| Existing comment:
Noble-looking from a distance, the Capitol had quite a different effect up close in its early days, as this unsparing Latrobe view reveals. Twenty years before the landscaping of the site began, Shockoe Hill was bare and bald. At the top loomed the unfinished exterior of the Capitol. The facades, still of red brick with areas of whitewash, lacked their window frames, their coats of stucco, and their Ionic capitals, which were not put into place until late in 1797. The adjacent government buildings were wholly alien to Jefferson's conception -- on the right is a modest wooden house for the governor, and on the left is a shanty on stilts that served as a belfry. |