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Construction took place in 1887-8, and the actual move was not until 1893, when North View was torn down.īidders interested in selling their land for the planned new Naval Observatory included: Another year and a half went by before Congress appropriated money to purchase North View, the Barber estate, north of Georgetown. Seventy-eight proposals came in, of which all but five were eliminated. The commission invited sealed proposals from Washington residents with land to sell.

#Usno vice president residence free#

It was agreed that the observatory “should be removed to the high ground north of the city… not near factories or dwellings where chimney smoke… would obscure the clearness of vision, the traffic would shake the instruments, and some high structure if placed upon the meridian near our instruments might hide a useful part of the heavens.” The question of malaria––literally, bad air––was addressed by the stipulation of high ground: according to the prevailing theory of disease, higher elevations, cooled by “salubrious” breezes, were free of the fevers caused by the miasmatic exhalations of low-lying areas near the river. In the same year that Asaph Hall discovered the moons of Mars, Congress established a commission to identify a new site. Although the role of mosquitoes had not yet been discovered, the connection between “insalubrity” and the nearby marsh was nevertheless unmistakable: the “location of the Observatory is unhealthful, caused, as I think, by the malaria from the shores of the Potomac, from which no artificial means will secure it.” It was the premature deaths, deemed to have been hastened by malaria, of a succession of Naval Observatory superintendents that finally made the status quo indefensible. “Why the neighborhood was called Foggy Bottom became apparent every time the astronomers had to suspend work when swirling mists obscured the heavens.” But swirling mists did not entirely prevent astronomic observations (such as the discovery the moons of Mars in 1877), and would have been unlikely to persuade Congress to pay for another observatory, had the river had no other effect on those who worked near its banks.Įach year, from May through the middle of October, the astronomers suffered from malaria “brought on by the swamp at the foot of Observatory Hill”… to the extent that the Observatory’s history is a litany of premature death, chronic sickness, and lost workdays”. Whatever the reasons for the choice of that first site, its proximity to the Potomac River proved to be a liability. The present location of the United States Naval Observatory, which has been at 3450 Massachusetts Avenue NW since 1893, is best understood by comparison its prior location at 23rd and E Street NW, where it had been in operation since 1844. Some notes on the United States Naval Observatory, in relation to its neighborhood.