D.C. Layout Guide
When George Washington chose the site of the national capital, he picked a 10 square mile area that included Georgetown, Alexandria, and Hamburgh in the Foggy Bottom area. Pierre Charles L’Enfant planned out the new city (known as Washington City) and Andrew Ellicott added revisions. This careful planning has led to the carefully ordered streets and highways which criss-cross D.C. today. D.C. is divided into four unequal quadrants, referred to by the ordinal direction from medallion in the United States Capitol crypt. Streets that travel north/south are named after numbers, going from east to west in the NW and SW quadrants and west to east in the NE and SE quadrants. Streets that travel east-west use a single letter, and then words of increasing syllables in ascending alphabetical order. Diagonal avenues are generally named after states.The buildings in D.C. are also carefully planned, and originally held to a building height limit of 130 feet (passed in 1899). The goal was to prevent the city from becoming overrun by skyscrapers. Although a 1910 law did away with the height maximum, it set the new standard that no building shall be more than 20 feet taller than the width of the street in front of it.D.C. is divided into eight wards, further divided into 37 Advisory Neighborhood Commissions. There are a total of 127 neighborhoods in D.C., and each ward of neighborhoods has a member on the Council of the District of Columbia (D.C.’s local legislative branch). A complete list of D.C. neighborhoods can be found on Wikipedia (“List of neighborhoods of the District of Columbia by ward”).Transportation around D.C. is generally done by foot or by public transit. D.C. has the second highest percentage of public transit commuters in the United States. Options include the Washington Metro, the Maryland Area Rail Commuter (MARC) train, Amtrak, the MEtrobus, the DC Circulator, the Inter-city bus, and special bus services for students and airport travelers.
