still relatively good. One guidebook explained, “Metro can make riders of other systems think they’ve died and gone underground to heaven.” When, in 1997, the Washington Post asked readers for their best and worst experiences of Washington, Metro frequently appeared on the list of bests. (A college student who had been handcuffed for drinking a soda on a train listed that experience as his worst moment in Washington.)84 Surely part of Metro’s civility springs from its environment. “Take the roughest man,” wrote George Pullman, the inventor of the luxury railroad car, “and bring him into a room elegantly carpeted and furnished, and the effect on his bearing is pronounced and immediate.” Metro cars may not be elegantly carpeted, but carpeted they are, much to the astonishment of visitors. Even in periods of financial distress, the WMATA board has refused to part with this visible luxury. The ride itself is generally so smooth, asserts one humorist, that “you could perform a bris without incident.”85 And, of course, the stations are palaces. Much of the credit goes to Harry Weese and his team, but a number of other designers contributed. The lighting, for example, was the creation of William Lam, who had worked with Weese on several earlier projects. Lam rejected quantitative measurements of good lighting, arguing that quality matters more than quantity,
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“Some Washington Post Readers” (Copyright 1999 Andrew Z. Glickman)
and the most comfortable environments were those whose artificial lighting emphasized entrances, rhythms, and shapes, rather than flooding the entire room or street with wattage. “It is important to realize,” Lam wrote, not long after the system opened, “that passenger safety may be endangered less by excessively low lighting levels than by confusing circulation patterns, especially under crowded conditions. Special types of lighting will serve the dual purpose of enhancing the appearance of the spaces and improving safety and traffic flow.”86 Even Lam wanted enough light for casual reading, not always achieved in Metro stations. In 1968 he lobbied for painted vaults. But the stations were not painted, and several early stations were built with relatively dark concrete. On top of this, light fixtures were not built to Lam’s specifications; parts of the pylons obscured some light intended for the vaults. The result was levels as low as one foot-candle, far less than specifications. To fix the problem, WMATA installed direct lighting on mezzanines. In new stations, it adopted a simplified vault, with fewer, shallower coffers (therefore fewer and lighter shadows) and a lighter-color concrete. These stations are notably brighter.87 Another vital amenity is Metro’s quiet. Early in the system’s operation, a survey team found that while two trains leaving the station at once could produce noise levels of ninety-one A-weighted decibels, a more typical level was eighty-four, or half the noise of Philadelphia’s system. No one technology accounts for this calm. Welded rails eliminate the “clickety-clack” of older railroads and sit on rubberlike cushions. Gentle curves reduce the
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Metro-inspired operatic set by designers Peter Sykora and Götz Friedrich (Photograph by Joan Marcus; used with permission)
friction of steel wheels on steel rails. The cars ride on air springs, while the stations are filled with sound-absorbent panels.88 Put together, the architecture, lighting, noise suppression, and behavior make the arrival of a train into an underground station a magnificent sound-and-light show. In the quiet, softly lit station, the platform lights begin flashing, like birds taking wing as they sense the footsteps of an approaching beast. Then one hears the train, first announced as a percussive rumble, like a burst of tympani. Steel rails turn golden with the train’s reflected headlights. Next, the train itself enters, its rumbling replaced with whistling, high notes of deceleration. As the train sweeps into the station, its shadow flies across the vault. At last, both train and shadow come to rest. Imitating a locomotive venting steam, each car emits a soft pneumatic gasp as the doors, in the words of Mary Quattlebaum, “slip aside like silver drapes.”89 And when those doors open, twelve or eighteen carpets of light spill onto the platform. The show is not over; now human performers come forward. When they all know their parts, the boarding process becomes a dance in four beats. In the first beat, just after the doors open, passengers standing near the door, but whose journey is not yet over, step onto the platform and to the side of the exit, like footmen making way for a princess. On the second beat, passengers whose journey is complete exit the car, making their way down an aisle graciously formed by those waiting to board. On the third beat, the footmen return to the car. And on the fourth, passengers on the
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platform, who have waited patiently, finally enter. It does not take much to disrupt this dance, just a clod who rushes into the car, or an impatient driver who sounds the “doors-closing” chime too soon. But when everything goes right, the effect is astounding. In 1989 the Deutsche Oper Berlin brought its production of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. When the curtain rose, Washingtonians were astonished and delighted to see a set whose coffered vault resembled the interior of an underground station in their own Metro. Set designers Peter Sykora and Götz Friedrich had drawn their inspiration in large part from a photograph of Metro. Seeking a “bracket” that could contain all four operas—and every form of drama from a mystery play to a “bourgeois tragic drama” to science fiction—they found in Metro an ideal neutral space. As Sykora explained it, the Metro photograph portrayed “a space without beginning and ending in no definite historical style, a space which allowed of associations reaching from the early Christian catacombs to an atomic waste-storage area. It was an area encompassing not only sorrow but also representing protection . . . as well as being an everyday kind of room. . . . Magnification and diminution became possible, as well as the use of the most different materials. Distance and proximity, above and below could be imagined within this framework. The binding ‘bracket’ for Wagner’s gigantic work had been found.”90 By the time Sykora discovered this bracket, Washingtonians had been playing out their own drama on Harry Weese’s set for thirteen years. With the stark stations and trains as their stage, riders themselves provide the life of the drama. Of the opera’s many plots, perhaps the most profound is the mixing of people. In a society that so often segregates people by race, class, age, and geography, Metro is a vast blender. On it, strangers may fall in love, or they may fight. Most frequently, though, they find a comfortable medium, not too close and not too far from each other. Though the rhythm of the shared machine may at times break down, it mostly works, a triumph of urban life.
Conclusion
Saturday, 13 January 2001, was sunny and, for winter, a warm day in Washington. It was a good day for school bands, pennants, and balloons, all of which marked the ceremonies—one in the District of Columbia and one in Maryland—celebrating the opening of five new stations on Metro’s Green Line. At the ceremonies, D.C. politicians thanked Prince George’s County politicians, and Prince George’s County politicians thanked D.C. politicians. Local officials praised federal officials, and federal officials praised local officials. A few politicians thanked all who had dug ditches. The engineers sat quietly and talked to each other.1 Perhaps the most striking aspect of the ceremonies was their focus on the completion of the five-station stretch of line. For WMATA had finished not only the Branch Avenue line, not only the Green Line, but the 103-mile regional system, a system not terribly different from the 98-mile system authorized more than thirty-one years earlier. Yet to dwell on the completion of the 103-mile system would be to suggest that Metro was finished, its form forever settled. That was not the case. Rather, Washingtonians continued to debate Metro’s future. In the debates of the new century, they could benefit from an understanding of the past and of the idealism that created Metro. The most dramatic debate concerned expansion. For close to a quarter century, Metro’s system map had shown blank circles and dotted lines for future stations and routes. The new map unveiled that day was no exception. Already it showed a new station to be added on the long stretch of Red Line between Union Station and Rhode Island Avenue in the District, plus two new stations on the eastern end of the Blue Line to Largo in Prince George’s. For years, WMATA had dismissed talk of building beyond the 103 miles, emphasizing the need to keep promises already made. Only in the mid-1990s, as designers neared the end of their work on the original system, could the Authority seriously consider additional segments. And many were the considerations. In the District, planners imagined stations and lines serving the city’s core. The National Capital Planning Commission called for a downtown “circulator” (the precise technology left undefined) to connect monuments in central Washington and Arlington National Cemetery. D.C.’s planners dreamt of stations that would decongest the hotspots of Adams Morgan and Georgetown. A new trunk line, or a light-rail route, could add more east-west, crosstown service. In this vision, Washington
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Transit Service Expansion Plan, 1999 (WMATA)
would gradually accumulate a dense net of rail lines like those in London, Paris, and New York.2 Northern Virginia focused on rail transit to Dulles Airport. The proposal had been studied in the 1960s and 1970s but kept on the back burner until the 103-mile system neared completion. Only in 1997 did Virginia complete the Dulles Corridor Transportation Study, calling rail the preferred alternative for better access to the airport. To serve sprawling Tysons Corner, planners envisioned an elevated loop with several stations. Grafting rail onto an already developed Tysons would be unlikely to create another Ballston or Bethesda, which grew up around rail. But it would be a start.3 In Maryland, besides the Largo extension, officials talked of a circumferential line to connect existing stations, like the ring lines serving London and Moscow. Metro’s planners were always aware of suburb-to-suburb
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commuting, and when possible they had built circumferential capacity into the system. For example, John Williams deliberately joined two routes at Rosslyn to allow commuters from the Vienna line to reach the Pentagon or Alexandria without crossing the Potomac into Washington. But for the most part, planners judged that the radial lines were a higher priority. Because of the concentration of employment downtown, these routes would have a higher patronage, and more walk-ons, than any purely suburban ring. And from the freeway opponents’ point of view, the damage of the Beltway had already been done by the mid-1960s, so it was more important to provide freeway alternatives in corridors not yet paved. That did not necessarily mean a ring line was not desirable, and soon after the first Metro segment opened in 1976, Montgomery County executive Jim Gleason asked the WMATA staff to study the prospects for a light-rail line using the Beltway right-of-way. Nothing much came of that, but the idea resurfaced in the late 1990s, championed by then county executive Douglas Duncan. By September 2001 Maryland officials seemed to agree on the desirability of some circumferential line, arguing mainly over whether to build a light-rail system inside the Beltway or a heavy-rail line further out.4 All expansion plans were threatened not long after by a shaky national economy and a failed tax referendum in Northern Virginia. By early 2003, planners in the District, Maryland, and Virginia were all pointing to buses on exclusive rights-of-way as a potentially cheaper mode than heavy or light rail. A greater long-term threat to grand designs for transit was WMATA’s 2003 decision to lay off 90 percent of its planning and construction staff for lack of work.5 Though the specifics were new, the terms of the debate over extension dated back to Metro’s early history. Certainly the relative merits of subways and freeways remained in contention. In the District, freeway opponents were no longer content to block new roads; they hoped to remove or hide the freeways that had been built. Inspired by Boston’s Big Dig, designed to bury an elevated freeway, National Capital Planning Commission planners and private citizens called for the demolition or decking of several portions of the Inner Loop. In the Maryland suburbs, residents fought over a new “Intercounty Connector” highway to link Montgomery and Prince George’s counties north of the Beltway, while citizen opposition killed proposals for a new highway, and Potomac bridge, linking the high-tech centers of Fairfax and Montgomery counties. Likewise, as the Beltway’s Wilson Bridge crumbled, its replacement proved controversial. Some called for a caronly bridge, while others demanded fewer lanes and capacity for rail tracks. Eventually, the latter was chosen, but planners still disagreed over what sort of rail the bridge should carry or where the potential rail line should go.6 Design was also debated, with the tension between utility and beauty as evident as it was when Weese squared off against the Commission of Fine Arts. Although the vaulted station design has become central to Metro’s identity, WMATA has been an unreliable steward of its architectural legacy.
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In the early 1990s, the Authority painted the vaults of several stations, ignoring Weese’s commitment to “pure structure in plain concrete.” Later, the Authority further insulted Weese’s materials by bolting flimsy plastic signs, reading “Thank you for riding Metro,” onto his monumental granite parapets. Predictably, signs were soon gone at many stations, leaving empty, ugly brackets. And when WMATA decided to cover its escalators to protect them from rainfall, the WMATA staff chose a boxy canopy design with little thought. Only rejection by the Commission of Fine Arts and an outcry among the city’s architectural establishment forced the Authority to run a competition, yielding a more elegant design that draws from Weese’s coffered vaults.7 The issue of metropolitan governance also remained unsettled. In its haste to pass a compact before the National Capital Transportation Agency could break ground, the Joint Transportation Commission of the 1960s had created a limited transit authority with no direct taxing power and no role in highway planning. That compromise had succeeded in creating WMATA and in getting Metro built, but Metro was left without secure funding, and no strong, regional agency could plan for the area’s complete transportation needs. In the 1990s the Greater Washington Board of Trade resurrected the idea of a regionwide transportation authority with power to plan both roads and transit and to raise its own taxes. Elected officials were skeptical, but a Virginia–Maryland–District of Columbia Joint Legislative Commission on Interstate Transportation—a reincarnation of the JTC—was willing to discuss the idea.8 Another political problem of the 1960s left unfinished was the matter of self-government for the District of Columbia. The momentous changes of the 1960s and early 1970s established the right to vote in presidential elections, a nonvoting delegate to the House of Representatives, and an elected city council and mayor. Then home rule stalled. An amendment to give District residents voting representation in Congress failed to be ratified by the states, and the Home Rule charter continues to deny the District powers enjoyed by the fifty states, notably the power to tax income earned by commuters from other jurisdictions. Moreover, Congress retains power over District of Columbia appropriations, including taxes raised by the District itself, and from time to time members of the House of Representatives have succumbed to the temptation of blackmailing the city to satisfy their demands. Congressman Bob Barr used the congressional appropriations power to force WMATA to rename the airport station. Clearly, the House is not ready to surrender its power to manage local affairs.9 And basic issues of maintenance, operations, and behavior remain on the table. In August 2001, with ridership soaring, the Authority mooted proposals to order some new cars with bench seating along the walls, rather than pairs of seats facing the ends of the trains. Such a change would increase the system’s capacity, but only by having a larger percentage of standing riders. Richard Heck, who in the 1960s designed the car interiors, could
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only regard the scenario as a “grim” step backward. In 2005 the Authority introduced railcars whose exteriors were covered with advertisements for McDonald’s, a further retreat from Weese’s “public approach” of the 1960s. Yet such steps may be necessary. In April 2004 General Manager Richard White projected near-term needs of $1.5 billion for maintenance and improvements and warned of “reliability falling, ridership loss, road congestion increasing and air quality decreasing. It’s a death spiral.” But a study of the Authority’s finances showed that a “stable and reliable” revenue source remained as elusive as when mandated a quarter century earlier.10 And Metro continued to take on new functions. As Washingtonians assembled a bid to host the Summer Olympics in 2012, Metro became a key selling point, just as rail had been in the successful Salt Lake City and Athens bids. That bid failed, but in 2004 Metro helped to bring major league baseball back to Washington, with a proposed stadium to be built close to the Navy Yard station. On a bleaker note, the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 emphasized security. Although Metro performed admirably on the 11th itself, running a normal schedule and helping to evacuate the center of the city, the attacks did hurt the system. They deflated the area’s tourism sector while heightening fears of biological or chemical attack, like the 1995 nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. WMATA was forced to remove trash cans and newspaper recycling containers from station platforms, except for the Pentagon, Smithsonian, and Capitol South stations, which already had bomb-proof trash receptacles. Not only were riders left without a place to dispose of trash, but the cans had been the most prominent place on the platform to display the graphic warnings against eating and drinking. Tourists swilling coffee, along with cups and wrappers left on benches and platforms, became more common.11 Metro will never be perfectly secure, just as it has not perfectly achieved any of the goals of its creators. The Washington region ranks among the highest nationwide in ozone pollution, though some of that is due to industrial pollutants blowing in from the Midwest. Its citizens face some of the longest commutes in the country, with roughly 200,000 people (many of them transit riders) spending an hour or more to get to work. Washington remains, in the terms of the Brookings Institution, “A Region Divided,” with poor minorities concentrated in the eastern District of Columbia and in Prince George’s. Metro has alleviated these problems but cannot solve them.12 Nor has Metro realized the patronage its planners predicted. In 1967 the system’s traffic consultant predicted that in 1990, the rail system would carry 281 million riders per year, while bus and rail combined would carry “26 percent of all 1990 regional work trips, and 61 percent of the peak hour trips to Washington’s downtown area.” In fact, by 2000–2001, the rail system carried 174,268,000 passengers per year. One could argue that since 174 million is less than 281 million, even ten years after the target date, patronage has been disappointing. Or one could recall that the 1967 figure anticipated system completion by 1980, so the 281 million figure is
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really a goal for the system ten years after completion. In that case, we must wait until 2011 to evaluate the accuracy of the forecast. And even then, one might recall Ken Schellenberg’s comment, quoted in the introduction: “If Metro is keeping ‘only’ a half-million people off the road every day, isn’t it worth every penny?”13 Patronage in percentage terms is equally ambiguous. At the end of the twentieth century, transit accounted for 37 percent of peak hour trips into downtown Washington and Arlington, 11.2 percent of all regionwide commuting trips, but less than 2 percent from suburb to suburb. Evaluating these figures depends on one’s unit of analysis. The suburb-to-suburb figure, for example, includes commutes in Stafford, Loudoun, and Frederick counties, dozens of miles from the nearest Metro station. Surely the failure of Metro to attract commuters in Fredericksburg does not diminish its value. As Paul Weyrich and William Lind have argued, “we need to ask not what percentage of total trips transit carries, but what percentage it carries of trips for which it can compete.” Just to complicate matters, transportation planning expert George Wickstrom notes that if one is concerned about traffic congestion, air pollution, and energy consumption, the real measure of a transit system is not trips, but person-miles. A commuter with a thirty-mile trip who chooses transit over driving alone is sparing the air a lot more ozone than someone with a five-mile trip who makes the same choice. Moreover, the decision to build rail instead of freeways has also shaped driving behavior. Thanks not only to transit riding but also to relatively high rates of carpooling and walking, metropolitan Washington has the third-lowest percentage of workers who drive alone to work, after New York and San Francisco. And even those who drive can gain; one study estimated that had transit not operated in 2001, Washingtonians would have endured an additional 51.3 million hours of travel delay.14 Rather than sweat every detail, perhaps it would be best to evaluate Metro in reference to the alternatives, for it must be remembered that Metro emerged largely as a protest against other plans. By the mid-1950s, with tens of thousands of Washingtonians leaving for the suburbs every year, the Washington region and the federal government had four basic choices. The first would have been to impose strict controls on land use and fuel consumption in an effort to keep people and jobs in the center city. This is largely what Western Europeans did in the same decades, but Washington is not a European city, and it is all but impossible to imagine such policies being enacted in the 1950s. As Mass Transportation Survey director Keneth Hoover explained, “We operate on a democratic basis, and planners can only advise. . . . You cannot do the same as the Swedish people do who build the thing totally as government and say this will be this and that will be that.” Even in the late 1980s, presidential candidate Michael Dukakis was ridiculed for his eagerness to read a book on Swedish land-use planning: Americans will not soon embrace Scandinavian-style controlled growth.15
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The second option, the one proposed by the National Capital Parks and Planning Commission in 1950, was to tolerate or even encourage decentralization without building significant new transportation capacity to the center. Had this policy been maintained, the national Mall and the Federal Triangle would have remained the symbolic capital of the nation, but the executive departments and the bulk of private employment would be dispersed. The core of Washington could easily have become a tourist-dominated museum, like Venice, bordered by a depopulated ruin, like Detroit. Washingtonians caught a glimpse of this outcome in the early 1970s, on the eve of Metro’s opening, as residents left the District, and downtown, bereft of investment, became dominated by the sex industry. And even a gentler decline would have left the region without a vital center. As Wickstrom explained, “if you want a city to have a core—if you want to have a place, an identity—you’ve got to get people in as the region expands. Otherwise, you wind up with five, six different regions. Some kind of mish-mash that looks a lot like Los Angeles.”16 A third alternative, and the one that dominated political discourse from the publication of the Inner Loop plan in 1955 until Natcher’s defeat in 1971, was to allow the suburbanization of population, but to bring people back into the city to work by carving freeways through residential neighborhoods, commercial districts, and parklands. Whether freeways were built alone or supplemented with rail (in the “balanced transportation” system that the city’s newspapers, business groups, and highway lobbyists demanded), the effect would have been much the same. Some Washingtonians could have driven to work more easily, but a freeway network through the center of Washington would have destroyed the city as a place for pedestrians. Paths would have been blocked by multilane freeways, destinations replaced by parking garages, buildings turned away from the street, and the air made even less breathable. L’Enfant’s city of avenues and parks would have disappeared, at least until a Big Dig rebuilt what had been lost. Direct comparisons are difficult, but some of the effect of balanced transportation in Washington may be seen in Atlanta, which built both freeways and rail in the 1960s and 1970s. With the freeways in place, suburban voters had less need for rapid transit, and in Gwinnett, Cobb, and Clayton counties they refused to tax themselves to join the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. Because of this defection, rail plays less of a role in Atlanta than it does in Washington. MARTA is half the length of Metro and serves a narrower base. In 1990 only 4.7 percent of workers in metropolitan Atlanta took transit to work, compared with 13.7 percent of workers in metropolitan Washington. And in the mid-1990s transit handled only 20 percent of trips to Atlanta’s central business district, compared with 37 percent in Washington. In part due to such low transit usage, Atlantans on average drive more miles than residents of any other city in the world and suffer just as much delay from congestion as do Washingtonians. And to accommodate driving, they have filled much of their downtown with
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structured parking, resulting in a far less inviting streetscape. Atlanta is smaller than Washington and has a smaller downtown, but its experience hints at what might have occurred in Washington had the proponents of balanced transportation prevailed. Rail might have remained bobtailed at twenty-five or thirty miles, transit would have remained a service primarily for those with no other choice, and Washington would suffer more air pollution and the other consequences of auto-dependent sprawl.17 The fourth basic alternative, the one ultimately chosen, was to build a regional rail system as a substitute for a highway net. Only this alternative could allow the growth of employment in the District while maintaining Washington as a livable city. The regional rail system need not have looked exactly as Metro does today. Perhaps an 80-mile system, requiring buses and cars to get a bit closer to the center of town before discharging their passengers, would have provided most of the benefits of the 103-mile system at a lower cost. Alternatively, had construction not been delayed by Natcher, Reagan, and inflation, Washington might today have a 150- or 200-mile system, built on land acquired cheaply in advance of development, with service to more downtown destinations and suburban points. But only a fairly large, metropolitan-scaled system could do Metro’s present job of binding core and periphery into a single, metropolitan whole. Metro does have its flaws, but most cannot be laid at the feet of the NCTA, WMATA, or any one group of people, for every major decision was negotiated among a range of actors. Most of Metro’s serious shortcomings—its failure to serve Adams Morgan and Tysons Corner, the disruption caused by construction and parking lots, the long indifference to disabled riders—resulted from its creators’ scarce resources, competing priorities among well-intentioned citizens, and the need to weigh all benefits against tightly controlled costs. The somewhat unrealistic patronage forecasts resulted in large part from unrealistic population and land use projections imposed by planning agencies. Even Metro’s massive cost overruns are in large part the result of budget constraints; with a steadier flow of capital funds, those funds could have been spent more efficiently.18 The real pity of Metro may be that it did not cost more. We cannot know how long Metro will run, but consider that a railroad viaduct built in 1835—and subsequently reinforced—now bears Acela trains speeding at 150 miles per hour. Similarly, the technology of Metro’s trains may change, but the basic routes—and the land use patterns they foster—may last centuries. Why then, should a study evaluating Metro’s worth look only fifteen years in the future? Yet that is as far as the 1976 Faucett study gazed before calling for Metro to be cut in half.19 In 1962 Robert Wood, later under secretary of housing and urban development in the Johnson administration, advised Darwin Stolzenbach, Questions of cost feasibility and the comparative advantages of different modes of transportation have to be placed alongside of questions of plan-
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ning, of land use controls, of minority housing . . . of the new functions of the Central Business District, if we are to have clear images and choices about the style and environment of urban life we wish to enjoy. To make our public decisions solely on the basis of narrowly-conceived models involving narrowly defined costs . . . would be to deprive ourselves of the great bulk of relevant data which physical, engineering, and social sciences now make available to us.
Several of Metro’s shapers took this broader view, rejecting suggestions that their creation be evaluated on strictly economic terms. Tom Deen, who worked in Washington as an NCTA staffer and later consultant and went on to advise on transit systems around the world, said in 1999, “I’m not even sure you can make a compelling argument, numbers wise, that the Metro in Washington was a wise thing. I think it is, on a subjective basis.” William Herman, the NCTA and WMATA planner, stated simply that Metro had saved downtown Washington. “I have no apologies to make for overestimating ridership and revenue,” he reflected. “It was in the public interest.” Stan Allan, the architect, recalled that “everybody was going to have the same stations, equal treatment, because they were all paying for it. Nobody was saving money, going second class. They were all going first class together. It was a great trip.”20 Economic studies of transit will always be necessary, for without a solid understanding of the available alternatives, public moneys will be squandered. Quantitative studies may help predict how much a system will cost and how many people are likely to ride it, though given the complexity of these projects, no one should be surprised if projections prove imprecise. The system built is never the same as the system planned. And even if we had perfect knowledge of a system’s future cost and patronage, figures alone cannot determine if the system is worth building (though they may rule out some impractical proposals). Any quantitative evaluation that denies the multiple and evolving functions of transit risks a bias against not only transit but cities and public action as well. Economists and planners must remember that their science can only inform, not resolve, a debate. As Joseph Wholey, a WMATA board member and later chairman, explained in reference to the alternatives analysis of the 1970s, no study can dictate policy. “You just look at it and then you make a judgment, a political judgment.”21 Such simple wisdom is the greatest lesson Metro can offer to other cities. Not every city can use a multibillion-dollar, regionwide heavy-rail system. Other metropolitan areas lack Washington’s concentration of employment downtown and, like Washington, are adding most jobs to their suburbs, not central business districts. They lack such federal controls as the authority of the Commission of Fine Arts to insist on monumental stations and the power of the General Services Administration to steer employment to station areas. Cities starting transit systems today have already built their
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freeways, so they will not be able to follow Washington’s model of rejecting highways as the basis for city planning. More generally, the Great Society moment has passed. Since Vietnam and Watergate, Americans have remained suspicious of big government, expressing their distrust in tax revolts and votes for candidates who promise to dismantle and deregulate. On the day of George W. Bush’s inaugural in 2001, two triumphal visitors from Texas spent their Metro escalator ride condemning Kennedy, Johnson, and the liberals who had ruined America, even as they marveled at the clean, efficient, and “good-lookin’ ” subway about them.22 Likewise, the federal government has remained distrustful of massive public works projects. Since the 1970s, the Department of Transportation has stuck to the Ford administration approach of funding only incremental transit construction, rather than approving regionwide systems in the manner of Metro. Perhaps only a major shift in national ideology, comparable with the New Deal and the Great Society, can return public transportation to health and prominence both in Washington and around the nation. But as other American cities ponder smaller networks of light rail, bus rapid transit, and even monorail, their citizens can learn Metro’s lesson that the function of a transportation system is not merely to move bodies but to move bodies in a way that shapes a city. Unlike private automobiles, rail can deliver thousands of people without creating an overwhelming demand for parking. Unlike cars or traditional bus systems, rail can offer an alternative to freeways, saving historic districts and parklands and preserving a city’s pedestrian scale. Its inflexible routing can give developers and property purchasers the certainty needed to create transit-oriented development. And its stations can serve as public spaces in ways that bus stops do not. For all of these reasons, a transportation decision constitutes a broader choice. Warren Quenstedt, deputy administrator of the National Capital Transportation Agency and deputy general manager of WMATA, emphasized this point in an interview after his retirement. He noted that before one can determine what level of service, what technology, and what routes should constitute a transportation system, one must first ask, “What kind of city do you want?”23 In his fine book on the New York subway, Michael Brooks shows how artists, writers, and poets used that crowded, noisy, vital machine as a metaphor for New York itself: the transit system as symbol of the city.24 Turning that comparison around, the city functions as a symbol for the train. Like cities, transit systems are complex and growing human creations, with multiple functions. The great cities of the world are justified not with mission statements, bullet points, and quantitative goals, but with a common understanding that they serve evolving human needs both practical and spiritual. Great transit systems deserve the same appreciation. The word “republic” is derived from the Latin term res publica, literally, a “public thing.” Metro is a public thing. It is public transportation, pub-
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Conclusion
lic works, public policy, public investment, and, since its opening, public space. It is a monument to confidence in the public realm. Metro has been championed by people who believe that public things need not be mean, utilitarian, or even quantifiably cost-effective. Rather, its advocates have argued that public things should be grand, just, and enduring. As a symbol of urbanity, a preserver of neighborhoods, a work of beauty, a political unifier, a shaper of space, and a meeting ground for all Washingtonians, Metro makes Washington that much more the great city dreamed of by visionaries from Peter L’Enfant forward, and it makes America that much more the Great Society envisioned by Lyndon Johnson and the liberals of the 1960s. The visionaries have not and never will achieve perfection, but Metro shows that even in pragmatic matters of planning, idealism has a place.
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Notes
Recordings and, in some cases, transcripts of interviews by the author have been deposited as the Washington Metro Oral History Project, Department of Special Collections, Gelman Library, George Washington University. Introduction
1. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1976), series Q-153 and Q-175; Owen D. Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), chaps. 14 and 15. 2. Lyndon Johnson, “The Great Society,” address at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 22 May 1964, LBJL website, http://oak.lbjlib.utexas.edu/website/text_whca8_michigan. html (accessed 10 July 2003); Irwin Unger, The Best of Intentions: The Triumphs and Failures of the Great Society under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 51. 3. Johnson, “The Great Society.” 4. Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994); Michael Bernick and Robert Cervero, Transit Villages in the 21st Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997); Vukan R. Vuchic, Transportation for Livable Cities (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), xix; Jonathan Barnett, The Fractured Metropolis: Improving the New City, Restoring the Old City, Reshaping the Region (New York: IconEditions, 1995), 231. 5. John R. Meyer, John F. Kain, and Martin Wohl, The Urban Transportation Problem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), esp. part 3. For economic critiques of postwar rail systems, see, for example, Melvin M. Webber, The BART Experience—What Have We Learned? (Berkeley: Institute of Urban and Regional Development, 1976); Peter Hall, Great Planning Disasters (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), chap. 5; Jose A. Gomez-Ibañez, “A Dark Side to Light Rail?” Journal of the American Planning Association 51 (1985): 337–351; Don Pickrell, “A Desire Named Streetcar: Fantasy and Fact in Rail Transit Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 58 (1992): 158–176; Jonathan Richmond, “New Rail Transit Investments—A Review: Summary Paper,” Harvard University, 24 September 1998; and Alan A. Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), chap. 6. 6. John W. Bates, “A Look at the Critics of Rail Transit Programs,” in Andrew Hamer, ed., Out of Cars / Into Transit: The Urban Transportation Planning Crisis (Atlanta: Georgia State University, 1976), 170–181; Jesse Simon, “Let’s Make Forecast and Actual Comparisons Fair,” TR News 156 (September–October 1991): 6–9; Vukan Vuchic, “Recognizing the Value of Rail Transit,” TR News 156 (September–October 1991): 13–19; and Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind, Does Transit Work? A Conservative Reappraisal (Washington, D.C.: Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, May 1999). Lyle C. Fitch criticizes a 1962 report by Meyer,
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Notes to Pages 3–7
Kain, and Wohl for vastly underestimating the costs of urban freeway construction; see his Urban Transportation and Public Policy (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, 1964), 131, n. 19. There are, of course, exceptions to this polarized debate. For example, Boris S. Pushkarev, Jeffrey M. Zupan, and Robert S. Cumella, Urban Rail in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), offers quantitative analysis tempered by an understanding of the political and cultural nuances involved in transportation planning. 7. U.S. Comptroller General, Need to Resolve Metro Funding (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 29 June 1977), 4. 8. William J. Murin, Mass Transit Policy Planning: An Incremental Approach (Lexington, Mass.: Heath Lexington Books, 1971). See chapter 4 of this book for a more complete account of the origins of the Mid-City line. Stephen Zwerling, Mass Transit and the Politics of Technology: A Study of BART and the San Francisco Bay Area (New York: Praeger, 1974); Meyer et al., Urban Transportation Problem, 349–353. 9. Andrew Hamer, The Selling of Rail Rapid Transit: A Critical Look at Urban Mass Transportation Planning (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1976), 101–144. For the origins of the demand projections, see Stolzenbach to Staats, Deputy Director, Bureau of the Budget, 8 January 1963, OMB-NA, box 15, folder: Agency Views on NCTA Report to the President, 1962–1963; and Thomas B. Deen, interview by the author, Stevensville, Maryland, 1 December 1999; on reception of Wohl report, see N. E. Golovin, Office of Science and Technology, to Martin Wohl, Department of Commerce, 25 February 1963, and Sitton to Staats, 22 July 1963, both in OMB-NA, box 17, folder: National Capital Transportation Agency, Programs, Transit Development 1963. 10. Seymour Adler takes an equally dim view of Hamer’s account of transit planning in the San Francisco Bay area, calling Hamer’s chapter “seriously misleading.” Seymour Adler, “The Political Economy of Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980), 309. 11. Martin Wohl, “Metro’s Off-Track Bet,” Washington Post, 23 June 1996; Ken Schellenberg, “Metro: Worth Every Penny” (letter), Washington Post, 2 July 1996; Martin Wohl, interview by author, Springfield, Virginia, 2 May 2002. 12. For a conservative critique, see Fred Barnes, “In Praise of Highways,” Weekly Standard, 27 April 1998, which measures success only in terms of usage and convenience; for radical critiques, see Murin, Mass Transit Policy Planning, but also Mike Davis, “Runaway Train Crushes Buses,” Nation 261 (18 September 1995): 270; and Sam Smith, Captive Capital: Colonial Life in Modern Washington (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 223–226; for general hostility to mega-projects, see Kenneth Kolson, Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 136–139. Kolson’s skepticism about big plans is undercut somewhat by his clear fondness for Metro, one of the biggest plans of the twentieth century. 13. Lincoln, “Fragment on Government” [1 July 1854?], in Roy Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 220. 14. Two of the most nuanced accounts of rail investments examine Los Angeles, whose light- and heavy-rail systems have been widely denounced. Jonathan Richmond and Robert Post use history to reveal and explain questionable decisions in ways numbers alone cannot. They argue that pro-rail advocacy can be attributed to sentimental nostalgia for the good old days of the streetcar, blaming technological enthusiasm for warped decision making and deploring the decision to spend billions of dollars on rail lines they consider to be little better than toys. Unlike Richmond and Post, I consider fun to be a legitimate goal of public policy. If it is all right for an individual to spend his money on a snazzy sports car when a humble hatchback would get him to work just as well, why is it wrong for a region or nation of free people to
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Notes to Pages 7–12
buy collectively a more glamorous transit system than strict engineering specifications would demand? Jonathan E. Richmond, “Transport of Delight—The Mythical Conception of Rail Transit in Los Angeles” (Ph.D. diss., MIT, 1991); Robert C. Post, “The Myth behind Streetcar Revival,” American Heritage, May–June 1998, 95–100, and “Images of the Pacific Electric: Why Memories Matter,” Railroad History 179 (Autumn 1998): 7–44. Post accepts, and frequently applauds, the human tendency toward technological enthusiasm, but he does not want the bill charged to the taxpayer. See Post, “Strip, Salt, and Other Straightaway Dreams,” in John L. Wright, ed., Possible Dreams: Enthusiasm for Technology in America (Dearborn, Mich.: Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village, 1992), 98‒109; and Post, High Performance: The Culture and Technology of Drag Racing: 1950–1990 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 330. 15. Carl Abbott, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Howard Gillette Jr., “A National Workshop for Urban Policy: The Metropolitanization of Washington, 1946‒1968,” Public Historian 7 (Winter 1985): 7‒27, and Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Robert Harrison, “The Ideal of a ‘Model City’: Federal Social Policy for the District of Columbia, 1905‒1909,” Journal of Urban History 15 (August 1989): 435‒463; William R. Barnes, “A National Controversy in Miniature: The District of Columbia Struggle over Public Housing and Redevelopment, 1943‒46,” Prologue, Summer 1977, 90‒104. 16. “Remarks of Congressman John J. McFall of California, Majority Whip and Chairman of the Transportation Appropriations Subcommittee, to the American Public Transit Association, Statler-Hilton Hotel, Washington, D.C., April 13, 1976, 10:45 a.m.,” JRH, box 33, folder: “Urban Mass Transportation Administration”; U.S. Senate, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979: Hearings and Markups before the Subcommittee on Metropolitan Affairs and the Committee on the District of Columbia, 96th Cong., 1st sess., 1979, 13; Pietro S. Nivola, Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 56. 17. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty; Abbott, Political Terrain, xiii and 134; Ray Suarez, The Old Neighborhood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration, 1966–1999 (New York: Free Press, 1999). 18. Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, D.C. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 14. See also Frederick F. Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York: Free Press, 1997). 19. In January 1977, when the Dupont Circle Station opened, Metro fan Randy Kuning met reporters Jack Eisen and Thomas Crosby and used the occasion to ask them to stop using the term Metrorail, which he detested. They replied that they had invented it. Kuning, e-mail to author, 1 May 2002. 20. Massimo Vignelli, interview by the author, New York, 3 October 2000. Chapter 1. The City, 1791–1955
1. Walter Washington testimony, U.S. Senate, District of Columbia Charter Act: Hearings before the Committee on the District of Columbia, on S. 669, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 1955, 128. 2. Ibid., 30, 102, 116. 3. Wilfred Owen, Cities in the Motor Age (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 3. 4. Kenneth R. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and Location of the American Capital (Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1990), 19‒20, 32, 77. 5. Ibid., 221, 226. 6. John W. Reps, Monumental Washington: The Planning and Development of the Capital Center (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 5.
