The Sketch That Stopped THE BULLDOZERS
Grosvenor Chapman’s Role in the Preservation of Lafayette Square
MARCIA MALLET ANDERSON WITH LENI CHAPMAN PRESTON
this year marks a bicentennial for Blair House: The President’s Guest House, one of many historic landmarks on Lafayette Square, the 7-acre portion of President’s Park directly north of the White House. One of the first visitors to the house is said to have been the Marquis de Lafayette, America’s beloved hero of the Revolutionary War, who returned to America in 1824 from his native France for the first and last time. His portrait has long hung in the entrance to Blair House, welcoming the foreign heads of state who stay as guests of the president. It was also in 1824 President James Monroe graded the neglected grounds where the builders of the White House had once been housed. He planted grass and trees, creating a park with walkways in the center. In 1834, the Square first came to be known Lafayette Square, the name it is known by today.1
By 1824, fine houses had already begun to surround the perimeter of the newly created park. The first two houses on the Square were built by military men. In 1819 Commodore Stephen Decatur, the celebrated naval hero of the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812, completed his home, “designed for fine entertaining,” at the northwest corner of the park. That same year, Decatur sold two lots to Captain Joseph Lovell just around the corner, on Pennsylvania Avenue. Lovell, a medical officer during the War of 1812 and the first surgeon general of the United States, built a home for his family that is known today as Blair House.2 Although Decatur envisioned that the neighborhood would become an exclusive enclave of former naval officers, residents represented many professions and walks of life. Writer Henry Adams, adventurer Edward Fitzgerald Beale, publisher Francis Preston Blair, Secretary of State Henry Clay, banker W. W. Corcoran, former First Lady Dolley Madison, diplomat Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, and statesman Daniel Webster are just a few of the illustrious names associated with the Square in its first century.3 Prior to the abolition of slavery in the city in 1862, the neighborhood was home to an enslaved population as well; some of those who labored in bondage on the Square are recorded in census records and inventories now housed in the National Archives.4
Residential life on the Square continued after the Civil War, and, by 1868, when Henry Adams observed, “Lafayette Square was society. . . . Beyond the Square the country began,” the neighborhood was a well-established and fashionable center of the city's social life.5 But the residential character
of the Square would soon give way to the inevitable growth of the maturing capital city. Redevelopment had begun to claim the older homes all over the city and, for the century to come, even homes of great architectural beauty and historical significance would not be spared for progress. Those that fell fill the pages of architectural histories and books such as James Goode’s Capital Losses.6
By the middle of the twentieth century development became an ever-increasing threat to the picturesque dwellings of the President’s Neighborhood. Some surviving nineteenth-century homes had become headquarters of private organizations, such as the Brookings Institution and the AFL-CIO, while others housed government projects, such as NASA and the National Science Foundation.7 Blair House, once the home of Dr. Lovell, had been granted a reprieve from demolition by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fill a need for a presidential guest house.8 Decatur House, preserved through the prescience of its last owner, historic preservationist Marie Beale, had become the first property and the headquarters of the newly created National Trust for Historic Preservation.9
Following World War II, as the federal government grew and grew, the blocks adjacent to the White House were inevitably considered as the prime location for new monumental government complexes. During the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower a plan emerged that called for all of the old houses to be demolished and replaced with a single structure on the east for federal courts and a single structure on the west for federal executive offices. The enormous new buildings would be 130 feet in height, the maximum building height allowed in the city.10
The fate of the Square was all but certain when President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy took residence in the White House on January 20, 1961. The architects had even been hired. But the Kennedys soon made their dislike of the scheme known. In 1962, at their behest, the architectural firm of John W. Warnecke would be hired to oversee a very different plan for the Square, which ultimately preserved the historic character of the President’s Neighborhood that we know today. Warnecke’s role and the happy outcome is well known, but what inspired the concept that the Kennedys brought to Warnecke is an often-overlooked segment in the chain of events.
