Grounds For Serious Reflection

Slave labor helped build the city, including the White House. Records show dozens of slaves worked on the Capitol, and slaves worked at the Aquia Creek quarry in Stafford County, Va., cutting sandstone that was used in the Capitol and the Treasury Building. One account says these slaves generally were given a blanket and some clothing. In most cases, the master retained the money earned through these labors, but some slaves were paid under the table.

To house the slaves, the federal government let owners keep them in local jails for 34 cents a day. Slave owners also used a system of privately owned jails called "Georgia pens."

Along Seventh Street, which cut through the heart of the Mall, the slave trade flourished. Slaves frequently were sold in front of Lloyd's Tavern on the southeast corner of Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, and at the nearby Isaac Beer's Tavern on Seventh. The pen and tavern of Washington Robey stood at Seventh Street SW, between B Street and Maryland Avenue. The private jail of William H. Williams stood across the street in a yellow brick house.

"The slaves didn't stay at the Willard Hotel. They were locked up in these jails at night," says John Whittington Franklin, a program manager at the African American museum office. (His father is the noted historian John Hope Franklin.)

From 1802 to 1931, the huge Center Market at the corner of Seventh Street and Constitution Avenue NW -- where the National Archives now stands -- was where slaves and freed blacks could sell products outside the building. Some beat the odds: Alethia Browning Tanner, a vegetable vendor near the Capitol, saved enough money to buy her own freedom and that of several family members, part of the beginnings of a black middle class.

Tensions between the races were very evident, especially when the immigrant white population and freed blacks vied for jobs.

In 1835 a race riot occurred, beginning at the Epicurean Eating Grill on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue at Sixth Street NW. Beverly Snow, the owner of the restaurant and a free black, allegedly made remarks about the wives and daughters of men working at the Navy Yard. Whites trashed the restaurant, but Snow escaped. The rioters also destroyed black churches, schools and houses.

Giving the Mall Meaning

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In his 1791 plan, L'Enfant established the positions of the Capitol and the White House and showed an expanse that generally went from Third Street to 14th Street. He envisioned a 400-foot-wide savanna, lined with trees and important buildings, but the Mall initially evolved into a disorganized range.

Work sheds and shacks stood behind the Smithsonian Castle, which was completed in 1855. During the Civil War, the Mall was used for military drilling and to hold grazing pens for bison. The stench of sewage and slaughtered animals from the Washington Canal (covered today by Constitution Avenue) was so bad that President Abraham Lincoln established a summer retreat up North Capitol Street to get fresher air.

Railroad tracks were set down across the south side of the Mall in the 1870s, connected to a depot where the National Gallery of Art now stands. An African American neighborhood sprang up on land where the National Museum of the American Indian stands. Blacks lived in houses facing the Mall and along nearby alleys. All of the structures on that land were razed in the 1930s.

Things began to change in 1901 when Sen. James McMillan of Michigan formed a commission of distinguished planners to bring order to the Mall. The group extended its boundaries over existing waterways to the edge of the Potomac River and filled in the swampy land that would support the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.

The grand buildings of today's vista started to arrive at the turn of the 20th century. By the 1930s, much of the land had been cleared of trees and leveled. When temporary office buildings built during World War II were finally removed in the early 1970s, the area looked much like it does today.