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Notes to Pages 13–19
7. Ibid., 14. 8. Bowling, Creation of Washington, D.C., 239; Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815–1860 (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1939); David R. Goldfield, “Antebellum Washington in Context: The Pursuit of Prosperity and Identity,” in Howard Gillette Jr., ed., Southern City: National Ambition: The Growth of Early Washington, D.C., 1800–1860 (Washington, D.C.: George Washington University Center for Washington Area Studies, 1995), 1‒20, 92‒94; Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 17‒23. 9. Carl Abbott, “Dimensions of Regional Change in Washington, D.C.,” American Historical Review 95 (December 1990): 1375; Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1962–1963), 1:295; Bowling, Creation of Washington, D.C., 244. 10. Green, Washington, 1:316; Ambrose Bierce, Devil’s Dictionary (1911; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 134. 11. William Anthony Tobin, “In the Shadow of the Capitol: The Transformation of Washington, D.C., and the Elaboration of the Modern U.S. Nation-State” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1994), 6–12; Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 90–108. 12. Coolidge, quoted in Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 109; William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 350; Steven Lubar, “Trolley Lines, Land Speculation and Community-Building: The Early History of Woodside Park, Silver Spring, Maryland,” Maryland Historical Magazine 81 (Winter 1986): 316–329. 13. David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War (New York: A. A. Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1988), 73–74, 105, 119. 14. Federal employment figures for October 1959, from Martha Derthick, City Politics in Washington, D.C. (Cambridge: Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, 1962), 27; Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 373; Council for Economic and Industry Research, Inc., Economic Base Study for the General Development Plan, National Capital Region (30 June 1956; reprint, November 1956), 11. 15. John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 56–71, 89. 16. U.S. National Capital Planning Commission, Worthy of the Nation: The History of Planning for the National Capital (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 272; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, series Q-153 and Q-175. 17. George Beveridge, METRO . . . City of Tomorrow (Washington, D.C.: Washington Star, 1958), 2. 18. Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 154; Harland Bartholomew and Associates, An Approach to the Mass Transportation Problem in Washington, prepared for the National Capital Planning Commission (St. Louis: Harland Bartholomew and Associates, December 1952), 3A; “Clarendon-Ballston Commercial District Study: A Discussion before the Arlington County Planning Commission,” 9 June 1958, LCB, subgroup 3, series 5, folder 8. 19. Eunice S. Grier, People and Government: Changing Needs in the District of Columbia, 1950–1970 (Washington, D.C.: Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies, 1973), 10; Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 154; Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 310; John Dennis O’Keefe, “Decision-Making in the House Committee on the District of Columbia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1969), 48. 20. Stella B. Werner testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia Mass Transit Compact: Hearings before House Committee on the Judi-
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Notes to Pages 19 –25
ciary, Subcommittee No. 3, on H.J. Res. 402, 86th Cong., 1st sess., 1959, and 86th Cong., 2d sess., 1960, 122; NCPC, Worthy of the Nation, 335. 21. U.S. National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Washington Present and Future: A Portion of the Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs, Monograph no. 1 (Washington, D.C.: National Capital Park and Planning Commission, June 1950), 5, 15; Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 154. 22. “Metropolitan Area Planning,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 27 May 1949; Raymond V. Long, Commissioner of Planning and Economic Development, Commonwealth of Virginia, to John Nolen Jr., NCPPC, 22 February 1950, MHPC, box 5, folder 9; Bartholomew to Truman, 6 April 1951, MHPC, box 5, folder 5. 23. Louis Justement, New Cities for Old: City Building in Terms of Space, Time, and Money (New York and London: McGraw-Hill, 1946), 3–5. 24. Barnes, “A National Controversy in Miniature”; Green, The Secret City, 283. 25. I. M. Pei, “Urban Renewal in Southwest Washington,” AIA Journal 39 (January 1963): 65; Derthick, City Politics in Washington, D.C., 189; “Southwest Washington: Finest Urban Renewal Effort in the Country,” Architectural Forum 118 (January 1963): 85–91. Ultimately, 22,000 people were relocated. Frederick Clarke testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia Appropriations, 1964: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 12 June 1963, 641. 26. NCPC, Worthy of the Nation, 315; Mary Mix Foley, “What Is Urban Redevelopment?” Architectural Forum 97 (August 1952): 126. 27. Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 (1954); Pei, “Urban Renewal,” 65–69; Bryton Barron and Ella Barron, The Inhumanity of Urban Renewal (Springfield, Va.: Crestwood Books, 1965), 6; Derthick, City Politics in Washington, D.C., 189; D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, Annual Report, 1 July 1964–30 June 1965, 3. 28. Chalmers M. Roberts, “Bold Planning in Southwest Will Pay Dividends to D.C.,” Washington Post, 22 September 1952; James W. Rouse and Nathaniel Keith, No Slums in Ten Years: A Workable Program for Urban Renewal: Report to the Commissioners of the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C., January 1955), 6. 29. Timothy Davis, “Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, Washington, D.C.: The Evolution of a Contested Urban Landscape,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 19 (April–June 1999): 186–192; Phil Patton, Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 67–71. 30. J.E. Greiner Company and De Leuw, Cather & Company, Transportation Plans for Washington (prepared for the Board of Commissioners, District of Columbia, December, 1946), 12. 31. Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939–1989 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 77; Bureau of Public Roads, General Location of National System of Interstate Highways, Including All Additional Routes at Urban Areas Designated in September 1955 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955); Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York: Viking, 1997), 120. 32. George Siefert testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 6 of the Committee on the District of Columbia, Part I, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 1963, 394. 33. Alan Lessoff, The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption,” and Progress in Washington, D.C., 1861–1902 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), chap. 6. 34. Regional Highway Planning Committee for Metropolitan Washington, A Recommended Highway Improvement Program for the Washington Metropolitan Area (Washington, D.C., 1952). See also D.C. Department of Highways, Virginia Department of Highways,
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Notes to Pages 25 –29
and Maryland State Roads Commission, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Study (Washington, D.C., 1952). 35. Wilbur Smith and Associates, Report on Traffic Volumes and Capacity Requirements for Potomac River Bridges and Inner Traffic Loop (prepared for National Capital Planning Commission, 1955), 64; De Leuw, Cather & Company, Report on Inner Loop Freeway System, District of Columbia. Engineering Studies and Estimates (Chicago: De Leuw, Cather & Company, October 1955); Harold M. Lewis, A New Zoning Plan for the District of Columbia: Final Report of the Rezoning Study (New York, 9 November 1956), 26. 36. Wilbur Smith and Associates, Report on Traffic Volumes, 64; Urban Renewal Council, meeting minutes, 24 April 1959. D.C. Office of Urban Renewal, Progress Report of the Urban Renewal Workable Program for the District of Columbia (June 1959), includes a map showing the Inner Loop superimposed along the edges or through four urban renewal areas, three housing code enforcement areas, and a demonstration area. Both 1959 documents are in LJ, box 3, folder: Urban Renewal Council. 37. Bureau of Public Roads, General Location; Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Staff Report on Feasibility Studies for the Extension and Location of U.S. 240 to Connect with the District of Columbia (Silver Spring, Md., January 1958), 1. 38. Justement, New Cities for Old, 130. 39. John G. Leyden, “Stranded in the Summer of ’55,” Washington Post, 4 June 2000. 40. Ronald H. Deiter, The Story of Metro: Transportation and Politics in the Nation’s Capital, rev. ed. (Glendale, Calif.: Interurban Press, 1990), 14; Edwin Schell, interview by author, Baltimore, 7 January 1999, transcript, 11. 41. Bill Hogan, “The Day the Trolleys Stopped,” Regardie’s, April–May 1982, 82–91; Schell, interview, transcript, 15. 42. J.E. Greiner Company and De Leuw, Cather & Company, Transportation Plans for Washington, 46; Max S. Wehrly, “Would Sub-surface Streetcar Lines Improve Transportation in Downtown Washington?” Board of Trade Panel Discussion, 18 January 1956, MHPC, box 5, folder 11. 43. Hogan, “The Day the Trolleys Stopped,” 86. 44. Wayne Morse comment, U.S. Senate, Capital Transit Co. Matters: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Public Health, Education, Welfare, and Safety of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 84th Cong., 1st sess., 1955, 132; Robert McLaughlin to Matthew M. Neely and Sam Rayburn, 18 July 1955, MHPC box 5, folder 9; Evening Star, 28 March 1954, quoted in U.S. House of Representatives, Mass Transportation in the District of Columbia: Report to Accompany H.R. 8901, 84th Cong., 2d sess., H. Rep. 2034, 24 April 1956, minority views, 2; U.S. Senate, Public Transportation Serving the District of Columbia: Report of the Committee on the District of Columbia Pursuant to S. Res. 140 as Extended by S. Res. 192, 83d Cong., 2d. sess., S. Rep. 1274, 1 May 1954, 40–43, 71. Although Louis Wolfson escaped criminal prosecution for his management of Capital Transit, in 1969 he began a nine-month prison term after pleading guilty to securities violations involving other companies. In the course of his downfall, he sought legal advice from Supreme Court Associate Justice Abe Fortas, who also received a stipend from a Wolfson foundation. The disclosure of this arrangement created a scandal that forced Fortas to resign from the bench. Bruce Allen Murphy, Fortas: The Rise and Ruin of a Supreme Court Justice (New York: W. Morrow, 1988), 545–575. 45. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, series Q 241; Stephen H. Hess, “The Mess in Mass Transportation,” Johns Hopkins Magazine 7 (November 1955): 5; Wilbur Smith and Associates, Mass Transportation Survey: National Capital Region: Traffic Engineering Study (New Haven: Wilbur Smith and Associates, 1958), 9, 46.
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Notes to Pages 29 – 35
46. Walter Bierwagen testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Transit Authority: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce on H.R. 8901 and H.R. 8947, 84th Cong., 2d sess., 1956, 319. 47. J. A. B. Broadwater testimony, ibid., 251; Leyden, “Stranded in the Summer of ’55”; Louis Wolfson testimony, U.S. Senate, Capital Transit Co. Matters, 120. 48. McLaughlin to Neely and Rayburn, 18 July 1955, MHPC box 5, folder 9; U.S. House of Representatives, Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Transit Authority, 35. 49. Evening Star, 30 June 1968. 50. Robert McLaughlin testimony, U.S. Senate, Capital Transit Co. Matters, 95; Samuel Spencer testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Transit Authority, 136. See also U.S. Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Problems: Hearings before the Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems, 85th Cong., 2d sess., 1958, 165, and U.S. National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Moving People and Goods: A Portion of the Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs, Monograph no. 5 (Washington, D.C.: National Capital Park and Planning Commission, June 1950), 34; U.S. House of Representatives, Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Transit Authority, 77–78; John Nevius to D.C. City Council Members, 3 November 1972, DCCC, box 19, folder: Transit Misc 1971–74. Chapter 2. The Plans, 1955–1965
1. George Beveridge, “Congestion Forces New Transit Approach,” Sunday Star, 20 October 1957. 2. Norman J. Johnston, “Harland Bartholomew: Precedent for the Profession,” in Donald A. Krueckenberg, ed., The American Planner: Biographies and Recollections (New York: Methuen, 1983), 284; Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 155. 3. “Report of Joint Committee on Program and Procedures to the NCPC and NCRPC on the MTS, 16 June 1955,” MHPC, box 6, folder 1; U.S. Congress, Metropolitan Transportation: Investigation of Status and Prospects for the Mass Transportation Survey: Report to the U.S. Congress Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems, Staff Report, 85th Cong., 2d sess., April 1958, 3. 4. U.S. National Capital Planning Commission, U.S. National Capital Regional Planning Council, Transportation Plan for the National Capital Region: The Mass Transportation Survey Report (Washington, D.C.: NCPC, 1959), 2. 5. Luther Gulick testimony, U.S. Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Problems, 297; NCPC, Transportation Plan, 13. 6. Harland Bartholomew testimony, U.S. Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Problems, 15; U.S. House of Representatives, Washington (D.C.) Metropolitan Transit Authority, 280; Wilfred Owen, The Metropolitan Transportation Problem (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 24; E. L. Tennyson, “Can Rapid Transit Save Your City?” Architectural Forum 101 (October 1954): 200. 7. Robert B. Mitchell testimony, U.S. Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Problems, 10 June 1958, 324; Harland Bartholomew testimony, U.S. Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Problems, 22 May 1958, 18; NCPC, minutes, 1–2 August 1957, MHPC, box 5, folder 11. 8. Harland Bartholomew testimony, U.S. Senate, Location of Interstate Route 70 South (Maryland and District of Columbia): Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Works, 86th Cong., 2d sess., 1960, 48. 9. Harland Bartholomew and Associates, “An Approach to the Mass Transportation Problem”; Robert McLaughlin testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia,
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Notes to Pages 35 – 41
Maryland, and Virginia Mass Transit Compact: Hearings before House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee No. 3, on H.J. Res. 402, 86th Cong., 1st sess., 1959, and 86th Cong., 2d sess., 1960, 114; NCPC/NCRPC resolution, 2 August 1957, NCPC-NA, box 162, decimal 545-119-5, Mass Transportation Survey #3. 10. NCPC Minutes, 15–16 September 1955, NCPC-NA, box 162, decimal 545-119-5, Mass Transportation Survey #1. The South Jersey line was eventually built and is now known as PATCO. 11. Donald C. Hyde, “Moving People,” Urban Land 13 (December 1954): 3–8. 12. Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 60. 13. Rose, Interstate, 17; Statement by Pyke Johnson, 27 November 1958, MHPC, box 6, folder 1; Hoover considered Herring to be on the highway “side of the fence,” an ally of Johnson. Keneth Hoover, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, n.d., MHPC. 14. U. S. Grant III to J. D. Arthur, 1 July 1946, MHPC, box 6, folder 1; NCPPC, Moving People and Goods, 25. In 1954 Bartholomew had encouraged the D.C. Department of Highways to consider upgrading the Inner Loop to freeway standards; Thomas Airis testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia Appropriations, 1964, 7; Bartholomew testimony, U.S. Senate, Location of Interstate Route 70S, 47. 15. Jeffrey Brown, “A Tale of Two Visions: Harland Bartholomew, Robert Moses, and the Development of the American Freeway,” Journal of Planning History 4 (February 2005): 11–19; Harland Bartholomew, Development and Planning of American Cities: An Address Delivered before the Student Body of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, May 10, 1949 (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Institute of Technology, April 1950), 12; Bartholomew to C. McKim Norton, 13 May 1959, MHPC, box 7, folder 2. In 1979 Bartholomew complained to an interviewer about the power of the highway lobby and of Pyke Johnson in particular, but conceded that he himself had lobbied for a limited-access Inner Loop and, in the 1950 Comprehensive Plan, against rapid transit. Bartholomew, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, Clayton, Missouri, 27 March 1979, MHPC. 16. NCPC, Transportation Plan, 52. 17. Mass Transportation Survey, “Highway Phase of Engineering Design and Cost Estimates,” 14 December 1956, NCPC-NA, box 162, decimal 545-119-5, Mass Transportation Survey #2; NCPC, Transportation Plan, 40. 18. Robert Keith, telephone interview by author, 19 January 2000; John Nolen to Hoover, 15 May 1956, NCPC-NA, box 162, decimal 545-119-5, Mass Transportation Survey #2; Hoover later suggested that part of the problem is that the Smith forecasters knew how to manipulate data by changing a few punch cards but had yet to work out comparable methods to handle data on the electronic UNIVAC. Hoover, interview. 19. U.S. Congress, Metropolitan Transportation, 21; Hoover, interview. 20. C. D. Curtiss, Commissioner of Public Roads, Bureau of Public Roads, Department of Commerce, to Bartholomew, 20 August 1957, MHPC box 7, folder 1; Robert Keith, interview by author at NCTA reunion brunch, Stevensville, Maryland, 13 October 2002. 21. Paul Sitton to Elmer Staats, 14 February 1963, OMB-NA, box 17, folder: National Capital Transportation Agency, Programs, Transit Development 1963; NCPC, Transportation Plan, 48. 22. Frank Herring to Bartholomew, 5 December 1958, CDS, box 1, folder 1; C. McKim Norton to Bartholomew, 23 April 1959, MHPC, box 7, folder 1; NCPC, Transportation Plan, 81. 23. McLaughlin to Maurice Stans, Director, Bureau of the Budget, 30 September 1959, MHPC box 5, folder 10. 24. O’Keefe, “Decision-Making,” 224; Kathleen Sinclair Wood, “Cleveland Park: Country Living in the City,” in Kathryn Schneider Smith, ed., Washington at Home: An Illustrated His-
293
Notes to Pages 41– 45
tory of Neighborhoods in the Nation’s Capital (Northridge, Calif.: Winsor Publications, 1988), 204–211; Peter Craig, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., 5 November 1999. Among the legislators were such leaders as Richard Bolling of the House, who lived on Lowell Street, and Lyndon Johnson of the Senate, on 30th Street. Craig, Memorandum, “Re: Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning,” 4 April 1960, PSC, box 12, folder: Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning, 1960; William Finley testimony, U.S. Senate, Location of Interstate Route 70S, 37–44; Bartholomew testimony, U.S. Senate, Location of Interstate Route 70S, 46. See also MNCPPC, Feasibility Studies for the Extension and Location of U.S. 240, 3–5. 25. Craig, interview. 26. Craig, interview, and Craig, Memorandum, “Re: Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning,” 24 March 1960, PSC, box 12, folder: Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning, 1960; Rose, Interstate, 106; Craig testimony, U.S. Congress, National Capital Transportation Act of 1960: Hearings before the Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems, 86th Cong., 2d sess., 1960, 210; Alan Bible testimony, U.S. Congress, National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, 1. 27. U.S. Congress, Metropolitan Transportation, 27. 28. “National Capital Transportation Agency,” White House document, c. July 1960, and Robert E. Hampton, White House, to Ethel Friedlander, RNC [Republican National Committee], 30 August 1960, MHPC box 8, folder 8. 29. National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, Public Law 86-669, section 204, U.S. Statutes at Large 74 (1960): 537; Sydney M. Cone III, to William Sharon Farr, 23 June 1960, PSC, box 12, folder: N.W. Committee—National Capital Transportation Act of 1960; Stolzenbach to Charles Horsky, 8 April 1963, MHPC, box 7, folder 1; W. E. Finley, Director, NCPC, to Phillip S. Hughes, Asst. Director for Legislative Reference, Bureau of the Budget, 6 July 1960, and Hughes to Eisenhower, 9 July 1960, both in MHPC, box 8, folder 8. 30. U.S. National Capital Planning Commission, The Nation’s Capital: A Policies Plan for the Year 2000 (Washington, D.C.: National Capital Planning Commission, 1961), ix. 31. Ibid., 46, 50, 100, 29, 60, 105. 32. Luther P. Jackson, “15 Area Buildings Win Architectural Awards,” Washington Post, 6 January 1962. 33. Donald Canty, “How Washington Is Run: An Ungovernment without Top or Bottom,” Architectural Forum 118 (January 1963): 56; Raymond A. Mohl, “Ike and the Interstates: Creeping toward Comprehensive Planning,” Journal of Planning History 2 (August 2003): 237–262; U.S. Senate, Public Transportation Serving the District of Columbia, 2; William Walton, The Evidence of Washington (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 51; Walter N. Tobriner, recorded interview by Charles T. Morrissey, Washington, D.C., 6 July 1964, JFKL Oral History Program. 34. “Covington & Burling,” in Smith, Washington at Home, 310. 35. Elizabeth Rowe, interview by Michael L. Gillette, Washington, D.C., 6 June 1975, LBJL; Robert C. Albrook, “Blueprint for the Planners’ Battle,” Washington Post, 30 September 1956; Rives Carroll, “Cleveland Park Personalities: Libby Rowe,” Cleveland Park Voices: Newsletter of the Cleveland Park Historical Society, Fall 1987, 5–6, C100 box 20, folder 17. 36. Elizabeth Rowe, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, n.d., MHPC; Carroll, “Cleveland Park Personalities: Libby Rowe,” 17. On Rowe’s concern that highways threatened “expensive and landmark type structures and parks,” see Boleyn and Sitton, Commerce & Finance, to Staats, 24 October 1963, OMB-NA, box 2, folder: GG: 1963–65, Policy Advisory Committee on Highway Projects. In 1964 Rowe created the Joint Committee on Landmarks. NCPC, Worthy of the Nation, 292–293. 37. Charles A. Horsky, interview by Elizabeth Durham, 22 November 1981, MHPC, transcript, 2.
294
Notes to Pages 45 – 49
38. Charles Horsky testimony, U.S. Congress, Transportation Plan for the National Capital Region: Hearings before the Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems, 86th Cong., 1st sess., 1959, 704; Horsky testimony, “Public Hearing before D.C. Commissioners on Proposed Highway Improvements,” 5 January 1959, WHA, and Washington Housing Association, “Report on Urban Renewal in the District of Columbia,” 1 May 1961, WHA; “Letter to the Members,” November 1961, WHA. 39. Cody Pfanstiehl, interview by author, Silver Spring, Maryland, 15 December 1999. On the migration of operations research and systems analysis from military to civilian programs, see Stephen B. Johnson, “Three Approaches to Big Technology: Operations Research, Systems Engineering, and Project Management,” Technology and Culture 38 (1997): 891–919, and David R. Jardini, “Out of the Blue Yonder: The Transfer of Systems Thinking from the Pentagon to the Great Society,” in Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes, eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 40. Bartholomew, interview by Stolzenbach, 27 March 1979 (as an interviewer, Stolzenbach tended to talk about himself as well as asking questions); Stolzenbach testimony, U.S. Congress, National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, 184; Jack Eisen, “Transit Chief Joins Battling Planners,” Washington Post, 7 March 1961; Craig, interview; Craig, Memorandum, “Re: Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning,” 15 July 1960, PSC, box 12, folder: Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning, 1960; Richard K. Donahue, White House, to Macy, 25 March 1961, and W. John Kenney, Democratic Central Committee of the District of Columbia, to Bailey, 10 February 1961, both in John Macy Office Files, LBJL, box 573 folder: Stolzenbach; Stolzenbach comment, Herbert Harris II, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 21 October 1981, MHPC. 41. Craig, interview; Peter S. Craig, “Memorandum to File, National Capital Planning Commission,” 18 July 1962, MHPC, box 9, folder 8. Thomas Farmer, another founder of the Northwest Transportation Planning Committee, the anti–Northwest Freeway group of Cleveland Park, was close to the Kennedy White House and joined the National Capital Transportation Agency advisory board. Thomas Farmer, interview by Jane C. Loeffler, Washington, D.C., 13 February 1987; Horsky to Duke, 8 November 1963, MHPC, box 9, folder 11. 42. Deen, interview, 1 December 1999; Pfanstiehl, interview, 15 December 1999. 43. U.S. Congress, Transportation Plan for the National Capital Region, 136–154; John Rannells, The Core of the City: A Pilot Study of Changing Land Uses in Central Business Districts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). 44. Warren Quenstedt, interview by Elizabeth Durham, 6 November 1982, MHPC. Jim Phippard, an agency lawyer, recalled that because of Quenstedt’s political ties, he felt bound to give several NCTA patronage jobs to party loyalists. Interview by author, Washington, D.C., 26 October 1999. Various interview subjects, on and off the record, recall the NCTA as having employed a fair amount of deadwood for patronage purposes, but they are unwilling to name names. It seems, however, that the core of Stolzenbach’s staff—including Seeger, Herman, Pfanstiehl, and others—were quite effective in their jobs. 45. Basil Whitener, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, Gastonia, N.C., 13 November 1982, MHPC; Stolzenbach comment, Hoover, interview. 46. Robert Hale to John L. McMillan, 20 May 1960, PSC, box 12, folder: N.W. Committee—National Capital Transportation Act of 1960; National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, section 204 (f ); U.S. Senate, Hearings before the Committee on the District of Columbia to Consider the Nomination of C. Darwin Stolzenbach as Administrator-Designate, National Capital Transportation Agency, 87th Cong., 1st sess., 24 March 1961, 16–17. Stolzenbach had some justification for his position; in the hearings on the 1960 bill, Bible Committee staffer Frederick
295
Notes to Pages 49 – 52
Gutheim had established that the Bureau of the Budget believed that the new agency would have some responsibility for highway location. U.S. Congress, National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, 36. Elizabeth Durham, “The Authorization of Metro,” Metro History Project Monograph, 1 February 1983, 12, MHPC, box 14, folder 8; National Capital Transportation Agency, “Statement to the National Capital Planning Commission on Proposed District of Columbia Highway Projects,” 8 November 1961, MHPC, box 6, folder 9. 47. D.C. Board of Commissioners, Three Sisters Bridge (Washington, D.C., 1963), 2; Wilbur Smith and Associates, Report on Traffic Volumes, 46; Bartholomew to McLaughlin, 22 May 1957, MHPC box 5, folder 10; Rex Whitton testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia Appropriations, 1964, 733; Sitton to Frederick M. Bohen, Staff Assistant to the President, c. February 1968, CAH-LBJL, box 97, folder: Congressmen—88th. 48. Gilbert Gimble, “Planners Approve Inner Loop Projects,” Evening Star, 10 November 1961; Harold Seidman to Phillip S. Hughes, 1 November 1961, OMB-NA, box 17, folder: NCTA Programs 1960–62, Transit Development. 49. Stolzenbach testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 81; John Rannells, foreword to Stanley N. Allan, For the Glory of Washington: A Chronicle of Events Leading to the Creation of a System-Wide Architectural Concept for the Design of the Washington Metro Stations, December 1965–November 1967 (Chicago: Harry Weese Associates, 1994); Hoover, interview. Clarke acknowledged the conversation, recalling that his proposal “went over like a lead balloon.” Frederick J. Clarke Jr., interview by Elizabeth Durham, c. 1981, MHPC. 50. Phippard, interview; Stolzenbach comment, Hoover, interview. 51. Thomas Parke Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 152–153; U.S. National Capital Transportation Agency, Transportation in the National Capital Region: Finance and Organization. A Report to the President for Transmittal to Congress (Washington, D.C., 1 November 1962), 25; Stolzenbach comments in Hoover, interview. 52. Goldenthal to Stolzenbach, 8 January 1962, CDS, box 1, folder 8. 53. Deen, interview, 1 December 1999. The biggest disagreement was over parking costs. Deen recalls this as the largest distortion of the NCTA 1962 forecast, and testifying before Congress in the summer of 1963, Engineer Commissioner Clarke pointed out that parking costs were the only costs that the NCTA believed would increase. U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia Appropriations, 1964, 660. 54. National Capital Transportation Agency, Appendix to November 1, 1962 Report to the President, vol. 5: System Planning (Washington, D.C., 1963), 98; Stolzenbach testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for National Capital Region, Part I, 15, 18. 55. Keith to Goldenthal, 13 December 1961, CDS, box 1, folder 6; Stolzenbach testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for National Capital Region, Part I, 12; John Insco Williams to NCTA Route Planning Committee, “The Question of the Single-End Rapid Transit Vehicle,” draft, 20 February 1962, CDS, box 20, folder 13; U.S. National Capital Transportation Agency, “Summary Report on the Transit Development Program,” May 1963, MHPC, box 7, folder 7; National Capital Transportation Agency, Appendix to November 1, 1962 Report to the President, vol. 1: Engineering (Washington, D.C., 4 January 1963), 68–82. 56. Keith to Goldenthal, 15 December 1961, CDS, box 1, folder 5; Thomas Deen, “Critical Decisions in the Rapid Transit Planning Process,” in Hamer, Out of Cars / Into Transit, 97; quotation from Keith to Stolzenbach, 31 July 1962, CDS, box 1, folder 9; see also Williams, draft of memo to Quenstedt from Keith, 8 August 1962, CDS, box 21, folder 2; Graham to Gude, 4 February 1974, GG, box 95, folder: WMATA. 57. NCPC, Transportation Plan, fig. 45. 58. John Insco Williams, interview by the author, Brookline, Massachusetts, 3 January
296
Notes to Pages 53 – 58
2001. Rannells, foreword to Allan, For the Glory of Washington, 5; Route Planning Committee (Quenstedt, Forsythe, Keith, Williams) to Stolzenbach, 27 April 1962, CDS, box 1, folder 10. 59. NCTA, Transportation in the National Capital Region, 32; Keith, interview by author. 60. NCTA, Transportation in the National Capital Region, xxi, 28–29, 44. 61. Rannells, foreword to Allan, For the Glory of Washington; Robert M. Feemster, Chairman, Advisory Committee on Finance, NCTA, to Stolzenbach, 12 October 1962, NCTA, Transportation in the National Capital Region; NCTA, Transportation in the National Capital Region, xi. 62. Durham, “Authorization of Metro,” 18, 32; “With Friends Like These” (editorial), Washington Post, 17 January 1963. 63. D.C. Board of Commissioners, “A Preliminary Evaluation of the Transportation Plan Recommended by the National Capital Transportation Agency, November 1, 1962,” 18 February 1963, MHPC box 11, folder 3; U.S. Department of Commerce, “Review and Comments on the Transportation Program Recommended by the National Capital Transportation Agency,” 20 February 1963, MHPC, box 11, folder 7; Wohl, interview; N. E. Golovin, Office of Science and Technology, to Martin Wohl, Department of Commerce, 25 February 1963, and Sitton to Staats, 22 July 1963, both in OMB-NA, box 17, folder: National Capital Transportation Agency. Programs, Transit Development 1963. Eventually the federal government did build the headquarters of the Department of Labor over a portion of the Center Leg, complete with an enormous ventilation shaft at the core of the building to suck automobile exhaust to the roof. But this solution for valuable land a few blocks from the Capitol could hardly be used over the entire Inner Loop, unless at an expense dwarfing rapid transit. “An Air Rights Structure for the Department of Labor,” Architectural Record 142 (December 1967): 116–119; “Statement by the Committee,” AIA Journal 39 (January 1963): 116. 64. Horsky, legislative memorandum, 9 August 1963, MHPC, box 7; U.S. House of Representatives, Federal-Aid Highway Act Amendments of 1963: Hearings before Subcommittee on Roads of the Committee on Public Works on H.R. 4154 [and others], 88th Cong., 1st sess., 1963, 75; Whitener remark, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 7; Horsky to Ross R. Ormsby, Rubber Manufacturers Association, Inc., New York, 24 June 1963, MHPC, box 6, folder 6; Arthur E. Miller, Chairman of the District of Columbia Advisory Board, American Automobile Association, testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 31 July 1963. 65. Bartholomew, interview; Gingery, testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 348–349; Louis Prentiss testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Federal-Aid Highway Act Amendments of 1963, 73. 66. U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 265; Joel Broyhill remark, ibid., 11. 67. Rowe testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I; ibid., 229. 68. Stolzenbach comment, Alan Boyd, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 11 August 1981, MHPC; Horsky to Staats, 20 March 1963, OMB-NA, box 17, folder: National Capital Transportation Agency, Programs, Transit Development 1963; Kennedy to Tobriner, 1 June 1963, reprinted in Federal City Council, Freeways in the National Capital Region (Washington, D.C.: Federal City Council, April 1966), 55. 69. Horsky to Staats, 20 March 1963, OMB-NA, box 17, folder: National Capital Transportation Agency, Programs, Transit Development 1963. 70. U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 149; Horsky to Lawrence O’Brien, 22 November 1963, Reports on Pending Legislation, LBJL, box 1, folder: November 22, 1963; Delmer Ison testimony, U.S. House of Representa-
297 Notes to Pages 58 – 60 tives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 6 of the Committee on the District of Columbia, Part II, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 1963, 24; Stolzenbach to McMillan, 5 November 1963, ibid., 9. On trusting Whitener’s political judgment, see Stolzenbach comments during Jackson Graham, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, c. 1981, MHPC. 71. Quenstedt to Stolzenbach, 30 January 1964, MHPC, box 11, folder 5; Stolzenbach comments, Graham, interview; Quenstedt, interview. 72. “The Next Step” (editorial), Washington Post, 11 December 1963. Montgomery County Council, Resolution 5-817, 7 January 1964, WHCF, LBJL, box 394, FG 706, folder: National Capital Transportation Agency; Ed Seeger, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 11 November 1982, MHPC; Andrew J. Biemiller, Director, Department of Legislation, AFL-CIO, to All Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, 6 December 1963 [attached to Farmer to Horsky, 31 December 1963], CAH-LBJL, box 85, folder: Transportation: “Bob-Tail” Subway; Quenstedt, memoranda to files, 11 and 12 December 1963, MHPC box 11, folder 5. 73. Stolzenbach to Kermit Gordon, Director, Bureau of the Budget, 13 December 1965, OMB-NA, box 18, folder: Budget Preparation GC 1964, FY 1965 Estimates—NCTA; L. F. Wheat, Commerce and Finance Division, to Director, Bureau of the Budget, 25 September 1964, OMB-NA, box 15, folder: National Capital Transportation Agency, Required Reports, 1961–65; William Herman, telephone interview by the author, 30 March 2000. 74. Charles N. Conconi, “How Does Washington Really Rate as a Place to Live?” Washingtonian, February 1976, 107; James Rowe Jr., recorded interview by Charles T. Morrissey, Washington, D.C., 10 May 1964, JFKL Oral History Program, 1; George M. Smerk, Urban Transportation: The Federal Role (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 173–174. 75. Stolzenbach to Lawrence F. O’Brien, Special Assistant to the President, 29 June 1964, and Sitton to Pfleger, Broadbent, and Staats, 14 July 1964, OMB, box 17, folder: NCTA Programs 1964, Transit Development (Interstate System); Jerome Alper, History of the Negotiations of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority ([Washington, D.C.?]: J. M. Alper, 1988), 66; Quenstedt, interview; Cody Pfanstiehl, interview by the author, Silver Spring, Maryland, 4 January 2000. 76. National Capital Transportation Agency, Rail Rapid Transit for the Nation’s Capital (Washington, D.C., 1965), 1, 31; Seeger, interview. 77. NCTA, Rail Rapid Transit, 3, 39; Stolzenbach testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 82; “The Administration’s Establishment,” Metropolitan 61 (March 1965): 19; Stolzenbach to Roye Lowry, 9 November 1964, CAH-LBJL, box 85, folder: Transportation: Route 66; U.S. House of Representatives, Rapid Rail Transit for the Nation’s Capital: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 5 of the Committee on the District of Columbia on H.R. 4822, 89th Cong., 1st sess., 1965, 40. 78. Macy to Walter Jenkins, Special Assistant to President, 23 June 1964, WHCF, LBJL, TN 2, box 3, folder: TN2 11/22/63-1/12/65. In a 1982 letter, Stolzenbach referred to this document as “Macy’s letter to Jenkins that led to my resignation,” though the exact chain of events is unclear. Stolzenbach to Paul [Watt?], 20 April 1982, CDS, box 20, folder 16; Stolzenbach to President Johnson, 13 July 1964, John Macy Office Files, LBJL, box 573, folder: Stolzenbach; Horsky to Dungan, 21 September 1964, CAH-LBJL, box 99, folder: appointments; Quenstedt, interview; Horsky to John Macy [Civil Service Commissioner], 5 January 1965, MHPC, box 3, folder 6. Macy to President, 31 March 1965, Office Files of John Macy, LBJL, box 373, folder: McCarter, Walter; Stolzenbach comments, Harry Weese, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 1981, MHPC. 79. Horsky, interview; Quenstedt, interview; Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 1; “Evaluation: Walter McCarter,” John Macy Office Files, LBJL, box 373, folder: McCarter, Walter; John Rannells, interview by Elizabeth Durham, 16 October 1981, MHPC; Pfanstiehl,
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Notes to Pages 61– 68
interview, 15 December 1999. For other instances of President Johnson charming and bullying people into jobs they were not sure they wanted, see Joseph A. Califano, The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). 80. John Warrington, interview by the author, Issue, Maryland, 9 April 2001; WMATA, News Release, 8 December 1969, WMATA-A, accretion #2, file 5; Levenberg to Macy, 14 May 1965, Macy Office Files, LBJL, box 373, folder: McCarter, Walter; Horsky to O’Brien, 1 June 1965, Reports on Pending Legislation (LBJL), box 1, folder: June 1, 1965. 81. U.S. House of Representatives, Amend the National Capital Transportation Act of 1965: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 4, Committee on the District of Columbia, on H.R. 11395, 90th Cong., 1st sess., 1967, 30–32. 82. Chalk, “Memorandum,” 16 February 1965, BLW, box 134, folder 3; Horsky, legislative memo, 13 March 1964, CDS, box 73, folder 9; Andrew J. Biemiller, Director, Department of Legislation, to Whitener, 9 July 1965, BLW, box 135, folder 1; Warrington, interview; letters from Congressmen Richard H. Ichord, Ralph. J. Scott, Wm. M. Tuck, and E. S. Johnny Walker to Whitener, 23–25 June 1965, BLW, box 134, folder 5; Basil Whitener, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, Gastonia, North Carolina, 13 November 1982, MHPC. Chapter 3. The Stations, 1965–1967
1. Architectural critics’ opinions vary on Metro’s attractiveness and meaning. For example, Megan Miller finds that “rather than imposing a unilateral prescription, the design team of the Washington Metro defined details in search of a flexible whole—a democratic and fundamentally anti-monumental proposition.” “Elements of a Continuity: The Washington, D.C. Metro,” Praxis 1 (2000): 116. In contrast, Carl Condit once guessed that Metro’s stations had been “designed by a demented neo-Platonist looking for a pure form to express the inhumanity of government.” Clay McShane, e-mail to the author, 13 December 1999. A similar complaint comes from Marshall Berman, who admires the extreme contrasts of form and light in Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, and McKim’s Penn Station, but finds that the same elements in Washington create “a theater of absurdity and cruelty.” Perhaps Berman is upset that Metro, unlike those “great American spaces,” is not in Manhattan. “Notes from Underground: Plato’s Cave, Piranesi’s Prisons, and the Subway,” Harvard Design Magazine 15 (Fall 2001): 1–6. 2. Jay Johnscher, “A Visit to Metro,” Realtor, February 1975, 26. 3. Sue A. Kohler, The Commission of Fine Arts: A Brief History, 1910–1995 (Washington, D.C.: Commission of Fine Arts, 1995), 241. 4. Pamela Scott and Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 138–140, 238–239. Justice Brandeis was so disgusted by this pomposity he refused to occupy his chambers in the new building, preferring to work from home. Frederick Gutheim, “The New Federal Architecture: Will the New Frontier Bring Forth a New Look?” AIA Journal 39 (June 1963): 34. 5. Mary E. Osman, “After a 36-Year Wait, a Modern Art Museum Opens on the Mall,” AIA Journal 62 (November 1974): 45; Joseph Hudnut, “Smithsonian Competition Results,” Magazine of Art 32 (August 1939), 488; Gilmore Clarke to Delano, 22 July 1939, Office of Smithsonian Institution Archives, Research Records, Research File: Smithsonian Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Samuel T. Surratt, archivist, Smithsonian Archives, to S. Dillon Ripley, 29 February 1968, Office of Smithsonian Institution Archives, Research Records, Research File: Smithsonian Gallery of Art. The site designated for the art museum is now occupied by the National Air and Space Museum. The Smithsonian maintains a model of the proposed building prepared in 1940. 6. Kohler, Commission of Fine Arts, 74; Scott and Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia, 137–138; Wolf Von Eckardt, “Washington’s Chance for Splendor,” Harper’s, September 1963, 61.
