Here’s a pretty fantastic video — the result of “years of painstaking work and research” by Dan Bailey, director of the Imaging Research Center (IRC) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County — which attempts to show what Washington, D.C. looked like 200 years ago. According to the Bailey worked with “architectural historians, cartographers, engineers, and ecologists to assess the often-unreliable eyewitness accounts and to recreate a ‘best guess’ glimpse of the early city” — a truly fascinating glimpse into the hand that L’Enfant was dealt. You can check out more information about Bailey’s project at the project’s website.