Below is the text of my monthly “Editor’s Letter” in the new issue of Washingtonian.
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The last white chief executive of Washington, DC, was actually its last governor. Alexander Robey “Boss” Shepherd was born in the distinctly Southern city of Washington in 1835, the son of a well-to-do merchant who owned a lumberyard on the Washington Canal, where Constitution Avenue now lies. Entering politics for the first time at the dawn of the Civil War, Shepherd helped found the Washington Board of Trade in 1865, was de facto head of the District’s board of public works, and then became DC’s second governor after Congress established a territorial government in 1871. He came to that office full of swagger, with a strong vision to develop and fulfill Pierre L’Enfant’s original street plan. Once in power, he moved fast.
“Shepherd achieved in three years what it took Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann 20 years to accomplish in rebuilding Paris,” says his biographer John Richardson, a former CIA officer who lives in Arlington. Shepherd, Richardson explains, was Washington’s own Robert Moses, the New York City central planner who made that metropolis what it is today. DC after the Civil War badly needed updating; it lacked the infrastructure to support the near doubling of its population during the war years. In a short time, Shepherd oversaw the construction of 260 miles of streets and 183 miles of sewers. (Too many of those sewers, by the way, are still in use, as DC Water struggles with its aging infrastructure today.)
His vision didn’t come cheap. Shepherd’s spending was so out of control—three times the city’s allotted $6-million annual budget—that after forcing him from office, Congress took control of DC’s purse strings for a century, until the reestablishment of home rule in 1974. Shepherd spent his final 22 years pursuing a silver-mining business in Mexico.
In this issue, beginning on page 84, our longtime local-politics writer, Harry Jaffe, examines the question dominating this year’s mayoral election in the District: Is 2014 the year that DC elects a white mayor? The city is changing quickly, in demographics and wealth, gaining residents for nearly the first time since home rule, and a shocking trio of recent federal investigations has depleted the bench of aspiring African-American politicians. This odd turn of events means it’s not out of the question for either Jack Evans or David Catania to end up mayor by this time next year, particularly with so many questions still swirling around current mayor Vince Gray’s political future. Such an outcome would mark a signal change for DC, the so-called Chocolate City, just as it did for Detroit last fall when Mike Duggan was elected that town’s first white mayor in 40 years.
Unlike Duggan, whose city is now in bankruptcy, the winner of this year’s DC mayoral election will have a strong economic wind at his or her back, pumping fresh tax dollars, across much of the region, into the coffers of local governments even as it further stretches the area’s racial and economic inequalities.
In many ways, Boss Shepherd would recognize today’s District (the street plan, at least; Marion Barry’s Twitter feed would baffle him), although the thriving Washington area would dwarf even his expansive 19th-century vision for it, particularly as the Maryland and Virginia suburbs—farmland in his day—develop their own centers of gravity with projects like this year’s Silver Line expansion in Tysons.
Yet while his fingerprints are all over the city, Shepherd’s only physical manifestation is a statue near DC’s Wilson Building. The bronze memorial, more than a century old, sat in exile down near the Blue Plains water-treatment plant for decades before a 2005 citizen effort restored it to a place of glory. His return came just as the District’s renaissance really heated up.
Shepherd’s simply marked statue—bearing only his last name—could share the epitaph memorializing architect Christopher Wren inside St. Paul’s Cathedral in London: Lector, si monumentum requiris circumspice—“Reader, if you seek his monument, look around.”
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