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Notes to Pages 68–73
7. Risa Gustaitis, “The Emperor of the Hill,” Architectural Forum 129 (September 1968): 80–85; Ada Louise Huxtable, “Architecture,” in Alvin Shuster, ed., Washington, D.C.: The New York Times Guide to the Nation’s Capital (Washington, D.C.: R. B. Luce, 1967), 210; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Civic Architecture,” Architectural Record 142 (December 1967): 107; Scott and Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia, 107; Von Eckardt, “Washington’s Chance for Splendor,” 59; Canty, “How Washington Is Run,” 52. 8. Nathaniel Owings, quoted in Joseph Judge, “New Grandeur for Flowering Washington,” National Geographic, April 1967, 507. Robert B. Semple Jr., “The Washington of Tomorrow,” in Shuster, ed., Washington, D.C., 275, tells the same story, but suggests that Kennedy made his decision on the way to the Capitol for his oath of office, whereas in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s version, it was Arthur Goldberg, secretary of labor–designate, who was appalled by the Inaugural scenery. “Pennsylvania Avenue,” AIA Journal 39 (January 1963): 64; Kurt Helfrich, “Modernism for Washington? The Kennedys and the Redesign of Lafayette Square,” Washington History 8, no. 1 (1996): 16–37, 91–92; August Heckscher, recorded interview by Wolf Von Eckardt, New York, 10 December 1965, JFKL Oral History Program, transcript. 9. William Walton, recorded interview by Megan Floyd Desnoyers, New York, 30 March 1993, JFKL Oral History Program, transcript, 38; Von Eckardt, “Washington’s Chance for Splendor,” 58; Karel Yasko, recorded interview by William McHugh, Washington, D.C., 14 December 1966, JFKL Oral History Program; U.S. Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space, Report to the President, House Committee on Public Works, Committee Print No. 21, 87th Cong., 2d sess., 1 June 1962, 12–13. 10. Clifton Hood, 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New York (1993; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 93, 240, 257; Walter McQuade, “Subways Don’t Have to Be Miserable,” Fortune, April 1967, 177, 181–182, 184. 11. Hoover testimony, U.S. Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Problems, 109; NCPC, Transportation Plan, 69; U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 15. 12. Rannells, interview by Durham; Jack Eisen, “Toronto’s Gleaming Subway Is Like No Other,” Washington Post, 20 October 1959. 13. NCPC, Transportation Plan, 68; NCTA, Appendix to November 1, 1962 Report to the President, vol. 1: Engineering, plate 2; Pfanstiehl, interview, 15 December 1999. 14. Rannells, foreword to Allan, For the Glory of Washington, 8; Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 4; Robert Gretton, “Metro,” Canadian Architect, February 1967, 27–28. 15. Richard B. Fernbach to Shurberg, 2 January 1963, CDS box 2, folder 7 (Stolzenbach’s comments appear on an attached routing slip); NCTA, Administrative Bulletin, 24 January 1963, and Rannells, Board for Selection of Consulting Architect, minutes, 25 January 1963, both in CDS box 2, folder 6. 16. Jane C. Loeffler, “Frederick Gutheim: Capital Catalyst,” Washington History 10 (Spring– Summer 1998): 24–45, 92–94; Farmer, interview; Gutheim, “The New Federal Architecture,” 34. 17. Kent Cooper, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 6 December 1999. 18. Frederick Gutheim, “Washington as a Starting Point: Remarks to the Washington Chapter, American Institute of Architects,” 15 January 1963, AH, box 41, folder: Washington City Plan, General, 10/27/62–9/63; Gutheim, “The New Federal Architecture,” 34–35. 19. Rannells to Weese, 21 July 1975, HW, box 186, folder: Rannells; Frederick Gutheim, “Roland Wank,” Architectural Forum 133 (September 1970): 58–59; Rannells, foreword to Allan, For the Glory of Washington, 1. 20. Cooper, interview; Rannells to McCarter, 8 October 1965, HW, Job 575, box 5, folder: Client 2; Rannells, foreword to Allan, For the Glory of Washington, 1; McQuade, “Subways Don’t Have to Be Miserable,” 184.
300
Notes to Pages 73–79
21. Stolzenbach to Walton, 3 May 1965, MHPC box 6, folder 9; President Johnson to Walter J. McCarter, 22 February 1966, OMB-NA, box 7, folder: GCM D.C. 1966, folder # 1— Transit Development (Interstate System). An attached letter from Charles L. Schultze, Director, Bureau of the Budget, to Johnson dated 21 February 1966 explains that the NCTA “Administrator will be announcing the designation of its architectural contractor within two or three weeks. Prior to this announcement, it would be most appropriate for you to send the attached letter to him.” Clearly the Johnson letter was more a public ratification of the NCTA’s policies than a real order. Apparently, NCTA deputy administrator Warren Quenstedt and community services director Cody Pfanstiehl sent the letter to the White House. Graham, interview. 22. Kent Cooper, introduction to Allan, For the Glory of Washington; NCTA, “Policy for Final Design of the Transit Development Program,” draft, 10 May 1965, CDS, box 20, folder 5. 23. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 2; Sprague Thresher, telephone interview by the author, 3 January 2000. 24. Cooper, interview. 25. Ibid.; Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 1. 26. Walter McQuade, “Harry Weese: A Young Architect Recalls the Old Chicago School,” Architectural Forum 116 (May 1962): 103; Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 5; Harry Weese, “A Springboard to Reality,” Form & Function Finland, February 1984. 27. Eva Ingersoll Gatling, introduction to The Saarinen Door: Eliel Saarinen, Architect and Designer at Cranbrook (Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Cranbrook Academy of Art, 1963), 5; Andrea O. Dean, “Harry Weese of Chicago.” AIA Journal 67 (May 1978): 58; Weese, “Springboard.” 28. McQuade, “Harry Weese,” 102–103; Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 5; Harry M. Weese, “Housing Patterns and What Makes Them,” Architectural Record 123 (July 1958): 172. 29. Pei, “Urban Renewal in Southwest Washington,” 66; Stan Allan, “A Man of Many Words and Works,” Inland Architect 116 (1999): 58; “Technology: Precast Office Building,” Architectural Forum 116 (January 1962): 106. 30. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 1; Weese to Rannells, 31 December 1965, reprinted in Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 1; Pfanstiehl, interview, 4 January 2000; Stan Allan, interview by author, Chicago, 26 July 2000; Pfanstiehl, letter to the author, 29 October 2000. 31. Harry Weese, interview by Betty J. Blum, March 1988, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Ernest R. Graham Study Center for Architectural Drawings, Department of Architecture, Art Institute of Chicago, 1991, transcript, 273. 32. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 2. Allan, interview. 33. Weese, “Architectural Design for the New Washington Subway” (1966), reprinted in Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 2. 34. Harry Weese & Associates, “Concept Design for the NCTA,” reprinted in Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 3. 35. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 2. On Saarinen’s use of concrete, see Carol Herselle Krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 140. On concrete federal buildings, see “Yasko Cites Excellence in New Federal Buildings,” Architectural Record 137 (January 1965): 23. 36. Gutheim to Levenberg, 26 August 1966, FG, box 95, folder 12; Rannells to McCarter, Quenstedt, Lyon, Herman, Pfanstiehl, 17 August 1966, FG, box 96, folder 1. 37. Rannells, interview; Jim Caywood, interview by the author, Frederick, Maryland, 18 January 2000. 38. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 5; Caywood, interview; Cooper, interview; Weese, interview by Stolzenbach; John G. Stone III, to Thomas Appleby, RLA, 22 November 1966, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown Subway.
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Notes to Pages 80 – 84
39. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 4; NCTA, “Public Safety,” July 1965, WMATAA, series 2, subseries 1, file 8; “Two Subways” CITY, November 1967, 17. 40. Caywood, interview; Harry Weese & Associates, “Job Memorandum #33,” 21 October 1966, and “Job Memorandum #21,” 19 September 1966, both in HW, Job 575, box 4, folder: meeting notes; drawings in Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 4; Allan, interview. 41. Allan, interview; Harry Weese & Associates, “Job Memorandum #33,” 21 October 1966, and “Job Memorandum #32,” 7 October 1966, HW, Job 575, box 4, folder: meeting notes; NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 15 September 1966, vol. 1, NCPC; Weese to Rannells, 25 November 1966, HW, Job 575, box 5, folder: client correspondence, 1 of 2. On 7 October 1966, Weese presented perspective drawings of trussed designs, stating that “such schemes, in addition to their great interest as an architectural space avoids maximum overburden problems by reducing cover to a minimum and also anticipates more realistically obstructions below grade such as underpinnings, depressed roadways and utilities [sic].” In a July 2000, interview, Allan suggested that Weese only reluctantly abandoned vaults, and that his subsequent defense of Montreal-type stations before the Commission of Fine Arts represented his efforts to stick up for his client, rather than his own thinking. But given that Weese stressed his desire to maximize volume prior to the Montreal trip (at the NCPC meeting cited earlier) and in correspondence to Rannells, it seems likely that Weese was less attached to the vault design than was Allan, his project manager. 42. Harry Weese & Associates, “Synopsis of Concept Design and Policy for the National Capital Transportation Agency,” CFA-NA, box 74, folder: Metrorail Subway Site Plans and Correspondence, Nov 1944 to Dec 1966. The drawings are not signed, but Emil Kish, a Weese architect from 1967 to 1968, recognized them as the work of Reynolds. Emil Kish, interview by author, Arlington, Virginia, 10 February 2000. 43. Harry Weese & Associates, “Synopsis of Concept Design”; Caywood, interview. 44. Caywood, interview. 45. U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, Microfilm Copy of Minutes of the Commission, CFANA, box 5, 21 June 1967, 163. 46. Canty, “How Washington Is Run,” 51; Von Eckardt comment, Heckscher, interview, 66; William Walton, recorded interview by Megan Floyd Desnoyers, Stone Ridge, New York, 5 October 1993, JFKL Oral History Program, 233; Walton, Evidence of Washington, 45. 47. Elmer Staats, recorded interview by Robert C. Turner, Washington, D.C., 13 July 1964, JFKL Oral History Program; John Carl Warnecke, interview by author, San Francisco, 5 January 2002; Karel Yasko, interview by William McHugh, Washington, D.C., 14 December 1966, JFKL Oral History Program; Von Eckardt, “Washington’s Chance for Splendor,” 62. 48. Walton to Stolzenbach, 29 August 1981, CDS box 39, folder 2 (Bunshaft, the son of Russian Jews, was hardly Teutonic, but apparently that was the image he projected); Krinsky, Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, 3, 18–21; Charles Atherton, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 15 February 2000; Dennis W. Madde, President, Potomac Valley Chapter of Maryland, AIA [American Institute of Architects], to Kenneth C. Landry, Administrator, Department of Public Services, AIA, 17 March 1964, WW, box 4, folder: FAA—Information General, July 1963–December 1964. 49. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 1; Barbara Donald to Heckscher, 22 March 1963 and Donald to Dan Fenn, 5 April 1963, AH, box 41, folder: Fine Arts Commission, 2/27/63–4/25–63; Heckscher to Dan Fenn, 24 January 1963, [cc to Walton], and A. Stanley McGaughan, President, Washington-Metropolitan Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Inc., to President Kennedy, 4 April 1963, WW, box 4, folder: Fine Arts Commission—Membership; Weese, interview by Stolzenbach. 50. National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, Public Law 86-669, section 204 (d); David
302
Notes to Pages 85 – 90
Finley to Stolzenbach, 25 January 1963, CFA, box 79, folder: Site Plans and Correspondence, Nov 1966 to Dec 1966; Stolzenbach to William Walton, 3 May 1965 (with attached draft of “NCTA Policy for Final Design of the Transit Development Program”) MHPC, box 6, folder 9. Rannells later griped about the CFA’s dubious jurisdiction. Rannells to Stolzenbach, 13 September 1981, CDS, box 39, folder 2. 51. Warnecke, interview; Jon A. Peterson, “The Nation’s First Comprehensive Plan,” Journal of the American Planning Association 51 (Spring 1985): 142. When Glenn Brown of the American Institute of Architects first proposed an arts commission for Washington in October 1900, he wanted a body of architects, landscape architects, and sculptors as a counterweight to the army engineers who had previously dominated the city’s landscape. 52. Walton to McCarter, 10 October 1966, CFA-NA, microfilm roll 16; Quenstedt, “Washington Plans for Rail Transit,” speech to American Transit Association Rail Transit Group Conference, Montreal, Canada, 6 April 1967, OMB-NA, box 17, folder: NCTA Programs 1967, Transit Development. 53. CFA, minutes, 19 April 1967, 179–181. 54. CFA, minutes, 21 June 1967, 52–53, 167, 170, 188. 55. CFA, minutes, 19 April 1967, 197. 56. CFA, minutes, 17 October 1967, 50, and 20 June 1967, 53. 57. CFA, minutes, 21 June 1967, 160–161; Caywood, interview. 58. CFA, minutes, 21 June 1967, 52, 187; Rannells to Stolzenbach, 13 September 1981, CDS, box 39, folder 2. The fact that Harry Weese’s brother, John, was a partner in Skidmore could only have added to the sense of rivalry. 59. CFA, minutes, 19 April 1967, 188, and 21 June 1967, 179; CFA, minutes, 20 June 1967, 52; Weese to Rannells and Mel Siegel, 5 June 1967, HW, Job 575, box 5, folder: Client, 1 of 2. At the time of the NCTA presentations to the CFA, only the downtown system of 1965 had been authorized by Congress. But Weese and his clients were looking forward to a larger, regional system, and submitted drawings of suburban stations as well as downtown subways. Moreover, even the stubby 1965 system included aboveground stations on the B&O right-of-way north of Union Station. 60. On the purpose of the synopsis, Allan, interview. On its reception, Atherton, interview. In January 2002 Warnecke could not remember seeing the synopsis, but on being shown a photocopy, he interpreted it as a series of designs to make each station structurally unique, asking “Was he trying to make each place look different?” Interview by author. 61. Caywood to Weese, 12 April 1967, HW, Job 575, box 6, folder: DeLeuw; WMATA press release, “Area Rapid Rail Transit Authority to Retain Walter McCarter as Advisor after NCTA Transition in September,” 18 August 1967, CFA-NA, box 79, folder: Metrorail Subway Site Plans and Correspondence, Feb 1967 to Oct 1967; Atherton to McCarter, 23 August 1967, CFA-NA, box 79, folder: Metrorail Subway Site Plans and Correspondence, Feb 1967 to Oct 1967. 62. William Walton to Stolzenbach, 29 August 1981, CDS, box 39, folder 2. 63. Rannells to Walton, 13 December 1966, CFA-NA, box 74, folder: Metrorail Subway Site Plans and Correspondence, Nov 1966 to Dec 1966. 64. CFA, minutes, 19 September 1967, 134. 65. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 5; Weese to Rannells and Mel Siegel, 5 June 1967, HW, Job 575, box 5, folder: Client, 1 of 2. Werner Gottschalk to Weese, 22 September 1967, HW, Job 575, box 6, folder: Engineer/Consultant Correspondence. Precast concrete panels were used for the rock stations. Thus, the coffered vault of Dupont Circle, a rock station, is visually similar but structurally alien from the coffered vault of its neighbor, Farragut North. 66. CFA, minutes, 19 September 1967, 134. 67. William M. C. Lam, interview by the author, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 21 August
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Notes to Pages 91– 96
2000; Beth Dunlop, “Architecture in Transit: Washington’s Metro,” AIA Journal 63 (December 1975): 40 and 42; Weese to Lothmar Cremer, 10 October 1967, HW, Job 575, box 6, folder: Engineer/Consultant Correspondence. Signs bolted to the vaults and hanging lights were added after the system opened. 68. CFA, minutes, 17 October 1967, 50. 69. Graham to Board, 30 October 1967, reproduced in Allan, For the Glory of Washington. Nor did Graham want the cheapest stations possible. He derided proposals for Toronto-style tiled walls as designs for “the longest bathroom in the world.” Graham, interview. 70. CFA minutes, 17 October 1967, 51; “ ‘Exciting Variety’ Emerges in Station Designs,” Metro Memo, July 1970, 1; Allan, interview. 71. Allan to Thresher, 18 February 1969, HW, Job 612, box 3, folder: Client correspondence, 8/66–8/70; WMATA, “Restatement of Authority Goals and Policy,” 31 December 1970, CPf, box 7, folder 3. 72. CFA, minutes, 17 October 1967, 44; De Leuw, Cather, and Harry Weese & Associates, “Glenmont (B) Route Engineering Analysis, Sections B009, B010, and B011,” WMATA, 30 September 1977, p. 40, MSC, box 14, folder 24. The same solution was considered for stations on the Rockville line, but by the time it was proposed it was too late to make such severe changes. Dodge to Board, 11 August 1977, CPf, box 29, folder 2. In 1979 testimony, Boleyn promised that no more vaulted stations would be built. U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Subcommittee on Governmental Efficiency and the District of Columbia, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 96th Cong., 1st sess., 28 September and 3 October 1979, 130. Allan points out that even the Forest Glen and Wheaton stations are significantly more spacious than comparable “tube” stations in London and Paris. Allan, interview. 73. Wolf Von Eckardt, “Metro: Example for the World,” Washington Post, 20 November 1971; “Washington Metro,” Architectural Review 163 (February 1978): 102; Dunlop, “Architecture in Transit,” 40; “Architecture Enriches Mass Transit Engineering” and “Mighty Vaults Bathed in Light Inspire, Reassure Metro Riders,” Architectural Record 164 (mid-August 1978): 66; Nory Miller, “Washington Metro: It Works and Looks Good,” Ekistics 256 (March 1977): 171–173. 74. “Mighty Vaults,” 66; “Why Are All These People Smiling?” Washington Post, 3 April 1976. The same claim appears in Paul D. Speiregen, “The Metro Look,” Mass Transit 4 (July– August 1977): 64; Dunlop, “Architecture in Transit,” 40–42; Weese to Thresher, 9 October 1967, HW, Job 612, box 1, folder: Drafts of design rationale, 27 January 67–15 July 68. John Rannells of the NCTA never accepted the vault for cut-and-cover stations. In 1971 he wrote to Weese that “I still cringe a bit at the imposition of a single structural form for station insides—whether it makes structural sense or not.” Rannells to Weese, 25 August 1971, HW, box 186, folder: Rannells. For his part, Jim Caywood of De Leuw, Cather was grateful to Weese for denying before the CFA that he had been overly influenced by the engineers, a “factual statement,” according to Caywood. But he sourly noted that “Weese has taken a lot of credit for the design of the Metro system, naturally leaving the engineers out entirely.” Perhaps, he suggested, the CFA “should be given the credit for the architectural concept and Weese was merely their tool.” Caywood to Stolzenbach, 13 June 1980, CDS, box 5, folder 10. 75. CFA, minutes, 20 February 1968. Chapter 4. The Region, 1966–1967
1. Jerome M. Alper, “Transit Regulation for the Metropolitan Area of Washington, D.C.,” reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia Mass Transit Compact, 5–6; Carlton Sickles, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 1981, MHPC.
304
Notes to Pages 96 –101
2. U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia Mass Transit Compact, 105; Edward Northrop, interview by the author, Baltimore, Maryland, 8 June 2000; Horsky to Wolfe, 11 April 1963, CAH-JFKL, box 19, folder: Joint Transportation Commission, 4/63–6/63. Northrop’s office was across the street from McLaughlin’s office in the District Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Fenwick’s office was in the Woodward Building, a few blocks away on 15th Street. 3. Alper, History of the Negotiations, v. 4. Jerome M. Alper, interview by the author, Chevy Chase, Maryland, 8 October 1998; JTC, minutes, 2 December 1955, MHPC, box 7, folder 4. 5. Alper, “Transit Regulation,” in U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia Mass Transit Compact, 25–26; Alper, “Exploratory Comments on Some of the Problems Involved in the Coordination of Regional Transit Regulation,” 13 June 1955, MHPC, box 7, folder 2. 6. Bartholomew and Wehrly to Eisenhower, 16 December 1955, MHPC, box 6, folder 4. 7. Royce Hanson, The Politics of Metropolitan Cooperation: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (Washington, D.C.: Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies, 1964), 1–5; Washington Metropolitan Regional Conference, Cooperation: The Story of the Washington Metropolitan Regional Conference: Regional Annual Report (1961), 2. 8. Gingery testimony, U.S. Congress, National Capital Transportation Act of 1960, 43; Fenwick testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia Mass Transit Compact, 106. 9. D.C. Transit System, Inc., to Hon. Edwin E. Willis, Chairman, Subcommittee no. 3, U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia Mass Transit Compact, 184; Delmer Ison, interview by the author, Locust Grove, Virginia, 23 October 2000; NCPC, Transportation Plan, 1. 10. Northrop, interview; Alper, History of the Negotiations, 45. Although Northrop left the JTC in 1961, I have extrapolated his distrust of appointed experts to the other negotiators. 11. Alper to Members of JTC, 7 February 1963, MHPC, box 11, folder 4; Alper, History of the Negotiations, 56–67; Willard Clopton, “NCTA’s Rail System Plans Attacked by Parent Agency,” Washington Post, 8 February 1963; Fenwick to President Kennedy, 1 March 1963, CAH-JFKL, box 22, folder: Three Sisters Bridge, 3/63–11/63; Ison, interview; Alper, History of the Negotiations, 44; Horsky to Ralph Dungan, 14 September 1963, CAH-JFKL box 19, folder: Joint Transportation Commission, 7/63–10/63; Wolfe to Horsky, 10 June 1964, OMB-NA, box 17, folder: NCTA Programs 1964, Transit Development (Interstate System); Horsky to Sitton, 16 June 1964, CAH-LBJL, box 45, folder: Joint Transportation Commission. 12. Alper, History of the Negotiations, 1, 47, 63. 13. JTC, “Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Compact,” draft of 1 September 1964, CAH-LBJL, box 61, folder: Joint Transportation Commission, Accompanying Envelope. 14. Stolzenbach to Hughes, 29 December 1964, CAH-LBJL, box 45, folder: Joint Transportation Commission; Robert E. Giles, General Counsel, Department of Commerce, to Gordon, 17 November 1964, CAH-LBJL, box 45, folder: Joint Transportation Commission; Sitton to Staats, 28 October 1964, OMB-NA, box 15, folder: NCTA Programs, 1960–65: Interstate Compact; G. d’Andelot Belin, General Counsel of the Treasury, to Gordon, 17 November 1964, CAH-LBJL, box 45, folder: Joint Transportation Commission. 15. Alper, History of the Negotiations, 105. 16. Ibid., 72, 97, 106; Sickles, interview, 1981. 17. Alper, History of the Negotiations, 97; Wolfe to Staats via Horsky, 9 December 1964, OMB-NA, box 15, folder: NCTA Programs, 1960–65: Interstate Compact.
305
Notes to Pages 101–104
18. Alper, History of the Negotiations, 99; Alper to Joint Transportation Commission, 17 June 1966, CAH-LBJL, box 45, folder: Joint Transportation Commission; Alper to Graham, 18 October 1967, OMB-NA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA 1967–68. Regional Plan—Preadopted Sys; Sickles testimony, U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System for National Capital Region: Joint Hearings before the Committee on the District of Columbia and the Subcommittee no. 4 of the Committee on the District of Columbia, House, on S. 2185, H.R. 11193, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1969, 83. 19. Alper, History of the Negotiations, 112, 114. 20. NCTA Advisory Board, minutes, 3 December 1965, FG, box 95, folder 12; Joint Transportation Commission, Bureau of the Budget and NCTA, minutes of joint meeting, 26 July 1965, MHPC, box 6, folder 6; Whitener remark, U.S. House of Representatives, D.C. Area Transit Compact: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3 of the Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 2d sess., 1966, 126; Basil Whitener, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, Gastonia, N.C., 13 November 1982, MHPC; Andrew Kopkind and James Ridgeway, “Washington: The Lost Colony,” New Republic, 23 April 1966, 14. Whitener lived until March 1989, almost thirteen years past the running of the first Metro train. 21. “D.C. Democrats Oppose Plan for Subway Control,” Washington Post, 7 December 1965; Craig to Horsky, 23 March 1966, OMB-NA, box 7, folder: GCM D.C. 1966, folder # 2—Transit Development (Interstate System); NCTA Advisory Board, minutes, 3 December 1965, FG, box 95, folder 12. Gerry Levenberg to Boleyn, 16 March 1966, OMB-NA, box 7, folder: GCM D.C. 1966, folder # 2—Transit Development (Interstate System); Edwards, Gutheim, Wood, and Levenberg to McCarter, 1 March 1966, CAH-LBJL, box 80, folder: Compact Legislation. 22. Califano, Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, 229–230. 23. Richard H. Kraft [NCPRC director], “Metropolitan Planning, Policy Making, and the Year 2000 Plan,” talk given before the Northern Virginia Regional Planning and Economic Development Commission, 27 April 1961, NCPC-NA, box 18, folder: Year 2000 plan; President Johnson to the Congress, 29 June 1966, C100, box 19, folder 4. The reorganization plan took effect on 8 September 1966. 24. Seeger, interview; William Boleyn, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 26 April 2000; Craig to Chapman, Sanders Clark, Justement, and Merrill, 17 March 1966, C100, box 45, folder 6; Horsky to John W. Macy Jr., 31 August 1965, MHPC, box 9, folder 12. Horsky to Macy, 28 December 1965, CAH-LBJL, box 99, folder: appointments, Macy’s office; Boleyn, General Government, to Hughes, 27 April 1966, OMB-NA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA 1967–68, Regional Plan—Preadopted Sys. 25. Alper, History of the Negotiations, 140; Ison, interview; Alper to Joint Transportation Commission, 17 June 1966, CAH-LBJL, box 45, folder: Joint Transportation Commission. 26. WMATA Board of Directors, minutes, 17 October 1966, MHPC, box 7, folder 1. 27. WMATA Board of Directors, minutes, 17 October 1966 and 20 January 1967, MHPC box 7, folder 1; “Biographies of Board Members and Key Staff,” WMATA, 1970, CPf, box 13, folder 17. Ison later reported that his new colleagues at the NCTA gave him only mild ribbing about his earlier criticism of their work. For example, he once found a copy of his 1963 testimony mysteriously deposited on his desk. Ison, interview. 28. McCarter, NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 9 February 1967, NCPC-NA, box 61; Wolfe to Horsky, 14 June 1966, CAH-LBJL, box 45, folder: Joint Transportation Commission; NCTA, “Revised Transit Development Program for the Nation’s Capital,” 1967, GG, box 143, folder: Transit: studies, reports, 1967–1968. 29. McCarter to John W. McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives, 12 July 1967, MHPC, box 11, folder 7; NCTA, “Recommended Modifications of the System of Rail
306
Notes to Pages 106 –112
Rapid Transit Lines and Related Facilities Authorized in the National Capital Transportation Act of 1965,” 29 March 1967, CFA-NA, box 74, folder: Metrorail Subway Site Plans and Correspondence, Feb 1967 to Oct 1967. 30. Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, Potential Rail Transit Corridors in Northern Virginia (Staff Report to NVTC Commissioners, 4 April 1966), 4; Harry Weese & Associates, “Job Memorandum #27,” 23 September and “Job Memorandum #35,” 21 November 1966, HW, Job 575, box 4, folder: meeting notes. 31. Gordon M. Murray, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Transportation, to Phillips, GSA [General Services Administration], 25 May 1967, OMB-NA, box 6, folder: GGM, D.C. 1967, folder # 1-Southwest Area Rapid Transit Info; NCTA, “Recommended Modifications”; McCarter to John W. McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives, 12 July 1967, MHPC, box 11, folder 7; NCPC, Urban Renewal and Housing Division, “Shaw: Downtown Transportation Study,” c. 1969, DHCD, RLA library, box: Shaw. For criticism, see Murin, Mass Transit Policy Planning, 76–84; Richard Severo, “Slum Areas Bypassed by Subway,” Washington Post, 15 March 1967, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Amend the National Capital Transportation Act of 1965. 32. John Insco Williams, rough draft of memo to Quenstedt from Keith, 8 August 1962, CDS, box 21, folder 2; U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 121. A line up 13th Street NW was included in NCPC’s 1959 Transportation Plan, but it attracted little attention afterward. Stolzenbach later stated that he rejected a 7th Street line as part of his effort to keep the total price tag for his system under $1 billion. Stolzenbach comment in Frederick A. Gutheim, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, April 1982, MHPC. On Weese’s proposals, see Rannells, foreword to Allan, For the Glory of Washington, 12; Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 3; Harry Weese & Associates, “Job Memorandum No. 6,” 2 August 1966, FG, box 96, folder 1; Mathew Platt, telephone interview by the author, 27 September 2000; Rannells to McCarter, Quenstedt, Lyon, Herman, Pfanstiehl, 17 August 1966, FG, box 96, folder 1. 33. Walter E. Fauntroy, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., 12 October 2001; NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 15 September 1966, vol. 1, NCPC-NA, box 60, NCTA Advisory Board, Minutes, 20 September 1965, FG, box 95, folder 12; NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 9 February 1967, NCPC-NA, box 61. 34. NCPC Commission Meetings, Open Sessions, 1 December 1966, 9 February 1967, and 6 April 1967, NCPC-NA, boxes 61–62; Tobriner to Bible, 2 November 1967, in U.S. Senate, Amend the National Capital Transportation Act of 1965, 18; Graham to Gude, 12 September 1967, GG, box 143, folder: Transit-general correspondence, 1967–1968. 35. Deen, “Critical Decisions in the Rapid Transit Planning Process,” 93. 36. Jeff O’Neill to Gude and Hawk, c. March 1967, GG, box 142, folder: Transportation, General Planning, Secretary Boyd. 37. NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 9 February 1967, NCPC-NA, box 61; Alan M. Voorhees & Associates, Inc., “Traffic Forecast” (prepared for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, December 1967), 80. 38. Francis Francois, interview by author, Bowie, Maryland, 25 February 2002. 39. NVTC Newsletter, December 1965, C100, box 36, folder 15; Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, Proposed Regional Rapid Rail Transit Planning and Program, Technical Report No. 1: System Planning (December 1967), 19. 40. “Transit Planning Activity,” NVTC Newsletter, 1965–1966 Annual Report, HW, Job 575, box 5, folder: Promotional, 1 of 2; Royce Hanson, Chairman, Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission, to Adams, 9 June 1977, JLF II, box 25, folder 12. Cleatus Barnett, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, n.d., MHPC. 41. “Rail Rapid Transit Included in Fairfax County Plans,” NVTC Newsletter, March 1966,
307
Notes to Pages 112–118
C100, box 36, folder 15; Stolzenbach comments in Barnett, interview by Stolzenbach; NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 11 January 1968, 183, NCPC-NA, box 63. 42. Quenstedt presentation, NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 12 October 1967, 104–112, NCPC-NA, box 63; Platt, interview by the author. 43. “Precii of the following reports,” c. 1967, OMB-NA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA, Regional Plan-Pre-Adopted System, 1965–66. 44. The $300 million figure (actually $306 million) refers to the cost of the D.C. portions, including Sector Zero, of the Greenbelt and Branch Avenue routes as calculated in 1969 dollars in early 1969. De Leuw, Cather & Co. and Harry Weese & Associates, Preliminary Design and Capital Costs: Adopted Regional System, 1968, revised February 1969 (Washington, D.C.: WMATA, 1969), fig. 37, p. 66; Babson testimony, U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 66. 45. WMATA Board, minutes, 20 October 1967, MHPC, box 7, folder 6. Graham to Stanford E. Parris, Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, 2 November 1967, MHPC, box 7, folder 9; Warrington, interview. 46. Alper, History of the Negotiations, 123; Alper to Graham, 18 October 1967, and Armbrust, General Government Management Division, to Hughes, 24 August 1967, both in OMB-NA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA 1967–68, Regional Plan—Preadopted Sys. 47. Kallen, General Government Management Division, to Hughes, 25 October 1967, OMB-NA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA 1967–68, Regional Plan—Preadopted Sys; Alper, History of the Negotiations, 99; Armbrust to Hughes, 24 August 1967; William Boleyn, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., 10 May 2000. 48. Kuhn, Loeb & Co., Dillon, Read & Co., “Financial Requirements for Airlie II-A System,” 20 October 1967, OMB-NA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA 1967–68, Regional Plan—Preadopted Sys.; Willard W. Brittain, “Metro: Rapid Transit for Suburban Washington.” in David M. Gordon, ed., Problems in Political Economy: An Urban Perspective (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1971): 441; William Herman, telephone interview by the author, 30 March 2000. 49. Herman, interview. 50. E. W. Marlowe / Operations Research Incorporated, NCTA Technical Report 213: Comparison of Transit Vehicle Systems (NCTA, April 1964), 1; Graham, “General Transit Planning Policies: In Part, from Statute, Adopted by NCTA, or More Recently Adopted or Ratified by WMATA,” 28 December 1967, MHPC, box 7, folder 5; WMATA, “Response to Undated ‘UMTA’ Report, Subject: Assessment of WMATA Car Technology,” in U.S. House Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on D.C. Appropriations, District of Columbia Appropriations for 1974, part 1, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., 995; Quenstedt, “Washington Plans for Rail Transit.” 51. NCTA, Engineering Appendix, 1963, 62; Caywood, interview; Caywood to Sickles, Chairman, Washington Suburban Transit Commission, 8 December 1967, MHPC, box 7, folder 4. 52. NCTA, Engineering Appendix, 64; Harry Weese & Associates, “Job Memorandum #30,” 4 October 1966, HW, Job 575, box 4, folder: meeting notes; Graham, “General Transit Planning Policies.” 53. Richard Heck, telephone interview by the author, 30 October 2001. 54. Califano, Triumph and Tragedy, 231–232. 55. “Hearings, Official Proposals Alter Routes,” Metro Memo, March 1968; Francois, interview by author; De Leuw, Cather & Co. and Harry Weese & Associates, Preliminary Design and Capital Costs, fig. 2, p. 9. 56. WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program (1 March 1968), 5, 23. In truth, the ARS consisted of only 97.2 miles, but for some reason in discussions and documents it was always rounded up to 98 miles.
