Abstract
Metro riders who arrive at the NoMa-Gallaudet stop in northeast D.C. encounter an impressive display of recent and ongoing development. Cranes swing far above the skeletons of new buildings that rise from lots once empty and abandoned. The glass and cement headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, built in 2008, sits just steps from the Metro station. Elsewhere stand freshly built office buildings, apartment complexes, restaurants, and stores, and a Hilton hotel that abuts the Metro tracks. Even the station itself is new, built less than a decade ago.
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Notes
Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom, City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America, 5th ed. (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2006), 3.
Joel Achenbach, The Grand Idea: George Washingtons Potomac and the Race to the West (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), esp. 122–123, 127, 213, 267;
Kenneth R. Bowling, The Creation of Washington, D.C.: The Idea and location of the American Capital (Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1991).
See, e.g., Michael Dear and Nicholas Dahmann, “Urban Politics and the Los Angeles School of Urbanism,” in The City, Revisited: Urban Theory from Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, edited by Dennis R. Judd and Dick Simpson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 69–70.
Scott W. Berg, Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 104–105.
For more on the importance of rivers and commerce in location, see Carl Abbott, Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
The canal was intended to get as far as the Ohio River but never did. Achenbach, The Grand Idea, 215–216, 244, 262; Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington, Vol. 1: Village and Capital, 1800–1878 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 156–157, 193–194. Early efforts in Congress to build a network of roads from the district also faltered (e.g., Abbott, Political Terrain, 35–36).
James H. S. McGregor, Washington from the Ground Up (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 265. Because Georgetown and Washington had separate governments and budgets through the mid-1800s, they “pursued prosperity individually.”
Alan Lessoff, The Nation and Its City: Politics, “Corruption,” and Progress in Washington, D.C., 1861–1902 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 31.
Kenneth R. Bowling, “From ‘Federal Town’ to ‘National Capital’: Ulysses S. Grant and the Reconstruction of Washington, D.C.,” Washington History 14:1 (2002), 14–18;
Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington, Vol. 2: Capital City, 1879–1950 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 12–13;
Robert Harrison, Washington during Civil War and Reconstruction: Race and Radicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 58, 156–157;
Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C. ofter the Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 140–150; Lessoff, The Nation and Its City, chs. 2–3. The Heurich House museum is a good source for information about Heurich and his Dupont Circle mansion (http://www.heurichhouse.org/history/).
James M. Goode, Best Addresses: A Century of Washington’s Distinguished Apartment Houses (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 50; Lessoff, The Nation and Its City, 9, 159–162. For more on politicians investing in D.C., see chapter 4.
Abbott, Political Terrain, 101, 120; quote from Goode, Best Addresses, 52. For more on Cafritz, see Burt Solomon, The Washington Century: Three Families and the Shaping of the Nations Capital (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, ch. 6; Walter A. Scheiber, “Washington’s Regional Development,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 49 (1973–1974); quote from Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995[1972]), 123.
Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 266; Judd and Swanstrom, City Politics, ch. 6; see also chapter 8.
Quote from Jon C. Teaford, The Metropolitan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 127. The decline of American cities after World War II has been written about by many. See, for instance, Warner, The Urban Wilderness;
Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003);
Douglas W. Rae, City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005);
and Thomas J. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, Working Paper No. 76, U.S. Census Bureau (February 2005); “DC vs. VA vs. MD,” Washingtonian Magazine, October 2012, 75.
Tyson Freeman, “The 1980s: (Too) Easy Money Fuels a Building Boom,” National Real Estate Investor, September 30, 1999 (http://nreionline.com/mag/real_estate_easy_money_fuels/); Robert G. Kaiser, “Big Money Created a New Capital City,” Washington Post, April 8, 2007. A brief summary of Washington’s downtown development in the 1980s can be found in Stephen J. McGovern, The Politics of Downtown Development: Dynamic Political Cultures in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 197–210. For more on the convention center, see chapter 7.
Annie Lowrey, “Washington’s Economic Boom, Financed by You,” New York Times, January 10, 2013; U.S. Census Bureau, Patterns of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Population Change: 2000 to 2010, September 2012, http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/reports/c2010sr-01.pdf, table 3.7.
For more on the features and advantages of an agglomeration economy, see Brendan O’Flaherty, City Economics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 16–25.
Jon Bouker et al., “Building the Best Capital City in the World,” Research Report (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2008), 160.
Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 190–191. Washington and Madison both called for a university in the district during their presidencies; see George Washington’s Eighth Annual Address to Congress, December 7, 1796, and James Madison’s Eighth Annual Address to Congress, December 3, 1816.
Mark Abrahamson, Global Cities (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4–5; Fisher, “District No Joke Now”; Greater Washington Board of Trade, Greater Washington 2010 Regional Report, 21.
Paul Ceruzzi, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); Stephen S. Fuller, “Northern Virginia’s Economic Transformation,” November 2011, http://cra.gmu.edu/pdfs/studies_reports_presentations/By_The_Numbers_NoVa_Drives_Area_Growth.pdf; “Great Seneca Science Corridor,” Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, accessed January 8, 2013, http://www.montgomeryplanning.org/community/gaithersburg/index.shtm.
Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D. C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); McGovern, The Politics of Downtown Development, 204–206 and chs. 10–11; Teaford, The Metropolitan Revolution, 115–116; Emily Wax, “Black Middle Class Is Redefining Anacostia,” The Washington Post, July 29, 2011; quote from Marc Fisher, “Does Culture Follow the Census?” Washington Post, April 11, 2011.
See also Natalie Hopkinson, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of Chocolate City (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), xi–xii.
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© 2014 Matthew N. Green, Julie Yarwood, Laura Daughtery, Maria Mazzenga
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Green, M.N., Yarwood, J., Daughtery, L., Mazzenga, M. (2014). The Economic Life and Development of a Capital City. In: Washington 101. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426246_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426246_10
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