Another Southeast stadium?

It’s not even noon, and a few guys sitting in a tiny park at the intersection of Good Hope Road and Minnesota Avenue SE are all fired up about the idea of a soccer stadium up the street in Anacostia Park.

“They took the Redskins out and brought in baseball. That’s bad enough,” says Kevin Wilson, 37, who isn’t much of a soccer fan.

“You mean we’re talking about another one?” asks Vincent Trice, 49, who until now hadn’t even heard of plans for a stadium this side of the river. “Hell no!”
From Poplar Point, the site in Anacostia Park where the D.C. United soccer team wants to build a stadium surrounded by mixed-use development, you get a great view of the ballpark going up for the Washington Nationals on the other side of the Anacostia River. The ballpark is publicly financed, even though a majority of residents told pollsters they didn’t want it.

United owner Victor MacFarlane sees Poplar Point as a promising spot for a similar publicly financed venture with housing and retail. The city balked at United’s reported demand for $200 million in city subsidies, but the team still wants its stadium, and so do the local community’s elected representatives.

Marion Barry, who serves the area on the D.C. Council, initially opposed the project, but says he warmed to it when he realized it wasn’t about just soccer. These guys in the park love Barry but they are not as assured as he is by promises of retail and affordable housing.

To them, the likely outcome of a soccer stadium with mixed-use development would be akin to the baseball stadium: games they don’t care about, luxury condos for rich people and a surge in property values that will force them out of town.

Mary Cuthbert, chairwoman of the local advisory neighborhood commission, says the plan has broad community support, and that people tend to have knee-jerk reactions when they hear about it as mainly a soccer thing.

But others say Anacostians are being misrepresented by their local government.

“The citizens in Anacostia don’t want it,” says Yvette Barnes-Washington of One DC, a Shaw-based neighborhood advocacy group that got involved in Anacostia seven months ago. Barnes-Washington told Hillscape to go talk to people on Good Hope Road SE and see what they think. So Hillscape conducted a very informal street poll Aug 1. Of a dozen polled, eight had heard of the stadium idea. None liked it.

The funny thing is that both sides of this debate say they have the community’s support, and both sides think what’s happening now is unfair. Maybe they can find common ground at Poplar Point, looking across the river to see how much popular opinion has mattered in the past.

Traffic and cars drive local agendas

People often think of suburbanites, not city dwellers, as the car worshippers. But in several areas of Ward 6, cars are driving the neighborhood agenda, and parking is sacrosanct — it’s right up there with serious stuff like crime and education.

In Southeast, the Friends of Garfield Park are worried about a plan to relocate D.C. Police Headquarters to a building on Virginia Avenue SE, right next to the park. The new headquarters would also include the headquarters for the First District, which will be relocated from its current spot in Southwest. But Southeast residents aren’t as thrilled about having more cops as Southwesters are upset about having fewer — quite the opposite.

A recent FOGP newsletter explains the group’s wariness: “While we appreciate the police presence, we are very concerned about the amount of their presence … The parking necessary for the building is over 600 cars with 80 on-street spaces needed.”

“This would just be another burden on a neighborhood that is already crowded,” says FOGP member Monica Sullivan. “We have narrow streets and few garages. We don’t have many options.”

Meanwhile, in Northeast, there is a tug of war between residents and the AppleTree public charter preschool, which bought an old building on 12th Street NE to open a new campus. Both sides have filed appeals with the Zoning Commission, and neighbors have successfully lobbied the commission to close the “loophole” that allowed AppleTree to develop its property.

Advisory neighborhood commissioner David Holmes moved to the neighborhood so he could ditch hellish commutes. But as a commission member, he must constantly address traffic and parking problems, which he says are getting worse.

In Southwest, residents are anxious about the mayhem to be caused by baseball games at the new waterfront stadium. Not only do Southwesters fear that their parking spots will be taken up by game-goers; they worry that extreme stadium traffic will clog every road out of the quadrant, trapping residents inside. 

Call it the Aparkalypse. 

Fixing up the Folger

A fire in the Folger Theatre’s wardrobe room last October delayed the opening of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by only one week, but it wasn’t until this summer that the damage could be surveyed in-depth. Some surprises popped up.

Water used to extinguish the fire had damaged hand-carved decorations throughout the theater and caused wood in the stage floor to warp and buckle. In addressing those problems, general contractor Allyn Johnson says his crews discovered on the theater’s columns old paint that had been obscured by years of varnish.

“We’re bringing back colors,” he said as his crew pried up floorboards and painted small tiles throughout the theater. Come October, audiences will be treated to more than just brown.

“It’s just so lovely now,” said Judith Peck, who mixed golds, blues, reds and blacks to restore the theater to its original appearance. “I really enjoyed just doing the job.”

Token of fame

On Feb. 2, The Washington Post published a story about the crime-fighting heroics of Northeast Capitol Hill resident Gary Peterson, who bludgeoned an armed intruder with a frying pan in his kitchen.

Since then, Peterson says, every single day somebody asks him, “Hey, aren’t you the frying pan guy?”

Yes, he is, he tells the questioners. Then he hands them a pin shaped like a little frying pan.

“People refer to me as frying pan man, I give them a pin,” he says. Peterson had 500 pins custom manufactured to make himself feel more at home in the whole crazy story, since he figures it will follow him for the rest of his life.

“I’m really kind of embarrassed by being known as the frying pan man,” he says.