308
Notes to Pages 118 –122
57. Vignelli, interview, 3 October 2000; Warrington, interview; Cody Pfanstiehl, interview by author, Silver Spring, Maryland, 20 September 2000; Pfanstiehl to Weese, 11 April 1969, HW, Job 575, box 5, folder: Client 2; CFA, minutes, 17 January 1968. 58. Gleason, WMATA Board Chairman, to President Johnson, 14 June 1968, MHPC, box 6, folder 7. Chapter 5. The Bridge, 1966–1971
1. Rice Odell, “To Stop Highways Some Citizens Take to the Streets,” Smithsonian, April 1972, 24–29; Bob Levey and Jane Freundel Levey, “End of the Roads,” Washington Post Magazine, 26 November 2000; Faye P. Haskins, “The Art of D.C. Politics: Broadsides, Banners, and Bumper Stickers,” Washington History 12 (Fall–Winter 2000–2001): 46–63. 2. Odell, “To Stop Highways Some Citizens Take to the Streets”; Philip Hammer, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 22 December 1982, MHPC. 3. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1993), 11; Craig, interview by author, 5 November 1999. 4. Clear statements from all sides of the dispute, reprinted excerpts of several key documents, as well as a sense of the acrimony of the debates, can be found in U.S. House of Representatives, The Interstate System in the District of Columbia: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Roads of the Committee on Public Works, on H.R. 16000, to Amend Title 23 of the United States Code to Require the Construction of Certain Routes on the Interstate System in the District of Columbia, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 1968. Profiles of the lead ECTC activists and Peter Craig can be found in Levey and Levey, “End of the Roads.” For an example of cooperation by the ECTC and the Committee of 100, see the Committee on Urban Conservation, Freeways and Our City (1965), a sixteen-page pamphlet written by Craig and laid out by Abbott. 5. William D. Heath, Hearing Officer, Executive Director, Motor Vehicle Parking Agency, to Board of Commissioners, 7 April 1965, seventeen-page memo describing the public hearings on the North Central Freeway, 4 and 5 February 1965, in Department of Commerce Auditorium, MHPC, box 6, folder 4; Brussat to Horsky, 24 May 1966, OMB-NA, box 23, folder: NCPC, Transportation Planning Board, 1966–67. D.C. highway officials repeatedly accused Craig of fronting for his new employer, the Southern Railway. These ad hominem attacks ignored the fact that Craig had been fighting freeways long before joining the railroad. Craig to Duke, 12 August 1966, CAH-LBJL, box 62, folder: Transportation Miscellaneous; Craig to Horsky, 13 December 1965, CAH-LBJL, box 44, folder: Peter Craig Miscellaneous. 6. Elmer B. Staats, interview by T. H. Baker, Washington, D.C., 9 December 1971, LBJL, 1–15; “Possible Firms for D.C. Transportation Study,” CAH-LBJL, box 45, folder: Policy Advisory Committee—Accompanying Envelope; Federal City Council, Freeways in the National Capital Region (Washington, D.C.: Federal City Council, April 1966), 56; Wolf Von Eckardt, “The Changing Mood of Freeway System Victims,” Washington Post, 8 February 1970; Willard Fazar to record, 24 March 1965, CAH-LBJL, box 44, folder: Policy Advisory Committee, 1966. 7. Craig, letter to the author, 28 July 2004; Willard Fazar to record, 24 March 1965, CAHLBJL, box 44, folder: Policy Advisory Committee, 1966; Arthur D. Little, Inc., Transportation Planning in the District of Columbia, 1955 to 1965: A Review and Critique: A Report to the Policy Advisory Committee of the District of Columbia Commissioners (Washington, D.C.: Arthur D. Little, 1966), iii; Elizabeth Rowe, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, MHPC; Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty, 167. 8. U.S. Congress, Memorial Tributes and Services: William H. Natcher, Late a Representative from Kentucky, 103rd Cong., 2d sess., 1996, 7, 10–11; Christopher Murphy, Acknowledgements, Memorial Service, U.S. Capitol, 4 May 1994, in U.S. Congress, Memorial Tributes and Services:
309
Notes to Pages 123 –126
William H. Natcher, 77; Natcher, Journal, 17 June 1966, XVII, and 25 July 1966, XVII, 3818, WHN; Michael Wines, “William H. Natcher Dies at 84; Held Voting Record in Congress,” New York Times, 31 March 1994; Wendell H. Ford, foreword to U.S. Congress, Memorial Tributes and Services, William H. Natcher, iii. 9. Richard F. Fenno, The Power of the Purse: Appropriations Politics in Congress (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 32–35, 168, 179–180, 197. 10. Philip A. McCombs, “Rep. Natcher: Eye of Storm over D.C. Funds, Freeways,” Washington Post, 13 February 1971; Fenno, Power of the Purse, 179–180. 11. Natcher, Journal, 18 October 1969, XXII, 5246; 26 May 1966, XVII, 3687; 11 January 1956, III, part II, 1262; 31 March 1955, III, part I, 989; 17 August 1966, XVIII, 3917; 10 August 1967, XIX, 4384; 11 August 1967, XIX, 4386; 15 August 1967, XIX, 4388; and 22 June 1970, XXIII, 5630–5631. 12. Natcher, Journal, 8 September 1966, XVIII, 3946; 13 June 1968, XX, 4684; and 21 July 1969, XXI, 5053. 13. Rowe, interview by Stolzenbach; Ford, foreword to U.S. Congress, Memorial Tributes and Service, William H. Natcher, iii; Natcher, Journal, 19 March 1955, III, part I, 965; Jack Eisen, “Rep. Natcher: Policeman of D.C. Freeways,” Washington Post, 20 July 1969; Natcher, Journal, 19 July 1955, III, part I, 1167; Richard Harwood, “$760,000,000 Bargainer, Natcher Helps Hold U.S. Purse,” Louisville Courier-Journal, 29 January 1962. 14. U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia Appropriations, 1964, 619. 15. Natcher comments, U.S. House of Representatives, D.C. Appropriations, 1967: Hearings before a Subcommittee on District of Columbia Appropriations, Committee on Appropriations, 89th Cong., 2d. sess., 1966, 407, 409, 420. 16. George Hartzog, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 23 June 1981, MHPC; “Statement of Agreement Relative to Implementation of Freeway Program in District of Columbia and Virginia,” REM, box 6, folder: Official Files, 1967 (District of Columbia); Craig, Committee of 100, to NCPC, 13 September 1966, C100, box 19, folder 2; Fred Collington to Mr. Sutton, 15 June 1966, OMB-NA, box 2, folder: (D.C.) Highway Program Studies (cont’d) GC-1966. 17. Congressional Record, 1 July 1965, H 14955; Charles A. Horsky, memorandum, 19 August 1966, OMB-NA, box 7, folder: GCM D.C. 1966, folder # 2—Transit Development (Interstate System); “Subway Designers Get a Green Light,” Washington Post, 30 September 1966. 18. Craig to D.C. Council, 25 May 1976, PSC, box 40, notebook: Studies on Transportation Planning by P. S. Craig, 1972–1975; Committee of 100, Motion, 29 September 1966, CAH-LBJL, box 44, folder: Authorization for DC Highway Construction; Helen Leavitt, Member, Democratic Central Committee of the District of Columbia, and Peter S. Craig, Trustee, Committee of 100 on the Federal City, “Freeway Test Suit Filed,” 7 December 1966, CAH-LBJL, box 44, folder: Freeway Test Suit; Roberts Owen, interview by the author, Washington, D.C., 19 July 2000. 19. Department of Transportation Act, Public Law 89-670; Alan S. Boyd, interview by David G. McComb, Washington, D.C., 20 November 1968, LBJL, 14; Alan S. Boyd, telephone interview by the author, 2 October 2001. As under secretary of commerce for transportation, from 1965 to 1967, Boyd had nominally supervised the Bureau of Public Roads, but he lacked the staff necessary to analyze independently the bureau’s work. 20. Alan S. Boyd, interview by David G. McComb, Washington, D.C., 18 December 1968, LBJL, 18; P. L. Sitton, Commerce and Finance, to Staats, 15 October 1963, OMB-NA, box 15, folder: NCTA System Proposals, 1963; Craig, Memorandum, “Re: Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning,” 4 April 1960, PSC, box 12, folder: Northwest Committee for Transportation Planning, 1960; Office of the White House Press Secretary, press release, 6 January 1966, CAH-LBJL, box 46, folder: Transportation—NCTA; Sitton to Boyd, 1 May 1967,
310
Notes to Pages 126 –129
U.S. Department of Transportation, General Records, Office of the Secretary, General Correspondence, 1967–72, Record Group 398, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, box 44, folder: 6042-9 Federal-Aid Highways, District of Columbia, Three Sisters Bridge, 1967, pt 2; Peter S. Craig, Statement before the Joint Economic Committee, Subcommittee on Economy in Government, 6 May 1970, C100, box 36, folder 3; “Doubtful Appointments” (editorial), American Motorist [D.C. edition], June 1967, 10; Alan S. Boyd, Secretary of Transportation, “Remarks Prepared for Delivery before the Washington Board of Trade,” 26 September 1967, C100, box 36, folder 2. 21. Sitton to Bohen, 2 February 1968, MHPC, box 6, folder 8; Stephen J. Pollak to President Johnson, 4 May 1967, 10pm, MHPC, box 6, folder 7; Boyd testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Major Highway Problems in the District of Columbia: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Roads of the Committee on Public Works, 90th Cong., 1st sess. 1967, 3; Gude to Boyd, 16 September 1967, GG, box 142, folder: Transportation, General Planning, Secretary Boyd. 22. Brig. Gen. Robert E. Mathe to Boyd, 27 October 1967, GG, box 142, folder: Transportation, General Planning, Secretary Boyd; Ben W. Gilbert, telephone interview with the author, 19 March 2002; D.C. Department of Highways and Traffic, comments on “A Framework for the District of Columbia Highway Program,” 7 March 1968, CAH-LBJL, box 97, folder: Congressmen—88th; John Nevius, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, MHPC; John W. Hechinger, “Statement Concerning Approval of the Major Thoroughfare and Mass Transportation Plan of the District,” 12 December 1968, DCCC box 18, folder: Transportation Planning; Kallen to Hughes, 17 November 1967, OMB-NA, box 2, folder: GCP: 1966, D.C. Highway. 23. “A Brake to the Bulldozer” (editorial), New York Times, 21 February 1968; “Subway Designers Get a Green Light,” Washington Post, 30 September 1966; Sitton to Bohen, 2 February 1968, MHPC; “Case of Three Sisters” (editorial), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5 January 1968; Stephen J. Pollak to file, “Three Sisters Bridge,” 31 August 1967, James C. Gaither, Office Files, LBJL, box 269, folder: Transportation. 24. U.S. House of Representatives, Major Highway Problems, 1. 25. D.C. Federation of Civic Associations, Inc., v. Airis, 391 F. 2d, 478, 483–484, cited in U.S. House of Representatives, Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, 90th Cong., 2d sess., H. Rep. 1584, 53–55; 90th Cong., 2d sess., H. Rep. 16000. 26. “A Highway Bill We Could Live Without” (editorial), Life Magazine, 23 August 1968, 26B; Office of the White House Press Secretary, “Statement by the President on Signing S. 3418-Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968,” 24 August 1968, OMB-NA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA, General, 1966–1968. 27. Judith Hennesee, “A Layman’s Who’s Who on the Freeway Donnybrook,” Washingtonian, May 1968, 49; Frederick A. Babson, remarks, 7 August 1969, C100, box 36, folder 11; D.C. Federation of Civic Associations et al., Appellants, v. John A. Volpe, Secretary of Transportation, et al., 459 F.2d 1231 (D.C. Cir. 1972). 28. Jackson Graham to Joseph A. Califano Jr., 5 August 1968, WHCF, LBJL, TN2, box 3, folder: TN2 8/1/68–; Frederick A. Babson to District of Columbia City Council, 3 July 1969, and James P. Gleason, statement, 18 July 1968, both in MHPC, box 7, folder 10; Graham to Board, 12 September 1968, OMB-NA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA, Budget General FY 1969; Graham to Walter Washington, 13 November 1968, appendix to D.C. Department of Highways and Traffic, “Summary of Analysis and Recommendations on Alternate Proposals for the District of Columbia Comprehensive Transportation Plan,” 15 November 1968, C100 box 19, folder 2. Eight months earlier, Graham had testified that 70 percent of riders would arrive by motor vehicle. U.S. House of Representatives, Department of Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1969: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations,
311
Notes to Pages 130 –133
Part 3: Related Agencies, 90th Cong., 2d sess., 1968, 152. See also Babson and Graham testimony, U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 10 June 1969, 64. 29. Natcher, Journals, 24 September 1968, XX, 4758; “LBJ, Cabinet Officers Laud Prototype,” Metro Memo, October 1968. 30. Arlington Committee on Optimum Growth, “Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor: Citizens’ View,” September 1973, 13, CO-OPT, series 7, folder 2; Warrington, interview. 31. Though Atlantans would later reject some freeways, the Interstate 75 spine was built as planned. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Race, Place and Politics in Atlanta (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming). The Federal City Council financed much of the pro-bond campaign. James P. Gleason, interview by Stolzenbach, 7 January 1982; Warrington, interview. 32. NCPC, “Policies and Principles for a Transportation System for the Nation’s Capital,” 11 December 1968, DCCC, box 18, folder: Transportation Planning; NCPC, “Elements of the Comprehensive Plan,” 19, quoted in D.C. Council, “Report on the Interstate Highway System in the District of Columbia,” February 1970, GG box 142, folder: D.C. Freeways 1970; Boyd statement, 12 December 1968, C100, box 45, folder 7; Lowell Bridwell, Federal Highway Administrator, to Airis, 17 January 1969, GG, box 142, folder: D.C. Freeways 1969. 33. Lewis, Divided Highways, 129–130; Alan S. Boyd, telephone interview by author, 2 October 2001; Conversation 620-14, Oval Office, 17 November 1971, Nixon White House Tapes, NPMP. 34. Egil Krogh, telephone interview by author, 8 February 2001; U.S. Department of Transportation, Office of the Secretary, “Remarks by Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpe at the Ground Breaking of the Metro System in Washington, D.C. Tuesday, December 9, 1969,” WMATA-A, accretion #2, file 5; Roger L. Hildebeidel, Budget Examiner, OMB, to Weinberger, 9 October 1970, Egil Krogh, files, NPMP, box 35, folder: highways [1970]; House Committee on Public Works, “Summary of Staff Meeting on D.C. Highway Situation—July 1, 1969,” 2 July 1969, WHN, box: Rapid Transit, folder: Mass Transit, 1970?. 35. U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 42, 70. 36. Moynihan to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, 25 June 1969, 12:15 pm., WHCF, NPMP, [Ex] TN 2-1 (Metropolitan D.C. Subway System), 7/10/69–12/29/70; Frederick A. Babson, Chairman, WMATA, to District of Columbia City Council, 3 July 1969, MHPC, box 7, folder 10; Natcher, Journal, 27 January 1969, XXI, 4822; Natcher to Giaimo, 20 June 1969, RNG, box 76, folder: D.C. Transportation, 1969–72; Office of William M. Natcher, “Freeways—Rapid Rail Transit,” 24 September 1969, CPf, box 25, folder 12; “Delay in Awarding Subway Contracts Feared by Officials,” Evening Star, 6 August 1969; Babson, remarks, 7 August 1969, C100, box 36, folder 11; Jack Eisen, “WMATA Eyes Disbanding in Impasse over Subway,” Washington Post, 6 August 1969; Krogh, interview. 37. Walterene Swanston and Ronald Sarro, “District of Columbia Council Vote Follows Wild Melee,” Sunday Star, 10 August 1969; D.C. City Council, statement, 9 August 1969, DCCC, box 20, folder: Freeways 1969 (2); D.C. Department of Highways, Design Report—I266 Bridge and Approach Roadway (March 1971), 43; Hahn, statement, 8 August 1969, DCCC, box 20, folder: Freeways 1969. 38. Hahn, statement, 13 August 1969, DCCC, box 20, folder: Freeways 1969 (2); Office of William M. Natcher, “Freeways—Rapid Rail Transit,” 24 September 1969, CPf, box 25, folder 12; Colean, Chairman of Transportation Committee, Federal City Council, to Washington Trustees, 13 October 1970, C100, box 45, folder 8; James Heavey and William Grigg, “Hahn Threatens to Start New 3-Sisters Fight,” Evening Star, 19 September 1969; Babson to Graham, 7 August 1969, MHPC, box 7, folder 10; Graham, interview; Graham to Board, 2 September 1969, MHPC, box 7, folder 10; Office of William H. Natcher, “Freeways—Rapid Rail Transit,” 24 September 1969, CPf, box 25, folder 12.
312
Notes to Pages 134 –138
39. WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program (1 March 1968; revised, 7 February 1969), Addendum; WMATA, Annual Report, 1969, HW, Job 575, box 5, folder: Promotional Correspondence, 22 February 1966–1 March 1972. 40. Adams to Francois, Freeland, White, Miller, 15 June 1977, JLF II, box 25, folder 12. 41. Natcher, Journal, 16 October 1969, XXII, 5238; Hawk to Gude, 9 December 1969, GG, box 142, folder: D.C. Freeways 1969. 42. Walter Washington to Agnew, President of the Senate, 20 February 1970, GG, box 142, folder: D.C. Freeways 1970; D.C. Council, “Report on the Interstate Highway System in the District of Columbia,” February 1970, GG, box 142, folder: D.C. Freeways 1970. 43. Betty James, “Cuts in D.C. Budget May Not Be Final,” Evening Star, 5 June 1970. 44. Owen, interview; Jack Eisen, “Bridge Project Halted,” Washington Post, 8 August 1970. 45. Colean, Chairman, Transportation Committee, to Washington Trustees, Federal City Council, 13 October 1970, WHN, box: Rapid Transit, folder: Mass Transit, 1970?; “Hearings End on Design for Bridge,” Washington Post, 12 December 1970; “Chronology,” Metro Memo, July–August 1972. 46. Jack Eisen, “Volpe Gambles on Metro Loan,” Washington Post, 19 October 1970; Graham to Board, 15 October 1970, WHN, box: Rapid Transit, folder: Mass Transit, 1970?; Jack Eisen, “Metro Digs Deeper into Uncertainty,” Washington Post, 14 November 1971. 47. McCombs, “Rep. Natcher”; Eisen, “Metro Digs Deeper”; “Natcher Unyielding on Metro, Predicts $5 Billion Cost,” Evening Star, 9 September 1971; Joseph Volz, “Here Comes Metro Again,” Washington Daily News, 3 December 1971; Natcher, Journal, 18 November 1971, XXVI, 6510, and 11 February 1972, XXVII, 6641; Irna Moore, “Natcher on the Road to Metro Accord,” Washington Post, 23 May 1971; Natcher, Journal, 17 September 1970, XXIV, 5771. Natcher would later claim that he had predicted a $4 billion cost of the regional system as early as 1962. But in 1962, Natcher did not question Stolzenbach’s figure of $700 million for a regional system. Only in late 1970 did he first predict a $4 billion cost, and never did he acknowledge his own role in increasing Metro’s price. U.S. House of Representatives, District of Columbia Appropriations for 1974, Part 1: Hearings before the Subcommittee on D.C. Appropriations, 93rd Cong., 1st sess, 1973, 895; Natcher, Journal, 9 October 1962, XI, 2017; and 5 October 1970, XXIV, 5840. 48. Congressional Record, 2 December 1971, H 11670; “The Fate of Metro Now: A $211-Million Riddle” (editorial), Washington Post, 10 September 1971. 49. Krogh, interview. 50. Martis S. Becker, Chairman of Delegation, to Gude, 16 November 1970, GG, box 142, folder: North Central Freeway / Northern Parkway; Eisen, “Metro Digs Deeper”; William J. Goodman, Maryland Senator, Prince George’s County, to Gude et al., 12 May 1971, GG, box 138, folder: Transportation—Transit 92nd. 51. Gilbert Gude, interview by the author, Bethesda, Maryland, 2 August 2000; Gude to Alvin E. O’Konski, House Committee on the District of Columbia, 28 September 1970, GG, box 143, folder: North Central Freeway / Northern Parkway correspondence; Tydings, “Statement on District of Columbia Appropriations Bill Conference Report,” 1 July 1970, GG, box 142, folder: D.C. Freeways 1970. 52. Leland J. White, “Dividing Highway: Citizen Activism and Interstate 66 in Arlington, Virginia,” Washington History 13 (Spring–Summer 2001): 60; U.S. House of Representatives, Revenue Proposals: Hearings before Subcommittee No. 4. of the Committee on the District of Columbia to Consider D.C. Revenue Proposals, 91st Cong., 2d sess., 1970, 175; Jack Eisen, “Natcher Links Funds for Subway to Settlement of All Freeway Suits,” Washington Post, 12 August 1969; David R. Boldt, “Miller Walks Fast to Catch Broyhill,” Washington Post, 20 October 1972;
313
Notes to Pages 139 –141
Congressional Record, 11 May 1971, H 3744; William E. Timmons to David Parker, 17 November 1971, WHCF, NPMP, [Ex] TN 2-1 (Metropolitan D.C. Subway System), 1/1/71–. 53. Robert Giaimo, interview by Morton Tenzer, 10 December 1982 and 22 May 1984, Center for Oral History, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut; Giaimo to Mrs. Irving Berman, Woodbridge, Conn., 19 August 1969, and Giaimo to Lauren Brown, 30 October 1970, both in RNG, box 70. 54. Giaimo to Ross Dixon, Dean of Students, Worcester Junior College, 23 June 1971, RNG, box 70; Giaimo to Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Fox, 14 August 1972, RNG, box 75, folder: D.C.-General; Marion Edey, Chairman, League of Conservation voters, to Editor, New Haven Register, 13 May 1971, and Giaimo to Conte, handwritten note, 6 December 1971, both in RNG, box 75, folder D.C. Metro Correspondence and General-3. 55. Congressional Record, 11 May 1971, H 3750; “Chronology,” Metro Memo, July–August 1972; “Back to Volpe” (editorial), Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), 13 May 1971; “Subway Release” (editorial), Evening Star, 22 May 1971; Natcher, Journal, 28 May 1971, XXVI, 6308; Jack Eisen, “July 4, 1974, Goal Set for First Subway Run,” Washington Post, 4 December 1971; “Metro Construction Radiates Daily toward Suburbs,” Metro Memo, September 1971. 56. John A. Volpe, Secretary of Transportation, et al., petitioners, v. D.C. Federation of Civic Associations, et al., Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, Supreme Court of the United States, October Term, 1971, submitted January 1972, 26a, 31a. See also D.C. Federation of Civic Associations v. Volpe; Natcher, Journal, 18 October 1971, XXVI, 6463. 57. Robert C. McDonnell, Staff Director, Montgomery County Council, memorandum, 22 November 1971, GG, box 143, folder: Transportation—Transit—Subways ’71; Jack Eisen, “Subway Fund Bid Defeated,” Washington Post, 12 May 1971; Fairfax County Government, news release, 4 December 1971, RNG, box 75, folder: D.C. Metro; “Could the Metro System Really Die?” (editorial), Washington Post, 17 November 1971; Conversation 294-25, Executive Office Building, 18 November 1971, Nixon White House Tapes, NPMP; President Nixon, statement, 18 November 1971, GG, box 138, folder: Transportation—Transit 92nd; Krogh, interview. 58. Jack Eisen, “House Releases District Subway Funds,” Washington Post, 3 December 1971. 59. Congressional Record, 2 December 1971, H 11675; Volz, “Here Comes Metro Again”; Eisen, “House Releases District Subway Funds.” On the final roll-call vote on the Giaimo amendment, the count was 195 to 174. Robert T. Hartmann, aide to Minority Leader Gerald Ford, considered the earlier teller vote to be “crucial,” and noted that after the initial vote, several Republicans apparently considered the matter settled and went home to dinner. No author, no date, no title [Apparently Hartmann to Ford, c. December 1971], Robert T. Hartmann, Papers, GRFL, box 61, folder: Vote Breakdown on Four Bills—Draft Extension, Debt Limit, SST, Metro Funds. 60. Fenno, Power of the Purse, 416; Natcher, Journal, 3 December 1971, XXVI, 6550; Fred Barnes, “Mayor Drops Freeways,” Evening Star, 29 December 1971; “Freeway Plan Dropped by Md. Agency,” Washington Post, 4 April 1972; Martha Angle, “D.C. Canceling Pact on Bridge,” Washington Star-News, 4 August 1972; Jack Eisen, “Three Sisters Plan Is Still Considered by Federal Agency,” Washington Post, 22 October 1972; Natcher, Journal, 24 November 1972, XXVII, 7016–7019; Mary Russell, “Highway Trust Busters Rebuffed,” Washington Post, 4 April 1973; Douglas B. Feaver, “Three Sisters Highway Project Is Killed—Again,” Washington Post, 13 May 1977. In the days following the floor vote, Natcher did consider withdrawing the D.C. appropriations bill altogether, but Speaker Carl Albert refused to go along with that tactic. Giaimo, interview, 22 May 1984. 61. U.S. Comptroller General, Transit Authority’s System of Reporting on the Status of METRO’s Costs and Construction Progress Needs to Be Improved (Washington, D.C.: General Accounting Office, 13 March 1974), 8.
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Notes to Pages 142–149
Chapter 6. The Builders, 1972–1976
1. Dermot Cole, “When the Pipeline Came,” Heartland Magazine, 13 July 1997. 2. Cleatus Barnett, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 25 January 2001. 3. Sitton to John Clinton, 15 September 1964, OMB-NA, box 17, folder: NCTA Programs 1964, Transit Development (Interstate System). 4. Stephen Klaidman, “Dramatics Color Graham’s Methodical Bent,” Washington Post, 20 January 1975; Graham, interview; Roy T. Dodge, interview by Lynn L. Sims, Alexandria, Virginia, 26 February 1982, Engineer Memoirs, Research Collections, Office of History, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alexandria, Virginia. 5. Warrington, interview; Jack Eisen, “Metro’s Shy Pilot,” Washington Post, 11 March 1973; Klaidman, “Dramatics Color Graham’s Methodical Bent”; Graham, interview; WMATA Board, minutes, 17 March 1967, MHPC, box 7, folder 6. 6. Stephen Klaidman, “Jack Graham: The $4.5 Billion (or More) Man,” Washington Post, 19 January 1975; Eisen, “Metro’s Shy Pilot”; Carol Caywood remark, Caywood, interview; Graham, interview. 7. Pfanstiehl, interview, 4 January 2000; Warrington, interview, comment made after end of recording; Thresher interview; Vignelli, interview; Graham, interview; Eisen, “Metro’s Shy Pilot.” 8. Klaidman, “Dramatics Color Graham’s Methodical Bent”; Larry Heflin, interview by author, Cabin John, Maryland, 25 September 2000; Pfanstiehl, interview, 20 September 2000; William Boleyn, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 10 May 2000; Warrington, interview. On one occasion he used his car instead of the motorcycle, only to realize that there was no place to turn it around, and that he would have to drive several miles back in reverse. 9. Herbert Harris II, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 2 March 2001; Vernon Garrett, interview by author, Phoenix, Maryland, 26 October 2000; Quenstedt, interview; Francis Francois, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, MHPC; Eisen, “Metro’s Shy Pilot”; “Metro Ticks,” D.C. Gazette, October 1975, RNG, box 88, folder: D.C. Subcommittee Research Material; Graham, interview. 10. Graham, interview; Dodge, interview by Sims, 109, and Dodge, interview by author, Belvoir, Virginia, 15 February 2001; Theodore Lutz, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 6 October 2000; Graham to Steen, 18 August 1979, Greater Washington Board of Trade, Archives, GWU, box 331, folder: Metro (Steen), personal correspondence, 1972–1983. 11. U.S. House of Representatives, Second Supplemental Appropriation Bill, 1971: Hearings before the Committee on Appropriations, 92d Cong., 1st sess., 1971, 1026; Quenstedt, “Washington Plans for Rail Transit,” speech to American Transit Association Rail Transit Group Conference, Montreal, Canada, 6 April 1967, OMB-NA, box 17, folder: NCTA Programs 196, Transit Development. 12. “Metro Construction Status,” July 1971, CPf, box 26, folder 4; “ ‘Big John’ Poised for Metro Tunnels,” Washington Post, 2 August 1971. 13. Heflin, interview; “Metro Construction Status,” July 1971, CPf, box 26, folder 4. 14. Heflin, interview. 15. Thomas Crosby, “Mole-Like Metro Cracks Walls in Tariff Building Wing,” Washington Star, 28 February 1975; Dodge, interview by Sims, 294; “Metro Construction Status,” July 1971, CPf, box 26, folder 4. 16. Fred Barnes, “Hard Rock Defeats Metro ‘Cookie Cutter,’ ” Evening Star, 24 April 1972; Garrett, interview; Thresher, interview. 17. Thomas Crosby, “Safety Rows Preceded Metro Cave-In,” Washington Star-News, 16 January 1973; Al Long to Pfanstiehl, September 1975, CPf, box 7, folder 8; WMATA, “Metro Year-End Review,” 24 December 1975, CPf, box 7, folder 8.
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Notes to Pages 149 –154
18. Paul W. Valentine, “Are Workers Safe on Metro Jobs?” Washington Post, 20 October 1974; Jay Mathews, “Report on Metro Death Draws Fire,” Washington Post, 7 April 1972; Thomas Crosby, “Firing by Metro Sets Off Strike,” Washington Star-News, 18 July 1973; Stephen Klaidman, “Metro Faces Big Hurdles,” Washington Post, 21 January 1975. 19. U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 203; WMATA, “Memorandum Concerning the Capitol South Station of the Ardmore Route, WMATA,” 22 June 1971, RNG, box 75, folder: D.C. Appro—D St. Station Metro; Stewart, Architect of Capitol, to Dodge, 15 August 1969, RNG, box 75, folder: D.C. Appro—D St. Station Metro. Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, the block in question was closed to vehicular traffic for security reasons. 20. Francois, interview by author; U.S. House of Representatives, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979: Hearings and Markups before the Subcommittee on Metropolitan Affairs and the Committee on the District of Columbia, 96th Cong., 1st sess., 1979, 28. 21. Wirth, Director, NPS [National Park Service], to Horsky, 15 July 1963, CAH-JFKL, box 23, folder: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Commission; George Hartzog, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 23 June 1981, MHPC; Graham, interview; NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 11 January 1968, NCPC, box 63. Wirth later emphasized his devotion to green space over harder public landscapes by resigning from the commission in protest after it approved plans for the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, which displaced several rows of trees on the Mall. Conrad Louis Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), 32. 22. Nicholas J. Roll, Office of Real Estate, WMATA, to Quenstedt, 7 June 1968, OMBNA, box 19, folder: GCP: WMATA 1967–68, Regional Plan—Preadopted Sys.; WMATA, Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report No. 1, 2 May 1974, p. 8, GG, box 95, folder: WMATA; Joseph P. Yeldell, Chairman, WMATA, to Hon. Walter J. Hickel, Secretary of the Interior, 27 July 1970, MHPC, box 7, folder 7. 23. NCPC Commission Meeting, Open Session, 12 January 1967 and 9 February 1967, NCPC-NA, box 61; Dodge, interview by author, February 2001; Weese, interview by Stolzenbach; Weese to Hartzog, 4 June 1970, and Weese to Owings, 15 May 1970, HW, Job 612, box 9, Miscellaneous stations; Graham to Dickenson, 10 February 1972, CPf, box 1, folder 6. 24. Keith to Stolzenbach, 1 August 1962, CDS, box 20, folder 4; Dodge, Memorandum for Record, 23 October 1967, HW, Job 612, box 3, folder: Client correspondence incoming; Weese to Thresher, 13 December 1968, HW, Job 612, box 3, folder: Client correspondence, 8/66–8/70. The engineers did leave flimsy knockout panels in the vault of each station to allow a blocklong pedestrian tunnel to be built in the future, but three decades later, such a tunnel was still just a planner’s dream. WMATA, Transit Service Expansion Plan (April 1999), 8. 25. William M. Wright, “White City to White Elephant: Washington’s Union Station since World War II,” Washington History 10 (Fall–Winter 1998–1999): 39–43; WMATA Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report No. 8, January 1976, CPf, box 28, folder 4. 26. David Braaten, “New Metro Delay Seen,” Washington Star-News, 27 July 1973; U.S. House of Representatives, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 27; Metro Memo, July 1974. 27. Herman, interview. 28. U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 80. 29. Dodge, interview by author; Warrington, interview. 30. Bootery, Inc. v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 326 F.Supp. 794 (D.D.C. 1970); Graham to Board, 3 December 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 3; D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study: Progress Report (December 1974), 17; “Revised Metrorail Capital Cost Estimate,” WMATA, Airlie XII Conference, 29–31 January 1976, Warrenton,
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Notes to Pages 154 –158
Virginia (WMATA, 1976), 41; Jack Eisen, “Two-Year Dispute Settled on Metro’s Farragut N. Station,” Washington Post, 19 February 1971. 31. WMATA, “Sidewalk Superintendent,” April 1971, and Norman Barclay, Very Important Juniors, to Gude, 1 April 1971, both in GG, box 139, folder: G Street Subway; WMATA Board, minutes, 24 January 1973, MHPC, box 7, folder 5. 32. Pfanstiehl, “Impact of New Systems on Communities,” before the Institute for Rapid Transit annual meeting, 10 June 1971, GG, box 138, folder: Transportation—Transit 92nd; Pfanstiehl, interview, 20 September 2000. 33. See, for example, Stephen C. Fehr, “Mood in Georgetown Swings toward Metro,” Washington Post, 10 January 1994. 34. Williams, interview; Deen, interview, 1 December 1999. 35. Herman, interview. 36. Donald Hirzel, “Subways Are for Weeping, at Least in Maryland Suburbs,” Washington Star, 19 April 1975; Platt, telephone interview by author; Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission et al., The Potential of Metro: Promise and Challenge: Metrospace 3 Symposium Summary and Proceedings, Silver Spring, Maryland, 19 June 1971, 18. 37. Wendy Sigal, “D Street SE Adjusts to Pesky Metro Dust,” Washington Post, 7 July 1973; Giaimo, interview, 22 May 1984. 38. Pfanstiehl, interview, 15 December 1999; “No-Growth Policy Becoming Luxury” (editorial), Northern Virginia Sun, 11 May 1973; Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (London: Verso, 1996), 99, 157; Carol Moore, “Metro Washington: A Commuter’s Guide to Metro,” Washingtonian, November 1972, 43. 39. Graham to Walter Washington, 13 November 1968, appendix to D.C. Department of Highways and Traffic, “Summary of Analysis and Recommendations on Alternate Proposals for the District of Columbia Comprehensive Transportation Plan,” 15 November 1968, C100, box 19, folder 2; Harry Weese & Associates, “Job Memorandum #35,” 21 November 1966, HW, Job 575, box 4, folder: meeting notes; David Sanders Clark, Chairman, Subcommittee on Transportation, Committee of 100, “Statement on Proposed Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program,” 15 January 1968, C100, box 36, folder 11; Jack Eisen, “Cut Urged in Metro Parking,” Washington Post, 28 April 1971. For some stations, the projected ratios were even more extreme. For Forest Glen, which became the focus of fierce neighborhood resistance, planners projected that 92 percent of station users would arrive by bus or car. Alan M. Voorhees & Associates, Inc., Transportation Projections, Lower Montgomery County (1975 and 1990), Technical Memorandum, Prepared for Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission, 17 January 1968, Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Printed Material, RG 15 (Boards and Commissions), Montgomery County Archives, Rockville, Maryland, box 2. 40. Elizabeth Becker, “Metro Line in Chillum Stirs Fight,” Washington Post, 13 March 1975; W. King Engel, President, Locust Hill Citizens Association, to Gude, 26 January 1968, GG, box 143, folder: Transit-general correspondence, 1967–1968. The Authority later estimated the cost of the proposed Bethesda tunnel at between $11 and $16 million. WMATA, “Community Problems,” 2 June 1972, RNG, box 75, folder: D.C. Metro Notebook, 1972; Jack Eisen, “NE D.C. Residents Warn They Will Fight Metro Plan,” Washington Post, 1 September 1970. 41. Becker, “Metro Line in Chillum Stirs Fight”; WMATA, “Community Problems,” 10 November 1971, CPf, box 26, folder 5; “Subway Payment Withheld,” Evening Star, 5 January 1972; “Metro to Build Va. Station Near RF&P Line,” Washington Post, 11 October 1972. 42. Fred Barnes, “They Beat ‘City Hall’ on I-66,” Evening Star, 10 April 1972; Citizens Transportation Coalition for Metropolitan Washington to “Congressman,” 10 May 1971, RNG, box 75, folder: D.C. Metro Correspondence and General-2; Odell, “To Stop Highways
317
Notes to Pages 158 –162
Some Citizens Take to the Streets,” 27; Helen Leavitt, Superhighway—Superhoax (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1970), 104. 43. Swanston and Sarro, “District of Columbia Council Vote Follows Wild Melee”; Dodge, interview by author; Herman, interview; Petition to President Ford, 1 January 1975, AMB, box 5, file: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority—1/1/75–1/31/75; Washington Ecology Center and the Coalition on Optimum Growth, Press Release, 31 July 1973, CO-OPT, series 10, folder 3. 44. Ellen Hoffman, “Construction Alters District,” Washington Post, 13 August 1970; Heflin, interview; “Worthy of Study” (editorial), Northern Virginia Sun, 27 April 1972; Pfanstiehl, interview, 4 January 2000; Warrington, interview; “Metro Staff Doesn’t Budge on 2 Stations in Arlington,” Northern Virginia Sun, 29 April 1972; Donald Hirzel and Thomas Crosby, “Metro Facing Homeowners Revolt as Subway’s Impact Becomes Clearer,” Washington Star, 27 April 1975. 45. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, Public Law 91-190, U.S. Statutes at Large 83 (1970): 852; Saunders v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 359 F.Supp. 457 (D.D.C. 1973); Frank Kaufman, U.S. District Judge, to Robin Ficker and William Horkan, 12 December 1973, CPf, box 1, folder 8; WMATA, Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report No. 1, 2 May 1974, GG, box 95, folder: WMATA, 27; Garrett, interview; Jackson Graham, “Manager’s Progress Report,” Mass Transit 2 (March 1975): 10. 46. William Shannon testimony, U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 112–113; Lawrence Feinberg, “Red Line Runs Quietly By,” Washington Post, 4 September 1984; Joseph Saunders’s legal brief, as read by Saunders, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 9 November 2000. 47. Pfanstiehl, interview, 4 January 2000; Saunders, interview. 48. Saunders, interview. 49. Saunders v. WMATA; “Metro Eyes 2 Routes in Northwest,” Washington Post, 9 March 1974; Thomas Crosby, “Appendix to Cost Metro Dearly,” Washington Star, 27 February 1975; Saunders, interview; WMATA Office of Program Control, Semiannual Report No. 8, January 1976, CPf, box 28, folder 4, 10. 50. Kirk Scharfenberg, “City Gets Control of Future Metro Designing, Sites,” Washington Post, 13 January 1973; Sonia Boin, “Forest Glen Citizens Warn of Suit If Station Fight Fails,” Suburban Record (Silver Spring, Md.), 5 March 1975; Graham, interview; Caywood, interview; D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study. Progress Report (December 1974), 22; John Fondersmith, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 30 May 2001. 51. Jacqueline Bolder, “Gaithersburg Metro Stop Endorsed,” Washington Star-News, 15 February 1975; Jack Eisen, “Metro Airport Plan Approved,” Washington Post, 7 January 1972; D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study: Progress Report (December 1974), 23; “A Proposal for Commuter Parking at Metro Stations and Bus Serviced Satellite Fringe Parking,” in WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan for Completion of the Public Transportation System for the National Capital Area (August 1978), III-83; Eisen, “NE D.C. Residents Warn They Will Fight Metro Plan”; Alvin Williamson to File, 9 December 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 3; WMATA, Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report, 8 August 1974, CPf, box 27, folder 4. The station was planned for Oklahoma Avenue and 21st Street NE. 52. Metro’s construction work force peaked in late 1975 at around 7,000 workers, declining to fewer than 3,000 by the end of 1977. The peak years of expenditure were 1975 and 1976. WMATA, Office of Program Control, Report, January 1978, 12, CPf box 29, folder 9. 53. Pfanstiehl to staff [no names on document], unsent draft memo, 17 June 1969, CPf, box 1, folder 1. Ellipses in original. 54. Dodge, interview by author; Graham, interview.
