Over the last few days, the Washington Post featured a number of streetcar pieces.  First, Lisa Rein laid out the basis for the debate on overhead wires.  The Post’s editorial board then chastised all the players to find a realistic and reasonable solution.

Today’s print edition features two pieces delving deeper into how streetcars fit into the mold of historic preservation, urbanism, and urban untidiness.  The first comes from Adam Irish, a member of the DC Preservation League and a volunteer at the DC Historic Preservation Office.  Irish starts by marking the difference between those who seek to preserve urbanism and those that seek to preserve DC’s monumentality above all else:

This kerfuffle is about more than just ugly wires, however. It gets to the heart of an old and familiar conflict over how Washingtonians and Americans at large envision the city. In its coverage, The Post has referred to opponents of wires as “preservationists,” but I think “D.C. monumentalists” better describes their stance. For the monumentalist, Washington, D.C., the city comes second to Washington, D.C., the sanitized and photogenic capital.

The monumentalist vision of Washington has choked nearly all urban life from the Mall and its environs. It has fashioned large sections of our city into pleasing vistas for tourists but has given the rest of us lifeless wastelands (if you’ve ever stepped foot outside at L’Enfant Plaza, you know what I’m talking about).

Urban life and urban form isn’t always pretty.  In fact, the sometimes-messy complexity is part of what makes cities such interesting places to live in.  Spiro Kostof described it as “energized crowding,” a kind of messiness that’s inherent to creativity and day to day life.  This isn’t to discredit the formalism of Washington’s City Beautiful aesthetic – merely asserting that such monumentalism shouldn’t trump all other facets of urbanism.

Philip Kennicott expands on those themes in his piece, also running in Sunday’s print edition:

If you listen to preservationists, the most ardent of whom oppose any overhead wires in the city, you might think Washington was loaded with great vistas. And it is, but not the awe-inspiring views they’re thinking about, which turn out to be fairly few and often not that impressive. Even down our wide avenues, sightlines tend to terminate in small monuments that are best seen up close.

The great views down the streets of Washington are just coming into their full glory as the leaves of spring return. These aren’t wide-open vistas with monumental buildings in the far distance; they are tunnel-like views of shaded streets, overarched by majestic elms, oaks and maples. These shady tubes of green, which are rare in newer and suburban neighborhoods, are the truly distinctive beauty of Washington. The only reasonable concern about running overhead wires should be the protection of trees that create these glorious canopies.

Nobody in this debate would argue that overhead wires look good, but too often the debate is framed in either/or terms – either the wires are ugly or they are not.  Kennicott addresses this false dichotomy as well:

Arguments against overhead wires rest on two essential assumptions: that the city is filled with streets that have historically significant and aesthetically impressive views; and that wires and poles would be ugly intrusions on these grand vistas. The former is questionable, the latter a matter of opinion.

The point about wires obstructing views that don’t always exist is a good one.  As noted, DC’s canopy of street trees is a legacy worth protecting, yet these same trees (on, say, East Capitol street) make for a wonderful streetscape – but at the cost of forgoing views of the Capitol Dome beyond a few blocks.

Google street view of Capitol Dome (it's in there somewhere) from East Capitol Street, near 4th Street.

This isn’t to say that wires wouldn’t obstruct this view – but the key point is that the streetcar plan does not propose to obstruct these types of views with wires at all.  Kennicott hammers on this point, noting that the current plans do not include major obstructions, both by avoiding major view corridors and considering the fact that wire ‘obstruction’ is relatively minor.  Like the trees that line many of these grand avenues, the positive benefits of the streetcars vastly outweigh the negative costs.

The takeaway message from all of these articles should be that a reasonable compromise – a hybrid of wires and battery power to protect key viewsheds – is both realistic and palatable to most Washingtonians.