The Three Sisters Bridge was a planned bridge over the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., with piers on the Three Sisters islets. Envisioned in the 1950s and formally proposed in the 1960s, it was cancelled amid protests in the 1970s.
A bridge over the Potomac in the same location was first proposed in 1789, and bridges have been planned every few decades since then. In the 1950s, the creation of the George Washington Memorial Parkway and the extension of the parkway onto the north side of the Potomac River from Chain Bridge to Carderock, Maryland, led to calls to turn Canal Road NW into a highway and to build a bridge over the Three Sisters to link the two sections of parkway. The rationale for a Three Sisters Bridge changed over the years. At one time, the bridge was to be part of the "Inner Loop" system of spoke-and-hub freeways planned for the District of Columbia. At another, it was intended to bring then-unbuilt Interstate 66 into the city.
The bridge proposal proved highly contentious and is a notable example of a "highway revolt". Local residents of the Georgetown neighborhood and the citywide Committee of 100 on the Federal City opposed the bridge. Opponents of superhighways in the District of Columbia also opposed the bridge, as part of their opposition generally to the Inner Loop. Several protests involved civil disobedience, and some were violent. The Three Sisters Bridge spawned numerous lawsuits, one of which reached the Supreme Court of the United States. Representative William Natcher, a strong proponent of the bridge and chair of a key congressional subcommittee, withheld funding from the Washington Metro for six years in order to pressure the city into constructing the bridge. A legislative revolt in the United States House of Representatives in late 1971 released these funds. With Natcher unable to coerce the city, the bridge proposal effectively died. It was removed from federal planning documents in 1977.
Early bridge proposals A bridge across the Potomac River, using the Three Sisters as part of the supporting piers, was first proposed by Pierre L'Enfant in 1789.Berg, p. 78. It would have connected with an as-then unbuilt 39th Street and run due south across the Potomac.Williams, p. 490.
A bridge was again proposed at the site in 1826,Williams, p. 491. but the plan was defeated after supporters of Chain Bridge (then a toll bridge) opposed it.D'Angelis, p. 4. A bridge at the site was again proposed in 1828. This bridge would have carried a roadway on the upper level and an aqueduct capable of carrying barge traffic on the lower level. This time, however, Georgetown officials asked that the aqueduct be built further downstream. Disagreement over whether the aqueduct should carry a roadway was never resolved. The Aqueduct Bridge was completed in 1843.Williams, p. 493-494.
In September 1852, determined to get a bridge built at the Three Sisters, Georgetown city officials commissioned a study from engineer Charles Ellet. Ellet proposed a single-span bridge at the Three Sisters whose main arch would be more than long and whose deck would be above the water. Stone abutments high on the Georgetown side would arch over the C&O Canal and connect the C&O Canal abutment to the high ground. A single high stone abutment on the Virginia side would tie the bridge to the palisades there. Although the Mayor of the District of Columbia also supported this plan and legislation was introduced in the United States Congress to give it effect, the bill was not acted on and the bridge never built.Williams, pp. 497, 499–500.
A bridge was planned again in 1856, but debate over its exact location lasted for years. The onset of the American Civil War forced the cancellation of the plan.Williams, p. 500-504.
On February 28, 1891, the United States Congress enacted a statute that incorporated the Washington and Arlington Railway Company in the District of Columbia, with authorization to reach Fort Myer and the northwest entrance of Arlington National Cemetery by crossing the Potomac River on a new bridge that the company would construct at or near the Three Sisters. At Google Books. The bridge was not built.
Proposed George Washington Memorial Parkway bridge
In 1928, Congress authorized the construction of a parkway from Mount Vernon, Virginia, to Arlington Memorial Bridge in Arlington County, Virginia. The parkway was named the Mount Vernon Memorial Parkway. The following year, the highway was renamed the George Washington Memorial Parkway by Congress, which authorized its extension to the Great Falls of the Potomac.Davis, p. 177.
A bridge was part of the 1929 parkway expansion. The idea for an enlarged parkway honoring George Washington came from Representative Louis C. Cramton, who introduced legislation in January 1929 to construct a larger system of roads and parks in the D.C. metropolitan area."Women's Club to Hear About Parkway Plans." Washington Post. January 1, 1929; "Cramton Urges His Park Building Bill." Washington Post. February 14, 1929. In the Senate, the bill was amended by Carter Glass to include a bridge across the Potomac at the Great Falls of the Potomac."Amendment Plans Great Falls Bridge." Washington Post. February 15, 1930. Congress enacted the "Act of May 29, 1930" (46 Stat. 482) — more commonly known as the Capper-Cramton Act — to establish the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The act appropriated $13.5 million to acquire land and build a parkway on the Virginia shoreline from Mount Vernon to the Great Falls of the Potomac (excluding the city of Alexandria), and to build a parkway on the Maryland shoreline from Fort Washington, Maryland, to the Great Falls of the Potomac (excluding the District of Columbia). (This section is now known as the Clara Barton Parkway.) The bridge across the Potomac at or near the Great Falls was included in the final bill."Appendix C: Capper-Cramton Act." Great Falls Park Final General Management Plan/EIS. George Washington Memorial Parkway. National Park Service. Fall 2007. Accessed 2012-10-24.