318
Notes to Pages 162–165
55. Kopkind and Ridgeway, “Washington: The Lost Colony,” 14; Derthick, City Politics in Washington, D.C., 122; Minority Development Advisory Council to WMATA Board of Directors, 30 September 1974, DCCC, box 19, folder: Metro Misc. 1974; WMATA, “Report on Affirmative Action Program,” 10 December 1970, CPf, box 26, folder 1; Jack Eisen, “Minority Hiring on Metro Falls Short of Goal,” Washington Post, 23 July 1973. 56. Sterling Tucker, interview by Thomas H. Baker, Washington, D.C., 21 April 1969, LBJL, 4; Derthick, City Politics in Washington, D.C., 122; Jack Eisen, “Metro Contract Idea Rejected,” Washington Post, 19 November 1971. 57. William W. Gullet, County Executive, Prince George’s, to Sickles, 31 August 1971, DCCC, box 17, folder: Metro Misc Correspondence, 1971; Gleason, County Executive, Montgomery, to Sickles, 1 September 1971, DCCC, box 17, folder: Metro Misc Correspondence, 1971; Statement by Joseph Alexander, 2 September 1971, MHPC, box 8, folder 9; WMATA Board, minutes, 29 July 1971, MHPC, box 8, folder 10; David A. Sutherland, Virginia House of Delegates, to Graham, 27 July 1971, DCCC, box 17, folder: Metro Misc Correspondence, 1971; Herbert Harris II, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 13 March 2001; Graham to Charles Diggs, 1 August 1973, DCCC, box 19, folder: Metro Misc. 1971–1973; J. J. Eigenmann, Assistant Comptroller-Budget, to Graham, 25 May 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 2. 58. Volpe to Graham, 8 April 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 2; WMATA Board, minutes, 9 April 1970, MHPC, box 8, folder 9; “Minority Participation Increased,” Metro Memo, December 1970; WMATA, “Report on Affirmative Action Program,” 16 September 1971, CPf, box 26, folder 4; Sterling Tucker, interview by Stolzenbach, Washington, D.C., 20 November 1981; “Moore Calls Metro Staff Lax in Search for Black Bidders,” Evening Star, 3 December 1971; Warrington, interview; “Board Committee to Study Ways to Increase Minority Participation,” Metro Memo, November 1971. The administration’s order coincided with the establishment of the Labor Department’s “Washington Plan” for minority hiring in federally funded projects, a plan based on the earlier “Philadelphia Plan” of 1969. Francis T. Coleman, “The Philadelphia Plan Goes to Washington,” ABA Journal 57 (February 1971): 135–139. 59. Cathe Wolhowe, “Minority Job Goal Opposed,” Washington Post, 25 September 1973; Eisen, “Minority Hiring on Metro Falls Short of Goal”; Paul R. Jackson testimony, House Committee on the District of Columbia, Subcommittee on Commerce, Housing, and Transportation, WMATA Funding and Operations, 1975, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 5 November–16 December 1975, 4 February, and 2 March 1976, 16 December 1975, 375–377; James D. McClary, Executive Vice President, Morrison-Knudsen Company, Inc., to Roy Dodge, 26 August 1971, DCCC, box 17, folder: Metro Misc Correspondence, 1971. 60. “Moore Calls Metro Staff Lax in Search for Black Bidders”; Fred Barnes, “New Subway Challenge,” Evening Star, 9 January 1972; Thomas Crosby, “Metro Ad Pact Now Will Be Split,” Washington Star-News, 7 June 1973. 61. Charles Wesley Harris, Congress and the Governance of the Nation’s Capital: The Conflict of Federal and Local Interests (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1995), 138. 62. Minority Development Advisory Council to WMATA Board, 30 September 1974, AMB, box 5, folder: WMATA: 8/9/74–9/3/74; Thomas Crosby, “Metro Policy Changes Urged to End Construction Delays,” Washington Star-News, 3 October 1974; Jack Eisen, “Stalemate on Metro Continues,” Washington Post, 11 October 1974; “Board Adopts Plan for Using More Minority Contractors,” Metro Memo, November 1974; WMATA Board, minutes, 29 August 1974, DCCC, box 20, folder: WMATA Agendas (misc). 63. “Broyhill Says Metro Minority Plan ‘Stupid,’ ” Northern Virginia Sun, 5 October 1974; Michael Kiernan, “Nevius Breaches Unity on Metro Pacts Vote,” Washington Star-News, 8 October 1974. 64. “Broyhill Says Metro Minority Plan ‘Stupid’ ”; “Broyhill Hits Fisher on Metro,” North-
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Notes to Pages 166 –168
ern Virginia Sun, 14 October 1974; Vicki Duncan, “Officials Fear Loss of Metro in County,” Bowie Blade, 17 October 1974; Rick Thompson, “D.C.’s Free Ride” (editorial), Bowie Blade, 17 October 1974. 65. Michael Kiernan, “Nevius Breaches Unity on Metro Pacts Vote,” Washington StarNews, 8 October 1974; Nevius, interview by Stolzenbach; “Broyhill Says Metro Minority Plan ‘Stupid’ ”; Thomas Crosby, “Minority Plan Set by Metro,” Washington Star-News, 1 November 1974; U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 10 June 1969, 61; Graham to Board, 22 October 1974, DCCC, box 19, folder: Metro Misc. 1974. 66. Tom Brannan, “Minority Rail Pact Okayed,” Alexandria Gazette, 1 November 1974; Tucker to WMATA Board, 30 October 1974, DCCC, box 19, folder: Metro Misc. 1974; Jack Eisen, “Metro Impasse Is Broken,” Washington Post, 1 November 1974; “Board Adopts Plan for Using More Minority Contractors,” Metro Memo, November 1974. A year later, in December 1975, Moore was satisfied that the compromise had largely worked. Whereas minority contractors had received between 1.8 and 4 percent of Metro construction dollars up to November 1974, in the following year they received 6.2 percent of structural and 15.4 percent of finish contracts. U.S. House of Representatives, WMATA Funding and Operations: Joint Oversight Hearings before the Subcommittee on Commerce, Housing, and Transportation, the Subcommittee on Fiscal Affairs, and the Subcommittee on Bicentennial Affairs, the Environment, and the International Community of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 94th Cong., 1st sess., 1976, 388. By July 1977, the percentages of work done by minority firms since the compromise was up to 10.8 percent and 22.2 percent, exceeding the goals set in 1974. WMATA Office of Program Control, Semiannual Report no. 11, July 1977, 4, RNG, box 914, folder: METRO (District of Columbia) APPROPRIATIONS. 67. President’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped, “Joint Statement,” 1966, HW, Job 575, box 8, folder: handicapped; Robert A. Katzmann, Institutional Disability: The Saga of Transportation Policy for the Disabled (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1986), 20–25. 68. Pfanstiehl to McCarter et al., 26 and 29 August 1966, HW, Job 575, box 8, folder: handicapped; WMATA, “Preliminary Application of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for a Research and Development Grant under the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964, as Amended,” 1 October 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 3. 69. Allan to K. G. Knight, 26 August 1966, HW, Job 575, box 6, folder: DeLeuw; Allan, interview; Weese to Rannells, 21 November 1966, HW, Job 575, box 5, folder: client correspondence, 1 of 2; Weese, interview by Blum, 175, 177. 70. WMATA Board minutes, 15 December 1967, MHPC, box 8, folder 3; Janet Fay, Architectural Barriers Project, to McCarter, 15 February 1966, HW, Job 575, box 8, folder: handicapped; H. W. Kusserow, “Elevators in Subway Win OK,” San Francisco Examiner, 20 January 1967; Pfanstiehl to Rannells, 18 May 1966, HW, Job 575. box 5, folder: Promotional, 1 of 2; Pfanstiehl to McCarter et al., 26 August 1966, HW, Job 575, box 8, folder: handicapped. 71. U.S. House of Representatives, Design and Construction of Federal Facilities to be Accessible to the Physically Handicapped: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds of the Committee on Public Works, on H.R. 14464, 91st Cong., 1st sess., 1969, 14–17. 72. Edward H. Noakes and the Potomac Valley Chapter, AIA, Task Force. “Barrier Free Rapid Transit,” Report to the American Institute of Architects et al., September 1969, reprinted in U.S. House of Representatives, Design and Construction of Federal Facilities; Graham to Mrs. Janet W. Fay, Chairman, Architectural Barriers Project, Washington, 19 September 1967, MHPC, box 7, folder 10. 73. WMATA, “Preliminary Application of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority for a Research and Development Grant under the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964, as Amended,” 1 October 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 3; WMATA Board minutes, 27 August
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Notes to Pages 168 –172
1970, MHPC, box 8, folder 9; C. C. Villarreal, administrator, UMTA, to Graham, 17 December 1971, CPf, box 1, folder 5. 74. Graham to Board, 28 December 1971, CPf, box 1, folder 5; “Metro and the Rights of the Handicapped” (editorial), Washington Post, 14 July 1973; Graham to Fallon, 8 December 1969, U.S. House of Representatives, Design and Construction of Federal Facilities; WMATA, news release, 4 May 1972, CPf, box 10, folder 10. 75. Graham to Board, 27 August 1970, HW, Job 612, box 3, folder: Client correspondence incoming; Dodge, interview by author; Thresher, interview. 76. Ed Wasserman, “Metro Must Be Accessible for Disabled, Court Rules,” Montgomery County Sentinel, 28 June 1973. 77. “Metro and the Rights of the Handicapped” (editorial), Washington Post, 14 July 1973; Margaret Cauffield, “Dial-a-Bus” (letter), Washington Post, 26 July 1973; Richard W. Heddinger, “The Twelve Year Battle for a Barrier Free METRO,” American Rehabilitation, May–June 1976, 7–10; Richard W. Heddinger, interview by author, Bowie, Maryland, 11 October 2000; Charles H. Percy, “Serving the Handicapped,” Washington Post, 17 August 1973. 78. Ed Wasserman, “Metro Must Be Accessible for Disabled, Court Rules,” Montgomery County Sentinel, 28 June 1973. “Lawsuit Seeks to Require Metro to Provide Facilities for the Handicapped,” Washington Informer, 27 April 1972. 79. WMATA Board, minutes, 20 September 1973, MHPC, box 7, folder 6; “Metro and the Rights of the Handicapped (Cont.)” (editorial), Washington Post, 17 August 1973. Although it would be years before the Department of Transportation completed regulations applying the section to urban mass transit systems, it was clear that Congress was moving toward greater and greater demands for accessibility. Katzmann, Institutional Disability, 10, 45–60. 80. Allan, interview; Graham, interview; Thresher, interview. 81. Graham, interview. In 1981 WMATA officials estimated that as few as fifteen people in wheelchairs used the system each day and stated their reluctance to take any additional measures to improve handicapped access. Bill Fahrenwald, “Washington Metro: ‘Let’s Do It Right,’ ” Railway Age 182 (14 December 1981): 37; Lynn Burns, “June 22 Hearing Set on Bogie Road,” Desert Sun (Palm Springs), 9 June 1979; Douglas B. Feaver, “Retired Head of Metro Is Still Feisty,” Washington Post, 25 December 1980. 82. Feinberg, “Red Line Runs Quietly By.” Chapter 7. The Money, 1972–1980
1. WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program (1 March 1968; revised, 7 February 1969), 25. De Leuw, Cather & Co. and Harry Weese & Associates, Preliminary Design and Capital Costs, 1969. 2. U.S. Comptroller General, Evaluation of the Capital Cost Estimate for the Metro Rapid Rail Transit System, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 8 May 1975), 4; U.S. Comptroller General, Need to Resolve Metro Funding, 5; Herman Nickel, “Washington’s Metro Is the Solid-Gold Cadillac of Mass Transit,” Fortune, 3 December 1979, 110–112+; Rep. Alvin E. O’Konski, quoted in Jack Eisen, “Hill Votes Guarantee of Metro,” Washington Post, 27 June 1972. As the system neared completion, WMATA officials frequently used a figure of $9.4 billion for Metro’s total capital cost. For example, WMATA chairman Gladys Mack testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Examining Metro’s Track Record: An Over-Sight Hearing on the Challenges and Opportunities Facing the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority: Hearing before the Subcommittee on the District of Columbia of the Committee on Government Reform, 106th Cong., 2d sess., 2000, 41. The WMATA staff calculated a somewhat higher figure—$9.948 billion—that includes additional railcars, another rail yard, and other expenditures. Looking at year-by-year costs and expen-
321
Notes to Pages 172–174
ditures, the staff also calculated that the system cost between $19.2 and $20 billion in 2001 dollars. Colin Alter, WMATA, e-mail to author, 13 March 2002. Using the cost of unskilled labor as a yardstick, this is equivalent to roughly $3.8 billion in 1968 dollars. Calculation from EH.net, “How Much Is That?” www.eh.net/hmit/ (accessed 13 March 2002). 3. Warrington, interview; Herman, interview. 4. Califano, Triumph and Tragedy, 142; Blaine Harden, “The Visitor Center: Bungling and Deception,” Washington Post, 17 November 1980; Boleyn, interview, 10 May 2000. Overruns were nothing new to the 1970s. They had plagued public works in Washington since the nineteenth century. Harry C. Ways, “Montgomery C. Meigs and the Washington Aqueduct,” in William C. Dickinson, Dean A. Herrin, and Donald R. Kennon, eds., Montgomery C. Meigs and the Building of the Nation’s Capital (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001), 28; Lessoff, The Nation and Its City, 77. And they remain common in public works projects into the twentyfirst century. Bent Flyvbjerg, Mette Skamris Holm, and Søren Buhl, “Underestimating Costs in Public Works Projects: Error or Lie?” APA Journal 68 (Summer 2002): 279–295. 5. De Leuw, Cather & Co. and Harry Weese & Associates, Preliminary Design and Capital Costs, 55; WMATA Board, minutes, 22 January 1970, MHPC, box 8, folder 1; Graham testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, WMATA Funding and Operations, 1975, 5 November 1975, 16; U.S. Comptroller General, Evaluation of the Capital Cost Estimate for the Metro Rapid Rail Transit System, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 8 May 1975), 9. 6. WMATA, Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report, 8 August 1974, CPf, box 27, folder 4; WMATA, Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report, November 1974, CPf, box 27, folder 4. The segments in question were D008 and D009; WMATA, Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report, 8 August 1974, CPf, box 27, folder 4; Lawrence Feinberg, “Red Line Runs Quietly By,” Washington Post, 4 September 1984; Caywood, interview; “Revised Metrorail Capital Cost Estimate,” WMATA, Airlie XII Conference, 41. 7. WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program (1 March 1968), 18; Graham to George P. Shultz, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, 19 October 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 3; “Revised Metrorail Capital Cost Estimate,” WMATA, Airlie XII Conference, 41; Fred Barnes, “New Subway Challenge,” Evening Star, 9 January 1972; WMATA, “Cost Escalation Projections,” 24 January 1972, RNG, box 75, folder: D.C. Metro Notebook1972; Samuel S. Fields, “Paying the Bills for Metro” Mass Transit 2 (March 1975): 27; Jack Eisen, “Metro’s Cost at New High,” Washington Post, 7 September 1973; WMATA, “Implications of the 80/20 Transit Cost Sharing Ratio as Authorized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973,” 20 September 1973, MHPC, box 7, folder 5; Thomas Crosby, “Metro Brass Rides the Inflation Line,” Washington Star-News, 5 January 1975. 8. Richard Steen, “Making the Most of Metro,” Realtor, February 1975, 21; WMATA, Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report, 8 August 1974, CPf, box 27, folder 4; Pfanstiehl to staff, 14 November 1974, CPf, box 1, folder 10. 9. “Comparing Metro with the Interstate” (editorial), Washington Post, 21 November 1976; Robert Patricelli, Remarks before the Annual Meeting of Central Atlanta Progress, Atlanta, 11 February 1976, JRH, box 9, folder: value capture; U.S. Comptroller General, Cost, Schedule, and Performance Problems of the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity, Louisiana, Hurricane Protection Project (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 31 August 1976), 8; Lyn Ragsdale, “Politics Not Science: The U.S. Space Program in the Reagan and Bush Years,” in Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, eds., Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 146; Wright, “White City to White Elephant”; Raymond J. Keating, “The House That Taxpayers Built,” New York Times, 15 April 1998; “GAO Tabulates Cost Overruns,” Washington Star, 26 February 1975.
322 Notes to Pages 174 –176 10. Babson testimony, U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 34; Schuyler Lowe, Executive Officer and Comptroller, “Alternative Financial Course of Action,” Airlie VI, 15–17 January 1971, CPf, box 14, folder 6; Jack Eisen, “Hill Votes Guarantee of Metro,” Washington Post, 27 June 1972; Byron Klapper, “Resistance to Pricing of Two New Offerings Kills Some Early Gains,” Wall Street Journal, 11 October 1972. Jack Eisen, “$225 Million Subway Issue Sold to Merrill Lynch, Four Others,” Washington Post, 11 October 1972; WMATA, Office of Program Control, “Quarterly Report,” 8 August 1974, CPf, box 27, folder 4; WMATA, “Metro YearEnd Review,” 24 December 1975, CPf, box 7, folder 8. 11. Graham to Board, 6 September 1973, DCCC, box 20, folder: WMATA Agendas (1973); U.S. Comptroller General, Evaluation of the Capital Cost Estimate, 19. In 1979 WMATA estimated that delay was responsible for 24.3 percent of the increased capital cost, quite apart from the 22.5 percent due to escalation. U.S. General Accounting Office, Issues Being Faced by the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (Washington, D.C.: 10 April 1979), 17. With delay and escalation so large a component of the added cost, it is impossible to calculate what proportion of Metro’s overruns resulted from any given cause of delay, such as neighborhood opposition or interagency feuding. But with those overruns in the billions of dollars, one can say with confidence that each delay was significant. 12. NCTA, “fact book,” 15 November 1963, BLW, box 135, folder 2; WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program (1 March 1968), 21; Lowe, Executive Officer and Comptroller, to Board, 11 June 1973, CPf, box 1, folder 8; Alper, History of the Negotiations, 28; Kennedy testimony, U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 10 June 1969; WMATA, “Fact Booklet on H.R. 15507,” June 1972, GG, box 138, folder: WMATA ’71–’72; WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program (1 March 1968), 21. 13. Jack Eisen, “No Fanfare Marks Bus Line Takeover,” Washington Post, 14 January 1973; Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems, Transportation Problems, 23 May 1958, 164; NVTC, Newsletter, special issue, c. 1965, C100, box 36, folder 15; Edward J. MacClane, President, D.C. Federation of Civic Associations, Inc., to Gilbert Hahn, President, City Council, 29 May 1969, DCCC, box 19, folder: D.C. Transit System, 1970–1971; Lee Flor, “Chalk’s Empire Healthy Despite Losses Here,” Evening Star, 9 September 1968. 14. D.C. Transit System, Inc., Washington, D.C., Monorail Presentation Charts (Washington, D.C.: D.C. Transit System, Inc., November 1959); D. C. Transit System, Inc., Proposal for the Demonstration Model of a Controlled High-Speed Superail Transit System for Mass Transportation, Washington, D.C. to Dulles International Airport (January 1962); Chalk, testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Transit Program for the National Capital Region, Part I, 265; D.C. Transit System, Inc., Proposal for a Modern All-Bus Rapid Transit System for the Washington Metropolitan Area (Washington, D.C., 10 August 1964); WMATA Board, minutes, 28 October 1971, MHPC, box 8, folder 11; Fitch, Urban Transportation and Public Policy, 44. 15. WMATA Board, minutes, 31 March 1967, MHPC, box 7, folder 10; Lowe to Graham, 7 March 1969, MHPC, box 8, folder 11; Babson testimony, U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 66. 16. Moore to Council Members, “Report on 1971 Budget Amendment for Purchase of D.C. Transit Company,” draft, 5 June 1970, DCCC, box 19, folder: D.C. Transit Company; “Bus Acquisition Legislative Chronology,” CPf, box 1, folder 8; “Metro Weighs Helping Chalk to Buy Buses,” Evening Star, 5 December 1971; Atlee Shidler, introduction to Stephen C. Swaim, Transit for the 70s: Why Public Transit Is Dying in Washington: A Strategy for Revitalization (Washington, D.C.: Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies, March 1972), v; Nevius to Council Members, 3 November 1972, DCCC, box 19, folder: Transit Misc 1971–74; Wilbur Smith and Associates et al., Integrated Metrobus Services for the Washington Transit Zone. Transit Technical Studies Final Report, Project No. IT-09-0020-1 (prepared for Washington Metropoli-
323
Notes to Pages 176 –180
tan Area Transit Authority, 1975), 5; “Under the Wire” (editorial), Washington Star-News, 17 October 1972; Stephen Green and Jack Eisen, “D.C. Bus Bill Is Approved, Goes to Nixon,” Washington Post, 15 October 1972; Jack Eisen and Wendy Sigal, “IRS Presses Chalk on Taxes,” Washington Post, 15 January 1973. 17. Graham to Board, 22 January 1970, MHPC, box 8, folder 1; Joseph L. Fisher, “Opening Remarks, Workshop on Bus Acquisition Problems,” 13 July 1972, MHPC, box 8, folder 2; U.S. House of Representatives, WMATA Funding and Operations, 1975, 123. New York and Chicago were larger. 18. Allen Long to Graham through Pfanstiehl and Lowe, 24 September 1973, CPf, box 1, folder 8; Kopkind and Ridgeway, “Washington: The Lost Colony,” 21; “Bus Unfares,” Evening Star, 10 April 1972; Thomas Crosby, “Bus Fare Cut Seen Crippling,” Evening Star, 4 July 1973; WMATA Board Budget Committee (Barnett, Herbert Harris, Nevius) to Board, 7 June 1974, CPf, box 1, folder 10. 19. Joseph A. Alexander, “Metro’s Costly Burden,” Washington Post, 3 January 1982; Kirk Scharfenberg, “The Public Inherits a Sick Bus System,” Washington Post, 14 January 1973; Thomas Crosby, “Metrobus: Why Losses Pile Up and Why Nothing Can Be Done,” Washington Star-News, 28 December 1974; Jack Eisen, “Bus Unrest,” Washington Post, 27 October 1974; “WMATA Acquires Buses; Some Fare Reductions Seen,” Metro Memo, February 1973, 3; Warrington, interview. 20. Jack Eisen, “Metrobus Fuel, Pay Costs Soar,” Washington Post, 4 January 1974; Wilbur Smith and Associates et al., Integrated Metrobus Services, 5, 15; WMATA Board Budget Committee (Barnett, Harris, Nevius) to Board, 12 November 1974, CPf, box 1, folder 10. 21. “The Price of Popular Bus Service” (editorial), Washington Post, 26 July 1973. 22. Thomas Crosby, “Metro Warned about Deficits,” Washington Star-News, 2 July 1973; Eisen, “Hill Votes Guarantee of Metro”; Audrey Wennblom, “40¢ Flat Metro Fare Proposed by County,” Montgomery County Sentinel, 3 October 1974; Eisen, “Metrobus Fuel, Pay Costs Soar”; Jeffrey Stansbury, “Suburban Growth—A Case Study,” Population Bulletin 28 (February 1972): 14. 23. Pfanstiehl to Lowe, unsent draft, 14 July 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 2; William H. Shaw, “Firm Bus Stop” (letter), Washington Post, 11 December 1972; Warrington to Bennewitz (Budget), 16 September 1975, CPf, box 7, folder 8. 24. Adams to Francois, Freeland, White, Miller, 15 June 1977, JLF II, box 25, folder 12; WMATA, “Net Income Analysis 1974: Authorized Regional System. Traffic, Revenue, and Operating Costs. Report in Brief,” WMATA, Airlie XII Conference, 130; Herman testimony, House District Committee, WMATA Funding and Operations, 1975, 55. 25. MNCPPC, Potential of Metro, 13; Comer S. Coppie, Special Assistant to the [D.C.] Mayor to Andre Buckles, 24 January 1975, AMB, box 5, folder: WMATA: 1/1/75–1/31/75; WMATA, Revenue and Operations Committee on Metrorail Fares, Report, 28 August 1975, CPf, box 28, folder 2. 26. Barnett to Ash and Claude S. Brinegar, Secretary of Transportation, 30 December 1974, CPf, box 1, folder 10; Thomas Crosby, “52-Mile Subway Cut Weighed,” Washington StarNews, 1 January 1975; WMATA, “Alternative to Programmed Completion of ARS,” 1 October 1974, AMB, box 5, folder: WMATA: 10/1/74–12/31/74; “1977 Presidential Review,” November 1975, JRH, box 24, folder: DOT Budget—FY 1977 Presidential Review. 27. Cleatus Barnett, Chairman, WMATA, to Roy Ash, Director, Office of Management and Budget, 9 December 1974, CPf, box 1, folder 10. 28. Graham, interview; Charles Ewing, “A Ford Saw the Future,” Washington Star-News, 12 October 1973; Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, Analysis of the Philosophy and Voting Record of Representative Gerald R. Ford, Nominee for Vice President of the United States (25 October 1973), 17; Ford, Remarks at Sixth International Conference on Urban Transpor-
324
Notes to Pages 180 –183
tation, Pittsburgh, 9 September 1974, Presidential Documents: Gerald R. Ford (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), vol. 10, number 37, 1121; Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal (Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 1987), 71. 29. Thomas Crosby, “No Subway Tracks, No New Payments, Md. Hints,” Washington Star-News, 7 December 1974; Vicki Duncan, “Officials Fear Loss of Metro in County,” Bowie Blade, 17 October 1974; Francois, interview by Stolzenbach. 30. Ben W. Gilbert, telephone interview by author, 19 March 2002. 31. Craig, interview; Thomas Crosby, “U.S. Ponders Canceling Freeways to Pay for Metro,” Washington Star-News, 23 January 1975; Ron Shaffer, “Freeway Money Eyed for Subway,” Washington Post, 25 January 1975. 32. James T. Lynn, OMB, to President, 16 April 1975, WHCF, GRFL, box 11, folder: FA4, executive. 4/1/75–5/2/75. 33. Michael Raoul-Duval, notes on meeting, Michael Raoul-Duval, Papers, GRFL, box 6, folder: Meeting with the President, 6/16/75, William Coleman et al. (Washington Metro); Andre Buckles and Mike Duval to Jim Cannon, 8 May 1975, AMB, box 5, file: Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority—2/1/75–6/31/75; James T. Lynn, “Meeting on Metro Financing, June 16, 1975,” 12 June 1975, James M. Cannon, Files, 1975–77, GRFL, box 47, folder: Metro Financing Meeting, 6/16/75; “1977 Presidential Review,” November 1975, JRH, box 24, folder: DOT Budget—FY 1977 Presidential Review; Boleyn, interview, 10 May 2000; WMATA Office of Program Control, Quarterly Report No. 8, January 1976, CPf, box 28, folder 4; U.S. House of Representatives, Second Supplemental Appropriation Bill, 1976: Hearings before the Subcommittee on the Department of Transportation and Related Agencies of the Committee on Appropriations, 94th Cong., 2d sess., 1976, 560. 34. Francois, Chairman, Joint Steering Committee, to Patricelli, 30 November 1976, JLF II, box 25, folder 12; Gilbert, interview; Patricelli to Coleman, 20 October 1975, Stephen G. McConahey, Files, 1974–1976, GRFL, box 39, folder: District of Columbia—Metro System; Boleyn, interview, 10 May 2000. 35. WMATA, “Implications of the 80/20 Transit Cost Sharing Ratio as Authorized by the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973,” 20 September 1973, MHPC, box 7, folder 5; Sickles to Alexander and Tucker (fellow members of WMATA Board Legislative Committee), 7 August 1975, CPf, box 1, folder 11; Patricelli to Coleman, 20 October 1975, McConahey, Files, GRFL, box 39, folder: District of Columbia—Metro System. 36. Charles A. Lave, “Rail Rapid Transit and Energy: The Adverse Effects,” Transportation Research Record 648 (1977): 14–29; Hamer, The Selling of Rail Rapid Transit; Webber, The BART Experience; Robert Lindsey, “Mass Transit, Little Mass,” New York Times Magazine, 19 October 1975; Urban Mass Transportation Administration, “Major Urban Mass Transportation Investments: Notice of Proposed Policy,” Federal Register, 1 August 1975, 32546. 37. “1977 Presidential Review,” November 1975, JRH, box 24, folder: DOT Budget—FY 1977 Presidential Review; U.S. Comptroller General, Evaluation of the Capital Cost Estimate, Graham to Board, 8 May 1975, CPf, box 1, folder 11; Jack Faucett Associates, Inc., The Washington Area METRO Rail System: A Current Perspective and a Preliminary Appraisal of Alternatives: Study and Report from the Library of Congress Congressional Research Service for the Subcommittee on Fiscal Affairs of the Committee of the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, 94th Cong., 2d sess., 3 February 1976, Serial No. S-4, Committee print, A-2; Francois to Graham, 20 January 1976, CPf, box 2, folder 1; Francois, interview by Stolzenbach; Gilbert Gude to Romano L. Mazzoli, 16 January 1976, CPf, box 2, folder 1. 38. Graham testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, WMATA Funding and Operations, 1975, 12 November 1975, 75; Graham to Board, 16 January 1976, CPf, box 2, folder 1; Graham, interview.
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Notes to Pages 184 –187
39. Boleyn, interview, 10 May 2000; Graham to Board, 27 November 1975, CPf, box 1, folder 11; Sterling Tucker, chairman, keynote address, 29 January 1976, WMATA, Airlie XII Conference, 4. 40. Jack Faucett Associates, The Washington Area METRO Rail System, 21. 41. Damian Kulash, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 20 June 2001; Jack Eisen, “Support for Metro Appears Weakening in Congress,” Washington Post, 1 March 1976; U.S. House of Representatives, WMATA Funding and Operations, 1975, 636. 42. WMATA Office of Program Control, Semiannual Report No. 8, January 1976, CPf, box 28, folder 4, 10; WMATA Board, minutes, 22 January 1970, MHPC, box 8, folder 1; Glenn Bugos, “System Reshapes the Corporation: Joint Ventures in the Bay Area Rapid Transit System, 1962–1972,” in Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes, eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 127; Thomas Crosby, “Metro Finds Deficiencies in Rail Cars,” Washington Star-News, 23 January 1975; Jack Eisen, “More Metro Problems: Noisy and Swaying Cars,” Washington Post, 23 January 1975; Roy J. Harris Jr., “Rohr Industries Grew Fast, and Currently It Is Shrinking Fast, Too,” Wall Street Journal, 5 November 1976. 43. Pfanstiehl, interview, 4 January 2000; Howard Lyon, interview by author, Gaithersburg, Maryland, 13 March 2000; “History Is Made as Metro Opens, 51,260 Ride Free on First Day,” Metro Memo, May 1976, 2. 44. Neal R. Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom, “Mass Transit Funds Are Rolling, but Cities and Feds Are Wary,” National Journal, 7 August 1976, 1110; COG, Metro Financial Review: Update, September 1976, 22 September 1976, 1; Daniel P. Kearney, Associate Director for Economics and Government, OMB, to Coleman, 16 September 1976, JRH, box 33, folder: Washington Metro, July 1975–Sept 1976. 45. Lutz, interview; Irving G. McNayr, Executive Director, NVTC, to Lutz, Deputy Undersecretary for Budget and Program Review, U.S. Department of Transportation, 4 August 1975, CPf, box 7, folder 8. Based on this experience, in October 1975, Lutz recommended that the WMATA board be enlarged to include a permanent federal representative. Patricelli to Coleman, 20 October 1975, McConahey, Files, GRFL, box 39, folder: District of Columbia—Metro System; Department of Transportation News, press release, 16 July 1975, JRH, box 33, folder: Washington DC Metro, July 1975–Sept 1976. 46. Thomas B. Deen and Robert E. Skinner Jr., “Responses to Alternatives Analysis Requirements,” Transit Journal 2 (November 1976): 53; Patricelli, “Statement to the Special WMATA/COG/TPB Meeting, 24 September 1976,” JLF II, box 25, folder 12; Barnett, interview by author; Thomas Crosby, “U.S. Dollar Limit on New Subway Angers Members of Metro’s Board,” Evening Star, 1 October 1976; Tucker, Chairman, Metro Board of Directors, Francois, Chairman, COG Board of Directors, and John R. Freeland, Chairman, Transportation Planning Board, to President Ford, 27 October 1976, WHCF, GRFL, FG 234, box 180, folder: WMATA, exec; Coleman to Tucker, 7 December 1976, WHCF, GRFL, TN 2-1, box 3, folder: Metropolitan DC Subway System. 47. George M. Smerk, The Federal Role in Urban Transportation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 148–149; Brock Adams, Secretary of Transportation, to Joint Policy Steering Committee, Transportation Planning Board, WMATA, COG, 18 May 1977, CPf, box 2, folder 7; Barnett, interview by author; De Leuw, Cather and Harry Weese & Associates, “Glenmont (B) Route Engineering Analysis, Sections B009, B010, and B011,” WMATA, 30 September 1977, MSC, box 14, folder 24. 48. Crosby, “Metrorail Urged to Drop Plan for Springfield Line,” Washington Star-News, 10 February 1975; “Suburban Metro Stations Near Completion,” Metro Memo, November 1976, 2.
326
Notes to Pages 189 –193
49. Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., Alternatives Analysis, Interim Report (March 1978), 16–22; Wickstrom testimony, U.S. Senate, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Governmental Efficiency and the District of Columbia, on S. 828 and H.R. 3951, 96th Cong., 1st sess., 1979, 235. 50. Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., Alternatives Analysis, Interim Report, 16. 51. Joint Policy Steering Committee for the Metrorail Alternatives Analysis, Final Report (June 1978), i; Wickstrom testimony, U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 235. 52. Jack Faucett Associates, Inc., The Washington Area METRO Rail System, 40; U.S. House of Representatives, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority: Oversight Hearings before the Subcommittee on Economic Development and Regional Affairs of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 95th Cong., 2d sess., 1978, 2 March 1976, 674; Henry Bain, New Directions for Metro: Lessons from the BART Experience (Washington, D.C.: Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies, December 1976); James A. Grant, Town Planner, Town of Vienna, “Light Rail Transit—An Alternative for Metrorail in Fairfax County,” 25 November 1975, JLF II, box 25, folder 14. 53. Joseph S. Wholey, deposition, 20 January 1977, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, City of Fairfax, Va., v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority et al., Civil Action 76-918-A, Jerome M. Alper, Papers, WMATA, FIC 5, box 1; Francois, interview by author; Kulash, interview. 54. U.S. House of Representatives, Impact of Highway and Mass Transit Programs on the Federal Budget and Associated Federal Urban Investments: Hearings before the Task Force on Community and Physical Resources of the Committee on the Budget, 95th Cong., 1st sess., 1977, 37. Indeed, during the years that Silver Spring served as a temporary terminal, the area was swamped with the cars of commuters hoping to board Metro there. George V. Wickstrom, interview by author, Kensington, Maryland, 15 October 2001. 55. WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan (Revised), 14 December 1978, CPf, box 15, folder 1, III-12; Wickstrom, interview. 56. Bureau of Social Science Research, Inc., Attitudes toward Metrorail in the Washington Area: Brief Summary of Findings, c. May 1975, JLF II, box 25, folder 14. The ARS [Adopted Regional System], originally planned to cover 98 route miles, grew to 100 miles with the addition of the Shady Grove Station on 25 July 1975. 57. U.S. Senate, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 82; U.S. House of Representatives, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 56; Metropolitan Washington Board of Trade, The Case for Metro: A Reaffirmation of Policy on the Completion and Financing of the Full 100-Mile System (January 1979); Blaine Harden, “Support for Metro at Issue in Va. Race,” Washington Post, 24 October 1978. 58. WMATA staff review of “New Directions for Metro by Henry Bain,” December 1976, CPf, box 2, folder 4; Wickstrom, interview. 59. The January 1976 Faucett study, which called for Metro’s truncation to be studied, had shied away from estimating the extent of freeways that would be needed as a substitute. Jack Faucett Associates, Inc., The Washington Area METRO Rail System, 40; Carlton Sickles, “Financing Metro,” Realtor, February 1975, 18; “Cutting Metro Won’t Necessarily Cut Area Transportation Costs,” Metro Memo, November 1976, 6; Jack Eisen, “Metro Aides Doubt Costs Can Be Cut,” Washington Post, 1 October 1976; Dodge to Board, 11 August 1977, CPf, box 29, folder 2; Dodge, interview by author. 60. “Social and Economic Impacts If Metro Is Not Completed,” WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan for Completion, III-58. 61. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Touch-
327
Notes to Pages 193 –195
stone, 1990), 675–694; Feaver, “Commuters Turn to Metro, but Will the Shift Last?” Washington Post, 11 July 1979; Jack Eisen, “More Virginia Commuters Turning to Metro,” Washington Post, 8 June 1979; WMATA, Office of Financial and Policy Planning, Quarterly Metrobus and Metrorail Ridership Report no. 10, January 1981, 23–24, WMATA-A. Series 1, file 22; U.S. Senate, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 22. 62. John W. Fischer, Analyst in Transportation, Congressional Research Service, to Fisher, 9 June 1978, JLF II, box 25, folder 13; Senator Mathias, “Keeping Faith with Urban Mass Transit,” presented to the Urban Transportation Planning Policy Seminary, Maryland Department of Transportation, Baltimore, 17 October 1978, U.S. Senate, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 348; U.S. House of Representatives, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 11, 98. 63. U.S. House of Representatives, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 14; WMATA, Office of Program Control, Semiannual Report No. 12, January 1978, CPf, box 29, folder 9; “Staff Issue Paper on Metro Financing Bills, H.R. 3634 and H.R. 1792,” U.S. House of Representatives, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 8. 64. WMATA, Office of Government Relations, Bimonthly Report no. 70, January–February 1979, WMATA-A, Series 1, file 18; Harris, interview, 2 March 2001. 65. U.S. House of Representatives, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 12; Donald P. Baker, “Congress to Vote on Biggest Metro Bill since 1971,” Washington Post, 16 July 1979; Harris, interview, 2 March 2001. 66. Donald P. Baker, “Carter Drops Opposition to Metro Funding Bill,” Washington Post, 27 September 1979; Harris, interview, 2 March 2001. 67. Page, General Manager, to “TOE,” 10 October 1979, JLF II, box 25, folder 10; Gilbert Hahn Jr., “Financing the Metro System” (letter), Washington Post, 6 January 1975; U.S. House of Representatives, Impact of Highway and Mass Transit Programs, 43; “Staff Issue Paper on Metro Financing Bills, H.R. 3634 and H.R. 1792,” U.S. House of Representatives, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 10; WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan (Revised), 14 December 1978, CPf, box 15, folder 1; Legislative Committee to Board, 7 September 1977, CPf, box 29, folder 3; John B. Burcham, remarks, Airlie IX workshop, 16 February 1973, CPf, box 14, folder 9; J. Bruggeman, P. Dearborn, R. Peskin, and G. Wickstrom, Transit in the Nation’s Capital: What Lies Ahead? A Study of Projected Transit Service, Costs, and Financial Impacts on the Region through the Year 2000 (Washington, D.C.: Federal City Council, 1986), Executive Summary, VIII.12; “Metro Finances: Early Warning,” WMATA, Airlie XVIII Conference Background Papers, 10–11 December 1981, 7; “Stable and Reliable Legislation,” WMATA, Airlie XVII Conference Background Papers, 11–12 December 1980, 25. 68. U.S. House of Representatives, Metro Funding Problems: Oversight Hearing before the Subcommittee on Government Operations and Metropolitan Affairs of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 99th Cong., 2d sess., 1986, 55–56; U.S. General Accounting Office, Applying DOT’s Rail Policy to Washington, D.C.’s Metrorail System Could Save Federal Funds (12 January 1983), i; Stephen C. Fehr, “$1.3 Billion Earmarked for Metro,” Washington Post, 25 October 1990; “Local Money Woes May Jeopardize Metro’s Last 13 Miles,” Washington Post, 20 August 1991; and “Dave Gunn Will Travel,” Washington Post, 3 January 1993; “Washington, D.C., Metrorail Construction,” in Nancy Grubb, Office of Program Management, Federal Transit Administration, 1996 Statistical Summaries: FTA Grant Assistance Programs (April 1997). 69. “ ‘Viewpoints’: How Much Metro?” Washington Board of Trade News, March 1977, 3, 15; Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co with JHK Associates, “Detailed Financial Analysis of the Selected System: Patronage, Revenue, and Operating Cost Estimates: Executive Summary,” WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan for Completion, III–20; Barnett, interview by author.
