Archelaus makes its headquarters in Cleveland Park, a pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C., which was developed as one of the capital’s first “streetcar suburbs” starting in the 1890s. Our local Historical Society recently sponsored the restoration of Cleveland Park’s fifteen antique police and fire call boxes as public art. The cast-iron call boxes had been neglected since the 1970s, when the introduction of 911 emergency service rendered them obsolete. Now they have been spruced up and decorated with attractive paintings and instructive text.

In any case, yesterday morning I happened upon the call box at the corner of Quebec Place and Reno Road, adorned with a verdant landscape. The accompanying text noted:

An 1897 study for Washington, D.C. by the renowned landscape architecture firm of Frederick Law Olmsted influenced the layout of many streets in Cleveland Park. Rather than following the standard grid pattern, streets east of 34th Street (Reno Road) and north of Newark Street are curvilinear, irregular in block size, conform to the natural hilly contours of the land, and reflect the small tributaries of Rock Creek.

I found this information interesting, because the original plan for downtown Washington, created by Pierre Charles L’Enfant (1754-1825), was based on a rigidly rectilinear grid, intersected with diagonal avenues. It is a clear product of the Enlightenment, with a unyieldingly rationalist concept and a strictly neo-Classical aesthetic, a sharp reaction against the disorderly, unplanned streets and crooked byways of medieval and early modern cities. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, city planners were seemingly prepared to react, in their turn, against the geometric severity of L’Enfant’s vision in favor of an organic, curvilinear aesthetic more in keeping with, say, the Art Nouveau movement of their own day.

I am even more intrigued, however, by the reflection that better than half a century later, in the profoundly different cultural milieu of the postwar period, planners of sprawling suburban subdivisions evidently embraced this curvilinear aesthetic anew. It must have been clear, even to them, how oppressively regimented, soulless, and sterile a rectilinear suburbia would be. Not that the ubiquitous curvy streets and culdesacs of the suburbs and exurbs really solved the problem. It may be an unfair example, but I am reminded of the aerial opening shot of the relentlessly suburban Upper Whinging in the second Harry Potter film, which conveys nothing so much as the impression of a vast concentration camp.