At the time President Kennedy took office and
opposite Entitled Lafayette Square: Once the White House Overlooked a Residential Neighborhood, Peter Waddell’s 2011 painting imagines the residential neighborhood on Lafayette Square in 1902. During the nineteenth century the Square was home to former First Lady Dolley Madison, naval hero Commodore Stephen Decatur, and many other notables. After years of alteration and demolition, the low-scale residential quality of the Square was restored at the behest of President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy in the 1960s.
previous spread Displayed near the entrance to the White House Conference Center at 726 Jackson Place, NW, a plaque is dedicated to Grosvenor Chapman and those whose “spirit and vision” helped to preserve the Square (page 106). Chapman’s likeness was captured by artist William Franklin Draper (page 107), a friend of the Chapman family who also created a portrait of President Kennedy that now hangs in the White House.
well before John Warneke arrived on the scene, the Committee of 100 on the Federal City had already made a study of the Lafayette Square project. A group founded in 1923 “to act as a force of conscience in the evolution of the nation’s capital city,” the Committee of 100 initially focused on the furthering the original L’Enfant and later 1902 McMillan plans for the city.11 But as more and more history was lost to early twentieth-century progress, the committee became an “adversarial force” siding against ambitious building at the expense of the city's beauty and history.12
The Committee of 100 was naturally interested in Lafayette Square and formed a subcommittee to study the project and then to advocate for preservation of the historic properties. Writing
to Senator Jennings Randolph, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and Grounds, in May 1960, Committee of 100 member L. Morris Leisenring asked, “Are you willing to wipe out forever the character our forefathers have created in Lafayette Square?”13 In the early months of the 1960s, architect Grosvenor Chapman, then vice chairman of the Committee of 100 and a member of its subcommittee focused on Lafayette Square, was asked by the committee to illustrate a plan to show an alternative to the monumental government buildings. Upon hearing an idea expressed by his fellow committee member Charles Glover Jr., Chapman created a sketch to illustrate an innovative solution.14
With finely drawn ink lines on translucent vellum, Chapman drew a row of facades on Jackson Place, the residential street on the west side of the Square. The row included the historic brick town houses still standing while eliminating three tall modern office buildings that had crept into the row, dwarfing the old residences. In place of the modern buildings he drew re-creations of historic facades. His concept would thus preserve the old, but it also made way for the new. Chapman inserted a new executive office building, the space that the federal government needed, behind the row of historic facades, adding a note and arrow to identify the government structure.15 Chapman’s visionary sketch, however, had not been commissioned by the government. It was just a concept put on paper by a private individual for a private organization. His colleagues would later remember that he simply hung the sketch in his office where it remained for some months before taking a journey that would change the course of the history of Lafayette Square.16
Sketch of Jackson Pl., Lafayette Sq., Grosvenor Chapman’s original sketch, made in c. 1960. It was this sketch that first inspired President Kennedy to place the tall government office building behind the row of restored and preserved low-scale historic facades.
right
On December 16, 1961, Chapman’s sketch was published in the Washington Post along with a photograph of the Square on which he had crossed out the three modern office buildings he proposed be replaced with restored facades.17
Meanwhile, back at the White House, President Kennedy had turned to his friend and adviser William Walton for help rethinking the plans created during the Eisenhower administration for Lafayette Square. Walton later shared his memories of the experience through an oral history, recalling that the Square was “an important early issue in the Kennedy administration, so that’s the second day, the third day . . . he said to me, ‘I don’t know what to do with it. It doesn’t fit with any cabinet office, so please, will you take it?’ . . . I had my first job within the first week.” Walton continued, “I just did see him all the time. And right away in the White House. He called me every morning for something. ‘Come down.’ . . . He started making stacks for me to educate myself on and decide what we should do.” Walton also recalled that “it took some time,” but they eventually did have a plan.18
Describing Mrs. Kennedy ’s role, Walton continued, “Lafayette Square, she played a key part. I mean, she kept us at it. . . . And said until the bulldozers move, we’re ahead and you can’t give up. And she meant it, and we didn’t. She was really riding us there.”19 At some point in late 1961, Admiral Neill Phillips, then chairman of the Committee of
100, took Chapman’s sketch to William Walton. As recalled by Joe Miller, Chapman’s longtime partner in the firm of Chapman & Miller, Architects, Walton then showed the sketch to Mrs. Kennedy, and one night after dinner he went out to the park with the President and Mrs. Kennedy, with Chapman’s sketch in hand. The president soon embraced the solution of placing the new office buildings behind the historic facades. A solution found, the architectural firm of John Warnecke was hired to execute the visionary plan.20
The foreword to Warnecke’s plan explains that President Kennedy “outlined a concept envisaging that the Square be developed as a functional, as well as an esthetically pleasing area in accordance with its historical residential character and that all new structures to be erected should possess a harmonious relationship to the White House and other important historic buildings in the Square that should be preserved.”21
In a September 19, 1962, report of the Committee of 100, progress on a variety of issues is summarized. The first item under “Definite Achievements” is “ The saving of Lafayette Square from conversion into a complex of massive Federal office buildings. Although there will be large scale Federal construction in the Lafayette Square area, it will now be carried out in such a way as to preserve the early 19th Century character of the Square.”22
Years after the successful completion of the new
above
On December 16, 1961, Chapman’ s sketch was published in a Washington Post article announcing that the Committee of 100 had submitted a proposal for preserving the Square to President Kennedy. The article also included the photograph above of the existing structures on Jackson Place. Chapman marked three twentiethcentury office buildings with “X”s to indicate that they should be removed and replaced with lowscale town houses designed in keeping with the historic facades.