328
Notes to Pages 196 –200
Chapter 8. The District
1. On the difficulty of realizing significant (or any) energy savings with heavy rail in the absence of altered land use patterns, see U.S. Congressional Budget Office, Urban Transportation and Energy: The Potential Savings of Different Modes (Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Serial 95-8, September 1977). 2. Juri Pill, “Land Development: The Latest Panacea for Transit?” Mass Transit 15 (January–February 1988): 74. 3. Hanson, Politics of Metropolitan Cooperation, 1–10. Richard Hébert, “The Great Metro Land Grab,” Washingtonian, August 1970, 38; Frederick Gutheim and Wilcomb E. Washburn, The Federal City: Plans and Realities (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976), 61. 4. MNCPPC, Potential of Metro, 10. 5. Quantitative studies document changes in land use around Metro stations without attempting to explain the decisions behind those changes. See, for example, Henry Moon, “Land Use around Suburban Rail Stations,” Transportation 17 (1990): 67–88, and Rodney D. Green and David M. James, Rail Transit Station Area Development: Small Area Modeling in Washington, D.C. (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993). Two studies take on the issue from a more qualitative perspective, interviewing both planners and developers to understand their hopes for Metro: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Metrorail Station Area Planning: A Metrorail Before-and-After Study Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, August 1983), and Herman Fu Huang, “Development Decisions for Real Estate Projects near Washington Metro Stations” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995). But both studies present their evidence primarily as a series of anonymous paraphrases, making it difficult to capture much detail about decision making, and neither study describes the evolution of policy regarding land use around stations. 6. Ben W. Gilbert, Ten Blocks from the White House: Anatomy of the Washington Riots of 1968 (New York: F. A. Praeger, 1968), 178. 7. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Summary of the Urban Renewal Program,” November 1965, CAH-LBJL, box 35, folder: D.C. Reorganization, Summer Program, Public Housing, etc. When cities failed to rebuild after clearing their slums, the razed districts earned nicknames like “ragweed acres” and “Hiroshima Flats.” Roger Montgomery, “Improving the Design Process in Urban Renewal,” in James Q. Wilson, ed., Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1966), 459. 8. Raymond A. Mohl, “Planned Destruction: The Interstates and Central City Housing,” in John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 226–245; Miles Colean, Renewing Our Cities (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1953), 133; Montgomery, “Improving the Design Process,” 469, 478. 9. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Summary of the Urban Renewal Program,” November 1965, CAH-LBJL, box 35, folder: D.C. Reorganization, Summer Program, Public Housing, etc.; Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 113–120. 10. U.S. National Capital Planning Commission, Urban Design Monograph for Shaw and Downtown Urban Renewal Areas, draft, January 1970, 1. 11. Richard Longstreth, “The Unusual Transformation of Downtown Washington in the Early Twentieth Century,” Washington History 13 (Fall–Winter 2001–2002): 50–71; D.C., Metro Development Committee, Third Meeting, 2 September 1970, DCCC, box 19, folder: Subway Stop;. Lyle C. Bryant, Rosslyn: A Case Study in Urban Renewal (n.p., 1967), 38; D.C. Redevel-
329
Notes to Pages 200 –204
opment Land Agency, Office Building Construction in Washington, D.C., 1960–1967 (September 1967), 5, Accession 93-009 (District of Columbia Archives), box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown Feasibility Survey. 12. “Downtown Washington: From Any Angle, It Looks Like Nowhere.” Architectural Forum 118 (January 1963): 97. 13. Derthick, City Politics, 90. “Downtown Washington,” 97; Howard Moskof to Downtown Progress Contract File, 20 December 1966, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown General / Canny; Knox Banner, “Urban Design,” in Philip W. Goetz, ed., Britannica Book of the Year, 1965 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1965), 237. 14. Knox Banner, “A More Beautiful Downtown in a More Beautiful Washington,” Washington Building Congress Bulletin, September 1965; Downtown Progress, “Action in Downtown Washington,” January 1968, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown; Gilbert, Ten Blocks from the White House, 76. 15. James K. Batten, “ ‘You Must Be Out of Your Mind to Be Out Alone after Dark in a Neighborhood Like This,’ ” New York Times Magazine, 22 March 1970, 22–23+; Development Research Associates to Michael Brimmer, director, Downtown Project, 30 September 1969, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown Progress / Canny; Irving H. Berman, The Influence of Bulk and Height Restrictions on the Economics of Office Building Development in the Downtown Urban Renewal Area, Washington, D.C. (Washington, D.C.: National Capital Planning Commission, March 1971), 15; Claudia Levy and Eugene L. Meyer, “Demise of Downtown Feared by Investors,” Washington Post, 5 April 1971; “McPherson Square,” D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study: Progress Report: Service Area No. 9: Central City (December 1974); Wolf Von Eckardt, “As Downtown Lay Dying . . . ,” Washington Post, 13 February 1971. 16. William H. Jones, “U.S. to Put Area Offices in District,” Washington Post, 9 September 1971; Development Research Associates to Michael Brimmer, director, Downtown Project, 30 September 1969, and Development Research Associates to Michael Brimmer, director, Downtown Project, 30 September 1969, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown Progress / Canny; Development Research Associates, Updated Marketability Report, Downtown Urban Renewal Area, Washington, D.C. (July 1972), DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown Marketing (Werner). 17. Wright, “White City to White Elephant,” 39. 18. D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, Annual Report, 1969, 9; Robert N. Gray to Knox Banner, Downtown Progress Interoffice Memo, “Downtown Redevelopment Marketing Meeting Series: Summary of the Fourth Meeting,” 29 June 1972, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown; Development Research Associates, Initial Site Marketing Recommendations, Downtown Urban Renewal Area, Washington, D.C. (July 1972), DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown Marketing (Werner). 19. John Stone III to Richard Nelson, draft, 16 February 1967, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown General / Canny; Robert N. Gray to Knox Banner, Downtown Progress Interoffice Memo, “Downtown Redevelopment Marketing Meeting Series: Summary of the Eighth Meeting,” 6 July 1972, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: Downtown. 20. Knox Banner, “The New Face and Space of Downtown Washington,” reprinted in Congressional Record, 5 June 1980, 13533–13534; Keith to Goldenthal, 13 December 1961, CDS, box 1, folder 6; Route Planning Committee (Quenstedt, Forsythe, Keith, Williams) to Stolzenbach, 27 April 1962, CDS, box 1, folder 10; Alan M. Voorhees & Associates, Inc., Traffic Forecast (prepared for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, December 1967), 83. 21. Jack Eisen, “Parking Space Cut Planned in District,” Washington Post, 6 September
330
Notes to Pages 204 –207
1973; Development Research Associates, Updated Marketability Report, 21; E. J. Applewhite, Washington Itself (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 224; Benjamin Forgey, “Civic Center Makes Sense and Dollars,” Washington Star-News, 17 April 1974; “Gallery Place,” D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study. Progress Report: Service Area No. 9: Central City. Ashley/Myer/Smith, Phase Two Preliminary Report: Downtown Washington Streets for People (28 February 1973), 1–3; Jack Eisen, “Subway as an Economic Spur,” Washington Post, 18 November 1969. 22. Sterling Tucker, Chairman, Housing and Urban Development Committee, to Members of the Council, 18 January 1972, DHCD, RLA library, box: Downtown; Daniel H. Shear, Secretary, NCPC, to Gilbert Hahn Jr., Chairman, D.C. Council, 7 April 1970, DHCD, box: Downtown, folder: NCPC-NDP2 transmittal letter to City Council; John P. Clark to James L. Woolfork, memo, 10 June 1975, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: presentation to D.C. Council members, 9/23/75. Until 1971, the Mount Vernon Square Station was called Federal City College. 23. “Excerpts from Barton Aschman memo to RLA and Downtown Consultants, 1-4-71,” DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: data (and other good stuff). 24. Robert N. Gray to Knox Banner, Downtown Progress interoffice memo, 12 September 1974, DHCD, box: Downtown Urban Renewal, folder: data (and other good stuff ). 25. “Marion Barry for Mayor Campaign Platform Paper: Comprehensive Planning / Land Use,” 13 July 1978, C100, box 27, folder 1; John B. Willmann, “City Review: Washington, D.C.,” National Real Estate Investor, June 1975, 65; Fondersmith, interview; Jerry Knight, “Adding Up D.C.’s ‘Renaissance’ in Construction Projects,” Washington Post, 31 December 1978; Dennis E. Gale, Washington, D.C.: Inner-City Revitalization and Minority Suburbanization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 48; Stephen McGovern, The Politics of Downtown Development: Dynamic Political Cultures in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 198. 26. McGovern, Politics of Downtown Development, 197; Michael J. Weiss, “How Close Is Metro?” Washingtonian, December 1980, 263–269; Federal City Council, Staff Report on MetroRelated Private Investment in the Washington Metropolitan Area (9 July 1979); Pushkarev, Zupan, and Cumella, Urban Rail in America, 35. 27. Douglas N. Schneider testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 90; “ ‘Downtown Would Not Have Come Back without the Subway’: Interview with Rosslyn Center Builder Stanley R. Zupnik,” Subway Magazine, Spring 1979, 44; Harry Jaffe, “The Twilight Zoning,” Regardie’s, May 1990, 34; Carol O’Cleireacain, The Orphaned Capital: Adopting the Right Revenues for the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997), 26. 28. Harry Weese & Associates, Job Memorandum #69, c. August 1967, HW, Job 612, box 1, folder: Meeting Minutes, Job Memorandums, 15 March 1967–27 February 1968; Federal City Council, Staff Report on Metro-Related Private Investment; McGovern, Politics of Downtown Development, 199. Ironically, Hecht’s rise contributed to the fall of Woodward & Lothrop, across the street. In 1984, the ailing Woodies’ was acquired in a leveraged buyout, weakening it further until it finally collapsed into bankruptcy in 1994. 29. Charles P. Freund, “There Goes the Neighborhood,” Regardie’s, November 1984, 81–104. 30. Fondersmith, interview; D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, Annual Report, 1980, 25; D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, Annual Report, 1983, 11; David S. Hilzenrath, “Bargain Price Tag Eyed for Gallery Place Tract,” Washington Post, 23 June 1989; John Mintz, “Carr Company Agrees to Save Gallery Place Building Project,” Washington Post, 28 July 1987; Harry Jaffe, “The Year of the Snakes,” Regardie’s, June 1989, 79.
331
Notes to Pages 207–210
31. Benjamin Forgey, “Washington’s Sporting Chance,” Washington Post, 25 June 1994; Thomas Heath, “D.C. Jumped at Chance to Grab Pro Teams,” Washington Post, 12 June 1994; Stephen C. Fehr, “Metro Is Arena’s Biggest Selling Point,” Washington Post, 11 June 1994; David Montgomery and Thomas Heath, “Neighborhood Isn’t Cheering about Arena’s Impact,” Washington Post, 1 March 1998. 32. Eric Lipton, “Arena Renaissance Hasn’t Happened,” Washington Post, 13 May 1999; Jackie Spinner, “Upscale Dreams Downtown,” Washington Post, 14 May 2001. 33. For a snapshot of the replacement of sex-oriented businesses with office buildings in the early 1980s, see J. McIver Weatherford, Porn Row (New York: Arbor House, 1986). For a time, the two coexisted quite happily, as construction workers employed on the new projects patronized the pornography stores; “New Art on Old G Street” (editorial), Washington Post, 13 February 1975. 34. COG, Metrorail Station Area Planning, 51; O’Cleireacain, Orphaned Capital, 9, 104. 35. D.C. Mayor’s Commission on Downtown Housing, Downtown Housing in Washington, D.C.: Realizing the Goal of a Living Downtown: Executive Summary (Washington, D.C., November 1988); David S. Hilzenrath, “Zoning Panel Endorses Downtown Retail Plan,” Washington Post, 24 December 1988; David S. Hilzenrath, “Carr Co. Opposes District’s ‘Living Downtown’ Policy,” Washington Post, 16 March 1991; Rudolph A. Pyatt Jr., “In Wake of Carr Case, D.C. Must Decide What It Wants in a ‘Living Downtown,’ ” Washington Post, 20 June 1991; David Montgomery, “Residential Growth Still Hasn’t Achieved a ‘Living Downtown,’ ” Washington Post, 23 October 1997; Spinner, “Upscale Dreams Downtown.” 36. D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study. Progress Report (December 1974), 41; Wolf Von Eckardt, “Big Stakes in a New City Game,” Washington Post, 4 March 1978; Eugene Robinson, “Home Rule in Rhodes’ Debris,” Washington Post, 16 September 1984. 37. McGovern, Politics of Downtown Development, 202; COG, Metrorail Station Area Planning, 45; J. Y. Smith, “Architect Edwin Weihe Dies,” Washington Post, 29 December 1994; D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, Annual Report, 1983, 11. 38. Volpe, Remarks before Council of Governments, 16 February 1971, CDS, box 19, folder 8. 39. Fauntroy, “We Did It Before and We Can Do It Again,” 4 October 1989 (presentation), Walter Fauntroy, Papers, GWU, box 27, folder 6; Gillette, Between Justice and Beauty. As far as I can tell, the “Mid-City” place name is not widely used among Washingtonians, but it has long been used by WMATA to refer to the D.C. portion of the Green/Yellow trunk. Nor is WMATA alone in this usage; for example, there is a Mid-City post office on 14th Street, and Rene Sanchez, “Ellington’s Old Neighborhood Seems Ready for Renaissance,” Washington Post, 4 May 1991, quotes a longtime resident using Mid-City as an alternative to the schoolderived names of Shaw and Cardozo. 40. Robert E. Mathe, interview by Albert E. Cowdrey, 12 February 1974, Research Collections, Office of History, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alexandria, Virginia, 16; D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, Annual Report, 1 July 1964–30 June 1965, 3. 41. Mathe, interview, 11; Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 6; Wilson, Urban Renewal; G. Franklin Edwards, “Community and Class Realities: The Ordeal of Change,” Daedalus 95 (Winter 1966): 3; Daniel Thursz, Where Are They Now? A Study of the Impact of Relocation on Former Residents of Southwest Washington, Who Were Served in an HWC Demonstration Project ([Washington, D.C.]: Health and Welfare Council of the National Capital Area, 1966), 93–102; D.C. Office of Urban Renewal, Adams-Morgan: Democratic Action to Save a Neighborhood (Washington, D.C.: Office of Urban Renewal, Stein and Marcou Associates, and American University, January 1964), 3.
332 Notes to Pages 210 –215 42. D.C. Office of Urban Renewal, Adams-Morgan, 30; Horsky to Macy, 4 February 1965, CAH-LBJL, box 99, folder: appointments, Macy’s office. 43. Harold Goldblatt, Citizen Participation in Urban Renewal, Washington, D.C.: A Report to the United Planning Organization and the Community Renewal Program (Washington, D.C.: Health and Welfare Council of the National Capital Area, January 1966), 86. 44. Walter E. Fauntroy, interview by Darwin Stolzenbach, 18 January 1982, MHPC. 45. D.C. Redevelopment Land Agency, Urban Renewal—1966, Annual Report, 2, 10; Fauntroy, statement before the NCPC, 7 April 1966, Fauntroy Papers, box 26, folder 6. 46. “Racial Effect of Renewal under Study,” Evening Star, 27 September 1960; Fauntroy, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 12 October 2001; Wolf Von Eckardt, “Shaw: The Theory and the Actuality,” Washington Post, 25 November 1970; Fauntroy, interview by author. 47. William Raspberry, “Planners Try Shaw Survey,” Washington Post, 24 November 1968. 48. Wolf Von Eckardt, “Shaw Area Will Launch New-Style City Renewal,” Washington Post, 8 April 1966; U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 11 June 1969, 121; “Dr. King Rallies Shaw Renewal Forces to ‘Revive a Dream,’ ” Evening Star, 13 March 1967. 49. Robert Giaimo, interview by Morton Tenzer, 12 May 1983, Center for Oral History, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, 19. 50. Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–1969 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 175; Willard Clopton Jr. “Riot-Scarred 7th Street Area Gets Role in Shaw Renewal,” Washington Post, 24 November 1968; MICCO, What Kind of Neighborhood Do You Want? The Choices for Shaw Residents in Urban Renewal (booklet), July 1968, Fauntroy Papers, box 26, folder 21. 51. U.S. Congress, Financing Subway System, 11 June 1969, 121; Reg Griffith Associates, MICCO: Yesterday . . . Today . . . and Tomorrow: An Analysis of the Organization’s Strengths and Weaknesses (prepared for Model Inner City Community Organization, Inc., November 1971), 95; Fauntroy, “Where’s Our Subway Line?” (editorial), Shaw Power, December 1969, 2, Fauntroy Papers, box 25, folder 7; “Chronology,” Metro Memo, July–August 1972; D.C. Municipal Planning Office, Metro Impact Studies Progress Report (December 1976), 18. 52. NCTA Advisory Board, minutes, 20 September 1965, FG, box 95, folder 12; Fauntroy to Quenstedt, 22 March 1967, Fauntroy Papers, box 26, folder 7; NCPC Meeting, Open Session, 28 July 1967, NCPC, box 62; WMATA, “Regional Rail Rapid Transit System,” January 1971, in MNCPPC, Potential of Metro. 53. D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study: Progress Report (December 1974), 3. 54. “Service Area No. 1: Upper Northwest,” D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study: Progress Report (December 1974), 2; Gail Hamer, “Homeowners Protest Metro Subway to Mayor,” Washington Afro-American, 26 April 1975. 55. De Leuw, Cather & Co. and Harry Weese & Associates, Preliminary Design and Capital Costs, 53; WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan (Revised), III-25; Roy T. Dodge to Board, 16 December 1976, Alper Papers, FIC 10, box 4, folder: WMATA v. City of Fairfax, Summary Judgment of WMATA et al. 56. Douglas N. Schneider Jr. to Washington and Gilbert, c. April 1973, DCCC, box 17, folder: Metro Misc 1969 & undated; D.C. Municipal Planning Office, Metro Impact Studies Progress Report (December 1976), 19; “Shaw Metro Site Approved,” Washington Star-News, 8 June 1973. 57. Metro E and F Route Corridor Task Force, Report on Non-Quantifiable Criteria, 1 March 1978, CPf, box 29, folder 9; WMATA, Office of Program Control, Semiannual Report No. 12, January 1978, CPf, box 29, folder 9; WMATA, DECO Consolidated Quarterly Progress Report no. 1, June 1980, p. 5; WMATA-A, series 1, file 6.
333
Notes to Pages 215 –219
58. D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development, The U Street Study Area: Potential Development Sites, Draft (June 1981), 2; D.C. Office of Planning and Development, U Street Station Study (June 1980); D.C. Office of Planning and Development, The Comprehensive Plan: Exhibits Packet (20 March 1981), 6; WMATA, DECO Consolidated Quarterly Progress Report no. 6, September 1981, WMATA-A, series 1, file 8; WMATA, DECO Consolidated SemiAnnual Progress Report no. 2, December 1982, WMATA-A, series 1, file 9. 59. Feaver, “Administration Seeking to Slow Metro Building,” Washington Post, 7 February 1981; U.S. General Accounting Office, Applying DOT’s Rail Policy, 8, 12; U.S. House of Representatives, Metro Funding Problems: Oversight Hearing before the Subcommittee on Government Operations and Metropolitan Affairs of the Committee on the District of Columbia, 99th Cong., 2d sess., 1986, v, 52. 60. Ed Foster-Simeon, “U Street Will Be Lucky to Survive Green Line,” Washington Times, 25 September 1990; D.C. Council Chairman David Clarke, quoted in Courtland Milloy, “Green Line’s Go-Ahead,” Washington Post, 22 September 1985. 61. Nell Henderson, “Federal Report Cites Metro in Green Line Delay,” Washington Post, 7 August 1990; Milloy, “Green Line’s Go-Ahead.” 62. Eugene L. Meyer, “5 Years Later: Riot Areas Not Rebuilt,” Washington Post, 8 April 1973; “Georgetown Comes to Shaw,” Shaw Power, January 1971, 2, DHCD, RLA library box: Shaw; D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development, The U Street Study Area: Potential Development Sites, Draft, June 1981, 1; Eugene Meyer, “The Dispirit of ’76,” Planning 42 (March–April 1976): 21; Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Department of Metropolitan Development and Information Resources, WMATA Development-Related Transit Ridership: Final Report (January 1992), 56; Patrice Gaines-Carter, “Childhood Lost,” Washington Post, 27 May 1985. 63. Virginia Ali, interview by Hedrick Smith, Washington, D.C., 15 July 1999, Public Broadcasting Service, “Duke Ellington’s Washington,” www.pbs.org/ellingtonsdc/interviewsAli.htm (accessed 15 July 2001); Foster-Simeon, “U Street Will Be Lucky to Survive Green Line”; Nell Henderson, “Shaw Area Residents Outraged by Metro Excavation Hazards,” Washington Post, 24 April 1990; Michelle M. Murphy, “Regional Report: The District of Columbia,” Regardie’s, June 1990, 188. 64. Ali, interview; Murphy, “Regional Report,” 188; Laura Lang, “Forgotten Again,” Washington City Paper, 3 September 1999. 65. Reg Griffith Associates, MICCO: Yesterday . . . Today . . . and Tomorrow, 72–73; Bowman, “The Renovation of Shaw,” Washington Post, 6 December 1976; Meyer, “The Dispirit of ’76,” 20. 66. John Mintz, “Former Crime Hub of 14th and U Turns Bohemian,” Washington Post, 25 June 1988; Courtland Milloy, “A White Tornado Sweeps Shaw,” Washington Post, 16 April 1987; Mintz, “Investors Reclaiming Riot Corridors,” Washington Post, 7 April 1988. 67. Jim Keary, “Openings Herald New Era,” Washington Times, 10 May 1991; Marc Fisher, “Bringing a New Look to U Street,” Washington Post, 12 April 2001, and “Barber Fears His Demise in U Street Revival,” Washington Post, 14 April 2001; Eric Lipton, “Columbia Heights Taking Flight,” Washington Post, 1 April 1999. 68. D.C. Office of Planning and Development, U Street Station Study, 9; Jaffe and Sherwood, Dream City, 159; Toby Millman, “Shaw’s Urban Core,” lecture, National Building Museum, 30 April 2001. 69. Crystal Yvonne Anderson, “The Early Years of Metrorail: A Lost Opportunity for Realization in the Shaw Community, Washington, D.C.” (M.A. thesis, George Washington University, 1995), 54; Marc Fisher, “U Street Diner Reflects Changes in Booming Shaw,” Washington Post, 10 April 2001; “Bringing a New Look to U Street,” Washington Post, 12 April 2001;
334
Notes to Pages 219 –226
and “Barber Fears His Demise in U Street Revival,” Washington Post, 14 April 2001; Fauntroy, interview by author. 70. Thomas C. McDaniels Jr., “Get the Green Line on Track—Now,” Washington Post, 1 February 1998. More recently, some attribute poor service on the completed Green Line to racism. See Curtis Cook, “Green Line Complaint” (letter), Washington Post, 10 June 2002, and chapter 10; Roger Sanjek’s introduction to his book, The Future of Us All: Race and Neighborhood Politics in New York City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), provides helpful models for thinking about the different types of power at work in urban politics. Chapter 9. The Suburbs
1. Bernick and Cervero, Transit Villages, xi. 2. WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program (1 March 1968), 3; “Development at Rail Stations,” WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan for Completion, III-22. 3. Already by the mid-1970s, more than 80 percent of new jobs were created in the suburbs. Robert T. Dunphy and Department of Community and Economic Resources, Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Trends before Metrorail: A Metrorail Before-and-After Study Report: Interim Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), 56. Between 1999 and 2003, only 22 percent of job growth took place in the central jurisdictions of the District, Arlington, and Alexandria. Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Economic Trends in Metropolitan Washington, 1999–2003 (14 July 2004), 4. 4. The Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission attempted to apply the plan for its two constituent counties in On Wedges and Corridors: A General Plan for the Maryland-Washington Regional District in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties (Silver Spring, Md.: Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission, 1962). But Arlington proved more devoted to the idea than Prince George’s. 5. Bryant, Rosslyn, 27–39. 6. Arlington County Planning Commission, minutes, 29 January 1962, LCB, subgroup 2, series 6, folder 3; Keith to Goldenthal, 13 December 1961, CDS, box 1, folder 6; Williams, interview. 7. John Rannells, “Open Meeting of National Capital Regional Planning Council, 2:30– 4:00 pm, June 3, 1963,” CDS, box 20, folder 16. 8. NVTC, Potential Rail Transit Corridors, 6. 9. NCTA, Transportation in the National Capital Region, 39; NCTA, Appendix to November 1, 1962 Report to the President, vol. 5: System Planning (1963), 104. 10. NVTC, Potential Rail Transit Corridors, 1. 11. Hanson, Politics of Metropolitan Cooperation, 54–57; Montgomery County, Maryland, Report of the Committee to Evaluate the General Plan, Rockville, September 1967, Maryland– National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Printed Material, RG 15 (Boards and Commissions), Montgomery County Archives, Rockville, Maryland, box 1. 12. Barnett, interview by author; Dickran Y. Hovsepian, interview abstract, 17 and 27 June 1988, Montgomery County Archives Project, Montgomery County Archives, Rockville, Maryland. 13. John I. Williams, “Typical Trips by Rapid Transit,” draft, 29 August 1962, CDS, box 1, folder 9. 14. Arlington Planning Commission, minutes, 30 June 1958, LCB, subgroup 3, series 5, folder 8; Bert W. Johnson, County Manager, to Arlington County Board, “Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor Study, Report #4. A Growth Pattern and Model for Consideration,” 4 May 1970, WMATA-A, accretion #2, file 5; Progress & Potential, June 1982, WMATA-A, series 3, file 9; COG, Metrorail Station Area Planning, 75; Joan Sorenson, “Metro Sprawl at Issue,” Montgom-
335
Notes to Pages 226 –231
ery Journal, 13 March 1975. Unlike classic urban renewal, the legislation prohibited the county from writing down land perceived to be overvalued, but it still provided an important tool for planners hoping to promote dense development around stations. 15. Hall Gibson, Statement before the Montgomery Planning Board, 28 February 1973, CO-OPT, series 5, folder 3; Ted Weihe, “Prepared Opening Remarks,” n.d., CO-OPT, series 10, folder 1; Ellen Bozman, interview by author, Arlington, Virginia, 12 January 2004; “Co-Opt Alert,” vol. 1, no. 1, January 1972, and vol. 2, no. 6, July–August 1973, CO-OPT, series 8, folder 2; Co-Opt, “Citizens Conference Attacks Metro Funding Policies,” news release, 7 June 1975, CO-OPT, series 10, folder 3; Ted Weihe, “Financing the Metro System” (letter), Washington Post, 6 January 1975; Lois Matthews, “Metro Portal, Growth under Fire,” Northern Virginia Sun, 17 May 1972. 16. Mark R. Parris, The Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor: Early Visions (Arlington County Planning Staff, 25 February 1989), 8; Laura Costello, “Bethesda Controls Development with a ‘Beauty Contest,’ ” Blueprints 7 (Summer 1989): 6; “Downzoning Backed in Takoma Sector Plan,” Suburban Record, 25 May 1973; Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Sector Plan for the Transit Impact Area in Takoma Park (October 1974), 22 and 32; COG, Metrorail Station Area Planning, 66; Sonia Boin, “Takoma Residents Cheer Down-Zoning Metro Station Area,” Suburban Record, 7 February 1975; Weiss, “How Close Is Metro?” 17. Jerry Oppenheimer and Winston Groom, “Congestion Protestors Have Fine Day,” Sunday Star, 19 November 1972; Sonia Boin, “Forest Glen Citizens Warn of Suit If Station Fight Fails,” Suburban Record, 5 March 1975; “Metro System Must Not be Cut—Sickles,” Suburban Record, 3 January 1975; Barnett, interview by author; Norman Christeller, interview by Bill Offutt, 1 October 1992, Montgomery County Archives; Bozman, interview; COG, Metrorail Station Area Planning, 75. 18. D.C. Zoning Commission, Metro Development Committee, Fifth Meeting, 7 October 1970, DCCC, box 19, folder: Transit Stops; “Metro Stations Impact Study Released,” Alexandria Gazette, 5 June 1973; Progress & Potential, June 1982, WMATA-A, series 3, file 9. 19. Larry Van Dyne, “Uncle Sam’s Neighborhood,” Washingtonian, November 1991, 194. 20. “New Thinking on Parking Garages,” Architectural Forum (February 1953): 132; Sandra Evans, “Ballston Grows Up and Up,” Washington Post, 25 April 1998; Mark Baechtel, “Balancing Act,” Regardie’s, January 1990, 282; Richard Cowan, “Regional Report: Ballston, Virginia,” Regardie’s, January 1990, 281; Bernick and Cervero, Transit Villages, 220. 21. Parris, Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, 8; Progress & Potential, June 1982, WMATA-A, Series 3, File 9; Jeff Dufour, “Clarendon’s Inner-Suburb Success Story,” The Hill, 30 April 2003. 22. Rick Greenberg, “Busted in Bethesda,” Regardie’s, November 1990, 30. 23. Jack Eisen, “Big Development Is Approved for Md. Metro Stop,” Washington Post, 31 October 1980; “Metro a Partner in Joint Development,” in “Metrorail Moves out Wisconsin Avenue,” advertising supplement to Washington Post, 22 August 1984, 9; JHK & Associates, Development-Related Ridership Survey II (prepared for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, December 1989), 15–19. 24. Greenberg, “Busted in Bethesda,” 27–40; Costello, “Bethesda Controls Development,” 6; Jim Brady, “Eight Projects Win Approval in Bethesda,” Washington Post, 16 July 1983; Montgomery County Planning Board, Maryland–National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Sector Plan for the Bethesda Central Business District, Montgomery County, Maryland (Silver Spring, Md., June 1976), 103. 25. Dunphy et al., Trends before Metrorail, 71; John R. Benedict, “Support Grows for Silver Spring Sector Plan,” Suburban Record, 30 January 1975; Manuel Perez-Rivas and Margaret Webb Pressler, “Silver Spring ‘Dream’ Mall Turned Down,” Washington Post, 13 November 1996; Karl Vick and Margaret Webb Pressler, “ ‘Town Square’ Is Latest Plan to Renew Silver
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Notes to Pages 231–235
Spring,” Washington Post, 29 October 1997; Dana Hedgpeth, “Development Planned near Silver Spring Metro,” Washington Post, 21 June 2001. 26. Moore, “Metro Washington,” 46; Weiss, “How Close Is Metro?” 267; Joyce Siegel, “Smart Growth Comes Farm Fresh in Maryland,” Urban Land 58 (January 1999): 32. 27. Pfanstiehl to author, 21 September 2000; Greenberg, “Busted in Bethesda,” 34–35; Benjamin Forgey, “Newfangled and Old-Fashioned,” Washington Post, 15 December 2001; Neil Irwin, “For Urban Developers, a Hard Row to Hoe,” Washington Post, 13 January 2003. 28. Dennis Leach, “Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor,” in Hank Dittmar and Gloria Ohland, eds., The New Transit Town: Best Practices in Transit-Oriented Development (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), 148. 29. Terry J. Lassar, “Hitting the Streets” Urban Land 58 (July 1999): 32–37; Cowan, “Regional Report: Ballston, Virginia,” 278; Chris L. Jenkins, “Arlington’s Metro Metropolis,” Washington Post, 7 July 2002; Bernick and Cervero, Transit Villages, 223; Peter Whoriskey, “Is It Smart Growth or a Dumb Idea?” Washington Post, 14 January 2001. 30. National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board, COG, Priorities 2000, Metropolitan Washington: Circulation Systems (Washington, D.C.: February 2001), 42. 31. Anthony A. Downs, Stuck in Traffic: Coping with Peak-Hour Traffic Congestion (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution; Cambridge, Mass.: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1992), 115. Joel Garreau asserts, without evidence, that “the vast majority of all people will continue to arrive at such a rail-served Edge City by car. Even in a building directly over the tracks, 90 percent of all office workers will demand parking.” Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), 132. 32. Anne Wilkins, interview by W. Joseph Coleman, Fairfax County, 20 May 1974, Northern Virginia Oral History Project Collection, Special Collections & Archives, Fenwick Library, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia; John F. Herrity, “The Future of Fairfax County: An Insider’s Perspective,” in Joseph L. Fisher and Richard T. Mayer, eds., Northern Virginia Challenges: The 1990s and Beyond (Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University, 1987): 95; James Keith, interview by Karen Coleman, Fairfax County, 11 March 1974, Northern Virginia Oral History Project Collection, Special Collections & Archives, Fenwick Library, George Mason University; Terry Spielman Peters, The Politics and Administration of Land Use Control: The Case of Fairfax County, Virginia (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1974), 5. 33. NCTA, Route Planning Committee (Quenstedt, Forsythe, Keith, Williams) to Stolzenbach, 27 April 1962, CDS, box 1, folder 10; Fairfax County, Office of Comprehensive Planning, The Tysons Corner Area Study (November 1977), 6; Fairfax County, Planning Division, A Land Use Plan for the Tyson’s Corner Area (Adopted February 7, 1963) with First Amendment Proposals (February 1965), 19, 21. 34. Shelly Smith Mastran, “The Evolution of Suburban Nucleations: Land Investment Activity in Fairfax County, Virginia, 1958–1977” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 1988), 144; Fairfax County, Planning Division, Land Use Plan, 3, 31. 35. Joseph Alexander, interview by author, Washington, D.C., 29 January 2001. 36. In contrast to former Montgomery councilman Cleatus Barnett’s comment, “don’t tell me anything about the cost. If it costs more, it costs more, but that’s what we’re going to do,” former Fairfax supervisor John Beerman recalled, “we only had a certain amount of money.” Barnett, interview by author, and John L. Beerman, telephone interview by author, 19 May 2001; Alexander, interview. WMATA Board, minutes, 20 October 1967, MHPC, box 7, folder 6. 37. Beerman, interview; NVTC, Potential Rail Transit Corridors; NVTC Alternate Rail Transit Approaches to Fairfax City: Staff Report (Arlington, Va., 30 September 1966); Beerman was unable to remember the Planning Commission’s having any voice at all in the rail planning process.
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Notes to Pages 236 –239
38. WMATA, System Planning (December 1967), 9. 39. Alan M. Voorhees & Associates, Inc., Traffic Forecast (December 1967), table E-1, 158. Tysons Corner appears in the table as Traffic Zone 543. 40. Northern Virginia Planning District Commission, Northern Virginia Metro Station Impact Study: Final Summary Report (June 1977), 33; “Highriseville: Do We Really Want It?” (editorial), Northern Virginia Sun, 12 May 1972. 41. Gladstone Associates, Northern Virginia Metro Station Impact Study: Phase IIIA: Market Analysis: Report no. 3: Metro Station and Corridor Development Potentials (Northern Virginia Planning District Commission, May 1974), 20; Gladstone Associates, Northern Virginia Metro Station Impact Study: Development Potentials at Metro Stations (Northern Virginia Planning District Commission, June 1974), 3; Booz, Allen & Hamilton, Development Research Division, A Study of Land Use Planning Alternatives and Recommendations in the Vicinities of West Falls Church, Dunn Loring and Vienna Metro Stations (Fairfax County, Office of Comprehensive Planning, 1975), I-5. 42. Sue Stone, “Vienna Mad at Fairfax Vote on Metro Stop Site Zoning,” Northern Virginia Sun, 15 September 1973; Alicia Mundy, “The Fall Guy,” Regardie’s, October 1986, 77. 43. “No-Growth Policy Becoming Luxury” (editorial), Northern Virginia Sun, 11 May 1973; Mike Fay, “High Density Metro Development,” Virginia Sentinel, 28 June 1973; “A Complete Fiasco” (editorial), Northern Virginia Sun, 11 October 1974. 44. Metro K and J/H Route Corridor Task Forces, Metrorail Alternatives Analysis: Land Use and Station Area Impacts for Final Regional Alternatives (Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, March 1978), 19. 45. John B. Willmann, “City Review: Washington, D.C.,” National Real Estate Investor, June 1974, 120, and “City Review: Washington, D.C.” National Real Estate Investor, June 1976, 96; Gladstone Associates, Northern Virginia Metro Station Impact Study: Phase IIIA, Report no. 2, II-11, III-12; Mastran, “Suburban Nucleations,” 98; Fairfax County, Office of Comprehensive Planning, Tysons Corner Area Study, 105; Ross Netherton and Nan Netherton, Fairfax County: A Contemporary Portrait (Virginia Beach, Va.: Donning Company, 1992), 42. Other hot suburban markets were Bethesda, Alexandria, Rosslyn, and Crystal City, all of them designated as Metro station areas. 46. Fairfax County, Office of Comprehensive Planning, Tysons Corner Area Study, 139, A1. 47. Steve Behrens, “Predicts High-Rises around Metro Station,” Virginia Sentinel, 6 April 1972; Frank Tropin, “Metro Station’s Plans Advanced,” Alexandria Gazette, 6 July 1973; “Tyson’s Metro Station, Metro-Related Road Plan Considered by Supervisors,” Providence Journal (McLean, Va.), 28 February 1975; James A. Grant, Town Planner, Town of Vienna, “Light Rail Transit—An Alternative for Metrorail in Fairfax County,” 25 November 1975, JLF II, box 25, folder 14. 48. Patricelli to Coleman, 20 October 1975, McConahey, Files, GRFL, box 39, folder: District of Columbia—Metro System; Thomas Grubisich, “Fairfax Votes No on PLUS,” Planning 42 (March–April 1976): 45. 49. Fairfax County, Planning Division, Land Use Plan, 3; Metro K and J/H Route Corridor Task Forces, Land Use and Station Area Impacts, 34. 50. Metro K and J/H Route Corridor Task Forces, Land Use and Station Area Impacts, 51; League of Women Voters of the Fairfax Area, Virginia, “Metro: The Alternatives Analysis,” March 1978, JLF II, box 25, folder 13; WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan (Revised), III-12; Douglas B. Feaver, “N. Virginia Reduces Possible Metro Alignments,” Washington Post, 24 January 1978. 51. “Tyson’s Corner Urban Design Charrette,” 23–26 June 1976, in Fairfax County, Office of Comprehensive Planning, Tysons Corner Area Study, B13; Kulash, interview; Metro K and
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Notes to Pages 239 –245
J/H Route Corridor Task Forces, Land Use and Station Area Impacts, 14; Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board, Testing of Transportation Plan Alternatives (May 1976), 8, and appendix C. In the appendix, Tysons appears as transportation analysis district 96. Kulash, who participated in the charrette, recalls discussions of Metro taking only about half an hour. 52. Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co., Metrorail Alternatives Analysis, K Route: Draft Technical Report, vol. 2: Appendices (prepared under contract to Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, 14 October 1977); Douglas B. Feaver, “N. Virginia Reduces Possible Metro Alignments,” Washington Post, 24 January 1978. 53. Alexander, interview; U.S. Senate, National Capital Transportation Act Amendments of 1979, 235. 54. Ronald Kirby, remarks at Federal Planning, Urban Revitalization and Smart Growth in the National Capital Region Conference, Washington, D.C, 8 January 2001; Robert Cervero, “Rail Transit and Joint Development: Land Market Impacts in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60 (1994): 92; Marc Leepson, “Regional Report: Fairfax County, Virginia,” Regardie’s, December 1990, 124; Rich Minchik, interview by Herman Fu Huang, 9 August 1994, courtesy Dr. Huang; Mastran, “Suburban Nucleations,” 209; Joseph E. Brown and Michael E. Hickok, “Can Tysons Be Saved?” Regardie’s, August–September 1991, 43–52; Alice Reid, “Tysons Growth Revs Up Concern about Gridlock,” Washington Post, 13 March 1999. 55. Michael D. Shear and Alice Reid, “Elevated Metrorail Loop Proposed for Tysons Area,” Washington Post, 22 January 1999; Katherine Shaver, “Dulles Rail to Be Built in Phases,” Washington Post, 20 March 2003; Peter Whoriskey, “Fairfax’s Elusive Downtown,” Washington Post, 1 April 2001; Michael D. Shear, “Fairfax Increases Development near Future Rail Line,” Washington Post, 22 May 2001, and “Mini-City Gets Cold Reception in Fairfax,” Washington Post, 28 June 2001; Peter Whoriskey, “Planned Tysons Towers Add New Dimension to Metrorail Proposal,” Washington Post, 22 June 2003; Lisa Rein, “Lawmaker Steps in on Virginia Growth,” Washington Post, 21 April 2005. For a more hopeful view, see Lisa Rein, “Arrival of Metro Could Transform Tysons,” Washington Post, 7 August 2004. 56. Tom Deen, telephone interview by author, 8 January 2003. 57. Wilkins, interview by Coleman. Chapter 10. The Riders
1. Board Budget Committee (Barnett, Harris, Nevius) to Board, 12 November 1974, CPf, box 1, folder 10. 2. “Rail Ridership by Day for the Period September 5, 1977–September 16, 1977,” CPf, box 2, folder 11; WMATA Office of Financial and Policy Planning, “Metro Passenger Count: July 1977,” August 1977, CPf, box 29, folder 2; Edward A. Daniel testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, 104. 3. CFA, minutes, 17 January 1968; Jack Eisen, “Signs in the Subway,” Washington Post, 20 January 1977; Pfanstiehl press release, 29 July 1977, CPf, box 2, folder 9; “WMATA Staff Persons Answer Questions from the Riders,” Metro Memo, December [1977?], 8. 4. COG, “1975–1996 Metro Core Cordon Person Travel Trends,” spreadsheet, courtesy of M. Patrick Zilliacus, COG; WMATA, Office of Planning and Development, Quarterly Metrobus and Metrorail Ridership Report no. 13, November 1981, WMATA-A, series 1, file 22. 5. Kenneth Mowill, quoted in Jack Eisen, “Riders Worry Bus Service Will Deteriorate,” Washington Post, 24 March 1977; WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan (Revised), I-37; Amanda Ripley, “Missing the Bus,” Washington City Paper, 13 March 1998. 6. Nancy G. La Vigne, “Crime Prevention through the Design and Management of the
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Notes to Pages 245 –248
Built Environment: The Case of the DC Metro” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers, 1996), 160; U.S. Census Bureau, “Means of Transportation to Work for Workers 16 Years and Over,” Census 2000 Summary File 3, tables P30 and PCT65A through PCT65I, http://factfinder.census.gov. Data are for workers age sixteen and older who reported only one race. The census was taken prior to the opening of the last stretch of the Green Line through Southeast Washington and Prince George’s County; it is likely that black ridership increased once that segment was opened. Interestingly, whites were more likely to use Metro in all jurisdictions except Fairfax County and Prince George’s County, but Prince George’s County blacks rode at nearly twice the rate as Prince George’s whites. Hispanics were somewhat underrepresented on Metro. Only 6.2 percent of Hispanic workers rode Metro to work, compared with a regional average of 8.8 percent of all workers. The high rate of bus ridership among blacks is due in part to their concentration in the District; 40 percent of bus commuters lived in the District, compared with only 28 percent of rail commuters. 7. Lyndsey Layton, “Green Line Riders Are Feeling Crunched,” Washington Post, 19 January 2001; Gary Roberson, “Thanks for Riding Metro” (letter), Washington Post, 27 January 2001. 8. J. A. Caywood, Senior Vice President, De Leuw, Cather, to Dodge, 1 October 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 3; John Burgess, “Pilot Error Probable Cause of D.C. Crash, Report Says,” Washington Post, 11 August 1982. 9. U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, Railroad Accident Report: Derailment of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Train no. 410 at Smithsonian Interlocking, January 13, 1982 (14 October 1982). 10. John Burgess, “Technology and Repair Woes Mar Metrorail’s Reputation,” Washington Post, 22 August 1982; John Burgess, “Ridership Drops Despite Three New Metro Stations,” Washington Post, 25 June 1982; Stephen J. Lynton, “Metro Subway Use Shows Marked Increase in Suburbs,” Washington Post, 19 October 1984. 11. Bruggeman et al., Transit in the Nation’s Capital, VIII-1; Robert Peskin, interview by author, 6 September 2000, Bethesda, Maryland; Nell Henderson, “Metro Purchasing Methods Faulted,” Washington Post, 11 June 1988. 12. Nell Henderson, “Transit Industry Ranks Metro Rail and Bus System Tops in U.S., Canada,” Washington Post, 29 October 1988; George Hoyt & Associates, Inc., 1994 Metrorail Passenger Survey: Final Report (prepared for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, July 1994), B–7. 13. Stephen C. Fehr, “Riders Growing Uneasy as Metro Shows Its Age,” Washington Post, 28 June 1992; Alice Reid, “In an Aging Subway System, Escalating Breakdowns,” Washington Post, 17 February 1998; Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 4; Jack Eisen, “Air Condition Cutback Eyed by Metro Staff,” Washington Post, 26 March 1975. 14. Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 4; H. W. Cosher, General Service Sales Supervisor, Otis Elevator Company, to John H. Coleman, Coverdale & Colpitts, Consulting Engineers, 4 December 1968, HW, Job 612. box 3, folder: Client correspondence incoming; CFA, minutes, 21 June 1967; Graham to Mrs. Erwin N. Griswold, 1 April 1970, PSC, box 54, folder: Chronological File, January to June, 1970. 15. Allan to Thresher, 7 November 1968, HW, Job 612, box 1; Melvin Siegel, Office of Architecture, to File, 6 December 1967, HW, Job 612, box 1, folder: Planning and Design: Elevators and Escalators, 6 December 1967–18 June 1969; Reid, “In an Aging Subway System, Escalating Breakdowns”; Richard White, prepared statement, U.S. House of Representatives, Examining Metro’s Track Record, 90. 16. Joseph D. Whitaker, “Woman Halts a Driverless Metro Train,” Washington Post, 9 October 1979; National Transportation Safety Board, Railroad Accident Report: Collision of Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Train T-111 with Standing Train at Shady Grove
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Notes to Pages 248 –250
Passenger Station, Gaithersburg, Maryland, January 6, 1996 (29 October 1996); Lyndsey Layton, “Metro Plans Return to Computer Control,” Washington Post, 25 October 2000. 17. Alice Reid, “Metro Gets Healthy Dose of Increased Ridership,” Washington Post, 1 March 1998; Stephen C. Fehr, “Metro Approves Voucher Plan for Commuters,” Washington Post, 4 December 1992; Lyndsey Layton, “Covering the Commute,” Washington Post, 3 October 2000. 18. Lyndsey Layton, “Rail Ridership Hits New Highs,” Washington Post, 10 September 2004; WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program (revised, 7 February 1969), 27; “A Proposal for Commuter Parking at Metro Stations and Bus Serviced Satellite Fringe Parking,” WMATA, Proposed Financial Plan for Completion, III-79; WMATA, “Parking at Metro Stations,” www.wmata.com/metrorail/parking.htm (accessed 20 January 2002); Lyndsey Layton, “On Metro, Morning Rush Is Dawning Earlier,” Washington Post, 25 October 2000; HSAREMI to WPEDITORS, “Metrorail 25th Anniversary Memories,” http://washingtonpost.com forum, 26 March 2001. 19. Richard Neel, “Huntington Metro Delayed til ’83,” Alexandria Gazette, 8 April 1982; Nell Henderson, “Metro Sees Possible Shortage of Rail Cars Down the Line,” Washington Post, 13 June 1988; WMATA, “WMATA Facts,” www.wmata.com (accessed November 2000); WMATA, Adopted Regional Rapid Rail Transit Plan and Program, 15; Stephen J. Lynton, “Metro Faces Car Shortage When Red Line Opens,” Washington Post, 27 July 1984; Lyndsey Layton, “To Keep Up, Metro Wants $4.5 Billion,” Washington Post, 7 December 2001; U.S. General Accounting Office, Mass Transit: Many Management Successes at WMATA, but Capital Planning Could Be Enhanced (Report to the Committee on Government Reform, Subcommittee on the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, July 2001), 27. 20. U.S. General Accounting Office, Mass Transit, 6; “Readers Sound Off on Metrorail Hang-ups,” http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/apri199/metresponse8.htm (accessed 8 April 1999); Lyndsey Layton, “Metrorail Fixes Won’t Be Noticeable until 2001,” Washington Post, 14 October 1999. 21. Lyndsey Layton, “Metro Reassigns Top Train Mover,” Washington Post, 7 July 2000. 22. LADYDAY4, posting to “Metrorail Envisions New Downtown Line,” www.washingtonpost.com, 19 May 2001; Alice Reid, “Metro Gets Healthy Dose Of Increased Ridership,” Washington Post, 1 March 1998; “Metrorail Statistics,” WMATA, Meeting Market Demand: Metro Fiscal 2001 Annual Report and Fiscal 2002 Budget (2001). In fiscal 2001, Metro, BART, and the New York City subway all recovered between 60 and 70 percent of operating expenses from fares. The heavy-rail systems in Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia recovered between 45 and 50 percent. Smaller systems in Atlanta, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Miami recovered less than a third of their expenses from fares. American Public Transit Association, “Heavy Rail Transit Agencies Financial Data, Fiscal Year 2001,” www.apta.com/research/stats/rail/hrfinance.cfm (accessed 25 July 2003). 23. For an exception, see ORADUDE, who suggested a twenty-five-cent surcharge for capital improvements. Posting to “Mayor Prods Metro Over Escalator Woes,” www.washingtonpost.com, 5 July 2000; Daniel F. Drummond, “Metro Tracking for Growth Ahead,” Washington Times, 29 March 2001; Lyndsey Layton and Lisa Rein, “Cash-Strapped Local Officials Balk at Metro’s Capital Expenditures,” Washington Post, 19 November 2002; Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Report of the Metro Funding Panel (26 January 2005), 13. 24. Lyndsey Layton, “Metro Gives Riders Platform for Views,” Washington Post, 27 July 2000; HENPERSON, posting to “Metrorail 25th Anniversary Memories,” www.washingtonpost.com, 11 July 2001; Lyndsey Layton, “Coming to a Curve,” Washington Post, 25 March 2001; Steven Ginsburg, “Commuters Like Metro More Than They Use It,” Washington Post, 6 March 2005. 25. Bob Levey, “The Many Reasons Why Jim Avoids Metro,” Washington Post, 9 June 2000.
