Johnson was President when the enlargement of the Capitol building was finished, including the rearing of the present dome. While the alterations were in progress, the grand two days’ parade of the victorious armies took place on Pennsylvania Avenue, the President reviewing it as it passed the White House. General Grant was elected by the Republicans to succeed Johnson, taking office in March, 1869. During the next sixteen years, divided between his two terms and the administrations of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur, Washington almost doubled in population. While Grant was President, it was so constantly in the public eye that many rich men discerned its future possibilities and invested in real estate there. Army and navy officers, retired from active duty, found it pleasant to settle down where they would be most likely to meet their old comrades. A few scholars drifted in, so as to have easy access to the Government libraries and records. Thus, in both a material and a social way, Washington took a strong upward start.
For the esthetic side of the general change, less can be said in praise. Most of the dwellings built during this era can still be distinguished by their gratuitous ugliness. The parks became strewn with flower-beds of fantastic shape, overrun by a riot of inharmonious colors. Statues sprang up like mushrooms, unrelated in size or style or any other quality. Alterations of street grades left little houses perched on bluffs and leaning against big neighbors built at the new level, or sunk in dingy pits. All this contributed to give the city an unfinished look, like that of a child growing out of its small clothes. Over the whole process of transformation loomed its master figure, Alexander R. Shepherd.
No man of his day, unless it were Grant himself, endured more wholesale denunciation or found more valiant defenders than he. Like Grant, who believed in him thoroughly, he had an iron will which treated all obstacles as negligible when he had set himself to accomplish a certain end. As a plumber by trade and a very competent one, he had accumulated a fortune before middle life. Early in his business career he had made up his mind that Washington’s failure to fulfil L’Enfant’s ideal of a beautiful capital was due to the sluggishness which pervaded it, and this he resolved to dispel. Grant listened to his projects and encouraged them. The first step was to abolish the existing form of municipal government and to substitute a Territorial form, with a Governor and a Board of Public Works. Shepherd was made vice-president of the Board and virtually its dictator.