And Washington’s old bugaboo, race, says they won’t either. Suburbanites, overwhelmingly white (except for the former D.C. residents of Prince George’s County, known to most as “Ward 9”), have already decided they want nothing to do with D.C. except as a place to collect paychecks.
The most sanguine of the Board of Trade drumbeaters admit that without suburban ticket-buyers, baseball can’t survive here.
Even the stream of middle-class white and black young people, the oft-ridiculed Yuppies and Bourgies who have come back to D.C. in the past eight years and more strongly since Mayor Anthony Williams (D) took over in 1998, have not changed the demographics of D.C. that much. It is still a 60 percent black city.
That famously “Chocolate City” is what the suburbanites view with a mixture of fascinated dread and contempt. They love to talk about the city and its foul-ups, its traffic jams, its incompetence, completely forgetting their own part in creating such flaws as there are by their craven flight from the venue of the greatest social issue of U.S. history — racism.
Say “Northwest Washington” to your suburban friends and there won’t be much reaction. See what you get when you say “Southeast Washington.” QED, as my old math teacher used to say.
Williams is an optimistic man who thinks that attitudes have changed and, as a result, that suburban whites will flock to deepest Southeast Washington to watch baseball. He also thinks that a stadium, which will be dark most of the time and will be surrounded by parking lots or parking structures, will be a magnet for development. Well, it hasn’t happened in Baltimore, and it won’t happen here.
So it was no surprise last week when more than 150 angry people showed up at a Southwest forum to shout down the mayor’s designated hitter, city Administrator Robert C. Bobb, during what was billed as a question-and-answer session and ended as a local uprising.
Nor was it any surprise when the City Council held hearings on the matter Oct. 28 — hearings that revealed Bobb and his teammate, Sports Commission Chairman Mark Tuohey, to be utterly unconvincing under the razor-sharp questioning of Councilman David Catania (I-At large), who pointed out that other new stadiums sold far fewer tickets than the optimists of D.C. predict.
Yet there is a solution: The team is going to play at RFK for three years in any case.
Let the start of construction of the new stadium be delayed, at least for that first year. Let the doubters and the cheerleaders both see if the people will come to a more familiar venue in sufficient numbers. Because if the city bulls ahead and spends the taxpayers’ $450 million and then baseball proves a flop, we’re headed for a real financial disaster.
D.C. in mourning
Post-election, beaten and unbelieving
Election week found Washington, usually a breezy and cynical place, in deep mourning.
No death caused the gloomy faces, head-shaking, slow steps or the talk about leaving the country, unless it was the death of the bubble of innocence that surrounds the city with a halo of liberal hopes and Democratic Party membership.
The most frequently heard outcry in the Hill’s coffee shops, on its sidewalks and markets, was this: “How could the rest of Americans be so stupid?” Less frequently heard: “Inside the Beltway is fantasyland.”
With the highest Democratic Party registration of any jurisdiction in the nation and three electoral votes the party can always count on, rejection at the polls on the scale of Tuesday’s is hard to take and leads to disbelief, anger and, only eventually, psychologists say, acceptance.
Said a close friend who works for Earth Justice: “Now Bush can complete the rape of the environment.”
Said a Russian friend: “The Europeans now believe the U.S. is in the hands of a radical evangelical theocracy — not unlike the mullahs of Iraq.”
Said a Kerry worker who had raised thousands for her candidate on the Hill: “I’m seriously thinking of moving — to Scotland.”
Curiously, Hill street thinking has never veered toward the obvious. No one in this Democratic enclave asks what went wrong — with the method, with the man, with the message. That, presumably, will come later.
costly repairs
Anacostia fails river ratings tests yet again
It seems that no matter how many times governments hear the facts, the sorry condition of the Anacostia River is still head-scratching news.
A “first ever” report from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) on the state of Washington’s second river cites raw sewage and street runoff as clear and obvious causes of pollution.
This is what local groups like the Anacostia Watershed Society and others have been pointing out for years, based on observation and analysis of the city’s antiquated sewage system. CBF reported that on a baseline of 100 — the condition of the river when Washington was first settled — the Anacostia now rates a 17.
The D.C. sewer system, built at the turn of the century, acts like a gutter that should carry wastewater to a pumping station and then off to the highly sophisticated purification plant at Blue Plains. But as soon as the volume of water gets above a certain point, it overflows directly into the river. That means during any intense rain or summer shower.
But it gets worse, because the overflow mixes directly with raw sewage from hundreds of thousands of toilets and other drains, and this also empties into the river, causing dangerous coliform bacteria to permeate the water. All local agencies are in agreement that the pollution is deplorable. And there is a plan, to build vast underground tanks to hold millions of gallons of the overflow in check until the pumps can handle it.
But that will cost plenty, some say as much as $1 billion, for it will mean replacing or lining many of the city’s under-street sewer lines as well as building the tanks. Naturally, money to start construction of the new sewer arrangement has proved easy to cut from budgets, replaced with lesser funding for more studies.
Now the CBF study points out that big plans for development along the Anacostia’s banks will depend for economic success on a cleaner river. Even baseball is involved, since a river awash with debris off the city’s streets doesn’t do much to attract fans a few hundred yards away.
METRO
• Barry Watch: Newly elected (by an exceptionally large number, more than 15,000 of 28,000 eligible Ward 8 voters) and newly bearded, former mayor, now Councilman-elect Marion Barry (D) quickly embarked on his new agenda: to stop baseball. The method must seem particularly sweet to Barry. He’ll use a D.C. law that requires council approval for contracts of $1 million or more. The law was passed to curb Barry’s own past spending problems. ...
• Anatolia Bazaar, the Turkish antiques and collectibles outpost at 631 Pennsylvania Ave. S.E., is to close down, according to owners Dilek and Mit Tildrin, who earlier sold the restaurant Anatolia in the same block to new owners. ...
• Those horrible Christmas cards — which always elicit either envy or rage — and show photos of someone’s glamorous family skiing at Aspen, yachting at St. Barts or other idiocy, are on sale at MotoPhoto here on the Hill, 15 percent off if ordered before Nov. 15. Infuriate your friends. ...
• Meet ink-stained wretches: The National Press Club’s Book Fair and Authors’ Night is looming, Nov. 17 at the club’s ballroom at 529 14th St. N.W. This is one of D.C.’s biggest bargains ($5 at the door). There meet and possibly buy the books of Joel Achenbach, Bob Edwards, Kinky Freedman, Judy Gelman, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Malachy McCourt and former Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.) (if they all show up). ...
• Chang Paik, vegetable grocer of the Eastern Market South Hall, has signed a contract to buy Capitol Hill Poultry, for many years the business of “Chickenman” Chris Nicholas. Another time, such a local dig deal might go unnoticed, but with Thanksgiving looming, Paik will have to rush to get ready for the 4,000-5,000 turkeys that the poultry stand, now under interim operation, usually sells. ...
• Harriet Pressler, energetic Re/Max-agent wife of former Sen. Larry Pressler (R-S.D.), has been appointed by the Congressional Club to the Congressional Spouses Orientation Committee — which guides incoming members to new D.C. addresses. Few will chose the Hill, Pressler warns: It’s just too expensive. ...
• My Brother’s Place, the popular hole in the wall for Hill lunchers at 237 2nd St. N.W., has been sold and is going upscale with a new chef imported from the Watergate, new menu and new logo.
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