Development Threatens a Natural Oasis in Anacostia

All agree that pollution should be removed and the site made more accessible. But some park officials are concerned that it might be overdeveloped.

They worry, for example, that the wetlands will be built mainly with the intention of soaking up stormwater that streams off the pavement around the stadium, housing and memorials.

Instead, a different type of wetlands would be best if the aim were to create a hospitable habitat for wildlife.

"It does have to be cleaned up," said Susan Rudy, who retired this month as natural resource program manager for the Park Service district that includes Anacostia. But she said she favors "just improving what's there, removing the bad stuff and allowing the area to be a viable natural area . . . keeping a place where the native species can continue to thrive and a place where people can have the opportunity to watch them."

Uwe Brandes, an official with the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative, said planners are taking "extraordinary steps to avoid the notion that the redevelopment of the site comes at a cost [to] the natural systems and habitat that's out there."

The fenced area is not pristine wilderness but former mud flats filled in by the Army Corps of Engineers early in the last century, he said.

"Even the wetlands are kind of a joke," formed when storm drains backed up, he added.

The main aim of the Poplar Point project, he said, is to "reintroduce public access to this site" and to "connect surrounding neighborhoods to the river."

But it also offers an opportunity to improve a wildlife habitat, he said, and "bring natural life back to the river."

"We want to create a great park here," Brandes added, "a place where people feel just as comfortable as the animals."

Brandes said that officials hope to hold public meetings on the Poplar Point plan this summer but that it will be at least a decade before the project comes to pass: It is part of a larger, complex plan to replace the Frederick Douglass Bridge.

While work on developing the site goes on, a different world goes on behind the chain-link fence.

If the site were safe enough for public use, it would be possible to stand in an open meadow, watching a swallowtail butterfly, and see no sign of humans or their structures. The willows are home for half the year to nesting willow flycatchers, tropical birds that fly here to breed. The whistle of spring peeper frogs can be heard early in the season.

But there is this, too: An elm tree pushes through the shattered glass of a greenhouse. Weeds abound. "This land needs work, no doubt about it," Rosenstock says. "But what kind of work . . ."