MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Two hundred fifty years ago, the founding father signed the Declaration of Independence. It marked the beginning of the United States of America. Over the next five months, NPR is bringing you stories about how that project took shape, the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness from 1776 to today, for a series we're calling...
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: America.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: America.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: America.
MARTIN: ...America in Pursuit. We begin here in Washington, D.C. The year is 1791. At the time, the city, if you could call it that, was really just a vast swath of undeveloped marshland to turn it into the capital we see today with wide avenues, public squares and the National Mall stretching toward the Potomac. The founding fathers needed a visionary. They found one in Pierre L'Enfant. He was a French engineer who believed so much in America that he changed his first name to Peter. With pencil and paper, he mapped the city that became Washington, but full recognition of his contribution did not come for more than a century. Rebecca Rosman has his story.
REBECCA ROSMAN, BYLINE: To see the first blueprints for Washington, you have to go underground. They keep it in a basement vault at the Library of Congress.
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JULIE STONER: Come on in.
ROSMAN: Reference specialist Julie Stoner holds the keys to a treasure trove of some 6 million maps lying in these cabinets. She pulls out one with pencil shadings drawn by L'Enfant himself.
STONER: This was 1791.
ROSMAN: 1791.
This is the Washington before Washington existed.
STONER: So you've got the grid.
ROSMAN: In these early versions of his plan, you can see the grid cut through by wide diagonal avenues, laid over what was at the time not very much.
SCOTT BERG: And you have to imagine farm fields, woods, you know, not quite as level as it is now.
ROSMAN: That's Scott Berg, author of a book about L'Enfant font called "Grand Avenues." Berg says L'Enfant wanted a capital that would make this young republic feel real, powerful. After all, America was brand new at this point.
BERG: The rest of the world is looking at it going, no way is this going to work. You know, like, it's a good idea, but no way is this going to work.
ROSMAN: This scrappy young country needed to take some big risks to prove that it could work. They took one on L'Enfant, who had arrived to the colonies with a group of French engineers.
BERG: He was essentially the lowest person on the ladder that came over with the French. He was a...
ROSMAN: He ends up at Valley Forge with a bunch of men who would go on to hold big roles in the United States - James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton.
BERG: All of these people were young. They were there. They were having a great time, and they drank a lot, and they partied a lot. What gave them part of their high spirits and the headiness that they felt was that they were all sort of part of the circle of George Washington because...
ROSMAN: L'Enfant was the kind of guy, Berg says, who would sketch napkin portraits of his buddies. He was memorable, talented, fun to be around. After the war, Washington remembers him and recruits L'Enfant for a much bigger project.
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ROSMAN: Which is what brings us here to the National Mall. We're staring at the U.S. Capitol building. Berg says L'Enfant's inspiration for these grounds came from an unlikely place.
BERG: You have to think, if you stand up there on the West Plaza, and you look this way, you are reminded of Versailles.
ROSMAN: Versailles, the home of the French monarchy, with its grand grounds leading you straight to the king's palace. L'Enfant steals the idea and turns it on its head. The palace isn't for a king. It's built for the American people.
BERG: And so what you're doing is essentially saying, bye-bye, king. Hello, elected representatives of the people. Hello democracy.
ROSMAN: It was about convincing the world that this new American experiment could work.
BERG: And they're saying, we are a new country. Everything's very tenuous. We need a show of our ambitions, of our right, of our ability to exist on the world stage.
ROSMAN: An L'Enfant did all that at an impressive speed, drafting his first blueprints in just two weeks. He was confident about his work, saw it clearly and had the perfect combination of brilliance, gusto and naivete to push it through. It's what made him so compelling and also incredibly difficult to work with.
BERG: He was so charismatic and driven and so precocious. But he was also, like, a hothead and an idiot. And, you know, he reminds me a lot of Americans. He felt very American in that way.
ROSMAN: Almost as soon as he started his drawings, the fights piled up. He fought with the commissioners, with landowners, with Thomas Jefferson. Eventually, his strongest supporter, George Washington, had had enough. Less than a year after he started the project, L'Enfant was fired. An engineer named Andrew Ellicott took over. L'Enfant died broke and largely forgotten. But his design stayed in the bones of Washington, and a century later, the city finally embraced him.
At Arlington National Cemetery, L'Enfant's grave sits on a hill overlooking the capital he envisioned. That's where I meet military historian Allison Finkelstein.
ALLISON FINKELSTEIN: We have the best view of Washington, D.C. But it's not just beautiful, it's really symbolic.
ROSMAN: When L'Enfant died, Finkelstein says, he was buried in an unmarked grave on a friend's estate in Maryland. In 1909, Congress brings him here to Arlington to see the city that outlived him.
FINKELSTEIN: And it seems fitting that he should be buried somewhere where he can be honored and look out in death, at least, at the legacy of his design as it was actually instituted.
ROSMAN: But you don't have to stand at his grave to see his legacy. You can sit right in the middle of it. Back at the National Mall, Berg says L'Enfant imagined this as a public place for the people. Although over the years, heightened security has changed things. Sections are periodically closed to the public. Today, the Capitol steps are blocked off, and there are ropes around the grassy areas of the Mall. Berg says that's a shame.
BERG: I'd like to go back up there. I used to go up there. And it's, you know, like the city, the story is ongoing. Who knows what's going to happen to the federal city in the next hundred years, and we shouldn't hold it sacred because no one place has ever - you know, places have to evolve.
ROSMAN: Washington is still evolving, like the American project it was built to represent.
Rebecca Rosman, NPR News, Washington, D.C. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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