Construction work on the George Washington Memorial Parkway was fitful, and the bridge was eventually cancelled. Construction began in the 1940s and continued into the 1960s. The Capper-Cramton Act received amendments in 1946, 1952, and 1958, both funding and terminating portions of the unbuilt parkway. The most significant changes came when Congress declined to fund construction of the segments from Fort Washington to the District of Columbia, from I-495 in Virginia to the Great Falls, and from MacArthur Boulevard/Carderock north to the Great Falls. Opposition to these segments emerged from the Izaak Walton League, the Wilderness Society, and other groups, which argued that the environmental damage caused by these segments would be too severe to justify their construction.Davis, pp. 179–180. (The portion of the parkway on the north shore of the Potomac would not be renamed the Clara Barton Parkway until 1989.)
Proposing the bridge During World War II, the population of the District of Columbia rose by about 30 percent to 861,000 people. The terrible overcrowding and traffic jams in the city convinced many that not only was a subway system needed, but that vastly enlarged and improved highways were required as well. Post-war projections showed D.C. losing population to the suburbs, and planning for nuclear war emphasized moving many federal agencies into the suburbs as a means of reducing the government's vulnerability to attack. These and other factors meant that new superhighways would be needed to bring workers into town to work, and to move them from agency to agency throughout the day quickly and efficiently.Schrag, p. 17-19.
In 1946, a consultant's study laid out a plan for a hub-spoke-and-wheel system of limited access highways for the D.C. metropolitan region, centered on the White House.Subcommittee on District of Columbia Appropriations, p. 451. The plan received support from prominent architects like Louis Justement and urban planners like Harland Bartholomew. Four years later, in 1950, the National Capital Parks and Planning Commission, which had statutory authority to approve planning in the D.C. metro area, issued A Comprehensive Plan for the National Capital and Its Environs. This planning document (written by Bartholomew) incorporated the highways proposed in the 1946 consultant's study.Gillette, p. 157; Committee on Appropriations, p. 1558. In 1954, the governments of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia signed an agreement to jointly plan transportation in the region with the National Capital Parks and Planning Commission. In 1955, the District government hired a consultant, De Leuw, Cather & Company, to propose a new highway system in the city. They proposed a vast figure-eight centered within the boundaries of the original Federal City.Schrag, p. 25.Originally, government officials did not foresee that the city of Washington would expand to fill the boundaries of the entire District of Columbia. The "Federal City", or City of Washington, originally lay within an area bounded by Boundary Street (northwest and northeast), 15th Street Northeast, East Capitol Street, the Anacostia River, the Potomac River, and Rock Creek. See: Hagner, Alexander. "Street Nomenclature of Washington City." Records of the Columbia Historical Society. 7 (1904), pp. 237–261, 257; Hawkins, Don Alexander. "The Landscape of the Federal City: A 1792 Walking Tour." Washington History. 3:1 (Spring/Summer 1991), p. 10-33, 16. The De Leuw, Cather study proved highly influential, and was incorporated (in modified form) into the plans of the intergovernmental regional planning effort. In 1957, Senator Clifford P. Case introduced legislation that would require the District of Columbia to build a bridge across the Three Sisters connecting D.C. and Virginia.Craig, p. 1616-1617. No action was taken by Congress at that time to approve the bridge. The intergovernmental study, the Mass Transportation Survey, was released in 1959. This study proposed the Inner Loop system of hub-spoke-and-wheel highways in Washington, D.C.,Gilette, p. 159. largely based on the original 1946 consultant's report. As part of the Inner Loop, a new bridge over the Potomac River at the Three Sisters was proposed to link the proposed "Outer Inner Loop" in D.C. with a new superhighway (which would later be signed Interstate 66).Schrag, p. 39.
In 1960, the D.C. Highway Department issued a six-year capital improvement plan which formally proposed a "Three Sisters Bridge" as part of its interstate highway plans.Special Subcommittee on Traffic, Streets, and Highways, p. 337. City highway planners wished to redesignate the existing Whitehurst Freeway as the Potomac River Freeway, and extend this freeway on top of Canal Road NW to the Georgetown Reservoir, where it would connect to the George Washington Memorial Parkway. A proposed spur of the Potomac River Freeway, designated Interstate 266, would begin at the junction of the Potomac River Freeway and Foxhall Road NW, and be carried over the Three Sisters Bridge to Virginia. There it would connect (via an as-yet undefined route) with Interstate 66.Schrag, p. 120.
Controversy over the bridge