To See the Truth at Poplar Point, Don't Just Follow the Money

The air at Poplar Point, where raptors glide through the sky and tiny frogs called spring peepers create a chorus of mating calls, is thick with inevitability. Development is coming -- condos, shopping, a soccer stadium.

The big money says so. The mayor says so.

No, says the Anacostia riverkeeper. It's not going to happen, can't happen. The proof, he says, is found not alongside Washington's most neglected waterway, but clear across the city, where the rich people live. Over there, in Rock Creek Park, lies the guide to Poplar Point's future.

"This discussion would never happen if we were talking about Rock Creek Park," says Brian Van Wye, who was appointed by the nonprofit Earth Conservation Corps to care for the Anacostia River. "If somebody said they were going to build a stadium and condos and shopping centers in Rock Creek Park, there'd be a storm of protest and the idea would be dead in a day."

Indeed, a couple of years ago, when a congressional committee proposed to put luxury townhouses and strip malls on parkland on Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River, the outrage was so powerful and instantaneous that the notion was declared dead in a matter of hours.

But Poplar Point is in Anacostia, where the government freely imposes its schemes and grabs parkland without regard for those who live there. The city planners who created Rock Creek Park and the Mall envisioned Anacostia Park as a similarly expansive refuge from urban clamor. But over the last few decades, the military took large chunks of the land for bases, and the White House took land for secret intelligence installations, and even a good portion of the last remaining stretch of parkland is now fenced off, a forgotten and neglected wasteland of abandoned ideas and vandalized buildings.

It's only natural that the developers and politicians who superimpose a stadium and housing and stores on aerial photos of wetlands think of Poplar Point as a dump. That's how they've treated it.

Van Wye and leaders of the Earth Conservation Corps, which trains hundreds of young Washingtonians each year to care for the river, led me under the fences and into what should be open parkland. There, we found greenhouses where the Architect of the Capitol used to grow the flowers that were delivered fresh each morning to members of Congress, and the tree nursery where the District once worked to keep up its claim to be Tree City. The buildings, empty for two decades, look as if they were abandoned in a hurry -- chairs, desks, filing cabinets still sit under roofs that are no more. There's even an order board where congressmen's requests for flowers were posted each morning.

It's a hellish wreck, a field of broken glass, rusted radiators, bizarrely twisted pipes, all left to rot because, hey, the politicians figure, the people who live here won't squawk.

Inevitably, politicians and developers will point to this mess and say, see, it's not a park anymore, it needs to be paved over. But there's no such need: Anacostia, sadly enough, is full of empty spaces crying out for development. Every bit of the economic boost the Fenty administration pines for can be accomplished just outside the park, on sites with spectacular river views. And Poplar Point could become what was always intended -- another Rock Creek Park.

"We want to see this park opened up to the people, not put behind a wall of development," says Bob Nixon, chairman of the conservation group. This is not a typical case of greens vs. development -- Nixon's group not only supports building housing and retail, it even owns land just outside the park, along Howard Road SE, where several property owners are eager to build.

"We can go ahead and build a town center, with a grocery, restaurants, the necessities of life so people don't have to drive to Virginia or Maryland," says developer Tim Kissler, another Howard Road property owner. "And the park can be the amenity."

Back when Kissler was an owner of the D.C. United soccer team, he supported putting a soccer stadium on the Anacostia waterfront. Now, he believes the area can prosper without a jump-start from a stadium. Even if a stadium is approved, though, that process is likely to take years. There's no need to hold up the rest of the development while that battle is fought.

The Conservation Corps supported the Nationals' baseball stadium right across the river because "that was a case of taking contaminated, industrial land and putting it to productive use," Van Wye says. "In this case, you're taking public parkland away from the community just as the city is getting more crowded."

The current United owner, Victor MacFarlane, wants to put a soccer stadium at Poplar Point and pay for it by building housing and retail nearby. If a stadium can spark investment and build the tax base, that's great. But it's no excuse for grabbing public parkland.

Despite the mayor's optimism, the city could end up fighting itself. A raft of laws commits the District to preserving the wetlands at Poplar Point. In February, the D.C. Department of the Environment spoke out strongly against development that would fail to protect the Point as a habitat for wildlife.

Van Wye showed me ospreys and mallards and threatened birds such as the willow flycatcher. Hawks, falcons and bald eagles hang out at the park. Their presence here is anything but inevitable. Keeping the wildlife here and making Anacostia Park what it was always meant to be will take decisive acts of political will.

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