Ward 5 In Profile

A Sense of Possibilities
Ward Encompasses What's Wrong And Right in City

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 25, 1998; Page J01

In this election year for the District, this is the seventh in a series of profiles of each of the city's eight political wards.

To Ruth Marshall, the impulse to move from suburban Adelphi to Northeast Washington came straight from the mouth of God, like a tip on the sixth race at Pimlico. She was standing in the shower -- "I do my best thinking in the shower" -- when she asked for guidance.

"I said, 'Lord, what should I do now?' "

And the answer came: Washington was the place. And Marshall saw that it was good. She immediately surrendered her search in Maryland and the very next day found a red brick house with a deep green lawn in Queen's Chapel.

Sweet serenity. On a crisp late spring evening, walking with her 6-year-old daughter on peaceful Crittenden Street, Marshall shrugged and said, "Hey, divine intervention."

A small boost from God or man is both welcome and essential in Ward 5, a thick slice of city that stretches from beauty to beastliness and back again in 7.2 square miles.

Ward 5, where 9 of 10 residents are black, is home to the flowers and trees of the National Arboretum and the gleaming dome of National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It encircles the peaceful cloisters of the Franciscan monastery and the leafy, prosperous streets of North Michigan Park. At 10th and Irving Streets NE, it features a bright yellow house with round walls and a roof shaped like a pilgrim's hat.

Yet the ward is also the domain of the trash haulers and the garbage they move from city to country. Every day, great heaps of waste arrive for transfer to rural outposts. Garbage in, garbage out. The smell lingers, an irritant in the nostrils and the minds of residents who protest the truck traffic, the odor and the psychic damage of sharing their neighborhood with a dump.

The ward's southern trunk includes Trinidad, which offers nothing so verdant as its island namesake.

And Ivy City, where green vines are as scarce as opportunity. In the crook between the keep-out fences of the Arboretum and Langston Golf Course is a stretch of housing as bleak as a rainy November dawn.

In this year when the city will elect a new mayor, not much unifies Ward 5, if truth be told, except the desire at every level for something a little better, a little brighter and always more secure.

The District of Columbia owes them that, say residents. Now, if only the administrative organism everyone in the ward calls "downtown" can deliver.

"I'm doing my best, but it gets frustrating when you fight and work so hard for things and it doesn't go the way you want it to," said Dorthia Austin, leader of the Ivy City Patriots, a civic improvement group. "Most of the politicians aren't interested in here. They come around when they want our vote, then you never see them again."

The many-tiered leadership of D.C. government is like the nine-headed hydra slain by Hercules; cut off one head and two grow back. Faced with such dilution of political clout, many neighborhoods are inventing their own strength by managing things locally.

"The way things are going now, we're not going to wait on the city. We're going to do it ourselves," said Anthony Hood, president of the 11,000-home Woodridge Civic Association.

The city won't provide enough recreation for kids or a van for seniors in Woodridge? The neighborhood civic association got $1.25 million from Allstate Insurance Co. for sports, safety programs and other good works.

A youth league near South Dakota Avenue needs better facilities? Volunteers backed the Woodridge Warriors by raising more than $200,000 in a memorial fund, helping the 40 coaches who volunteer their time in a program now in its fourth decade.

Ward 5 D.C. Council member Harry Thomas Sr. (D) is trying to reduce the required 500-foot buffer between trash transfer sites and businesses? Opponents staged a protest this month and invited the media.

The leader of the trash protest was John Frye, an electrician and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner who also is doing battle with liquor stores in his crime-plagued Trinidad neighborhood.

In fact, Frye has no trouble keeping busy, pushing development projects nearby and trying to build bridges to other parts of the ward.

"We want the boarded-up houses to be gone," Frye said as he drove the lower regions of the ward one recent Saturday. "Once you get the old stuff out, you've got to get some newer stuff in. If you wait too long, the bad will come back. You talk about saving the kids. You can't save them unless they have someplace to go."

In Woodridge, thanks to community effort, dozens of kids do have a place to go and a purpose once they get there. They play football, baseball and basketball for the Warriors, and launch homers and winning drives from the fields next to Taft Junior High.

"Watch your mouth, Mr. Hayes. I can hear you all the way over here," Tim Ellis called to a young first baseman on a crystalline evening. The boy looked up sheepishly and Ellis gave him a thumbs up and a smile.

