D.C. roads not undertaken

CHRISTOPHER WREN, the great 17th-century English architect, whose many works dominated the London scene, had as his epitaph, "If you seek his memorial, look about you." Similar words might be fitting for Peter S. Craig, who died Nov. 26 at the age of 81, only in his case it would be what you didn't see that would mark his significance. For Mr. Craig, with a number of other stubborn, determined and often outraged citizens of the Washington area, helped turn back one ill-advised road project after another in the District nearly a half-century ago, thwarting the will of congressional powers and a good many vested interests to do it.

So what you don't see today is a highway bridge swooping into Georgetown at the tranquil place on the Potomac where cormorants gather every spring to do their fishing; a Palisades Parkway along the District shore, a highway through parkland in Northwest Washington and a long-planned North-Central Freeway running through much of the eastern part of the city and over places where thousands of people live. In all, Mr. Craig and his allies succeeded in blocking about three-quarters of the interstate highway system once planned for the District.

Much of this resistance was accomplished by turning a seemingly mundane dispute over planning and highway-building into a morality play, and it didn't hurt that it was set mostly in the 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement. Led by the vocal Sammie Abbott of Takoma Park (a town in the path of the proposed freeway) and an associate named Reginald H. Booker, members of the biracial coalition, protesting the specter of "white men's roads through black men's homes," went to every meeting they could find in the city and suburban counties and towns, protesting, denouncing and occasionally getting pretty rowdy.

Peter Craig was a more quiet sort. An uptown lawyer who became involved in the movement when he learned of a freeway threatening his Cleveland Park neighborhood, he soon realized that stopping highways did not mean just shunting them east to where so many of Washington's African American residents lived. His quiet and effective work in the years that followed, along with the fireworks of Mr. Abbott, Mr. Booker and many others, finally stopped the North-Central Freeway, despite a determined effort in Congress to see the highway project through. They also worked to help make the regional Metro system a reality -- a long-sought alternative to additional freeways.

There are still some who argue that the city made a major mistake when it blocked those highways. Most Washingtonians, we think, when they look about the city, with all its beauty and its history as community and national capital, would say otherwise.