Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

To this day, well let's call this an extended July 4th holiday week episode.

We just came off celebrating Independence Day and we were thinking about some episodes to do around

this time and we figured we'd go to our nation's capital and follow up a little

bit on an episode we did recently about how Washington DC became Washington DC, how the site got selected,

the challenges about putting DC where it was how it's not

actually built on a swamp even though everyone likes to say it was built on a swamp and in

that episode if you listen you will remember that we kind of brushed up a few times on the way that the DC streets are laid out the grid system with

Lettered streets running one way and numbered streets running the other and then a bunch of avenues named after states running at Diagonals and that was largely

the work of Pierre Lefunt, an American French engineer who designed the basic layout for

Washington DC in the 1790s. So let's revisit the Lymphant Plan and what

better guess to have on this episode than Scott W. Berg professor at George Mason

University, the author of many books, including one called Grand Avenues,

which is all about Pierre Charles Lufund

and the Plan for D.C.

So Professor Berg, Scott, welcome to the show.

Thanks for doing this.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah.

And here, as always, are Nicole Hammer Vanderbilt

and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wusley.

...