Logan Circle Group Prays for Deliverance
Illegal Church Parking Mostly Ignored

By Paul Schwartzman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 5, 2006

Jason Powell fully expected hassles from city living -- the panhandlers, the litter, the prostitutes -- when he bought his Logan Circle rowhouse 18 months ago.

What he did not foresee was being unable to drive his Toyota on Sundays.

The reason: worshipers going to church.

In a long-standing practice outside congregations across the city, one largely ignored by police, parishioners routinely descend on neighborhoods on Sundays and leave their cars in crosswalks and on the yellow stripes in the middle of the street and block cars by double parking.

Powell and a cluster of neighbors have mounted a campaign to prod the District to enforce the regulations in Logan Circle, one that has angered clergy and their congregations and exposed tensions borne of a previously sleepy downtown that is now booming with new condominiums and residents.

"This church has been here since the 1800s, and they just moved here," Metropolitan Baptist Church member Joi Brown, 22, said on a recent Sunday morning after parking her gold Dodge on Vermont Avenue a few feet from a "No Parking" sign, with her left wheels resting on the concrete median.

Hers was among more than 50 illegally parked cars in the immediate area, many with Maryland and Virginia license plates, as their owners headed to services at Metropolitan and Vermont Avenue Baptist Church, the largest of four congregations in the neighborhood.

"It's just once a week," Brown said. "They're praising the Lord. Let it go."

Dee Hunter, chairman of the Advisory Neighborhood Commission that includes neighboring Shaw, home to a number of congregations, compared the residents' campaign to a "witch hunt" and said that much of the opposition "almost rises to the level of racism and religious persecution."

"What kind of society have we become when we are calling on police to write tickets on people who are going to worship?" he asked.

Residents say their complaints are rooted in a simple wish: to come and go as they please. Congregants, they say, block them in not only on Sundays, but also during weekday church meetings and funerals, sometimes parking in front of alleys and fire hydrants even when there are available spaces only a few blocks away. "People should have to abide by the same rules I do," said Powell, 30, a financial manager. "They shouldn't have more rights than I do, especially since I live here."

Washington is home to more than 600 congregations, many clustered in neighborhoods from Capitol Hill to Mount Pleasant to Georgetown. For as long as District officials and clergy can remember, traffic agents and police have generally accommodated worshipers by refraining from issuing tickets for parking illegally.

The relaxed rules are "a vestige of a different city, when we were slower and more Southern," said Terrance Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations. "Yet now we're transforming into a thriving metropolis."

Police Inspector Kevin Keegan, who oversees traffic safety, said the department has "never tolerated" parking in front of fire hydrants or cars blocking "crosswalks, intersections and alleys." But, he said, officers have generally refrained from ticketing worshipers whose cars, while parked illegally, are not a safety hazard. "They're not grocery shopping, they're not at the local pool hall, okay?" Keegan said. "We've got to have some consideration for the reason they're there."

Over the years, the lax enforcement has led to simmering complaints in various neighborhoods. J. Thomas Bandy, 55, a business form designer for the U.S. Postal Service, lives on Sixth Street NW, near five congregations. Ten years ago, he said, he complained to the police about worshipers blocking his Jeep, only to be told by an officer that they do not enforce regulations on Sundays.

Since then, Bandy said, nothing has changed -- except that he has learned to park illegally to avoid being trapped on Sundays when he wants to get to his own church in Foggy Bottom. "I just gave up," he said.

Parking is also a chronic problem for congregations. Corinthian Baptist Church, at Fifth and I streets in Northwest, plans to move to Lanham in March, primarily because its members have had difficulty finding spaces. "We don't feel too good about it, but we don't have a choice," said John Johnson, the church's administrative officer. "We tried to rent parking spots, but all the parking spaces are being constructed on."

Metropolitan Baptist also plans to move to Prince George's. At one time, congregants parked on a field at a neighboring public school, an arrangement that ended in 1999 after residents said the cars were damaging children's playing grounds and went to court.

The Rev. H. Beecher Hicks, Metropolitan's pastor, said the parking complaints are the result of the "gentrification process" in which newcomers "don't want to be bothered or pained by the presence of large institutions or large crowds."

"They want to come and go at will simply because it's a residential neighborhood," he said. "Nevertheless, it's a residential neighborhood in which churches resided before they arrived."

Todd Lovinger, a lawyer who bought a house on 12th Street NW three years ago and organized Logan Residents for Equitable Enforcement of Parking Laws, said he appreciates the churches' history. But, he said, "the community has changed."

After being blocked in by congregants on many occasions, including once when he tried to take his teenage son to a fencing class, Lovinger said he went to Vermont Avenue Baptist Church to complain and left messages for the pastor, which were not returned. In early December, he sent a letter to the District's Department of Public Works, which oversees parking enforcement, that was signed by nearly 50 neighborhood residents.

Still, not everyone who signed is embracing the cause. John Arce, 36, who has rented a two-bedroom on Vermont Avenue for six years, acknowledged that friends have been stuck at his place for hours waiting for congregants to leave. But he described himself as "anti-gentrification" and said he was reluctant to take on the churches.

"I yearn for the old D.C., when there were African Americans and it wasn't a yuppie state," he said.

The residents' complaints prompted a series of recent meetings, at which church representatives, D.C. officials and residents work toward finding long-term solutions to the parking crunch. But the residents still want enforcement. Several fanned out on a recent Sunday to count illegally parked cars, then reported their findings at an Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting last week.

Stanley Mayes, chairman of the 3rd Police District's Citizen Advisory Council and a lifelong Shaw resident, listened and shook his head before standing up to speak.

"You be careful what you ask for," he said, warning of stepped-up enforcement nailing drivers who double-park to get dry cleaning or groceries. "You aim at other people, and you take out yourself."

Powell, who was also at the meeting, said enforcement agents should need no prodding. There is no shortage of parking tickets in the neighborhood, he said, except on Sundays.