By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 21, 2005; Page DZ03

So often, Washington seems a place divided -- federal against local, suburbs against city, east vs. west, black vs. white, rich and poor, public and private. We even have one river for the haves and one for the have-nots.

But Washington is gloriously united in one regard: No matter where we live, no matter our station in life, we are absolutely convinced that the folks on the other side of town have a corner on the city government's attention. It's the people across the park who get the prompt police response, the dependable garbage pickups, the good city jobs. Perhaps the most fervently held belief is the deep-seated notion that Washingtonians across Rock Creek Park from wherever we may live get all the good recreation facilities -- the fields, tracks, gyms, pools and recreation centers -- that everyone expects as a basic perk of citizenship.

The result is a cavalcade of controversies pitting children against old folks, baseball lovers against soccerites, dog owners against moms and toddlers, and on and on -- people squabbling, yelling, demanding, protesting, suing and voting over who gets to play what where.

"These are culture wars," says Neil O. Albert, deputy mayor for children, youth, families and elders, discussing the faceoffs that seem to occur in nearly every neighborhood. "It's part of the change in the city. Lots of single people moving in and they need a place to run their dogs, families moving to neighborhoods needing playgrounds, different populations with different needs, and often they clash."

Albert doesn't look like a tough guy: He's lean and supple, a veteran who has survived by mastering one of the world's most notorious bureaucracies. But Albert is a political heavyweight, a prizefighter who rose to his current job last summer after heading the District's Department of Parks and Recreation for three years, and taking the agency from a state of utter dysfunction to a place where it regularly designs and builds impressive facilities that residents love.

Along the way, Albert learned that recreation is an oddly useful guide to the differences that hold this city back, and to the solutions that show the way forward.

When federal money became available to improve Kenilworth Park, the 180-acre open-space facility on the eastern shore of the Anacostia River in Northeast, the city proposed an ambitious expansion of soccer fields to serve the many teams that find it hard to schedule playing time around town. But neighbors of the park protested the plan, citing it as evidence that the District was catering to rich white people and their sports interests.

"The concern was, 'Hey, black people don't play soccer,' " Albert says. "Well, I was born in Guyana, and black people do play soccer." Still, the city worked with neighbors, scaled back the soccer plan from 10 fields to three and, at the neighbors' request, added baseball, softball, football and tennis facilities, as well as a walking track.

Albert recalls showing up for a neighborhood meeting at McLean Gardens in Northwest a couple of years ago to find a room packed with people raring for a fight. They had heard that the city was planning to install a dog run nearby, and the word was that the land would come from the community garden.

"Gardens, Not Dogs," said the signs and chants that greeted him. It was all Albert could do to try to convince the crowd that there was no need for such choice, that no one was seeking to take away the people's gardens.

Whether the issue is dog runs vs. soccer fields in Mount Pleasant (young, single whites vs. Hispanic immigrants), kids' sports vs. fallow open space on a school field in Georgetown (yuppie families vs. old folks), or basketball vs. soccer at Upshur Street Park (longtime black residents vs. Hispanic newcomers), recreation debates are often a convenient way to vent ethnic and economic rivalries.

The vehemence of these battles reflects a commitment to activity that transcends neighborhood, economic and ethnic boundaries. Despite our reputation as Wonkville, with workaholics whose collective factory whistle always blows in the dark, Washington is also a place that plays hard. When foreign dignitaries gather for breakfast at the Watergate Hotel, they look out the picture windows onto the Potomac and marvel at the stream of joggers and walkers passing along the riverfront path.

"You are such an energetic people," a minister of the German government said one early morning as he swallowed cup after cup of coffee in an effort to prod himself into useful activity. "In most of the world, we would rather be in bed."

But how we express ourselves in those hours outside the office varies according to where we live and who we are, and therein lies a story that says a great deal about the challenges facing a city all too divided -- a city whose most prominent feature on a map is an enormous and ambitious park.

Albert moved to Shepherd Park in Northwest five years ago, when it was still primarily a neighborhood of middle-aged, black empty-nesters. Residents wanted a recreation center with a big gym and rooms for community meetings and crafts classes for retirees. But more recently, change has come to the area in the form of younger families, black and white.

"Now it's, 'Instead of a big rec center, can we have a toddler playground, open space, a walking track on the elementary school field?' " Albert says. "Needs change, and that's not mainly race, but the changing economic makeup of the community."

In the best situations, neighborhoods can rely on longtime residents who embrace change to act as volunteer mediators and find solutions to these conflicts. In Adams Morgan, Katie Davis, a radio documentary producer who has lived all her life in the neighborhood, took it upon herself to engage both dog owners and local kids in search of a peaceful way to accommodate both two-legged and four-legged ramblings in Walter Pierce Park. Young, white kickball players, teenage Hispanic soccer players, black youths at the basketball hoops, moms at the playground and dog walkers all consider Davis an ally, and she has managed to corral people from all those groups to help with her Saturday park cleanups and her Urban Rangers camp program for neighborhood youngsters.

"We used to get letters saying, 'Darn these white folks thinking they can run us out of here with their dogs,' " Albert recalls. "When we have great community leaders, we can arrange meetings and let them talk among themselves, and the leaders help people bridge differences."

