A Tour the Mayor Should Take

The next time D.C. Mayor Tony Williams or his high-priced economic development types begin patting themselves on the back about cleaning up the city's bumper crop of abandoned buildings, think of children attending J. C. Nalle Elementary School in the Marshall Heights section of Southeast Washington. A more appalling and dehumanizing situation confronting so many children may be hard to find.

Stand with them at the front door of their school. Join them on the playground. Take in the ghastly, decaying structures that stare back from the south side of the street.

Their hulking, repulsive presence says it all.

Those obscene buildings tell J. C. Nalle kids that they don't count. Because if those girls and boys did "come first," as the downtown politicians love to preach, they wouldn't be forced to endure such loathsome buildings year in and year out.

Over the top, overwrought rhetoric, you say?

Please, I implore you, take a few minutes today, this weekend or perhaps one day next week and go see for yourselves. It won't require much of your time.

Here's how you get there: From downtown, drive east on East Capitol Street, go around R. F. K. Stadium and continue east across the Whitney Young Bridge, which straddles the Anacostia River.

Continue east on East Capitol Street for about five blocks. When you cross Benning Road (the abandoned Shrimp Boat carryout will be across the street on your left), move to the right lane.

At 49th Street SE, immediately veer right onto Central Avenue (Saint Luke Catholic Church is on the right). Turn right on 50th Street SE. (The public library's Capitol View branch is on the left.) Proceed up the hill for four blocks.

Nalle Elementary School, at the intersection with Bass Place, is at the top of the hill. Now drive slowly past the school, and stop at the corner of 50th and C streets SE.

Look first to your left at the multi-story structure across the intersection. Next, take in the sight on your right. Better yet, turn right onto C Street and cruise the length of the block.

Absorb the ugliness of the massive, disfigured buildings on the left side of the street. Imagine children trying to learn, play and retain a sense of self-worth under the shadow of those forbidding skeletons with their burned-out windows and garbage-strewn surroundings.

Go see for yourselves, and tell me if I am wrong.

To be sure, students inside Nalle are offered programs and services that are also enriched by corporate resources and volunteers. But none of that makes up for the dreadful scene that neither the mayor nor any of his top lieutenants would permit to exist across the street from a school attended by one of their loved ones.

That those silent symbols of official abandonment have not been demolished is a testament to the disconnect between the jargon-filled position papers on housing rehabilitation coming out of the mayor's office and the harsh physical realities that confront children in that east-of-the-river community.

And Nalle was only one stop on the tour of Ward 7 that I took this week with its council member, Kevin Chavous.

We started on Minnesota Avenue, the commercial strip that's downtown for some of the ward's residents. Many of the shops are small, marginal and only there to feed, fuel or keep the body clean. The burned-out Senator Theater is still there, too.

Chavous and I traveled the length of Sheriff Road and Eastern Avenue, worked our way through side streets where drug dealers and prostitutes play, and past dilapidated apartments where users get high and johns rid themselves of used property.

We also saw homes where owners were doing their best to keep up their property -- flowers, neat lawns, no litter. Sometimes, there were whole blocks at a time, including the 200 block of 62nd Street NE, where my wife, Gwen, and I and our two young sons lived in the early '60s.

We also made our way through a couple of communities that are far above the norm -- solidly middle-class neighborhoods with beautiful homes and manicured lawns. And quiet. But each is an oasis -- albeit large and comfortable -- in a ward disproportionately filled with defeat and despair.

For two hours, Chavous pointed out vacant and dangerous properties that cry out for conversion to housing and commercial development -- vacant lots, broken-down cars, and abandoned buildings that remain public nuisances and breeding grounds for crime.

One cannot help asking if the mayor and his economic development gurus love their planning sessions and paper-pushing exercises more than they care about putting neighborhood revitalization into action. Just a thought.

There was, however, one thing we didn't see on our tour until we reached the upscale neighborhoods: A police squad car.

In a ward that has compiled more than 20 homicides, 300 robberies, 680 stolen autos, and more than 630 cases of aggravated assault and burglaries -- all since Jan. 1, we did not encounter one police officer in a scout car, on a bike, riding a scooter or walking a beat in neighborhoods that needed cops the most.

A police official familiar with the operations of the 6th District, which covers Ward 7, who requested anonymity, acknowledged in an interview that the ward "has a police visibility problem." Tell me about it.

He said 6-D is "not up to full strength." Officers are out of service on administrative leave for criminal matters, on restricted duty limiting contact with the public or away on maternity leave.

The policing situation is so dire, Chavous said, that a recent Ward 7 double homicide was not fully investigated, because there weren't enough detectives available. And, he said, the lack of police coverage is all the more galling to crime-weary residents who see their Fort Dupont Park saturated with a mass of police cadets searching for a missing intern.

Chavous spelled out those and other safety concerns in a letter sent to Chief Charles Ramsey yesterday. But with the police brass busy playing cat and mouse with a cagey California congressman and getting so much face time on TV, there's no telling when Chavous will hear back from headquarters.

A copy of Chavous's letter was also delivered to Ramsey's boss-in-name-only, Mayor Williams. Hello?

Considering the city's neglect of those abominations at 50th and C streets SE, Chavous and folks in Ward 7 shouldn't hold their breath.