Suburbia's Sidewalk Squabbles

"It's taken on a life of its own," said Charles Thomas, a psychologist and 27-year resident of Fox Hills West. "This has been a very quiet, peaceful neighborhood up until this whole business of sidewalks came up."

Thomas and other sidewalk opponents said there have been no pedestrian accidents reported along the proposed route for the sidewalk, a curving six-block stretch of Falls Chapel Way ending at Cold Springs Elementary School. And without a safety problem, he sees no reason to pave over the fescue, uproot the Bradford pear trees and generally "change the character of the neighborhood" that he found so appealing as a homebuyer three decades ago.

His chief adversary, Kenneth Cho, a radiologist and five-year resident of the neighborhood, said the pedestrian conditions are dicey, even if the worst hasn't happened. His youngest child walks in the road to the school, which doesn't provide bus service, accompanied by his wife, who is legally blind.

"It was obvious to us that this was needed as soon as we moved in," said Cho, who first applied to the county for a sidewalk in 2003. "We've got a walking school, we've got a street with double lines."

Cho's first run at a sidewalk for the neighborhood was turned down when a county official found no particular safety risk. When other sidewalk proponents filed a new application last year, opponents accused them of not just of an unfair do-over but of packing the Fox Hills West Residents Association board and using the supposedly neutral body to promote the sidewalk.

Cho was elected president of the association in December, but opponents declared him ineligible because of a technicality in the bylaws. When a new group of board members, most of them living along the proposed route of the sidewalk, held their own vote in January, electing Thomas as president, Cho and others accused them of an illegitimate power grab. Cho made his case in the next edition of the Huntsman, the group's newsletter. The new board stopped Cho's newsletter and distributed its own.

"I never, ever thought it would go this far," Cho said.

Tensions remain high in the neighborhood. Residents received letters from the county this week saying that sidewalk construction would begin April 7. And the fight over control of the association continues.

But there may be hope for peace in the long term. Robin Rosenblum, a sidewalk advocate who was at the center of the Maryknoll Avenue fight, said the wounds eventually healed and the path has become a neighborhood gathering place.

"Even people who opposed it use it all the time," she said.