Development Threatens a Natural Oasis in Anacostia

By D'Vera Cohn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 26, 2006

One of the most biologically rich places in the city is inside a padlocked fence at Anacostia Park.

Amid tumbledown sheds and broken-up asphalt, National Park Service ranger Jim Rosenstock points to a wild turkey running through the grass. Bees buzz and a mockingbird sings against a faint backdrop of traffic noise. A yellow butterfly wafts past a discarded tire.

It took a long time to get to this odd positioning of nature's beauty against ruins. Until the mid-1980s, this land was used by the city's tree nursery and by greenhouses that supplied fresh flowers to congressional offices. After they closed, the abandoned and polluted acreage gradually evolved. Buildings fell down, and shrubs, swamps, meadows and trees took over. Flowering weeds broke through crumbled pavement. Creatures moved in -- dragonflies, songbirds, turtles, frogs, beavers and more.

But change is coming.

The 27-acre fenced-off plot is on Poplar Point, a key component of the city's sweeping plan to revitalize the eastern shore of the Anacostia River. Officials with the corporation overseeing the massive project are looking over bids submitted by design teams last month to prepare a site plan that would include museums, memorials and potentially 1,000 housing units and a stadium for professional soccer.

The makeover would offer economic development and recreation with a river view, bringing new residents and resources to a section of the city whose residents often feel neglected. The developer promises environmental improvements that include cleaning up the fenced area and opening it to public use.

But some Park Service officials are concerned that the development's top priority is to serve the needs of people, not nature. They worry about the loss of one of the city's few wild corners.

Most of Anacostia Park is bustling, on weekends, anyway. The activities there include soccer, jogging, strolling, picnicking and fishing. Not many who use the park know what is behind the locked fence, but neighbors have heard that big plans are afoot.

"It's going to be a second Georgetown," predicted Lucy M. Johnson, 74, a retired mental health counselor who was strolling along the riverfront with her daughter on a recent morning. "It's going to be something to see."

But Tawanna Johnson, 44, a pharmacist, has concerns that people-oriented development would pave over too much of the natural world. "I say leave it like it is," she said. "They can leave it for the birds and whatever."

Legislation before Congress would turn 110 acres there over to the city for this purpose and would require that 70 acres of that allocation be kept as open space in some form. The developers say their plan would include increasing the wetlands acreage.

The plan for Poplar Point has several environmental features, including cleaning up soil contaminated by pesticides and other chemicals and transforming a storm sewer back into a natural stream.

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 . . ."