Existing comment:
Dupont Circle
Diverse Visions | One Neighborhood
Fire Fact | June 25, 1925
The era of horse-drawn fire apparatus ends with a ceremonial "final run" with Barney, Gene and Tom pulling a 1905 Steam Pumper belonging to Engine Company 19.
Fire alarm boxes such as this one (originally painted red) were installed in the District after the Civil War. Telegraphs transmitted the box number (top) to a fire alarm center. This system was used until the 1970s when the boxes were converted to a telephone system. By the 1990s, the callbox system had been replaced by the 911 system and was abandoned.
During the years following the Civil War, because there were no regulations governing the planning of new subdivisions, developers often laid out new streets with no regard for coherence and without public amenities. In 1891 Charles Carroll Glover (below) persuaded Congress to extend the order of L'Enfant's original streets and avenues all the way to the District line.
In 1880 street modernization began to reach this area. That year a recent invention known as asphalt, made of coal tar and gravel laid over a cement base, covered M and N Sts. and the numbered streets south of Dupont Circle while New Hampshire Ave. still had wood block paving, an earlier, failed experiment in street paving (the wood rotted). Gas lamps lighted the paved streets at intersections and at intervals, but only for six hours each night.
Artist | Matthew Parker
Washington artist, Parker, explores multidimensional DC landscapes through photographic collages using a standard point and click camera. Recently adapting Cubism, he wants viewers to experience a scene's poetic space through multiple collaged pictures that wrap around them. |