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Notes to Pages 250 –257
26. Nancy H. Hey, “Derailed by Metro” (letter), Washington Post, 4 September 2000; Alice Reid and Brian Mooar, “Metro Riders Stage Mutiny,” Washington Post, 9 April 1999; HSAREMI, posting to “Metrorail 25th Anniversary Memories,” www.washingtonpost.com, 26 March 2001. 27. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 2–3, 120. 28. Frank Getlein, “Vivid Notes from the Metro Underground,” Washington Star, 24 April 1975; Jack Eisen, “Metro Is Run for Us,” Washington Post, 4 October 1973; “Metrobus Issues AllRoutes Map,” Washington Post, 11 January 1974; Philip G. Schrag, Behind the Scenes: The Politics of a Constitutional Convention (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1985), 39. 29. Lynch, Image of the City, 47. 30. Ken Garland, Mr Beck’s Underground Map (Harrow Weald, Middlesex: Capital Transport Publishing, 1994). 31. David Lewis, “The Way of the Nomad,” in From Earlier Fleets: Hemisphere—An Aboriginal Anthology (1978), cited in David Turnbull, Maps Are Territories, Science Is an Atlas: A Portfolio of Exhibits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 53; author’s recollection of debates with his middle-school classmates; Paul Mijksenaar, Visual Function: An Introduction to Information Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), 6. 32. Washington, D.C., Convention & Tourism Corporation, 2003 Visitor Statistics (8 June 2004). 33. Joe Suerkiewicz and Bob Sehlinger, with Eve Zibart, The Unofficial Guide to Washington, D.C., 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1998); Applewhite, Washington Itself, 10–15; Kolson, Big Plans, 136; WB&A Market Research, Results of Intercept Interviews among Washington, DC Visitors (prepared for DC Heritage Tourism Coalition & Economics Research Associates, 1 December 2000), 62–69. 34. S. Dillon Ripley, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution, to Sickles, Chairman, WMATA, 30 November 1971, C100, box 37, folder 8; Jack Eisen, “Metro Mid-Mall Station Pushed,” Washington Post, 3 May 1972; WMATA board meeting, 9 November 1972, MHPC, box 8, folder 2; Boleyn, Assistant General Manager for Finance and Comptroller, to Stolzenbach, 1 May 1984, CDS, box 39, folder 3. 35. Dennis R. Judd, “Constructing the Tourist Bubble,” in Dennis R. Judd and Susan S. Fainstein, eds., The Tourist City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 35–53; Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992). 36. D.C. Municipal Planning Office and D.C. Bicentennial Commission and Assembly, Metro Places: Prospectus and Idea Paper (September 1975), 17; Downtown Progress, Downtown Washington: A Walking Guide (c. 1975). 37. WMATA, Office of System and Service Planning, Mass on the Mall [map, 1979]; WMATA, The Inauguration, January Twentieth, Two Thousand One, Washington, D.C.: A Guide to Metro Service for Inauguration Events [2001]; WMATA, Metro Walking Map to Million Family March Events [2000]; WMATA, Office of System and Service Planning, July 4th on the Mall [1981]; Kasey Vannett, “Metro Mania Offers Fast Track Class on City,” Washington Post, 27 May 1993. 38. Historical Society of Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C.: Beyond the Monuments (2000). 39. Linton Weeks, “Library Buys First Map of ‘America’ for $10 Million,” Washington Post, 19 June 2003; Allan, For the Glory of Washington, chap. 3; Graham to Board, 8 January 1969, MHPC, box 8, folder 10. 40. Dodge to WMATA staff et al., 20 December 1971, CPf, box 1, folder 5; NCPC Transportation Committee, “Transit Development Program. Southwest Mall—Ardmore Line. Voice of America Station,” 9 October 1969, DCCC, box 19, folder: Transit Stops.
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Notes to Pages 257–262
41. Jack Eisen, “Metro Board Prepares to Name Its 82 Stations,” Washington Post, 10 August 1971; Bert Johnson, County Manager, Arlington, to Joseph Fisher, 19 January 1972, PSC, box 54, folder: Chronological File, January–March 1972. 42. Personal observation, May 2001. 43. Metro Memo, August 1971. A few exceptions were made. For example, Foggy Bottom became Foggy Bottom–GWU in honor of the university whose campus surrounds the station. 44. Michael D. Shear, “Angling to Get on Metro Map,” Washington Post, 26 August 1993; Nell Henderson, “Next Stop on the Metro Line: Whatever the Name Is This Week,” Washington Post, 18 May 1989; “Stopping a City in Its Tracks,” Washington Post, 13 April 1995; Alice Reid, “All Aboard on Station Names,” Washington Post, 5 May 1999. 45. Reid, “All Aboard on Station Names”; Paul DeMaio, “Next Stop ‘WIPZAM,’ ” on “Humor Me!” http://members.aol.com/humorme81/ (accessed 19 September 2001); Michael Schaffer, “Metrorail Conquers the World!” Washington City Paper, 22 October 1999; WMATA, Comprehensive Escalator Canopy Program Design Competition (2001). 46. Reid, “All Aboard on Station Names”; Shear, “Angling to Get on Metro Map.” 47. Lyndsey Layton, “GOP Ups Pressure on Metro,” Washington Post, 20 April 2001; Lyndsey Layton, “House Votes to Require ‘Reagan’ at Metro Stop,” Washington Post, 1 December 2001. The provision was included in the 2002 Transportation Appropriations Act, Public Law 107-87, section 343, U.S. Statutes at Large 115 (2001): 833. 48. Suerkiewicz and Sehlinger, Unofficial Guide to Washington, D.C., 112; Tourist Guide: Washington, D.C., 4th ed. (Greenville, S.C.: Michelin Travel Publications, 1999); Jo Becker, “New Md. Metro Route Down to 2 Choices,” Washington Post, 1 September 2001; Architect Stan Allan’s 2000 sketch for a twenty-first century Metro included a red-white-and-blue “Capital Line” as an addition to the color lines. 49. Eisen, “Metro Board Prepares to Name Its 82 Stations”; D.C. Office of Planning and Management, D.C. Metro Impact Study: Progress Report, 6; Pfanstiehl to staff, 20 February 1975, CPf, box 1, folder 11. 50. Lance Wyman, “Urban Legibility and Signs,” The Wheel Extended: A Toyota Quarterly Review 19, no. 4: 8–15, quotation on p. 11. Lance Wyman, “Subway Signage,” in CooperHewitt Museum, Subways (New York, 1977). 51. Wyman & Cannan Co., untitled materials showing proposed station pictograms, c. 1975. Originals in possession of Mr. Wyman. 52. Allan to Thresher, 7 November 1968, HW, Job 612, box 1; Weese, interview by Blum, 175; Weese to Thresher, 12 April 1968, HW, Job 612, box 3, folder: Client correspondence, 8/66–8/70. 53. Wolf Von Eckardt, “Putting People in ‘Metro Places,’ ” Washington Post, 14 February 1976; Randy Sue Coburn, “Artists Wary of ‘the Underground,’ ” Washington Star, 17 March 1975; Paul Richard, “ ‘Appropriate Art’ for a Pristine Metro,” Washington Post, 15 March 1975. 54. Kristin Ann Hall, “Evolution of the MetroArt Consortium: Collaborations in Public Transit Art Programs” (M.A. thesis, American University, 1994), 39, 64, 70. 55. This idea was already present in the 1970s, but revived in the 1990s. Coburn, “Artists Wary of ‘the Underground’ ”; Kelty Garbee, “Changing the Face of Metro,” Arts Washington, September 1999; Patrice Gaines, “Metro Hopes Artwork Will Help Riders See Subway in a New Light,” Washington Post, 7 December 2000. 56. Theodore Kim, “Penguins Now Rule,” Montgomery County Gazette, 19 July 2000. 57. Petula Dvorak, “Metro Snack Patrol Puts Girl in Cuffs,” Washington Post, 16 November 2000. Three years later, a federal judge ruled that the Authority’s conduct, though foolish, was legal. Hedgepeth continued to ride Metro, warily. Lyndsey Layton, “Metro Arrest for Snacking Ruled Legal,” Washington Post, 3 October 2003.
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Notes to Pages 262–266
58. Martin Kettle, “The Chip Police Get Their Girl,” Guardian (London), 17 November 2000; Cary Clack, “Do You Want Fries with That Arrest?” San Antonio Express-News, 18 November 2000; Clyde Haberman, “Every Tunnel Has a Mouth, If Not a Napkin,” New York Times, 16 December 2000. 59. C. B. Macpherson, “The Meaning of Property,” in C. B. Macpherson, ed., Property: Mainstream and Critical Positions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 1–13. 60. Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2000), 32. 61. WMATA, News Release, 16 January 1979, WMATA-A, series 3, file 9; Joe Azar, “Mister Regardie’s Neighborhood,” Regardie’s, June–July 1992, 12–13. 62. Kay Killingstad, Mastering DC: A Newcomer’s Guide to Living in the Washington, DC Area ([Arlington, Va.]: Adventures Publishing, 1998), 95–96. 63. Michael Eisenstadt, entry, “The Style Invitational; Week 164: Mean Meanings,” Washington Post, 5 May 1996; “Metro News,” Subway Magazine, Fall 1978, 25. 64. Robert Granader, “Notes from Underground,” Washingtonian, March 1994; Stephen Nordlinger, interview by author, Chevy Chase, Maryland, 6 December 2001; La Vigne, “Crime Prevention,” 160. 65. Carolyn Hax, “Tell Me about It,” Washington Post, 15 August 1999; “I Saw You,” Washington City Paper, 4 February 2000; Rebecca Dana, “Delayed Reactions; Pursuing Second Chances through the Personals,” Washington Post, 10 July 2003. 66. Bob Levey, “Dante’s ‘Inferno’ as a Piece of Flypaper,” Washington Post, 8 June 2001, C10; Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City (New York: William Morrow, 1992); Survey #42, “Building the Washington Metro: An Online Exhibit,” http://chnm.gmu.edu/metro, submitted 7 February 2003; Lyndsey Layton, “Here Comes the . . . Train,” Washington Post, 8 July 2000; Jeremy Korr, e-mail to the author, 13 March 2002. The radio station was WERQ-FM. 67. Mary Quattlebaum, Underground Train (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1999). 68. Esther Iverem, “A Rolling Start to a Downtown Sunday Night,” Washington Post, 30 April 1998; D’Vera Cohn and Petula Dvorak, “Animal Magnetism,” Washington Post, 11 January 2001; THEAJMAN, posting to “Metrorail 25th Anniversary Memories,” http://washington post.com, 24 August 2001. 69. Ingrid Groller Lane, “VISUAL ARTS; Scenes From a Metro Train,” Washington Post, 11 February 1993; Ron Shaffer, “Metro Trip Marred by Rude Teens,” Washington Post, 6 March 1997; Bob Levey, “Loud and Obscene Aboard Metrorail,” Washington Post, 16 July 1992; Serge F. Kovaleski, “Metro Rider Says Teens Taunted Her,” Washington Post, 8 January 1994; Stephen C. Fehr, “The Safe Years Are Over, Say Some Who Ride Metro,” Washington Post, 17 February 1994. 70. Terry Harrak with Susan Kellam, “Someplace to Call Home,” Washington Post Magazine, 12 November 2000; Larry Heelen, “Feasting on Homelessness,” Washington City Paper, 27 August 1999. 71. David S. Hilzenrath, “To Homeless, Subways Are for Sleeping,” Washington Post, 28 November 1987. 72. Mitch Snyder, “Metro Fences and the Homeless” (letter), Washington Post, 9 January 1989. 73. Shaun Sutner, “Homeless Intrusion in Bike Area Upsets Some,” Washington Post, 21 March 1991; Stephen C. Fehr, “Smile! You’re on Candid Elevator,” Washington Post, 28 April 1992; “Harassment Goes Underground,” Washington Post, 15 December 1991; Stephen C. Fehr, “Metro Clearing Away Panhandlers,” Washington Post, 31 January 1992. 74. Bob Levey, “In the Subway, a Pair of Very Selfish Oafs,” Washington Post, 1 July 1997; Ron Shaffer, “Passengers Off Track with Public Grooming on Metro,” Washington Post, 9 August 2001; Stacey Freed, “No Seat for Me,” Washington Post, 17 January 1999; Ian Drummond, “Ode to the Singing Man” (letter), Washington Post, 11 March 2001; Abbott Combes
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Notes to Pages 267–272
and Thomas Crosby, “Subway Gets High Marks from a Rail Rambler,” Washington Star, 19 July 1976. Kenneth Kolson of the National Endowment for the Humanities finds that “bad manners are on permanent display” and that “human nature as it manifests itself in the Washington Metro is not particularly attractive.” One must assume he has never ridden the New York City subway. Kolson, Big Plans, 138–139. 75. Representatives Alvin E. O’Konski and Richard L. Roudebush to colleagues, 10 July 1965, CDS, box 21, folder 6; Fehr, “The Safe Years Are Over, Say Some Who Ride Metro.” 76. WMATA Office of Program Control, Semiannual Report No. 10, January 1977, CPf, box 28, folder 5; La Vigne, “Crime Prevention,” chaps. 7 and 10; Beverly Silverberg, “When It Works, It Isn’t News,” Washington Post, 1 December 1996. 77. U2SCOOP, posting to “Metrorail 25th Anniversary Memories,” www.washingtonpost .com, 26 March 2001. 78. David Baldacci, Absolute Power (New York: Warner Books, 1996), 444–453; Sonia Boin, “Friendship Concourse Settled,” Suburban Record, 8 June 1973; “A Security Conscious Transit System,” Security Management, January 1975, 33; La Vigne, “Crime Prevention,” 62. 79. Lyndsey Layton, “Far Beneath the Street, a ‘Social Success,’ ” Washington Post, 25 March 2001; Bill Fahrenwald, “Metro Magic in Washington,” Railway Age 186 (December 1985): 66; Stephen C. Fehr, “Working on Metro All the Livelong Night,” Washington Post, 2 August 1993; Andy McNab, Crisis Four (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 326. 80. WMATA, “Metro Owner’s Manual” (advertising supplement), Washington Star, 21 March 1976, 18. 81. “The Potomac Station Neighborhood Celebrates the Opening of Metro–Potomac Station,” June 1977, CPf, box 2, folder 8; Herb Leonard to Pfanstiehl, 28 June 1977, CPf, box 2, folder 8; Joan G. Sugarman, “I Saw It on the Subway.” Subway Magazine, Fall 1978, 5. 82. RICKMAYHEW to RLAWRAY, “Pregnant Woman and Elderly Left Standing,” www.washingtonpost.com, 30 August 2000; Ron Shaffer, “Spy an Illegal Eater on Metro?” Washington Post, 29 October 2001; Lutz, interview. 83. Trevor Boddy, “Underground and Overhead: Building the Analogous City,” in Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park, 123–153; Lebron v. Washington Metro. Area Transit Auth., 749 F.2d 893, 894 (D.C. Cir. 1984). 84. One longtime rider even wrote that “people seem to be more courteous than when Metro opened in 1976.” Survey #33, “Building the Washington Metro: An Online Exhibit,” submitted 9 July 2002; Holly Bass and Ann Berta, Frommer’s Irreverent Guide to Washington, D.C., 2d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 220; “Life in Washington: Stories from 1997,” Washington Post, 1 January 1998. 85. J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 512; Nancy Shute, “The Wrong Side of the Tracks,” Regardie’s, October 1984, 125–134; Gene Weingarten, “Straight to Hell,” Washington Post, 16 May 1999. 86. William M. C. Lam, Perception and Lighting as Formgivers for Architecture (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 87. 87. Lam, interview; Douglas B. Feaver, “Metro Could Sacrifice Esthetics,” Washington Post, 9 April 1981. 88. COG, “Noise Survey of the Metro Rapid Rail Transit System,” January 1978, CPf, box 29, folder 9; “Floating Slabs, Padded Rails Keep Metro Quiet,” Metro Memo, May 1971. 89. Quattlebaum, Underground Train. 90. Peter Sykora, “The Spacial Concept,” in Deutsche Oper Berlin, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) [theatrical program] (Washington, D.C.: John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2–18 June 1989), 33–34.
345
Notes to Pages 273 –277
Conclusion
1. Author’s observations. The park dedication scene in Akira Kurasawa’s 1952 film Ikiru more or less captures the mood and function of the ceremonies. 2. “Priorities First Things First before Metro Expands,” Washington Post, 14 October 1988; “The Next Stop for Metro,” Washington Post, 27 December 1993; NCPC, Extending the Legacy: Planning America’s Capital for the 21st Century (Washington, D.C.: NCPC, 1996), 43; Stephen C. Fehr, “Where D.C. Wants Metro to Go Next,” Washington Post, 23 March 1994. 3. Fisher to Moore, 19 April 1979, and Fisher, “Statement on Legislation to Amend National Capital Transportation Act of 1969,” 25 June 1980, both in JLF II, box 25, folder 10; “Why Another Study?” in Dulles Corridor Rapid Transit Project, On the Move: The Dulles Corridor Rapid Transit Newsletter, July 2000; Michael D. Shear and Alice Reid, “Elevated Metrorail Loop Proposed for Tysons Area,” Washington Post, 22 January 1999. 4. Williams, interview; Graham to Robert W. Pully, 7 December 1970, PSC, box 54, folder: Chronological File, July to December, 1970; Gleason, interview, MHPC; Alice Reid, “Where Will It Go Next? Everyone Has Plans for Metrorail,” Washington Post, 23 March 1998; Jo Becker, “New Md. Metro Route Down to 2 Choices,” Washington Post, 1 September 2001. For an introduction to the problem of planning circumferential transit, see Hassan M. Galal El-Dine, “Planning for a Circumferential Mass Transit Facility in the Washington Metropolitan Area” (M.U.R.P thesis, George Washington University, 1991). 5. Lyndsey Layton, “Election Loss Leaves Rail Operators Scrambling,” Washington Post, 7 November 2002; Tom Ramstack, “Washington, D.C., Transit Officials Scale Back Light-Rail Plans,” Washington Times, 11 March 2003; Lyndsey Layton, “Metro’s Expansion Creaks to a Halt,” Washington Post, 13 July 2003. 6. NCPC, Extending the Legacy, 47; Stephen C. Fehr, “Southeast Freeway Could Go Under,” Washington Post, 9 October 2000; U.S. Department of Transportation, “U.S. Department of Transportation Completes Study of Ways to Improve Access to Kennedy Center” (press release), 6 March 2001; Eric Lipton and Michael H. Cottman, “Despite Wilson Building Dispute, Monts Pushes Another Project with City,” Washington Post, 25 March 1999; Alan Sipress, “Glendening Kills Intercounty Connector,” Washington Post, 23 September 1999; Michael D. Shear and Katherine Shaver, “Techway Opposition Followed Well-Worn Washington Route,” Washington Post, 26 May 2001; Walden Siew, “Wilson Bridge Plan Has Tracks,” Washington Times, 15 December 1998; Michael D. Shear and Lyndsey Layton, “Wilson Bridge Rail Proposal Adds 5 Stops,” Washington Post, 6 April 2001. 7. Benjamin Forgey, “Farragut North, the Underground Bungle,” Washington Post, 20 June 1992; CFA, minutes, 19 April 1967; Lyndsey Layton, “Architects Object to Design for Metro Station Canopies,” Washington Post, 26 October 2000. 8. The notion of taking planning power away from WMATA and giving it to a broader regional body was proposed much earlier, for example in Edwin T. Haefele, Making Metro Work (Washington, D.C.: Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies, September 1976) and Ronald Kirby, Kiran Bhatt, and Michael Kemp, Washington’s Metro: Issues and Options (Washington, D.C.: Greater Washington Research Center, June 1982). Peter Behr, “Region-Wide Solution to Traffic Problems Favored,” Washington Post, 19 September 1997; Peter Behr, “Conference Favors Regional Agency for Transportation,” Washington Post, 19 May 1998; Matthew Mosk, “Md. House Backs Regional Transportation Panel,” Washington Post, 21 February 2001. 9. O’Cleireacain, Orphaned Capital. 10. Lyndsey Layton, “Metro Considers a Divisive Stand,” Washington Post, 25 August 2001; Richard Heck, telephone interview by author, 30 October 2001; David Cho, “Cash-Strapped Metro Rolls Out Ad-Wrapped Trains,” Washington Post, 10 May 2005; Lyndsey Layton, “Metro Chief Predicts Transit ‘Death Spiral’ without Extra Funds,” Washington Post, 2 April 2004;
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Notes to Pages 277–282
Robert Puentes, “Washington’s Metro: Deficits by Design” (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, June 2004). 11. Andrew Brodhead, “D.C. Presents 2012 Olympics Bid,” Common Denominator (Washington, D.C.), 18 June 2001; personal observation. Security was not entirely a new concern. In 1970, for example, Graham had outlined procedures for evacuating Authority headquarters in case of a bomb threat. Graham to staff, memo, 24 March 1970, CPf, box 1, folder 2. 12. Karlyn Barker, “Region’s Air Rated 7th Worst in Nation,” Washington Post, 1 May 2001; D’Vera Cohn and Katherine Shaver, “Commute Here among Worst,” Washington Post, 20 November 2001; Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, A Region Divided: The State of Growth in Greater Washington, D.C. (Washington, D.C., 1999). 13. Alan M. Voorhees & Associates, Inc., “Traffic Forecast” (prepared for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, December 1967); WMATA, “Metrorail and Metrobus Ridership Reach Record Levels during Fiscal Year 2001” (press release), www.wmata.com (accessed 11 January 2002); Schellenberg, “Metro: Worth Every Penny.” 14. COG, “1975–1996 Metro Core Cordon Person Travel Trends, Inbound Persons by Mode, 6:30–9:30 A.M.”; U.S. Census Bureau, “Employment Status and Commuting to Work, 2000,” table GCT-P12, http://factfinder.census.gov; National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board, Long-Range Transportation Plan for the National Capital Region (Washington, D.C.: Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, 21 September 1994), 2–24; Weyrich and Lind. Does Transit Work?; Wickstrom, interview; Nancy A. McGuckin and Nanda Srinivasan, Journey to Work in the United States and Its Major Metropolitan Areas, 1960–2000 (U.S. Department of Transportation, 2003), exhibit 4.11, www.fhwa.dot.gov/ctpp/jtw/index.htm (accessed 2 July 2004); Texas Transportation Institute, 2003 Urban Mobility Study, Exhibit A-6, http://mobility .tamu.edu/ums/ (accessed 2 July 2004). 15. U.S. Congress, Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Problems, 98. See also NCPC, The Nation’s Capital: A Policies Plan for the Year 2000, 34–46; Edwin M. Yoder Jr., “Dukakis: The Nerd Image . . . ,” Washington Post, 25 July 1988. 16. Wickstrom, interview. 17. U.S. Census Bureau, 1990 Census, “Travel to Work Characteristics for the 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas by Population in the United States,” www.census.gov/population/socdemo/ journey/msa50.txt (accessed 16 June 2005); Atlanta Regional Commission, Travel Demand Models, 1995, courtesy Claudette Dillard, Atlanta Regional Conference; COG, “1975–1996 Metro Core Cordon Person Travel Trends, Inbound Persons by Mode, 6:30–9:30 A.M.” (data for 1993); Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, “Dismantling Transportation Apartheid: The Quest for Equity,” in Robert D. Bullard, Glenn S. Johnson, and Angel O. Torres, eds., Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), 52; Texas Transportation Institute, 2003 Urban Mobility Study, Exhibit A-4. 18. Deen, telephone interview, 8 January 2003. 19. Vahid Ownjazayeri and David A. Peters, “Rebuilding History,” Civil Engineering 68 (October 1998): 64–67; Jack Faucett Associates, Inc., A Current Perspective, 1. 20. Robert C. Wood, Professor of Political Science, MIT, to Stolzenbach, 6 November 1962, CDS, box 1, folder 8; Deen interview, 1 December 1999; Herman, interview; Allan, interview. 21. Joseph S. Wholey, deposition, 20 January 1977, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, City of Fairfax, Va. v. Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority et al., Civil Action 76-918-A, Alper Papers, FIC 5, box 1. 22. Michael Agosta, posting to “Building the Washington Metro: An Online Exhibit,” http://chnm.gmu.edu/metro, 12 May 2001. 23. Quenstedt, interview. 24. Michael W. Brooks, Subway City: Riding the Trains, Reading New York (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 3.
Index
Abbott, Sammie, 119, 158 activists, 95, 164, 170, 177, 266; antifreeway, 3–6, 41, 119, 121–28, 180, 275; anti-growth, 226, 236–37; anti-Metro, 153–61, 189, 237; and costs, 172–73; and Green Line, 218–20; and Three Sisters Bridge, 133–35 Adams, Brock, 187, 194 Adams Morgan (D.C.), 210, 217, 254, 273, 280 advertising, 77–78, 164, 264, 269, 277 affirmative action, 163–65, 218 African Americans, 5, 20, 119, 124, 156, 161, 262; and class segregation, 244–45; in D.C., 7, 17–18, 204, 255; displacement of, 209, 217–19; in government, 18, 116, 126, 140; Metro service to, 106, 216, 219–20, 245, 265; and minority contracts, 162–66; and riots (1968), 132, 162, 197, 201, 205, 211–13; and urban renewal, 22, 209–10 Airis, Thomas, 126–27, 129, 180 Alexandria (Virginia), 12, 14, 18, 22, 101, 157, 222, 234 Allan, Stanley, 75–78, 80, 93, 259, 281 Alper, Jerome, 96–97, 99–101, 103 alternatives analysis, 187–95, 215–16, 238–39, 281 American Automobile Association, 56, 61–62 Anacostia River, 12, 24, 157 architects, 6, 23, 52, 64–65, 128; and engineers, 69, 72–74, 78–83, 145; and handicapped access, 166–67, 170; and legibility, 250 architecture, 2, 6, 65–94, 104, 129, 208, 254, 267, 271; of BART, 73–74, 78, 93; classical, 68, 92; costs of, 88, 92, 173, 215; vs. engineering, 69–74; federal, 15–16, 22, 65–74, 93–94; and handicapped access, 166; and JFK, 44, 68; lighting in, 90, 269–71; neoclassical, 15, 67, 71; and prototype design, 74, 76, 86; and public art, 259; vaulted, 78–80, 86, 88–93, 153, 187, 244, 270, 275–76 Arlington County (Virginia), 18, 190, 221–34, 258; and financing, 130, 181; General Land Use Plan of, 226; and NVTC, 101, 234 Arlington National Cemetery, 254, 273 Arms, Richard E., 222–23 Army Corps of Engineers, 24, 47, 98, 144, 146, 153 art, public, 230, 259–61 Atlanta (Georgia), 279–80. See also MARTA automation, 114–15, 244, 246–48, 263 automobiles: and antifreeway movement, 122,
126, 128; in cities, 1, 11, 17, 20–22, 32, 196, 218; in D.C., 16–27, 31, 84; in downtown, 201, 203, 208–9; in Fairfax County, 233, 237, 240; and land use, 178–79; vs. mass transit, 1–2, 5, 28–30, 34–35, 69, 115, 182, 262, 279–80, 282; and Metro, 157, 161, 179, 183, 243–44, 246, 250, 253; ownership of, 1, 17, 34, 40; and suburbs, 1, 11, 17, 222, 226, 228, 230–33, 244, 250; in transportation studies, 34–36, 43 Babson, Frederick, 132–33, 234 Baltimore (Maryland), 12–14, 191, 198, 254 Barnett, Cleatus, 142, 225 Barry, Marion, 8, 119, 204 BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit; San Francisco), 1, 3, 9, 91, 167, 183–84, 189; architecture of, 73–74, 78, 93; and financing, 59, 113, 182, 194; rail cars of, 115, 185 Bartholomew, Harland, 19, 32–43, 45, 47, 52, 56, 119, 203; and regional cooperation, 96–97, 99; vs. Stolzenbach, 50, 54; and urban planning, 32–33, 35 Beltway, 25–26, 37, 112–13, 120, 234–36, 275 Bethesda (Maryland), 157, 159, 222, 227, 229–32 Bible, Alan, 40–41, 50 Bible Committee ( Joint Committee on Washington Metropolitan Problems), 40–42, 48, 71, 97 Blue Line, 214, 220, 244–45, 258, 268 Boston (Massachusetts), 12, 16, 198, 250, 275; subway in, 1, 27, 34, 65, 69, 93, 184, 258 Boyd, Alan, 125–29, 132 Broyhill, Joel, 55–56, 96, 138, 165 Bunshaft, Gordon, 84–86, 88–90, 92–93 Bureau of Public Roads, 24, 38, 44, 47, 57, 121, 126 Bureau of the Budget, 101, 113, 172. See also Office of Management and Budget Burnham, Daniel, 15, 66, 71, 76, 152, 202, 206 bus service, 4, 6, 8, 34, 164, 186; and alternatives analysis, 187, 189–90, 192, 215; and handicapped access, 167–69; and legibility, 251; and Metro, 9, 104, 157–58, 243–44, 275; in MTS, 35–39; and NCTA, 53, 56, 62, 99; private, 101, 175–76; vs. rail transit, 3, 30, 183, 282; for schools, 178–79; and suburban development, 226, 230; and tourists, 254–55; WMATA’s takeover of, 175–79, 182. See also Capital Transit; D.C. Transit System, Inc.
