There’s a well-known line in Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” that goes something like this: “When the needed cash is ready, there’s always a happy ending.”

So let it be with the massive infrastructure rebuilding planned for 7th Street S.E., the little commercial zone dominated by the glowing red-brick pile of Eastern Market, which is a target for so many Hill dwellers’ strolls and forays.

Because there is windfall money in the D.C. budget, perhaps because long-laid plans for improvements are inching forward, perhaps because the temperature in the community room of the Hill natatorium swooped close to the freezing mark, last week’s meeting of the Eastern Market Community Advisory Committee (EMCAC) was suspiciously, smoothly amiable.

But beneath the decorum lay the old questions: Why can’t the city take care of simple maintenance such as leaky gutters and water seepage, not to mention bringing the building up to the city’s own code? Why can’t the city do anything on time (except a baseball stadium)? It seems the seven-member quorum under Chairwoman Donna Scheeder had become simply inured to endless delay and excuses.

With one exception — former EMCAC Chairwoman Ellen Opper-Weiner reflected angrily afterward that the pace of improvements to the ancient market, and the performance of Eastern Market Manager Stuart Smith, have been way below par. “It’s been five and a half years,” she told The Hill. “The points are still the same, and guess what: Nothing’s been done.”

Indeed, Peter May, co-spokesman with Aimee Occhetti for the city’s Office of Property Management (OPM), hinted at disorganization and disarray because of departures of personnel from OPM. He refused to answer Opper-Weiner’s request for a timetable of badly needed work to be done. “I wish I could say it was moving faster,” he said.

One bright spot was EMCAC Capital Improvements Committee Chairman Monte Edwards, who is by training both a mechanical engineer and a lawyer. Edwards reported that the city and the D.C. Department of Transportation had agreed to such deluxe streetscape improvements as special curbs, period-style lampposts, rebricking and replacement of gutters and downspouts. The city will also repair lights that were mistakenly placed on the 7th Street side of the new market farmers shed. One day, if the needed cash is still ready, they will illuminate the market’s noble architectural detail at night.

Edwards has insisted that he, as well as city agencies, review final plans. 

D.C. General Hospital: Tony’s bitter dose

Mayor Anthony Williams (D) should stay completely away from hospitals — they are, with double irony, his aching Achilles’ heel.

First, the brouhaha and resentment over the closing of D.C. General has continued to fester. Then, the replacement hospital, Greater Southeast, appeared to please no one and seemed a financial disaster. Now a fresh hospital mess is brewing over an unlikely plan to build a brand-new hospital with Howard University at the site of D.C. General.

Critics complain that from not enough hospitals we will have too many — but at the same time not enough to serve the approximately 73,400 D.C. residents without any health insurance, who never pay their medical bills but appear regularly for treatment at emergency rooms and clinics.

The idea that the new $400 million hospital — National Capital Medical Center — would not be a “poor person’s” facility simply confounds logic because the proposed site is surrounded by the city’s poorest residential areas, Wards 8, 7 and 5. Its construction would certainly affect Greater Southeast, which has struggled, emerging from bankruptcy last year.

There is the question of massive, existing D.C. General. Is it to be torn down? Adaptively reused? Or would it not be logical and less expensive to adapt its physical plant to a new medical facility?

There’s also the question of the city’s network of health clinics, the Healthcare Alliance, which is getting better reviews as residents become familiar with healthcare in neighborhood clinics. A return to a big hospital on the D.C. General site, some say, would inevitably lead to old habits of using hospital emergency services for everything from nosebleeds to heart attacks.

Then there is the question of the city’s financial partner, Howard University. Subsidized by the federal government at a rate of $42 million a year (40 percent of its annual running costs), the university has a modest endowment of $333 million. The university wants to keep its own hospital and build the new one as well. Howard University Hospital has lost accreditation for some medical programs, yet it is Howard that is pushing for “world class” status for the new hospital.

The critics are led by charismatic City Council member David Catania (I-At large), who is hinted to be ready to challenge for the mayor’s job, whether or not Williams decides to run.

Behind all the objections is a wish for a targeted medical facility — for the poor. This could be built by adapting existing D.C. General structures and could complement the D.C. Healthcare Alliance.

Cardozo can’t stop spillage, hysteria

Farce has followed fiasco at mercury-haunted Cardozo High School, shut down for a cleanup necessitated by mischievous students who purposefully spilt the stuff, then shut down again last week when minute particles of mercury were found in a stairwell.

The moonscape image of workers in white suits with gas masks covered such lugubrious facts as these: It cost $150,000 for the first “cleanup” of 2 ounces of the potentially dangerous element.

Then school officials solemnly announced last week that professional cleaners might have missed additional mercury because the elaborate masks hampered their eyesight. Another furor was ignited when the alleged perpetrators, all teenage boys, claimed that they got the mercury from the school lab — which was supposedly clear of the stuff.

That claim makes the high school, not the kids, culpable in the weird world of D.C.’s no-fault teens.

Now parents are claiming that the school’s unsafe, another “cleanup” will be added to the bill and the alleged perpetrators are facing “cruelty to children” charges as well as the ultimate punishment in D.C.’s zany school world — suspension or expulsion, which well may make them subject to truancy charges as well.

METRO

• Hill bar inventor Joe Englert (Capitol Lounge, Politiki, Pour House) planning a boîte named Temperance? A June opening is planned at Petworth Metro, a housing hotspot for young urbanites near Georgia Avenue. Englert and partners saw a need for a 1920s-theme restaurant on the somewhat desolate strip and, to Joe, prohibition seemed not too far a leap. ...

• Eastern Market’s brainy butcher Bill Glasgow a year ago spotted a line in the Eastern Market legislation allowing market rents to be raised “102 percent of the Consumer Price Index” — and alarm bells rang. Last week, he petitioned for a change in the language to “102 percent of the change of the CPI.” ...

• Barry Watch: The former mayor and current council member (D-Ward 8), Marion Barry, has weighed in to the hospital controversy with a new idea of his own. He wants a new $400 million facility to be built — not on Reservation 13 (the old D.C. General site) but in Anacostia, where it would be on his new-won political turf. …

• Another hit show at the National Building Museum — a review of 250 years of the tools and techniques architects use. “Tools of the Imagination” opened last week. Location: 5th and E streets N.W. …

• Get arty, with a reception at Apex Gallery, celebrating its first year on so trendy 7th Street N.W. Friday, March 11 is the date, 6-8 p.m. the time and 406 7th St. N.W. the venue. …

• New on the Net: www.neighborhoodinfodc.org is a fact-packed exploration of city neighborhoods arranged by ward, neighborhood cluster, census tract and other tools, with demographic, census, social, economic and other measures designed for interested urbanites. ...

• About those new assessments. Capitol Hill was hit hard by the new tax valuations, with most row houses going up $100,000 or thereabouts. Seasoned residents such as Marie Birnbaum say: “Appeal. I always have and it sometimes works.” She and others advise writing well before the April 1 deadline, mentioning all the improvements you haven’t made, plus that clammy hell of a basement.