Ellis is a volunteer who comes from Ward 4 to coach football and basketball. Last season, the Warriors' 120-pound football team of boys ages 13 to 15, finished third in the nation in a tournament that took them as far as New York and Florida for games.

"When any kid comes, we don't make any cuts. We don't turn anybody away," said Ellis, who explained that the coaches sometimes dig in their own pockets for equipment for the players.

The program's guiding force since 1960 has been Mason Clark. He oversees more than a dozen teams of Warriors drawn from neighborhoods across the city.

"The main thing is to have the kids involved in something positive. If you have them doing something positive, they're not doing something negative," said Clark. "It's nothing earth-shaking. It's nothing 'exciting.' No one's getting murdered. No house is burning down. You're just seeing kids developing."

Clark made plans one recent evening to appeal for help to all candidates for citywide office this election year.

A diagramed political play.

Despite the relative affluence of its upper reaches, the ward is one of the city's poorest, with a median household income last year of about $35,000, higher only than Wards 7 and 8. It has more than 1,000 units of public housing scattered among 33 sites, including 334 units at Edgewood Terrace and 308 at Langston Terrace.

Crime is considerable and guns are many, although the numbers of cases are dropping in Ward 5 as they are throughout the city. Residents credit police efforts, particularly local beat cops.

As Dorthia Austin said of Ivy City, "It's a lot better. A lot of the open-air drug markets are gone, thanks to Sgt. [Ronald] Netter."

A trial this month in D.C. Superior court showcased what still goes too often wrong. A jury convicted William "Sleepy" Clark of killing two men standing near a stoop at the Brentwood Manor Apartments in September. A neighbor testified that she heard a voice say, "If I can't sell my drugs here, then nobody's going to sell their drugs."

Then she heard gunfire.

Dramatic change is underway in public housing, however, starting with Montana Terrace, once as violent as any corner of the city. The project will be reborn as housing for rent and for sale, with the unsalvageable parts torn down. Another low-income site, Western Mews, was recently leveled after soaking up nothing but trouble for years.

New York Avenue, grim gateway to the Nation's Capital from the east, pierces the heart of Ward 5 and stands as a symbol of much that is wrong and just as much that is possible, in ward and city alike.

Every day, 135,000 vehicles travel across the city line in each direction on the broad roadway. Trucks, tour buses, passenger cars and vans are mostly just passing through, since there is little on New York Avenue, apart from the stoplights, to hold their attention or slow them down.

Something, as they say, ought to be done.

"One, it's a tremendously traffic-congested artery that ties up the city. Two, it's just plain ugly. Third, it's a lost economic opportunity, with all that unused and misused land. And fourth, it negatively impacts the neighborhoods along the corridor," said Ron Linton, chairman of the New York Avenue Development Task Force.

Linton is pushing a vision that -- as visions do -- take time and money.

The future landscape in his mind's eye includes smoother traffic along the 3.5-mile corridor from Seventh Street NW to the District line, a mass transit hub and a functional business district that could provide decent jobs for nearby workers. He calls it "a crucial thing for the city."

Seeking relief, one can drive in two directions from New York Avenue, find great beauty and still be in Ward 5. The first is north, to Brookland, Catholic University, Trinity College and the shady streets of North Michigan Park. The second is south to the Arboretum, which borders the highway but stands utterly, peacefully apart.

"This is where you go if you want to think. I've been coming here for 30 years," said Joan Black, who teaches at Howard University and lives in a nearby neighborhood also called Arboretum. "I used to come here and write poetry. When I was younger, when I was romantic, before I became a grandparent."

Two or three times a year, Black takes a passel of children to the park, past Fern Valley and the dogwoods, past the Asian Garden, past the rhododendrons and the dwarf conifers, to the top of a hill.

There, she urges them to yell at the top of their lungs.

"I teach them scream therapy," Black said as she meandered through the place she adores. "They let it out. Then they roll in the grass and talk."

There is all too much squabbling and quarreling in city affairs, said Black, who believes, "If we're going to have some strength, we've got to work together."

Black, along with Frye and Hood, are among a number of energetic Ward 5 activists trying to stitch their disparate neighborhoods into a sturdier unit, the better to succeed against force and inertia alike.

"Anything that no one wants in this city is being dumped here," said Black. "Our council people are not listening. Our mayor is not listening, either."

Next: Ward 6 in profile.