At the foot of the Capitol, itself beautiful even then, were desolate waste lands being reserved for some ultimate Botanical Gardens, and a few miserable shack-like boarding-houses.[22] “Everybody knows that Washington has a capitol,” wrote a satirical English observer, “but the misfortune is that the capitol wants a city. There it stands, reminding you of a general without an army, only surrounded and followed by a parcel of ragged little dirty boys; for such is the appearance of the dirty, straggling, ill-built houses which lie at the foot of it.”[23] Where the Smithsonian Institution has long stood were innumerable quagmires reeking with miasma.[24] About the President’s Mansion, a few pretentious houses, several still handsome homes after almost a century, had been built, and in this section, and in Georgetown, lived the people of fashion and the diplomats. “The Co’t end,” it was called. At the four corners of the Mansion of the Presidents stood the plain brick buildings occupied by the State, Treasury, War, and Navy Departments. On Capitol Hill a few good houses had been erected, especially on North A and New Jersey Avenue, South. Other than these, and those west of the White House, there was little but pastures and enclosed fields in the eastern, southeastern, and northeastern sections of the town.[25] East of Fourteenth Street, on the north side, but few houses had been built beyond F Street, and the “country home” of William H. Crawford, at the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, was still considered as remote from town as on that winter day after his defeat for the Presidency when no callers were expected because of the heavy snow.[26]