Final Score's Out In Stadium Game

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In a playground by the nearly completed Jack Kent Cooke Stadium in Landover, Julie Zinszer keeps a close watch on her three children and worries whether the Washington Redskins' new home will attract crime. Along Sheriff Road, Arnold Proctor says he hasn't been able to grill out all summer, what with the dirt and noise from the construction.

Six miles due west, in Kingman Park in the District, there are no noise, no disruption and little expectation of any. There, Willie E. Miles enjoys the quiet of a summer afternoon from his row house porch just a few blocks from where football fans used to rock 55,000-seat Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium.

In those two neighborhoods are the winners and losers from many years of struggle over where the Redskins would play football. It will take years more to sort out just who won and who lost.

In both Landover and Kingman Park, many residents opposed plans to put a new stadium in their midst. Abandoning the idea of building next to RFK, team owner Cooke searched the Washington area until he was able to buy the Landover site from Prince George's County.

Cooke, who died in April, was determined to have the 78,600-seat stadium open for the 1997 football season, and the pace of construction over the last year has been frenetic. Still, stadium advocates say, the neighbors who now look like the losers because of the noise and disruption could turn out to be winners in the long run because of the stadium's possible economic benefits.

"I think it's understandable that there are going to be some folks who absolutely are opposed to having any major development project in their back yard or proximate to where they live," said William D. Miller II, senior policy adviser to County Executive Wayne K. Curry (D). But the stadium, he added, is the first piece in a revitalization of Landover, an unincorporated area of new and older subdivisions, shopping centers and office parks.

"The executive never looked at the stadium as the end-all project for that area. It's not even a catalyst," Miller said. "It's simply one piece, [but] a major piece, of a larger puzzle that's going to involve improvements in housing, public safety, the schools."

Miller said he is "very convinced" that residents will be pleased "once folks see [road] infrastructure improvements that went along with that stadium, which didn't come from a Prince George's tax on residents.

"I don't think people understand that for 340-some days a year, that $30 million worth of infrastructure will be for their pleasure," he said.

And that's not to mention the 50-plus scholarships for children to be awarded on opening day, Sept. 14, or the community sports complex to be built on Sheriff Road.

But just try telling all that to Karen Fleet, 50, a pediatric nurse who for a year has been trying to sell her town house on Congress Place, in the 137-unit Centennial Village development between Brightseat Road and the Beltway. "It's making it more difficult for me to sell my house," she said. "I didn't really want to be around with all the traffic."

Several of her neighbors also have put their houses up for sale, or, like Crystal Rousey, 33, say they are planning to do so. "It's terrible, trying to get in and out of this development," she said as trucks rumbled along nearby Brightseat Road.

"It's awfully close," said Zinszer, who lives in Summerfield, a 1,242-unit development filled with military families. "I hope it's not going to bring any crime in here. That's the only concern I have."

Dust from the construction has coated Proctor's windowsills and the white top of his beloved Lincoln Town Car.

But Bernard Ford, 34, a homeowner in Centennial Village, believes the stadium will increase the value of his property. He has no plans to leave.

Lester Brooks, 56, is moving from Northeast Washington into a 1950s rambler with a large back yard on Brightseat Road. "I think it's a good investment," said his wife, Helen, 54.

At Chips Rotisserie Plus on Central Avenue, by an entrance to the Beltway, there are differing views of business prospects. The owner, said operations director Robert Mack, "thinks the suburbanites will go [straight] back to Northern Virginia [after games]. I think it's going to be real big. We're traveling on the road to the unknown. We will see."

Traffic and parking are most on the minds of the stadium's neighbors, commercial and residential alike. Residents wonder how they'll get to and from church on game days, or how they'll get out of their subdivisions to go anywhere.

Construction changed Summerfield Boulevard from a two-lane road to a six-lane divided highway. That concerns Mike Beeman, chief of community relations for Andrews Air Force Base, which manages the Summerfield development. With 20,000 Redskins fans projected to drive out Central Avenue and up the boulevard, Beeman said, "you can imagine for a housing complex with no other entrances and exits, [it's] going to be frustrating for those people who live there."

The county says residents will get enough parking stickers for their cars and for guests to park on the street, while those parked illegally will get $50 tickets and be towed. But not in Summerfield or Centennial Village, which are private, the county says.

Not so, Beeman said: County roads course through the subdivision. They are the county's responsibility, he said. Whatever happens, the County Council must first enact legislation to put the parking program in motion, before Sept. 14.

Longtime residents of Kingman Park, an established neighborhood of row houses built in the 1920s, had learned to live with RFK since it opened as D.C. Stadium in 1961. But the neighborhood didn't want the bigger new stadium in its back yard. It didn't want the mess of construction, with the added health hazard of lead dust from polluted soil. It didn't want the added traffic or the loss of public parkland for more parking spaces to accommodate the larger crowds.

In Kingman Park, nonresident parking still is banned from many streets on stadium event days, whose dates are posted on signs. D.C. United, the professional soccer team, has 31 home games at RFK this year, attracting an average of 20,000 fans a game. For those dates, residents receive parking stickers for themselves but none for guests. Although the stadium impact area has shrunk with the departure of the Redskins, it still rankles.

"People can't pay a visit out here no time," Miles grumbled from his porch. "My sister visited last week. They gave her a damn ticket, for a soccer game."

Miles loves the neighborhood, where he's lived since 1939, but as he thinks of the new stadium in Landover, he suspects that the future lies elsewhere. "The money's out in Maryland now," he said. "Ain't nothing in D.C."

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