As the visitor drove about the town he found nothing in the physical aspects of the country-town capital to indicate that L’Enfant ever had a vision or produced a plan for a city beautiful. Because real estate dealers had quarreled over the location of public buildings, the selection of the hill for the Capitol had led to the location of the White House a mile or more to the west, and for three decades the problem of building a compact city between the two had failed. The streets were all unpaved when Jackson was first inaugurated, and only Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the President’s Mansion had been rescued from the mire when he left office. Hub-deep in mud in inclement weather, these country roads sent forth great clouds of dust on dry and sunny days. With the exception of the Avenue, not a single street approached compactness, the houses on all other streets being occasionally grouped, but generally widely separated, and in some instances so much so as to suggest country houses with their shade trees and vegetable gardens.[18] “It looks as if it had rained naked buildings upon an open plain, and every man had made a street in reference to his own door,” wrote Nathaniel P. Willis, who knew his Washington.[19] Another writer of the day who was impressed with “the houses scattered in straggling groups, three in one quarter, and half a dozen in another,” was moved to compassion for “some disconsolate dwelling, the first or last born of a square or crescent, yet in nebulous suffering like an ancient maiden in the mournful solitude of single blessedness.”[20] Still another contemporary word painter tells us that even on the Avenue “the buildings were standing with wide spaces between, like the teeth of some superannuated crone.”[21]