348
Index
Canadian subways, 34, 69–70, 73, 77–81, 87, 92–93, 196 Capital Transit, 27–30, 44, 96–98, 149 Capitol Hill, 7, 12, 27, 254 Carter, Jimmy, 187, 193–94 Caywood, Jim, 78, 82, 115, 173 Chalk, O. Roy, 30, 56, 62, 149, 175–79, 189 Chicago (Illinois), 11, 15, 76; subway in, 1, 34, 69, 115, 118, 157, 184, 246, 258; Transit Authority of, 47, 60 Chillum (Maryland), 157–58 cities, 7, 12–13, 74; and automobile, 1, 11, 17, 20–22, 32, 196, 218; model, 211; public transit in, 2–3, 5, 282; and suburbs, 8, 43. See also development, urban; urban renewal City Beautiful tradition, 15, 66, 93 City Council, D.C., 116, 124, 161, 170, 180, 212, 276; and highway dispute, 129, 132–36; and minority contracts, 162–64; and redevelopment, 202, 213 civil rights, 210–11, 219–20; for disabled, 166–70; and minority contracts, 162–66 Clark, David Sanders, 41, 157 Clarke, Frederick, 47, 49, 99, 124, 144 Cleveland (Ohio), 11, 34–36, 51, 184 Cleveland Park (D.C.), 44–45, 219; antifreeway activists in, 41–42, 47, 71, 102, 120–21, 159 Columbia Heights (D.C.), 106, 108, 116, 209, 214–15, 218 Commerce Department, 15, 67, 126 Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), 153, 202, 275–76, 281; and Metro architecture, 66–68, 73, 83–94 Committee of 100 on the Federal City, 57, 121, 125, 127, 135 Congress: and architecture, 66–68; and bus service, 176; and D.C. government, 11–15, 19, 95, 123, 135, 137, 164–65, 276; and funding, 7, 136, 171–72, 180–83, 193–95; and handicapped access, 169; and highways, 24, 36–38, 41, 49, 119–20, 125–26, 128, 132–34, 138, 140, 169, 181; LBJ on, 172; and MTS, 33, 41; and NCTA, 44, 48, 58, 61–62, 104, 143; and November Report, 55–56; and redevelopment, 202, 206; and regional cooperation, 97–98, 100, 102–3; and routes, 108, 214, 253; and streetcars, 27; and urban renewal, 22, 198; and WMATA, 112–14, 276. See also House of Representatives; Senate District Committee construction, 142–70, 204; costs of, 159–61, 174, 192; cut-and-cover, 80–81, 85–89, 92, 146–47, 149, 153, 174, 217; delays in, 159–61, 165–66, 169, 173–75, 184; disruption from, 142, 153–61, 217; problems with, 153, 172; rock tunneling, 147–48; underground, 148–49 Cooper, Kent, 71–74, 83, 87 costs, 3–5, 100, 171–95; and alternatives analysis, 189, 192–93; and architecture, 88, 92, 173, 215; and bus takeover, 175–79; capital, 171–72, 179, 183, 187, 189–90, 193, 243; and CFA, 85–86, 91;
construction, 174, 192; containment of, 186–87; and contracts, 162, 165–66, 172, 174; and delays, 141, 159–61, 214–16; of democracy, 170; and fares, 171, 186, 243, 246, 249; and handicapped access, 168–69; and highway dispute, 129, 136; of highways, 47, 174; and inflation, 171–75; vs. intangible benefits, 280–81, 283; and labor unions, 172, 174; maintenance, 246–47, 277; and NCTA, 113, 117; operating, 179, 189, 195, 243, 249; and opposition, 157–59; and suburban development, 223, 225; of subways, 50–51; and WMATA plan, 104, 112–13. See also funding, federal Council of Governments, Metropolitan Washington (COG), 103, 183, 187, 189; and development, 196, 221, 224, 236, 239 Covington and Burling (law firm), 44–45, 125 Craig, Peter, 41–42, 47–48, 102–3, 121–22, 125–27 crime, 156, 167, 201, 216–17, 267 D.C. Transit System, Inc., 98, 175–76, 178, 251 Deen, Thomas, 42, 50–51, 59, 108, 155, 281 De Leuw, Cather & Company, 28, 36, 69, 80; and highways, 25, 38, 125; and Metro, 71, 78–79, 81–82, 87–88, 92, 146 development, suburban, 221–33; and automobiles, 222, 226, 228, 230–33; and bus service, 226, 230; clustered, 223, 225–33, 242; mixed-use, 221, 226, 228–32, 237, 240; New Urbanist, 231; transit-oriented, 2, 221–42; and WMATA, 221, 225, 229–30; and zoning, 221, 226–27, 234. See also suburbs development, urban, 129, 196–220; community participation in, 209; in downtown, 197–209; high-density, 237–38; and Metro, 203–5, 212–13; in Mid-City, 209–20; mixed-use, 196, 204; and public policy, 196–97, 242; transit-oriented, 2, 196, 205, 220, 282; and zoning, 208, 217. See also urban renewal Disneyland, 16–17, 23, 31, 51, 175 DOT. See Transportation, Department of downtown (D.C.), 197–209; automobiles in, 201, 203, 208–9; and decentralization, 279; and Metro, 108, 180, 243, 253, 275, 281; new, 198, 201, 204; office space in, 200–202; old, 198– 208, 220; retail stores in, 200–201, 208; riots in, 197, 201, 205; and RLA, 201–4; urban renewal in, 197–98, 202 Downtown Progress (National Capital Downtown Committee), 201–3, 255 Duke, Charles, 103, 122, 125–26 Dulles Airport, 71–73, 78, 83, 87, 168, 235–36, 238, 240; and Metro routes, 233–34, 274 Dupont Circle (D.C.), 28, 149, 151, 217–18 economists, 73, 80, 82; vs. engineers, 46–47, 50, 56 Edwards, G. Franklin, 106, 210, 213–14, 219 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 24, 32–33, 42–44, 83, 96, 98
349
Index
elevated tracks, 157, 161, 191 elevators, 167–70 Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), 119–20, 158 energy conservation, 2, 182, 194–95, 278 Engineer Commissioner, D.C., 24, 40, 103, 116, 144; and highway dispute, 122, 126, 135; and NCTA, 47, 49, 54; and regional cooperation, 96, 98, 102 engineers, 1, 51, 97, 142, 144, 149–51; and alternatives analysis, 192; and antifreeway movement, 121, 126; and architects, 69–74, 78–83, 145; and CFA, 85–86, 93; vs. economists, 46–47, 50, 56; and financing, 129, 173; and handicapped access, 169–70; and highways, 24, 32, 35, 78, 128, 132, 170; and opposition to Metro, 158, 160; and politics, 62–64; and WMATA plan, 114–15 environmental impact statements, 158–59, 161, 238 environmental issues, 126, 139, 179, 187, 203, 277– 78; and alternatives analysis, 189, 192; and development, 198, 203, 240; and mass transit, 2–3, 8, 178, 280; and regional cooperation, 95, 97–98 equipment, 114, 118, 177, 243; automated-fare, 115, 244, 263; maintenance of, 246–49, 267–68, 276–77. See also elevators; escalators; rail cars escalators, 77, 79, 82, 86, 166–68, 170, 174; canopies over, 247, 276; on Green Line, 217; and handicapped access, 167, 170; maintenance of, 246–47; and Metro etiquette, 263 Europe, 69, 221, 278; subways in, 77–78, 93, 247. See also London; Paris; Stockholm subway Fairfax City (Virginia), 101, 234–35, 239, 257 Fairfax County (Virginia), 18, 157, 163, 223, 233–42, 275; and alternatives analysis, 187, 190; Board of Supervisors of, 233–34, 237; and NVTC, 101, 234; Planning Commission of, 235; school buses in, 178–79; suburban development in, 221–22, 224 Falls Church (Virginia), 101, 224, 233–34, 236, 238 fares: automated collection of, 115, 244, 263; and bus takeover, 177–78; and costs, 171, 186, 243, 246, 249; employer-paid, 248; and inflation, 174–75, 179; revenues from, 108–9, 118, 133, 175, 179, 249; and ridership, 108, 195, 246 Farragut Square (D.C.), 52, 104, 114, 150–51, 198; North Station, 154, 158, 170, 185, 204, 266; West Station, 204, 266 Faucett Report, 184, 189, 280 Fauntroy, Walter, 106, 116, 178, 209–14, 216–17, 219 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 71, 73, 153 Federal City Council, 62, 246 Federal Triangle, 15, 22, 67, 112, 279 Fenwick, Charles, 96–99, 103 Ford, Gerald, 140, 158, 180–83, 190 Francois, Francis, 183, 190 freeways. See highways Friendship Heights (D.C.), 149, 159, 228 funding, 5, 119–32, 171–95, 245, 253, 276–77; of
ARS, 117–18; backdoor, 136; of BART, 59, 113, 182, 194; with bonds, 108–9, 118, 130–31, 136, 163, 174–75, 178–79, 182, 193; and Congress, 7, 123, 136, 138–41, 165, 171–72, 180–82, 183, 193–95; of D.C., 13–14; and delays on Green Line, 215–16; and development, 196, 202–3, 207, 210, 216; and engineers, 129, 173; and fares, 108–9, 118, 133, 175, 249; federal, 2, 25–27, 36, 166, 168–69, 179, 184, 186, 190, 196, 198, 201–2, 210, 215–16; and handicapped access, 166, 168–69; of highways, 24–27, 36, 54, 132–33, 139; and highway transfers, 180–82, 193; and inflation, 174, 179–81, 187, 195; local, 118, 130, 134, 136, 179–83, 190; of MARTA, 113, 182–83, 194; of mass transit, 2–3, 59, 180–82, 194, 282; of MTS, 33, 38; and Natcher, 139–41; referenda on (1968), 130–31; and regional compact, 99, 101–3; and revised financing, 179, 181–82, 184, 186, 190; and ridership, 114, 184, 243; state, 13, 114, 130–31, 179–82, 249; for urban renewal, 22, 25, 198, 201; and WMATA, 108, 113, 139–40, 179–94 Garrott, Idamae, 156, 180 General Services Administration (GSA), 7, 19, 201–2, 228, 281 gentrification, 23, 217–18, 220. See also urban renewal Georgetown, 12, 24, 67, 120; Metro in, 155–56, 161, 273; urban renewal in, 212, 217 Giaimo, Robert, 138–40, 156, 193–94 Gingery, Donald E., 56, 98, 224 Gleason, Jim, 187, 275 Glenmont (Maryland), 92, 187 Glover-Archbold Park, 40–41, 49 Goldenthal, A. J., 47, 50 government, D.C. city, 24, 116, 119; Board of Commissioners, 18, 30, 95–96, 103, 108, 115, 162; and Congress, 11–15, 19, 95, 118, 123–24, 135, 137, 164–65, 276. See also City Council, D.C.; Engineer Commissioner, D.C.; home rule government, federal, 1–2, 6, 32, 262, 282; and affirmative action, 163–64; and architecture, 15–16, 22, 65–74, 93–94; and D.C., 12–16, 94; employees of, 16, 198, 201, 222, 226, 245; and financing, 118, 179, 181–82, 186, 190, 193–94; and handicapped access, 166; and highways, 24, 36–38, 41, 124, 126–28, 132–34, 140, 169; and Metro, 43, 113, 184, 189, 257, 281; and Metrochek, 248; and regional compact, 100, 102; vs. regional control, 98–99, 104; in suburbs, 18–19; and urban renewal, 24, 197. See also Congress graffiti, 74, 177, 267–68 Graham, Jackson, 87, 91, 129–33, 143–46, 185, 214, 254; and bus takeover, 178; and financing, 136, 172–75, 180, 182; and handicapped access, 166, 168–70; and minorities, 162, 164, 166; and NPS, 150–51; and opposition to Metro, 153, 157–59, 161; and politics, 142, 145; resignation of, 183–84; and station names, 256–57
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graphics and signage, 9, 89–90, 145, 258–59; as elements of continuity, 77, 86; and placement of signs, 244, 277. See also maps Great Society, 2, 5–6, 73, 141, 242–43, 282–83 Green Line, 209, 213–20, 245, 258, 273; and African Americans, 216, 219–20; delays in construction of, 213–16, 219 Gude, Gilbert, 137–38, 184 Gunn, David, 195, 266 Gutheim, Frederick, 71–75, 78, 83, 93, 99 handicapped access, 142, 166–70, 193, 280 Harris, Herbert, 166, 193–94 Harry Weese & Associates, 76–83, 92, 146, 167. See also Weese, Harry Heck, Richard, 115, 276 Heddinger, Richard, 169–70 Hedgepeth, Ansche, 261–62, 265 Herman, William, 59, 153, 155–56, 172, 281 highway departments: D.C., 36–38, 45, 47, 49–50, 78, 128, 133, 135; engineers in, 24, 78; local, 48, 100; and NCTA, 45, 47–48, 50; state, 36–38, 49, 119, 121, 172 highways: cancellation of, 192–93; and Congress, 24, 36–38, 41, 49, 119–20, 126, 128, 132–34, 138, 140, 169, 181; costs of, 47, 129, 136, 174; in D.C., 24–27, 116, 129, 132–36, 201, 220; defense of, 55–56; displacement of residents by, 45, 48, 50, 53–57, 106, 119–20, 126, 128–29, 132, 216; and engineers, 24, 32, 35, 78, 128, 132, 170; and federal government, 24, 36–38, 41, 126–28, 132–34, 140, 169; financing of, 3, 24–27, 36, 54, 132–33, 139; limited-access, 23–24, 28, 34; vs. mass transit, 3, 5–6, 32, 46–47, 156, 242, 279–80, 282; and Metro, 43, 106, 119–41, 170, 192, 253, 275–76, 278, 281–82; in MTS, 34, 36–38, 40; and NCTA, 43, 48, 50, 54, 57, 60–61, 63, 143; opposition to, 3–6, 41–42, 47, 71, 102, 119–28, 134–41, 150, 159, 170, 180, 210, 226, 275; and opposition to Metro, 155–58; planning of, 35, 84, 122, 128–29, 170; and redevelopment, 197–98, 210; and regional compact, 95, 98–99, 101–2; rights-of-way on, 109, 111, 187, 197, 223, 234; standards for, 26–27; and suburbs, 27, 137–38, 140, 224, 229, 240, 242, 279; transfer of funds from, 180–82, 193. See also Interstate Highway System; particular routes historic preservation, 7, 68, 75–76, 148–49, 197–98, 208, 242 home rule, 11, 14–16, 18, 118, 132, 142, 161; charter for, 165, 276; and Congress, 95, 164; and highway dispute, 138–39; and LBJ, 95, 102–3, 115–16, 119, 124, 126; and minority contracts, 164–65; and Natcher, 124, 141; and regional compact, 98; and taxes, 207, 276 Hoover, Keneth, 35, 38, 278 Horsky, Charles, 45, 47, 49, 56–57, 59–61, 103, 125, 128
House of Representatives: Appropriations Committee of, 123, 136–41, 165; Committee on Public Works of, 124, 128, 167; and D.C., 118, 123–24, 276; District Committee of, 14, 18, 48, 58, 96, 125, 132, 138, 164, 183, 194; and financing, 183, 194; and highways, 119, 125, 132, 138, 140; and NCTA, 58–59, 62–63; Ways and Means Committee of, 138 housing, 22, 25, 95, 198, 201, 281; and suburban development, 225–26, 228, 231, 234, 236; and urban development, 23, 45, 116, 203, 205–9, 216 Howard University, 211, 215, 257 Hyde, Donald, 35–36, 38, 42, 48 inflation: and bus takeover, 178; and costs, 171–75; and delays, 215, 280; and fares, 174–75, 179; and financing, 174, 179–81, 187, 195 Inner Loop, 24–26, 34, 42–43, 49, 119, 275, 279; and highway dispute, 120, 128; and MTS, 36–37, 40; and NCTA, 45, 54 Interstate 66, 187, 223–24, 232, 236 Interstate Highway System, 1, 7, 24–25, 40, 128, 141, 174; and highway dispute, 124, 132–33; transfer of funds from, 180–82, 193 Ison, Delmer, 56, 99, 103–4 Jack Faucett Associates, 184, 189, 280 Jacobs, Jane, 120, 210 Japan, 77; Tokyo subway in, 249, 277 Johnson, Lyndon B. (LBJ), 111, 129–30, 132, 152, 172, 210–11; Great Society of, 2, 5–6, 73, 141, 242–43, 282–83; and home rule, 95, 102–3, 115– 16, 119, 124, 126; and NCTA, 45, 59–60, 63, 73 Joint Transportation Commission ( JTC), 97, 104, 113, 276; vs. NCTA, 98–99, 102; and regional cooperation, 96, 98, 101 Justement, Louis, 20–23, 27, 43, 57, 76 Keith, Robert, 37–38, 42, 50–51 Kennedy, John F. ( JFK), 2, 98–99, 132, 198, 202, 282; and architecture, 44, 68; and CFA, 83, 93; on D.C., 44; and mass transit, 32, 42, 64, 83; and NCTA, 43–44, 54, 57–58 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 132, 197, 210–11 Kluczynski, John, 61, 128, 135, 138 Krogh, Egil, Jr., 137, 186 Kulash, Damian, 184, 190 labor unions, 8, 31, 149, 155; and bus takeover, 176–78, 182; and Capital Transit, 27, 29–30; and costs, 172, 174; and minorities, 162, 164; and NCTA, 58–59, 61–62 Lafayette Square, 68, 83, 147 Lam, William, 90, 269–70 Le Corbusier, 21, 27, 65, 76 L’Enfant, Peter Charles, plan of, 12–13, 15–16, 121, 128, 147, 196, 283; and automobiles, 22, 25, 27, 279; and later plans, 22, 67
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L’Enfant Plaza, 23, 116 Levenberg, Gerry, 102–3 liberalism, 2, 5–6, 44, 65, 95, 141, 282–83 London, 30, 84; Underground in, 73, 77–78, 87, 251, 253, 274 Los Angeles (California), 23–24, 250, 258, 279 Lutz, Theodore, 186–87, 190, 194 Lyon, Howard, 42, 50, 78, 185 the Mall, 15, 19, 201, 262, 279; design of, 66, 68; and highways, 22, 24; stations on, 150–51 maps, 31, 43, 149, 194, 201, 250–61; and alternative routes, 111–13, 189, 224; highway, 24–25, 37, 41, 54, 60, 136; NCTA, 53–54, 104–13, 155, 253; WMATA, 117, 156, 160, 216, 236, 273 MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority), 1, 9, 113, 156, 182–83, 194, 279 Maryland, 15, 17, 19, 157–58, 176, 207; bond referenda in, 130–31; and expansion of Metro, 274–75; funding from, 114, 179–82, 194, 249; highway department of, 36–38, 49; and highways, 25–27, 120, 137–38, 140–41; and Metro studies, 37, 187; and minority contracts, 163; and NCTA, 57–58; railroad corridors in, 109, 111; and regional cooperation, 42, 96–98, 100– 102, 276; and WMATA plan, 112, 116. See also Montgomery County; Prince George’s County; particular cities and towns mass transit systems: aesthetics of, 77, 93; architecture of, 69, 93–94; vs. automobiles, 1–2, 28–29, 34–35, 262, 282; and balanced transportation, 279–80; costs of, 50–51; and DOT, 125–26; early plans for, 1, 15, 27–29; financing of, 2–3, 59, 180–82, 194, 282; fund transfers from highways to, 180–82, 193; vs. highways, 3, 5–6, 32, 46–47, 156, 242, 279–80, 282; and JFK, 32, 42, 44, 64, 83; and oil prices, 192–93; and politics, 1–2; and pollution, 178, 280; private operation of, 59, 62, 101, 175–76; as public service, 179, 195, 282–83; as public space, 261–72, 282–83; rail, 2–4, 34–35, 37–40, 183, 191, 205, 280; and regional cooperation, 95–96, 99, 101; ridership on, 28–29; routes for, 51–52; social goals of, 2, 47, 220; studies of, 3–4, 32–43; and suburban development, 221–42; subways, 27–29, 36, 40, 50–51; technology of, 51; terms for, 8–9; unquantifiable measures of, 3–7; and urban redevelopment, 198, 205, 220. See also bus service Mass Transportation Survey (MTS), 32–43, 49, 69, 78, 96–98; balance in, 34–36; bus service in, 35–36; computer modeling in, 36–37; delays in, 37–38; and highways, 34, 36–38, 40, 121; vs. NCTA, 43, 45, 48–50, 53–54, 56–57, 60, 63; streetcars in, 34, 40–41 Mathe, Robert, 126, 144, 209 McCarter, Walter, 60–62, 75, 78, 87, 125, 185; and Graham, 143–44; and regional system, 102–4, 106, 108
MCI Arena, 207, 248 McLaughlin, Robert, 40, 56, 96–98, 196 McMillan, John, 18, 42, 48, 164 McMillan Commission, 15, 66–67 McMillan Plan, 121, 255 McPherson Square (D.C.), 150, 203, 205, 266 Metro (D.C.): accidents on, 149, 245–47, 249; bobtailed, 57–59, 61, 64, 102, 106, 111, 179–81, 183–84, 187, 189–92, 280; building of, 142–70; as controlled space, 268–69; crowds on, 245, 249–50; delays on, 213–16; disruption caused by, 142, 153–61, 217; early stages of building, 143–53; etiquette on, 263–64; expansion of, 273–75; experimental phase of, 243–44; future plans for, 273–83; governance of, 276; ground breaking for, 134, 146, 167, 184; heavy vs. light rail for, 191–92; history of, 3–6; maps of, 105, 107, 250–61; as model, 6–7, 281–82; names for, 8–9, 118; opening of, 184–86, 190–91, 216; as operatic set, 271–72; opposition to, 153–61; phases of, 190–91; planning for, 32–64; politics of, 1–2, 115–16, 143, 145, 150–53, 171, 219, 276; popularity of, 190, 249–50; problems with, 243–50; as public service, 195, 282–83; as public space, 150, 261–72, 277, 282; romance on, 263–64; studies of, 3–4, 6, 184, 187–95 Mexico City metro, 251, 259 Mid-City (D.C.), 108, 112, 116, 187, 199, 209–20; routes in, 179, 213–14; urban renewal in, 209– 10; and WMATA plan, 106, 112 minorities, 206, 226, 277, 281; and class segregation, 244–45; contracts for, 162–66; hiring of, 162–64. See also African Americans Model Inner City Community Organization (MICCO), 211–13, 216, 219–20 modernism, 65, 71, 76, 78; and CFA, 83–84; federal, 68, 92; Finnish, 75; of Justement, 21–22 monorails, 51–52, 56, 114, 175, 282 Montgomery County (Maryland), 17–18, 56, 71, 101, 219, 275; Citizens Planning Association of, 46, 225; County Council of, 46, 226, 234; development in, 221–33; and financing, 180, 194; and highways, 41, 138; and opposition to Metro, 159, 161; Planning Board of, 231; and Stolzenbach, 46–47, 58; and WMATA plan, 109, 111–12 Moore, Jerry, 162–66, 218 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 68, 83, 132–33, 137 Mt. Vernon, 12, 254, 257 Natcher, William H., 129, 131, 133–41, 161–62, 258, 279; and antifreeway movement, 122–25, 127; and D.C., 124, 137, 141, 165; delays caused by, 129, 157, 166, 172, 184, 214, 280; and Ford, 180; and House Appropriations Committee, 139–41; and Nixon, 133, 137; opposition to, 138–41, 156, 184, 193 National Airport, 153, 248, 258
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National Capital Park and Planning Commission (NCPPC), 19–20, 33, 49, 57, 84, 106, 125, 165; and expansion of Metro, 273, 275; and highways, 25, 120, 122, 131–32, 135; routes proposed by, 108, 112; and stations, 254; and urban renewal, 210–11; Year 2000 Plan of, 42–43, 45, 222 National Capital Park and Planning Council (NCPPC), 15, 19, 22, 32–33; 1950 Comprehensive Plan of, 19, 33, 43, 279 National Capital Regional Planning Council (NCRPC), 20, 33, 56, 103 National Capital Transportation Agency (NCTA), 41–63, 118, 244, 253, 276, 280; and architecture, 69–70, 73, 76, 80–94; bobtail plan of, 57–59, 61, 64, 102, 106, 111; and bus service, 53, 56, 62, 99, 175; and CFA, 83–93; and Congress, 44, 48, 58, 61–62, 103–4, 143; and costs, 113, 117; and crime, 267; and D.C., 95, 103, 152, 203; and handicapped access, 167; and highways, 43, 48, 50, 54, 57, 60–61, 63, 143; and JFK, 43–44, 54, 57–58; vs. JTC, 98–99, 102; and labor unions, 58–59, 61–62; and LBJ, 45, 59–60, 63, 73; and MTS, 43, 45, 48–50, 53–54, 56–57, 60, 63; and regional compact, 98, 100–102; routes of, 53, 106, 108, 214; and stations, 80–82, 256; and suburban development, 222–25, 234; and Three Sisters Bridge, 54, 56–57, 60, 125; and WMATA, 104, 116 National Park Service (NPS), 125, 150–53, 170, 253–54 Nevius, John, 127, 165 New Deal, 15, 45–46, 96, 222, 282 New York City, 17, 97, 100, 254; architecture in, 67, 84–85, 207; vs. D.C., 11–13; and Erie Canal, 13–14 New York subway, 1, 27, 34–35, 118, 146, 274, 282; architecture of, 65, 73, 78; and CFA, 86–87; as negative model, 69–70, 77, 80–81, 156; Penn Station on, 66, 198; problems of, 157, 249, 266–67; ridership of, 69, 246; and suburban visitors, 250–51; technology of, 115 Nixon, Richard M., 2, 140, 163, 165, 167, 169, 173, 201; and bus takeover, 176, 178; and Ford, 180–81; and Metro, 132, 134, 141; and Natcher, 133, 137 North Central Freeway, 125, 158, 181, 214; and Natcher, 135, 137–38, 141; opposition to, 119, 131–32 Northrop, Edward, 96–98 Northwest Freeway, 40–42, 46, 48–49, 112, 159; and NCTA, 44, 48, 54, 56 November Report (Transportation in the National Capital Region; 1962), 54–57, 124, 223; and Congress, 55–56; and regional cooperation, 99, 104, 106, 108–9, 111, 117 office buildings: architecture of, 208; in Fairfax County, 236–37, 239–40; federal, 226, 228; monoculture of, 207–8, 220; in old downtown,
200–202; and redevelopment, 204–5, 207–8; and suburban development, 222, 228 Office of Management and Budget (OMB), 132, 179–80, 183, 186. See also Bureau of the Budget Orange Line, 214, 220, 234, 240, 245, 258; and suburban development, 228, 233, 236 Owen, Roberts, 125, 134, 136 Owings, Nat, 74, 86 Paris, 142; Métro in, 51, 77–78, 118, 259, 274 parking, 170, 248–50, 282; and alternatives analysis, 187, 189–90, 192; in D.C., 22, 201, 203, 207; kiss-and-ride, 35, 226; and opposition to Metro, 155, 157, 161–62; and suburban development, 221, 226, 232, 237, 242 parks, 15–17, 23, 31, 40–41, 49, 51, 128, 147, 150–51, 170, 175, 255. See also National Capital Park and Planning Commission; National Park Service parkways, 15, 23. See also highways Patricelli, Robert, 187, 189–90, 192, 238 Pennsylvania Avenue (D.C.), 68, 202, 205 Pentagon, 15, 19, 71, 116, 222, 226, 228 Perlman, Sherman, 48, 52 Pfanstiehl, Cody, 47, 59, 70, 131, 174, 185, 231; on bus takeover, 179; and handicapped access, 167; and Natcher, 161–62; and opposition to Metro, 154–56, 160 Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), 11–13, 48, 127, 208; subway in, 34–35, 65, 69, 93, 184, 270 population growth, 14–19, 34, 233; and ridership, 184, 246, 280 Potomac River, 12, 15, 24, 141, 155; tunnel under, 147, 149, 155 Potomac River Freeway, 120, 128, 181 Prince George’s County (Maryland), 18, 101, 138, 207, 245–46, 273; and alternatives analysis, 187, 189; bus service in, 176; and delays, 214, 216; development in, 221, 224, 239; and expansion of Metro, 275; and financing, 180–81, 194; minorities in, 220, 277; opposition to Metro in, 157; and WMATA plan, 108, 111–12, 116 public hearings, 158, 160–61, 169, 184 Public Works, House Committee on, 124, 128, 167 Quattlebaum, Mary, 264–65, 271 Quenstedt, Warren, 48, 58–60, 104, 114, 145–46, 167, 282 racism, 8, 121, 155–56, 216, 219, 272. See also African Americans; segregation rail cars, 130, 177, 184–85, 195, 277; design of, 115, 269, 276; maintenance of, 246, 248–49; shortage of, 248 rail critics, 2–4, 6, 30, 233; and alternatives analysis, 182–83, 187, 191–92; and MTS, 36; and NCTA, 55–56, 222 Rail Rapid Transit for the Nation’s Capital (NCTA), 59–60, 253 Rail Rapid Transit Plan (1965), 104, 108
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railroads, 14–15, 126, 152; rights-of-way on, 109, 111–12, 116, 119, 148, 157, 223 Rannells, John, 47–48, 70–73, 78, 80, 86, 91, 104 Reagan, Ronald, 195, 215–16, 280 Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA), 22–23, 85, 206–7; and downtown, 201–4; and Mid-City, 212, 216 Red Line, 214, 219–20, 228, 231, 245, 258 retail businesses, 203, 205, 207; in downtown, 200–201, 208; and gentrification, 219; in MidCity, 213; opposition to Metro by, 153–55 Reynolds, Bob, 75–78, 81, 87–88 riders, 243–72; adolescent, 265; behavior of, 261–72, 276; and Metro etiquette, 266, 268; and Metro’s problems, 243–50; ownership of Metro by, 263, 268; popularity of Metro with, 190, 249–50; revolt by, 248–50 ridership, 3–5, 28–29, 50, 196, 243; and alternatives analysis, 189–90, 192; and bus takeover, 176, 178; comparative, 183–84, 246; and fares, 108, 195, 246; and future of Metro, 277–78, 281; increasing, 190–91, 193, 244, 248–49, 276; of New York subway, 69, 246; and population growth, 184, 246, 280; and WMATA plan, 108, 112, 114 riots (1968), 132, 162, 197, 201, 205, 211–13 Rock Creek Park, 41, 150–51 Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, 228–30, 232, 275 Rosslyn district (Arlington), 201–2, 222–23, 226, 228 Roszak, Theodore, 83, 86 routes, 51–52, 113, 173, 187, 216, 246, 282; above- vs. underground, 112, 118; and alternatives analysis, 187–89; bus, 178, 251; colors for, 258–59; and Congress, 108, 214; and Dulles Airport, 233–34; expansion of, 273–75; in Fairfax County, 233–34, 236, 238; on Metro map, 253; in MidCity, 179, 213–14; and NCTA, 53, 73, 106, 108, 214; and suburban development, 225, 236; and tourists, 254; and WMATA, 104–18, 214. See also Blue Line; Green Line; Orange Line; Red Line Rowe, Elizabeth (Mrs. James), 44–45, 49, 56–57, 59, 75, 120 Saarinen, Aline, 83, 85, 87, 90–91 Saarinen, Eero, 67–68, 71–72, 75, 83–85 Saarinen, Eliel, 67–68, 75, 78 safety, 149, 245–47, 249, 267, 270, 277 San Francisco (California), 3, 11, 30, 74, 127, 254. See also BART Sasaki, Hideo, 83, 86, 90 Schellenberg, Ken, 4, 6, 278 Seeger, Ed, 47–49, 58, 99 segregation, 18, 31, 162, 211; class, 244–45, 272 Senate District Committee, 11, 14, 30, 63, 128, 132 Shaw (D.C.), 106, 209, 211–13, 215–18 Sickles, Carlton, 56, 96–98, 101, 258 Silver Spring (Maryland), 15, 231, 244, 261 Sirica, John, 136, 139 Sitton, Paul, 126–28, 143
Smith, Wilbur, 37, 42 Smithsonian Institution, 67–68, 75, 78, 84, 92 Southwest neighborhood, D.C., 52, 76, 214, 217; urban renewal in, 22–23, 197, 202, 204, 209, 212, 214; and WMATA plan, 104, 106, 112 Soviet Union, 69; Moscow subway in, 82, 249, 274 space program, 2, 132, 174 Stark-Harris bill (1979), 194–95, 215 states: cooperation between, 95–100, 101, 102–3, 141, 166, 178, 183; funding from, 13–14, 114, 130–31, 179–82, 249; highway departments of, 36–38, 49, 119, 121, 172; and highways, 119, 124. See also Maryland; Virginia; Washington metropolitan region stations, 65–94, 161, 215, 237, 248, 269; acoustics of, 78, 90; development around, 195–97, 205, 213, 223, 225–33, 242; in downtown, 203, 269; and handicapped access, 166–70; homeless in, 266; and legibility, 251; on Metro map, 253, 259–60; mezzanines in, 77, 79–80, 89–90; in Mid-City, 213–14; naming of, 256–58; public art in, 259–61; as public space, 282; and safety, 167, 267; shapes of, 80–83, 86; structure of, 87–88; suburban, 51–52, 223, 225–33; underground, 78–83, 88; underground vs. aboveground, 87, 91–92; unified design for, 73–74, 86; vaults in, 78–80, 86, 88–93, 153, 187, 244, 270, 275–76 stations, by name: Anacostia, 91; Archives, 203, 205; Ballston, 228–32, 238, 242, 264, 275; Capitol South, 277; Clarendon, 228–29, 231; Court House, 228–29; Dunn Loring, 233, 236, 238; Eisenhower Avenue, 228; Forest Glen, 92, 158, 227; Franconia-Springfield, 233; Gallery Place, 87, 203–4, 206–7, 248, 257, 261; Georgia Avenue, 214; Grosvenor, 231; Huntington, 228; Judiciary Square, 85, 87, 134, 150, 203; Metro Center, 153, 203–5, 207, 244, 261, 266; Mt. Vernon Square, 203–4, 257; Oklahoma Avenue, 161; Pentagon, 155, 244, 277; Potomac Avenue, 216, 268; Rhode Island Avenue, 129, 185, 216; Rockville, 231; Shady Grove, 231; Smithsonian, 248–50, 254, 257, 277; Tenleytown, 261–62; U Street, 217–19, 261; Virginia Square, 228–29, 231–32; West Falls Church, 233, 236, 238; Wheaton, 92; Woodley Park, 151, 155, 254, 257. See also Union Station Stockholm subway, 73, 77–78, 82, 93, 115, 247; and clustered development, 225–26 Stolzenbach, C. Darwin, 45–63, 108, 143, 175, 185, 280; and architecture, 69, 71, 73, 84; background of, 45–46; vs. Bartholomew, 50, 54; and highways, 99, 119, 125–26, 129; and Montgomery County, 46–47, 58; opposition to, 54–56, 99, 182; and regional compact, 98, 100–102; and suburban development, 222–24, 229; and Three Sisters Bridge, 49, 120; and WMATA, 104 streetcars, 15, 27, 30, 175, 221; and MTS, 34, 40–41
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suburbs, 34, 101–2, 115, 221–42; and automobile, 1, 11, 17, 222, 226, 228, 230–33, 244, 250; bus service in, 178, 226, 230; and cities, 3, 8, 43, 196; commuting between, 274–75, 278; and D.C., 7, 15, 18–19, 95, 165, 194, 197; and delays, 214, 216; financing by, 130–31, 136, 180, 182–83, 190; flight to, 40, 198, 201; and highways, 25, 27, 137–38, 140, 224, 229, 240, 242, 279; housing in, 225–26, 228, 231, 234; and MARTA, 279; and Metro map, 253, 259; and Metro plans, 108–9, 112, 180, 190, 275, 278, 281; and minority contracts, 163, 165; and NCTA, 50–52; opposition to Metro in, 157, 160; stations in, 51–52, 223, 225–33; zoning in, 221, 226–27, 234. See also development, suburban; Washington metropolitan region Takoma Park (Maryland), 119, 157–58, 226–27 taxes, 142, 178, 275; D.C., 165, 194, 207; and home rule, 207, 276; and regional cooperation, 95, 194; and suburban development, 230, 242 theme parks, 16–17, 23, 31, 51, 175, 255 Three Sisters Bridge, 99, 121, 128–29, 133–39; destruction of, 141; and highway dispute, 119–20, 126, 131–32; lawsuits over, 135–36, 139; and NCTA, 54, 56–57, 60, 125; and opposition to Metro, 158, 160; protests over, 134–35, 137; and revised financing, 181–83; and Stolzenbach, 49, 120; and Virginia, 49, 138 Thresher, Sprague, 73, 91, 168 Tobriner, Walter, 44, 57, 116, 144 tourists, 202, 254–59, 262–63, 277, 279; vs. commuters, 254, 263; and Metro map, 253–54, 258–59; and Metro stations, 254, 257 traffic, 4, 35–36, 178, 278; computer modeling of, 37–38; congested, 32, 34, 50; gravity model of, 50; rush-hour, 34, 40, 132, 155, 243–44, 248; three-peak, 243–44 Transit-Oriented Development, 2, 196–242, 282. See also development, suburban; development, urban Transportation, Department of (DOT), 136, 141, 181, 186, 193, 282; creation of, 125–26; and highway dispute, 126, 134–35, 139–40 Transportation in the National Capital Region. See November Report Tucker, Sterling, 162–63, 165–66, 181, 185 Tysons Corner (Fairfax County, Virginia), 233–42, 274, 280 Union Station, 15, 66, 71, 148, 174, 184, 214; and building of Metro, 152–53; redevelopment of, 202–3, 205–6; and WMATA plan, 104, 114 Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA), 168, 182–83, 194 urban renewal, 32; citizen participation in, 210–11; in D.C., 7, 20–25, 197–98, 201–2, 209–10; displacement of residents by, 197–98, 209–10,
216–19; in downtown, 197–98, 202; gentler form of, 198, 210; and Metro, 85, 106, 220; in Mid-City, 209–10. See also development, urban Vienna (Virginia), 189–90, 233–34; Station in, 158, 236–40, 242 Vietnam War, 6, 173, 282 Vignelli, Massimo, 9, 118, 244, 259 Virginia, 17, 19, 96, 176, 178, 193, 207; and Alexandria, 14, 22; and expansion of Metro, 274–75; funding from, 114, 130–31, 181–82, 194, 249; highway department of, 36–38, 49, 172; and highways, 25, 120, 137–38, 140; and Metro studies, 37, 187; and minority contracts, 163, 165–66; and NCTA, 48, 57–58; and regional cooperation, 42, 97–98, 100–103; and Three Sisters Bridge, 49, 138; and WMATA plan, 111–13, 116. See also Arlington County; Fairfax County; particular cities and towns Vogel, Holmes, 42, 47 Volpe, John, 132, 134, 137, 139, 209 Walton, William, 73, 83–85, 87, 93 Warnecke, John Carl, 83–85 Warrington, John, 113, 145 Washington, D.C., 11–31; architecture of, 15–16, 22, 65–74, 83, 85, 93–94; Chinatown in, 203, 206–7; and Civil War, 14; demography of, 7, 14–18; as federal city, 12–16, 94, 102; geography of, 192; geology of, 146–47; history of, 8, 12–16; JFK on, 44; Justement plan for, 20–23; L’Enfant plan for, 12–13; and Metro map, 250–61; redevelopment of, 196–220; as theme park, 255. See also government, D.C. city; home rule Washington, Walter, 11, 24, 116, 124, 127, 132, 182, 186 Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), 8, 273, 280; Board of, 145–46; and bus service, 175–79, 182, 251; and CFA, 91–92; and class segregation, 244; and Congress, 112–14, 276; creation of, 87, 96–103; and D.C., 152, 203; and delays, 214–15; and development, 197, 207, 221, 225, 229–30; and experimental phase, 243–44; and Fairfax County, 235–36, 238–40; and financing, 108, 113, 139–40, 179–94; and graffiti, 267–68; and highway dispute, 129–32; increased scrutiny of, 182–83; vs. JTC, 98–103; jurisdictions of, 165, 186, 190, 194, 214–15; layoffs from, 275; and Metro maps, 255; Metro plans of, 100–101, 104–18, 276; and minority contracts, 162–66; naming of, 9, 99; and NCTA, 104, 116; Office of Community Services of, 154–55; and opposition, 153–61, 237; police force of, 268; and public art, 260; public role of, 166; and ridership, 108, 112, 114; and routes, 104–18, 214; and staff training, 246; and station names, 257–58; structure of, 103 Washington Metropolitan Area Transit
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Commission (WMATC), 42, 56, 98, 100–101, 103, 177 Washington metropolitan region, 95–118; compact for, 96–103; cooperation in, 95–100, 102–3, 141, 166, 178, 183; and federal control, 98–99; planning for, 196; water in, 97, 99; WMATA system for, 104–18 Weese, Harry, 74–83, 106, 108, 118, 125, 267, 277; and architecture, 94, 115, 244, 269, 272, 275; and CFA, 83–93; and escalators, 246–47; and handicapped access, 166–67; and public art, 259; and stations, 150–52, 206, 256 White, Richard, 249, 277 Whitener, Basil, 48, 55, 57–58, 62–63, 102–4 Wholey, Joseph, 190, 238, 281 Wickstrom, George, 192, 278–79
Wilkins, Anne, 56, 242 Williams, John Insco, 52, 71, 155, 225–26, 275 Wilson Boulevard (Arlington County), 224, 226, 234 Wohl, Martin, 3–4, 6, 55 Wolfe, Gregory, 99, 101 Wolfson, Louis, 28–30, 58 World War II, 17, 20, 27, 29, 31, 222, 233; and D.C., 15–16; and freeways, 23–24 Wyman, Lance, 251–53, 259 Yuma Street, 159–60, 170, 172–73 zoning: in Fairfax County, 237–38, 240, 242; suburban, 221, 226–27, 234; urban, 208, 217
