On June 28, Ward 6 D.C. City Council member Tommy Wells and First District police Cmdr. Diane Groomes led an evening walk with about 20 constituents on the northeast side of Capitol Hill. The walks have become a monthly tradition in which concerned neighbors join shoe-leather city officials to scan the streets and poke around alleys and vacant lots, often peeping into trash-filled backyards. 

The plan this time was to start at 7th and G streets NE and make a three-by-four-block loop, but the group moved very slowly. After over an hour of plodding, the gang had only reached the halfway point on the 900 block of 3rd Street, intersected by an alley. While most people stayed at the entrance, chatting, Wells decided to march down the alley. After a few minutes, Wells hurried back and urged Chief of Staff Charles Allen and constituent services and committee specialist
Daniel Conner to join him at the other end.

There, Wells held his jacket over his nose.

“This is one of the foulest end-of-an-alleys we’ve got,” he said, tiptoeing around strewn garbage and slime puddles. Nobody could explain the smell, which made Hillscape think of diapers and rotten lobsters.

The puddles appeared to be long-standing. They were bright green. Allen seemed upset, or excited, to have gotten some of the slime on his shoe.

“There’s sewage here. There’s prostitution in that car,” said Wells, pointing at a broken-down vehicle behind a chain-link fence that could easily be pushed over. “This can’t be allowed.”

A woman emerged from the back of one of the houses on the alley, curious about all the cops and suits peeking at the hideous refuse behind her home. She said the garbage wasn’t all hers and that the Department of Public Works was taking away only six items at a time.

“It will all be gone tomorrow,” she said.

Once everyone had had his or her fill of the alley, Wells decided the walk had gone on long enough, and the group dispersed after a brief powwow.

“We certainly crowned it off with a bang at the end,” Wells said. “I hope we can’t top that.”

Happy Fourth of July

My predecessor in this space, Duncan Spencer, penned a stirring lament in 2005 about the security fortress that Capitol Hill had become. Shortly after Independence Day, he wrote: “As I recall the Hill’s favorite holiday, July 4 began with a rustling of lawn chairs.”

But instead of hearing “light, clinking music” that year, Spencer found barriers, bag checks, machine guns and strict regulations on where to go and what to do. “The Capitol has become a Third World country, a kind of Haiti,” he wrote. During the celebration, an officer told him that an entire side of the Capitol was closed off because “that’s all they allotted us.”

Spencer concluded: “It must be time to ask, who is ‘they,’ and who are we?”

I don’t have a good answer, except that “we” definitely pay for all this “security madness” with “our” tax money. It’s worth adding that the ever-increasing costs and delays to the Capitol Visitor Center — which was supposed to be finished long before Spencer wrote those words — add an additional measure of absurd wastefulness to the whole July 4th scenario.

It is also worth mentioning that Spencer’s indignation already seems quaint. Inane and intrusive security measures have become as common as tying your shoelaces after going through a metal detector. Future generations probably won’t even complain.
 

Program likely to mitigate Peabody de facto segregation

This fall, the public Peabody preschool on C Street NE will accept its first class of 3-year-olds as part of a new early-learning program. Currently, there are two schools at the Peabody campus: Peabody proper, downstairs, and the School-Within-School at Peabody, upstairs. The two programs have near-opposite racial makeup, basically because many white families who have recently moved into the schools’ boundary area have been eager to send their kids to the arts-based “upstairs” program, while the traditional, literacy-oriented “downstairs” program has continued to absorb more out-of-boundary black children. Both schools are highly respected.

The new program for 3-year-olds, which likely will appeal to in-boundary white folks, requires a commitment to the downstairs program.

Lisa Raymond, who represents Wards 5 and 6 on the State Board of Education, is going to have her twins in the new program. She expects that a side effect of the requirement that the new class’s members commit to Peabody’s downstairs school may be to alleviate the white/black imbalance by making downstairs more representative of the immediate neighborhood.

SE branch back and fabulous

Capitol Hill’s public library, the Southeast Branch of the D.C. public library system, re-opened on June 24 after a nearly two-month-long renovation — and it looks good. Outside, it’s the same building, with some nice landscaping added.
Inside, instead of dreary brown shelf-corridors and oppressive fluorescent buzzing, the main floor is wide open and flooded with natural light. The centerpiece of the room is a stately fireplace with soft reading chairs arrayed in front of it.

Library Journal magazine targeted the Southeast Branch to use as a showcase for a June conference of the American Library Association, but several neighborhood groups also helped. The makeover is a testament to community’s commitment to this public resource.

City’s emergency preparedness is still for the dogs