It’s a given that RFK Stadium at East Capitol Street and the Anacostia is history. The 1961 landmark is to be torn down as soon as alternate locations can be found for the soccer teams who use it — and the Nationals have moved to the new stadium.

A standing-room-only crowd at the old Naval Hospital last week heard David Zaidain of the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) present options and ask for ideas about the 190 acres — much of it asphalt, some covered by the Armory and its buildings — on the property.

The upshot was vague. There were proposals from Hill residents for a recreation facility with baseball fields, perhaps a regional recreation center. Some want commercial development, pointing out that little shopping exists east of the Safeway at 14th Street S.E. Others wanted housing, or a mix.

Zaidain said there is no group supporting the retention of the stadium.

One of the peculiarities of the site is that it belongs entirely to the federal government, making the thought of commercial development somewhat remote. The land is now leased to the District “for stadium purposes,” Zaidain said. The NCPC has its own vision.

The federal planning body sees the area as “dramatic gateways to the city,” according to NCPC Chairman John V. Cogbill III. Under its 1997 master plan for the east-west axis of Washington, the site is the only logical location for “new museums, memorials, federal office buildings” and other structures to be built as the city grows.

The NCPC sees the Mall as filled almost to capacity, requiring a fresh start eastward.

Yet, in spite of intense public interest in the immediate future of the site once the baseball switch occurs, the NCPC will take until fall to evaluate the comments and suggestions, and only then submit a report to the full commission.

PARKING — THE PROBLEM
The weak side of the stadium

A stadium squabble over underground versus above ground parking. A mini crime wave. Sagging attendance at Nationals baseball at RFK.

What is the link? It is called parking.

It can be argued that the parking issue is the most important one facing the future of the stadium, and that current projections — that some suburban fans will want to walk almost half a mile through Southeast Washington’s least-known tip — is a joke.

Suburban viewers are the keys to the Nationals success. Most admit that. Suburbanites’ view of comfort is a large parking lot with plenty of spaces open in full view of the destination. You can see this at every suburban “big box,” at malls, theaters and strips everywhere from Tysons Corner to White Flint.

Unless that comfort zone is afforded, you can also count on the Nationals fans dropping out in droves. And as for the proposal to use Robert F. Kennedy Stadium’s lots, with a hypothetical seven-minute shuttle bus to the new stadium, it’s a suburbanite’s worst nightmare.

A car is as natural to the suburbanite as a needle to a junkie. It is safety, it is security, and it is air conditioning — and a promise that no matter how long it takes, eventually that car will move from the hell that is the city to the heaven that is the cul-de-sac.

The point is, unless the planners handle the cars right, the whole edifice of development of the “new” Southeast around the stadium is threatened. It may be that the proposed large parking garages, clad with condo units, can carry the parking traffic; another plan may surface. But to treat safe, close and plentiful parking as a budget-maybe is sheer madness.

If a couple of holdups panicked tourists on the Mall and a murder paralyzed Georgetown, imagine what a couple of bloody crimes could do for “new” Southeast. How fragile the projections are, that are made on the whims of people who live far from D.C.

REACTION ABOUT REACTION
Crime story has feet

Once in a great while, the dirty little secrets of D.C. are unveiled — and it’s not pretty.

This time it took Police Chief Charles Ramsey’s so-called “crime emergency,” dutifully followed by a shuffling of the street troops, a tough curfew on teens and fresh resolutions to post crime cameras in sketchy neighborhoods and actually check juvenile’s records — plus a tiny bit of introspection.

What are those dirty secrets? Mainly that this city, famous for “diversity” and nearing a 50-50 black-white split, is pretty much like a Southern town when it comes to crime.

That is to say that the ownership class, both blacks and whites, pays little attention to what the non-ownership (poor folks) do to one another. The high number of gun killings (though fewer than during the “murder capital” years) really don’t raise any civic ire or cause a crisis. Many people simply write these murders, both victims and perpetrators, as business as usual — “players” selling and cheating on drug deals, domestic disputes, robberies.

The owners don’t need to pay attention to these crimes. They are easy enough to avoid. You just stay away from the areas where large numbers of poor people live — parts of Wards 7 and 8, 5, 4 — and stick to the owners part of town, west of Rock Creek Park, Ward 3. Or you can stick to the gentrified portions of Capitol Hill. Or downtown, which each day is flooded with 350,000 owner-type people commuting in from the suburbs.

The “emergency” comes when the line between the owners and the non-owners is crossed — as happened in Georgetown and on the Mall. There poor people, who were also criminals and black, attacked owners who were white and presumably not “players.” And they did it in places where poor people seldom go.

The reaction was fierce and immediate, and historically predictable. Now there is counter-reaction. Advocates for the poor say this is really a race crisis, another instance of the owners failing to deal with the causes of poverty and ignorance and failed families and terrible schools.

But the introspection fails if it just comes up nods about social problems and social programs. D.C. has been doing this for years, reinventing the wheel with new programs and plenty of hand-wringing. What the city has got to do now is something new. Just as middle-class whites left D.C. in the ’50s during “white flight,” so middle-class blacks left D.C. in the ’80s and ’90s, leaving for housing opportunity.

The resulting mix exacerbates the differences between the owners and the non-owners, between blacks and whites. The rich are now richer, the poor relatively poorer, and in some sections of the city the rich and white (and some black) are pouring into the thousands of “luxury” condos built for them.

What’s to be done before the city’s poor blacks become a marginalized population, as in Miami? Perhaps it is time for a jobs program of last resort, a suggestion made long ago by one D.C. icon named Marion Barry.

Metro

• Ward 6 candidate for City Council Will Cobb — he who forgot to file with the Board of Elections and Ethics — is going ahead with plans to file as an independent candidate, after his appeal to rejoin the Democratic contenders failed. Cobb announced last Saturday that he was in the race in spite of the widely publicized snafu — that may have actually given him a publicity boost. ...

• Joe Fengler, chairman of Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 6A (Northeast Hill), wants one of the police department’s surveillance cameras aimed at one of H Street’s most notorious alleys — between 12th and 13th streets and Linden Place, sometimes known as AutoZone Alley. Fengler’s the first to ask for camera placement, part of MPDC Chief Charles Ramsey’s anti-crime plan. ...

• The 11th Street Bridge is coming down — all but the stone foundations — and with it the Hill’s Anacostia Community Boathouse at 11th and O streets S.E. The boathouse, originally used to develop small craft for World War II, now houses several rowing clubs. But all but one of the plans for reconstruction of the massive bridge over the river call for its removal. ...

• Marion Barry’s watching — with some amusement we presume — the latest flap over D.C.’s ever-swelling ranks of city-bureaucrat fat cats who live elsewhere but get paid here, thereby avoiding taxes, using county schools, getting the best of both worlds. Barry railed against the practice, mostly in vain. Tireless Ed Lazere of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute researched to find 60 percent of city employees who live out, work in cost the city between $50 million and 100 million per year. ...

• ANC 6B — the Hill’s aldermanic Advisory Neighborhood Commission (Southeast Hill) has spoken its last for the summer (next meeting Sept. 13) and has endorsed that long-hoped-for linkup between the Southeast/Southwest Freeway and the Anacostia Freeway headed to Maryland. When and the rest of the details still await. ...

• News sleuths at the local paper Capitol Hill Current Voice of the Hill scored a coup with the uncovering of an allegedly illicit massage parlor at 719 8th St. S.E. in the midst of the Hill’s Barracks Row. This is the first Capitol Hill house-of-ill-repute scandal in years.