Posted by Bob Arnebeck <[log in to unmask]>

While Clay McShane is to be congratulated for his list of web sites
about urban history, I hate to see urban mythology creep into it. In
describing a site on the history of the Mall in Washington, DC
["The Mall," at http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7ECAP/MALL/chron.html],
McShane writes: "Well-illustrated history of the Mall in Washington,
D.C. from its days as a swamp to the present including discarded
plans."

For the past ten years a number of historians of Washington, DC, have
been trying to put to rest the idea that the city was built on a
swamp. The Mall in particular was not a swamp, though it did have a
river with a tidal flow next to it (where today's Constitution Avenue
runs). As I read the web site in question, it does not suggest that
the area was originally a swamp.

The City of Washington, like every other US city founded in the 17th
and 18th centuries along tidewater, did have low ground. But the knee
jerk association of Washington with a swamp, on a list on urban
history, does a disservice, unless we all want to join forces and
begin talking about the New York swamp, and the Philadelphia swamp,
and the Baltimore swamp, etc. It bears remembering that to many
Europeans in the 18th century all of America was a swamp.

Bob Arnebeck
Independent scholar
Wellesley Island, NY