Overshadowed by his more luminous contemporaries, Pierre Charles L'Enfant and Andrew Ellicott, Nicholas King was the surveyor and engineer responsible for laying out and platting the property to become the capital's docklands. An immigrant from Yorkshire who was looking to acquire land to farm, King undertook engineering work on the side to supplement his income. His task-establishing lot lines for developers to build wharves for oceangoing vessels along the shore of the Potomac-was no easy one. Reconciling L'Enfant's geometric scheme for city blocks with the curve of the natural shoreline shaped by the tidal channel was likely a frustrating and difficult geometry problem. Though Washington never became as busy a port as New York or Boston, a vibrant waterfront nonetheless sprang up from Nicholas King's modest shoreline work.
No evidence of the nineteenth-century waterfront remains, as the intervening landfill, home to the Jefferson Memorial, now occupies the shoals known then as Potomac Flats, while the old waterfront has been rationalized as a smooth seawall abutting the discharge channel for the Tidal Basin.