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Washington, D.C.
The capital of the United States, a planned city on the Potomac
Washington was conjured out of tidewater farmland and swamp to be a capital from scratch, a deliberate political compromise made physical along the Potomac River. The District of Columbia is unlike any other American city: it belongs to no state, answers ultimately to Congress, and is built around monuments, museums, and the machinery of federal government rather than industry or commerce. Its metropolitan area holds more than six million people, but the city's identity is defined by the marble institutions clustered on the National Mall.
The city sits at the head of navigation on the Potomac, where the coastal plain meets the rolling Piedmont, on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia. Pierre Charles L'Enfant's 1791 plan imposed grand diagonal avenues over a rectangular grid, radiating from the Capitol and the White House and opening sweeping vistas toward the river. A height limit, set by law in the early twentieth century, keeps the skyline low so that the dome of the Capitol and the obelisk of the Washington Monument dominate the view. The terraces north of the Mall rise to around 120 meters, while the Mall itself sits barely above the tidal river.
Congress chose the site in the Residence Act of 1790, balancing northern and southern interests, and the government moved from Philadelphia in 1800. British troops burned the city's public buildings in 1814, and for much of its early history Washington was a muddy, half-finished town. The twentieth century filled in L'Enfant's vision with the great museums of the Smithsonian, the memorials, and the sprawling federal bureaucracy. Today Washington is the seat of all three branches of the United States government and a global center of diplomacy and policy.