Why DC's Shaped Like That

Video written by Corinne Neustadter

[caseclosed]

DC was very specifically told to be there or be square

[UncommonElevators]

2:30 is slightly inaccurate. When DC was created, all of the Virginia side was Alexandria County. In 1870, Alexandria City was seperated from the county when Virginia amended their constitution to make cities not part of counties (this is an oddity among our state laws). In 1920 the remaining part of Alexandria County was renamed to Arlington County.

[CrackShotCleric]

Also part of the retrogression deal was Virginia gave all rights to ownership of the Potomac River to Maryland, instead of the existing 50/50 split till that point. To this day, Virginia regrets that decision.

[elduderino]

1:06 I love using stock footage of Minneapolis for this segment because not only is it not Washing D.C. it's not even the capital of Minnesota.

[danielgreen]

I live in Arlington and I live near the old corner stone of the original stone that marked the corner border between Virginia and DC. today, it just serves as the marker between Arlington (OG DC) and Falls Church.

[gotnomoney]

If stock images didn't exist, Half as Interesting wouldn't exist.

[bababababababa]

Crazy how this would not even be the smallest state by population if it became a state

[McFlyOrPie]

Fun fact: 🤓
I live in York Pennsylvania. It's just West over the river from Lancaster. There are sooo many businesses here that use the phrase First Capital. Why? Because somebody supposedly did a rough draft of something called The Articles of Confederation, where the Country was referred as The United States of America for the first time. Yet technically, it was the "forth" capital when congress met here.

[kaisercortex]

I only clicked on this video because as a Marylander I yearn to be relevant and this video mentions Maryland.

[Fortzon]

3:40 It's amazing how little foresight the federal government had when making this restriction. Did they really think that Washington never grows enough to need all the land it was given? No wonder Alexandria City and Arlington County wanted to rejoin Virginia (on top of the slave thing) if you restrict new buildings only to the north of the Potomac and don't allow them anything new.

[heyvsauce]

Everyone knows old compromises never have gone bad

[mikemotter]

Tom Scott next year: why these stones are all around DC

[TS_Mind_Swept]

I never knew it was originally a full square, I always thought it was a weird shape because that's just how they do things 🤷🏿‍♀️

[dstinnettmusic]

Virginia later outlawed cities from absorbing surrounding counties, which was a practice the metropolitan areas did in response to white flight to try and keep their tax base.

This ultimately hurt the state as a whole because now Richmond and Petersburg can never reach their full economic potential. Richmond is a little tiny city, but if you include the surrounding counties it rounds out to become a much more respectably sized entity.

Which is all a part of the story of how Virginia went from mother presidents and capital of the south to the one with the Pentagon.

[tomthedespoiler]

LOL at 2:17: VA being shown as a sno radar blockers' sign while MD gets the Domino Sugar billboard in Baltimore is highly accurate to the DMV.

[schris]

4:15 Think about it, slavery cheapened labor costs, so in their minds the cost of leaving would be offset in the long term.

[mattguey-lee]

Fun fact I grew up in the South Arlington neighborhood of Fairlington. Behind one of my friend's house there was a mile marker for the Washington DC boundary.

[xp_studios]

"DC East was thriving!" is probably a sentence that nobody has uttered for 150 years

[icantthinkofaname]

“Wow, let’s see how Sam can stretch a single sentence in a 6-minute video”

[Gizmote]

I'm from Arlington and sometimes jokingly refer to it as "the rest of DC's square" or "the least southern part of the South". Also, DC statehood for the win!