above
William Walton meets with President Kennedy in the Oval Office. In the early days of his presidency, Kennedy had asked Walton to help him resolve plans for Lafayette Square.
top right and bottom right Walton joins First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy to review John Warnecke’ s plans for restoring the Square, 1962.
Relics of Grosvenor Chapman’s accomplishments and life story (clockwise from top left): Committee of 100 pin, Certificate of Satisfactory Service in the United States Navy during World War II, Yale 1934 commencement program, Society of Beaux-Arts Architects Award, and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects medal.
below
Grosvenor Chapman’ s invitation to the opening ceremony of the 1939 World’ s Fair in New York. One of the first projects of his architectural career, and one that he always remembered with pride, was to design a chicken coop for the Electric Farm at the fair.
federal office buildings and the preservation and restoration of the town houses surrounding the Square, published coverage of the project often omitted the role of the Committee of 100 and Chapman’s sketch. Admonishing the editor of Architecture, the journal of the American Institute of Architects, in 1983, Joe Miller wrote, “Several articles which have appeared recently, including your own . . . have omitted an interesting bit of history.” Miller recounted the role of the Committee of 100 and the Chapman sketch, concluding the letter with, “ The original concept for Lafayette Square, as we know it today, was conceived by Grosvenor Chapman, and it was his idea that was promoted by Mrs. Kennedy and adopted by the President.”23
Journalist Sarah Booth Conroy also worked to set the record straight with a piece in her “Chronicles” column published in the Washington Post. Speaking of Chapman shortly after his death in 1993, she wrote, “Ironically, he received little recognition for perhaps his most important achievement: an idea that helped save Lafayette Square.
His concept was brilliant but simple: Put the new buildings behind the old ones, so the Square itself was preserved.”24
After Chapman’s death, his widow Rose-Marie de Foix Edmunds Chapman, a noted landscape architect, also worked to ensure her husband ’ s contributions to preservation were remembered. In a 1994 oral history interview with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Mrs. Chapman emphasized that it was her husband along with the Committee of 100 that made the “whole study of this Lafayette Square project. Now Warnecke didn’ t have anything to do with that. He [Chapman] never particularly wanted any credit. He didn’ t want any recognition. . . . But I do. You see, his friends do.”25 Mrs. Chapman spearheaded the efforts to place the plaque on Jackson Place commemorating the role of her husband and his colleagues in saving the Square.
How did Grosvenor Chapman come to be in the right place at the right time to use his talents to help save the Square? Born in Paris in 1911, while his father was studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, Chapman graduated from Yale University and then received his own architectural degree from its School of Fine Arts. He first joined the New York firm of Harrison and Fouilhoux, which designed the distinctive Trylon and Perisphere for the 1939 World ’s Fair. Chapman often spoke with pride of his personal assignment—a chicken coop for the fair’s Electric Farm. At the onset of World War II he might have avoided the draft when, in a widely reported incident, his lottery number accidentally fell to the floor. However, he chose to serve his country and was assigned to the Navy Department in Washington, D.C., where he rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. After the war, having settled permanently in Georgetown, he entered into private practice with a number of partners. In 1960 he co-founded an architectural firm with his partner, Joe Miller. Their award-winning designs included military and public housing projects, private houses, public schools, and even a Georgetown gas station, which received a National Beautification Award from First Lady Lady Bird Johnson in 1968.26
As early as 1950 Chapman was already known as one of the most active members of the Progressive Citizens Association.27 This group had successfully gained passage of the Old Georgetown Act28 and preservation of the Old Stone House on M Street,
NW. Over the next thirty years he embraced the role of “adversarial force” in the cause of preservation. Often the battle was to defend against Congress and lobbyists determined to divide communities with highways, to derail the proposal for the Three Sisters Bridge into Georgetown, and to downsize proposed developments on Georgetown’s waterfront. He plotted strategy with fellow advocates in his living room, raised his voice in hearing rooms, and put pen to paper for a series in the Georgetowner.