Across town in Eastland Gardens, civic association President Dalton Howard plays a similar role, bringing volunteers together to make Kenilworth Recreation Center a vibrant community resource that keeps kids active and engaged while also giving older folks a place to gather.

"Anybody who comes into our community is going to learn that in our area, the community controls the parks," Howard says. "And regardless of race or income, the community knows more than the city. You have to bring the people together and create a viable organization."

But as often as such groups find consensus, other neighborhoods splinter over recreation issues. The resentments and suspicions that chronically limit the District's progress get all tangled up with the clamor for places to swim, run and play ball.

In affluent Ward 3 in upper Northwest, there is no state-of-the-art city recreation center, no public swimming pool, no ice rink. When improvements are made to parks and playgrounds, it is often local residents who organize the project and pay the freight. Yet east of the Anacostia, where the city has built a slew of new facilities, neighborhood groups grumble about how the rich white folks get all the new investment.

People on both sides of the divide keep asking: Whose city is this? The answer is rarely simple. It's true that a hugely disproportionate share of government investment in recreation facilities goes to less affluent areas east of the park. In the past five years, according to Albert, the District has built $40 million worth of new facilities in Ward 4 in that portion of Northwest that is east of Rock Creek. Ward 5 in Northeast has received the second-largest amount of spending, followed by Ward 7 east of the river, Ward 6 in Capitol Hill and environs and Ward 8 in Southeast. At the bottom of the list are the three wards stretching from downtown through Georgetown and on through upper Northwest (in order of spending, Wards 2, 1 and 3).

Those spending priorities are partly justified by the fact that poorer neighborhoods have greater needs, and more kids live in those sections of the city. But the baby boom in upper Northwest and the desire of many families there to stay in town rather than flee to the suburbs has increased pressure for more attention to areas that had previously been left to fend for themselves.

Yet when the city attempts to satisfy those requests, it often meets with vociferous and powerful opposition from neighbors who want nothing built. When the District committed to putting one of its fancy new rec centers at Stoddert Elementary School in Glover Park -- the model everyone seems to love is the Kennedy Recreation Center at Seventh and P streets NW in Shaw -- some neighbors went into activist overdrive, insisting instead on preserving trees and open space. Result: The city will build a much smaller facility that will provide virtually no relief for Northwest Washington kids who now travel to Maryland and Virginia for most recreational activities.

Similar howls from the NIMBY -- Not in My Back Yard -- crowd have gummed up attempts to build baseball fields at Fort Reno Park, a boathouse along the Potomac and an indoor pool at Volta Park in Georgetown.

District officials argue that they do not cave in to every nattering nabob of NIMBYism. "We don't react to the extremes," Albert says. "We look for consensus, and when a neighborhood tells us they don't want something, we make adjustments."

But he also admits to a certain frustration over the District's thin offerings. "I just got sick of hearing about all the things we couldn't do here," he says. "I kept hearing, 'I have to take my 3-year-old to Montgomery County for swimming lessons.' "

This winter, the city, after incessant lobbying by D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty (D-Ward 4), opened its $16 million Takoma Aquatic Center, featuring the District's first Olympic-size indoor pool. Another large indoor swimming facility will open this summer at Turkey Thicket, in Ward 5. But upper Northwest residents will have to continue to rely on suburban pools. Despite efforts by council member Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3) to get the University of the District of Columbia to live up to its commitment to make its pool available to residents, UDC grudgingly provides only an hour or so a day of public access. A rehabilitation of the Woodrow Wilson High School pool will not happen until at least 2008, Albert says.

"Regardless of where you live, you want functional programs," he says. For many years, the government had trouble delivering that minimum to any part of the city. Now that Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) has retooled the government to the point where some of the basics are reliable -- pumping $122 million into a six-year effort to rebuild parks and recreation centers -- the differing demands of the city's diverse communities get heard as they rarely did before.

The city, for example, launched a Black Invitational Swim Meet, giving new Washington swim teams a chance to compete with squads from other cities. The District teams tend to get trounced by swimmers from Baltimore, Detroit and other places, but the program has created a new demand for pool time. And that has helped build political support for restoring the dilapidated Capital East Natatorium, the city's major public indoor swim center before the Takoma facility opened.

In better-organized parts of town, officials say their challenge is not to jump-start community involvement, but to react to an already deeply involved public. Cooperative play programs at D.C. Chevy Chase and Turtle Park in American University Park began as initiatives of local parents, whose only request of the city was to provide the venue.

"The parents show up and coach their teams and fund-raise for the equipment," Albert says. "All they want from us is to provide the facility and get out of the way."

In contrast, community groups in many other parts of the District frequently complain that the city is not providing sufficient programs to get kids off the streets. "My wife thinks that by just responding to every request for programs, we enable folks east of the park and don't give them the incentive to initiate their own community activities," Albert says.

Those who live along streets of too much sorrow say their demands are not the result of a wish to have government take care of everything, but rather a recognition that young people who are not kept busy will end up in trouble.

"We do need more programs," Dalton Howard says. "Kids are dropping out of school, and they are on the street. If we don't give them options, we will pay the price."

Just as with the District's schools, police and social services, the parks and recreation leaders in a divided city must find a way to cope with too many young people whose needs are not fulfilled by parents.

"There's no one answer in this city," Albert says. "Every neighborhood is different."