Story of Dumbarton Bridge

The Interesting Story of Dumbarton Bridge

 

It’s easy to ignore a thing of beauty when you pass it every single day. It’s even easier to ignore it when you cruise over on top of it in a bus or car. The “it” in question is the Dumbarton Bridge, and today GM wants to stop and take in the bridge’s beauty and tell its interesting story.

Georgetown was formed in 1751, decades before the founding of the District of Columbia and the city of Washington. Even after the creation of the District, Georgetown remained separated from the city of Washington both as a legal and a infrastructural matter through much of the 19th century. In 1871, however, Georgetown was merged with the city of Washington. In the decades after the legal merger, rapid residential developments directly to the east of Georgetown contributed greatly towards a physical merger as well.

Specifically, in the 1890s construction of the Connecticut Avenue bridge (now known as Taft Bridge) was started, Massachusetts Ave. north of Rock Creek was paved, and the Kalorama Estate was subdivided into residential plots. This inspired Georgetowners to push for a new bridge connecting north Georgetown with the quickly growing Kalorama neighborhood. They asserted that Q st. was the best option, although it came with a couple pretty significant complications (GM will get to that later).

Interestingly, this wasn’t the first significant effort by Georgetowners to try to tie the neighborhood more closely with the neighborhoods directly across the park. Before a bridge was proposed, the Georgetown Citizens Association seriously proposed that Rock Creek be turned into a culvert, and the Rock Creek gorge filled in with land. This would open the area to residential development and facilitate movement between Georgetown and downtown. The plan was shot down by the McMillan Commission in 1901.

So a bridge it would have to be. By 1910, plans began to be formed. However, as mentioned above, there were some serious complications. First of all, Q st. came to a dead end at Dumbarton House. The historic mansion had to be relocated 100 feet to where it sits today. Secondly, Q St. in Georgetown is 185 feet south of Q St. across the park. The solution to this problem resulted in one of the bridge’s most elegant features: its gentle curve.



 The bridge was designed by Glenn Brown,
a secretary of the American Institute of Architects and one of the main
proponents of the McMillan Commission and its efforts to bring the City
Beautiful design theory to Washington. And City Beautiful design
elements are all over this bridge. First of all, it is a neoclassical
bridge with strong influences from Roman aqueducts. Secondly, the very
fact that a bridge was constructed with such grand scale and style
instead of with a purely functional style was also a fundamental
technique of the City Beautiful movement.

Finally, like the Columbian Exposition that
kicked off the City Beautiful movement, the bridge’s design reflects a
nostalgia for the by then disappeared American Frontier: the sidewalks
are supported by a series of arches each decorated with a bust taken
from a life-mask of the Sioux Chief Kicking Bear
and the bridge’s entrances are adorned with four massive bronze statues
of buffalo. (It’s probably not a coincidence that the actual Kicking
Bear was part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which probably did more
to stoke that nostalgia than any one thing.)

Those stately buffalo are probably the
bridge’s most distinctive feature, and they’re why some call it the
Buffalo Bridge (although frankly, GM hardly ever hears anyone actually
use this name). They were designed by Phimister Proctor,
who also designed the lion sculptures on the Taft Bridge. As you may
remember, a few years ago they were in bad shape. An effort organized by
the Dupont Circle Conservancy restored the buffalo to their current
dark bronze state. By the way, apparently in 1923, the tail of the
southeastern buffalo was cut off. Thankfully, at some point his dignity
was restored.

The bridge’s construction was finished in 1915.

Some more interesting tidbits:

• On the east end of the bridge, there used to be a plaza with a
  fountain. On the other end there was a streetcar yard (GM’s not sure if
  it’s part of the streetcar yard, but from this undated photo above,
  there appears to have once been a large factory building just west of
  the bridge).
• Originally there was a median down the center of the bridge where
  the lamps were (you can sort of see that above). It was removed in 1938
  due to concerns over traffic safety and the lights were moved to the
  sidewalks.
• Perhaps the oddest fact of all: the undisputed expert in all things Dumbarton Bridge is none other than Minor Threat’s Jeff Nelson, who’s apparently been working on a book about the bridge since a year after Salad Days was released.