On a personal basis, he was charmingly competitive, whether on the dance floor or the tennis court, and every sail on his beloved Taurus became a race whether organized or not. The only true win, however, was when all the other skippers took a reverse course around the buoys. His love of racing was such that one year he planted several patches of grass side-by-side, gave each a flag, and tracked their progress to see which one won.
In a short autobiography Chapman wrote in the final year of his life, he explained that his lifelong civic interests involved “planning and preservation in the Nation’s Capital and especially its oldest section, Georgetown.”29
A plaque dedicated in 1997 near Thirty-Fourth and Q Streets, NW, in his beloved Georgetown, beautifully summarizes his legacy:
His half-century of articulate, constructive and untiring activism on behalf of urban planning and historic preservation helped shape the face of Georgetown and the City of Washington.
• Led the effort to create the Georgetown Historic District • Fought to preserve the natural beauty of the Potomac Palisades • Inspired the preservation of Lafayette Square • Architect and advocate for the Eastgate Gardens public housing (Anacostia) • Supported renewal of the Maine Avenue Waterfront • Influential proponent of the D.C. Metro System • Friend and neighbor of Volta Park
He made this community—and this city—an appreciably better place.30
notes
This article was inspired by Grosvenor Chapman’s daughter Leni Chapman Preston, who generously shared her memories and archive with the Quarterly.
1. George J. Oluewakli, Lafayette Park, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1964): 7. See also Richard F. Grimmett, “The Marquis de Lafayette’s Return to the United States, 1824–1825,” White House History Quarterly, no. 72 (Winter 2024): 20–35.
2. William Seale, Blair House: The President’s Guest House (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2016), 4–11.
3. William Seale, To Live on Lafayette Square: Society and Politics in the President's Neighborhood (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2019), vi–xi.
4. James Tertius de Kay, Michael Fazio, Osborne Phinizy Mackie, and Katherine Malone-France, The Stephen Decatur House: A History (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 2018), 230–39.
5. Seale, To Live on Lafayette Square, vii.
6. James Goode, Capital Losses: A Cultural History of Washington’s Destroyed Buildings (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003).
7. Seale, To Live on Lafayette Square, x.
8. Seale, Blair House, 72–73.
9. de Kay et al., Stephen Decatur House, 393–403.
10. Seale, To Live on Lafayette Square, 169.
11. Richard Striner, “The History of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City: Its History and Its Service to the Nation’s Capital,” Committee of 100 on the Federal City website, www. committeeof100.net.
12. Ibid.; “Building on 100 Years of Planning Advocacy,” Committee of 100 on the Federal City website.
13. L. Morris Leisenring to Senator Jennings Randolph, Washington, D.C., May 23, 1960, copy in the archive of Leni Chapman Preston
14. Leni Chapman Preston, conversation with author, March 18, 2024.
15. Grosvenor Chapman, “Sketch of Jackson Pl., Lafayette Sq.,” c. 1960, original in the archive of Leni Chapman Preston
16. Sarah Booth Conroy, “Chronicles: The Savior of the Square,” Washington Post, August 1, 1993.
17. “Proposal Made for Jackson Place Restoration,” Washington Post, December 16, 1961, D2.
18. William Walton, oral history interview by Meghan Floyd Desnoyers March 30, 1993, 34, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum website. www.jfklibrary.org.
19. Ibid., 158.
20. Joe Miller to Allen Freeman, Managing Editor of Architecture, November 16, 1983, copy in the archive of Leni Chapman Preston.
21. John Carl Warnecke and Associates, foreword to “Architectural Program for Lafayette Square” (unpublished, n.p.), John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass.
22. Committee of 100 typescript report to members, September 19, 1962, copy in archive of Leni Chapman Preston.
23. Miller to Freeman.
24. Conroy, “Chronicles: The Savior of the Square.”
25. Rose-Marie de Foix Edmunds Chapman, oral history interview by Michelle L. Craig, May 23, 1994, 3–4, copy in archive of Leni Chapman Preston.
26. Copy in archive of Leni Chapman Preston.
27. Christie Rinehart, unpublished article in archive of Leni Chapman Preston.
28. “Old Georgetown Act,” online at U.S. Commission of Fine Arts website, www.cfa.gov.
29. Grosvenor Chapman to Charles Atherton, January 6, 1993, copy in archive of Leni Chapman Preston.
30. “In Memory of Grosvenor Chapman, 1911–1993,” inscription on marker at 34th and Q Streets Northwest, Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
