built in 1796 Southwest Waterfront is part of
Pierre L'Enfant's original city plans. It includes some of the oldest buildings in the city, including the
Wheat Row block of townhouses, built in 1793, the
Thomas Law House, built in 1796, and
Fort McNair, which was established in 1791 as "the U.S. Arsenal at Greenleaf Point." Before the federal government's survey and appropriation of the District of Columbia, most of what is now Southwest Waterfront was part of a large slave plantation owned by Notley Young. After the city was established, much of the former Young plantation was purchased by a Bostonian venture capitalist named James Greenleaf, who received a discount on sixty thousand real estate lots in exchange for a promise to build ten new houses on them per year. Greenleaf, however, had not secured the financial backing he had claimed and was unable to finance the promised construction. (He declared bankruptcy in 1797.) As a result, except for a few scattered buildings such as Thomas Law's (a land speculator who was able to put down pounds sterling) and workers' shanties, settlement of the Southwest Waterfront was extremely slow. Despite his crippling of the region's growth, Greenleaf's name was eventually given to the section of land along the bank of the river on which the Arsenal stood. Law himself was the other prominent figure in defining the early character of the Southwest Waterfront. He built its first industrial outpost, a sugar refinery, in 1797. He also initiated the construction in 1802 of the
Washington City Canal, which connected
Tiber Creek, at the western foot of the
National Mall, with the
Anacostia River—then called the "Eastern Branch"—just east of the Arsenal. The canal opened in 1815 but was too shallow and subject to unstable tides to be useful as the industrial pipeline Law had hoped for; instead, it quickly filled with trash and stagnant water, isolating the Southwest from the rest of the city. As a result of Law's canal, the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood was known as
The Island. It was further cut off from the city when railroad tracks were built along Maryland Avenue SW. It was known primarily for its brothels, its crime, and its filthy, decrepit alley slums, and was regarded as among the worst neighborhoods in Washington. After the
Civil War, with the Canal covered, the Southwest Waterfront became more organized. However, it remained a neighborhood for the poorer classes of Washingtonians. The neighborhood was divided in half by Fourth Street SW—then known as 4 Street— with Scottish, Irish, German, and eastern European immigrants to the west and Blacks to the east. Each half was centered on religious establishments: St. Dominic's Catholic Church and Temple Beth Israel on the west and
Friendship Baptist Church on the east. Each half of the neighborhood was the childhood residence of a future American musical star;
Al Jolson lived on 4 Street and
Marvin Gaye was born in a tenement on First Street.) The Waterfront developed a thriving commercial district with grocery stores, shops, a movie theater, as well as a few large and elaborate houses—mostly owned by wealthy blacks— but most of the neighborhood was a very poor
shantytown of tenements, shacks, and even tents. The latter were frequent subjects of photographs published with captions like, "The Washington that tourists never see." It was also a major traffic hub from Virginia. The
Long Bridge connected horse, stagecoach, and foot traffic from
Alexandria to
Maryland Avenue SW before becoming a railway bridge during the
American Civil War. It was also the access point to the Capital for steamboat lines. The following lines operated from there in 1903: the
Washington & Potomac Steamboat Company, the
Maryland, Delaware & Virginia B.Y. Company and the
Norfolk & Washington Steamboat Company. ==Urban renewal==