Turf Wars Forged Warriors

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The Redskins stadium about to open in Landover is a monument to the tenacity of its namesake, the late Jack Kent Cooke. In his quest to build a new playing field for his team, Cooke battled neighborhoods in and around Washington and tallied a record of one win and four losses.

In the process, Cooke also energized the apathetic, turned homemakers into opposition spokespeople and mere couch potatoes into savvy deal breakers. Before Cooke won in Landover, his losses amounted to two failed attempts to build a new stadium in the District, one in Alexandria and another in Laurel. In those neighborhoods, the little people defeated a money machine, and in the end many lives were changed forever.

What lingers from the fight against Cooke are people who are more politically astute -- some have gone on to fight for other causes in their neighborhoods. Others have no new battles, but their experience with the stadium has made them wary of outsiders proposing changes. They sit with their claws out, ready to rally their neighborhood forces at the first word that bulldozers are coming.

The new enemy in these neighborhoods has the same name -- development -- but a different face. In Alexandria, it's a planned apartment building at a Metro stop. In the District, it's Children's Island amusement park on the Anacostia River. In Laurel, it's any number of issues: gambling, a shelter for the homeless, a center for delinquent youths, an inter-county connector highway that would rip through front yards.

"I now know you can't afford to sit back and believe representatives are going to fight for your views," said Jeanne Mignon, a community activist in Laurel. "I've gone back into what I believe is an active arena, and I intend to stay there. I can never go back and say, `Let somebody else do it.' "

Mignon said that she was not always that involved in community fights but that she learned quickly from her experience with Cooke. When she and others in her community saw the newspaper one morning and learned about the stadium proposal near Laurel racetrack, they organized quickly.

"Think of anything that is legal, and we did it," Mignon said. "We begged and wrote letters to horsemen who owned horses at the racetrack. We sold things. Bake sales. Sold cookbooks. Went door to door. We were Citizens Against the Stadium-2, CATS. Cats are a good image. They scratch. They bite. They do all kinds of things against their enemies. We were prickly. We weren't going to give in, and it worked."

Rayburn Smallwood, president of the Maryland City Civic Association, which joined in opposing the stadium proposal in Laurel, said his neighborhood is always watchful now.

"We will fight anything we feel will be detrimental to the health and welfare of the community," Smallwood said. The group has since fought a proposed shelter for the homeless near a school and battled to get the District to move its delinquent juveniles away from the neighborhood.

"Just because we've gotten rid of the stadium doesn't mean we are out of business," Smallwood said. "There is always something. . . . You never know what is going to happen from day to day. Tomorrow morning, somebody else may drop a bomb."

From their neighborhoods, watching the stadium rise in the distance in Landover, many are relieved that the stadium is not in their back yard and pity the folks who allowed it in theirs.

"I feel sorry for the communities around there. . . . I understand they got $4 or $5 million in community benefits. But I'm very glad it didn't go here. It would have been a monstrosity, and it would have ruined many lives," Smallwood said.

Mignon stands at Whiskey Bottom and Brock Bridge roads. "You're looking at what would have been the 50-yard line," she said. Cars, diesel engines, trucks whiz by. "You know why we won? Traffic. Traffic would have been gridlocked for miles."

She looks around at the rural countryside and is pleased. "I'm never sorry for this fight. It was the best thing for this area, because life here would have been hell."

In Alexandria, some residents still bristle at the idea that a mammoth stadium might have risen in their back yards. They remember Cooke standing on the land he claimed and vowing that he would not be moved. "I'll say it as often as I'm asked," Cooke had said. "We will build a stadium at Potomac Yard."

Today, a Target stands in Potomac Yard, a kind of monument to the power of the city and its residents, who joined swiftly when they heard of the proposal between Cooke and then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder.

In Alexandria, within a day after the agreement between Cooke and Wilder fell apart, the group known as Citizens Against the Stadium celebrated, then went out of existence.

"They have gone back to their various sundry civic associations, and, if another threat from outside arrives, I'm sure all those same people can be counted on," said state Sen. Patricia S. Ticer (D), who was mayor when she helped lead the fight against Cooke's proposed stadium.

Cooke gave rise to a few political aspirants. Linda Michelsen, who founded Citizens Against the Stadium, ran for City Council, but in the last two years a family crisis has kept her out of the community arena. "As a group, per se, we did not stay together," Michelsen said. "The whole city was involved. You couldn't stay as a cohesive group."

Michael Brown, past president of the Del Ray Citizens Association, says residents have turned their attention to fighting a Metro proposal to sell its parking lot at the King Street Metro, where an apartment building would be built.

"Alexandria is the ninth-densest populated city in the United States," Brown said. "Anything that affects development and traffic in Alexandria, there is a lot of attention brought to it."

In Washington, where Cooke proposed to build a new stadium in the parking lot of the old Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, Kingman Park residents had a few days' rest before they geared up to fight Children's Island, an amusement park on the Anacostia River.

"We're still a very active community. Right now, we are opposing the Children's Island thing," said Desdemona Martin, who has lived in Kingman Park for 46 years.

"We are still a cohesive group," Martin said. "Quite a few of our children are living in the neighborhood, and we have passed it on to them. On my street, very few of our houses have bars. We are that way: Neighbors look out for each other."

Martin says that some people have lived in the neighborhood for 40-odd years and that, although they are growing old -- some are in their eighties -- they know how to fight. "It might be because we are an aging community, and they feel they can just push us around."

In Landover, even though residents lost the fight against Cooke, neighbors continue to fight battles around it. The biggest issue so far is a proposal by Metro to build a rail above ground to extend the Blue Line to Largo Town Center.

"There will be noise, vibrations, and it will be unsightly, defacing our community," said Abraham Lincoln, a member of the Peppermill Village Civic Association. "That is one of the major issues, along with improvement of the roads along the stadium area."

The other issues this group is tackling are school crowding, crime and a general effort to get state legislators to better heed the community's wishes.

"We finally got the state senator to get us revitalization and landscaping on Central Avenue," Lincoln said. "They did it, then they tore it up to accommodate people making left turns to go to that football game eight days a year. They took some of the people's land along Brightseat Road and along Sheriff Road. They are doing everything to accommodate that stadium."

Mignon was no wallflower, but she was never involved in community issues to this level before Cooke's proposal to build a stadium in Laurel. Mignon said she knew she had been changed when one recent evening she ran into one of Jack Kent Cooke's public relations men at a speech.

"I said, `Mr. Cooke gave me some very sleepless nights,' " Mignon recalled. " `He said, `Mrs. Mignon, you gave Mr. Cooke some very sleepless nights.' I took that as the biggest compliment. I told him, `Good.' "

Mignon has gone on to give other opponents or county officials sleepless nights.

"Jeanne is sort of a Paul Revere out there. She, among others, is one of the ones who would raise the flag of concern if there is something going on in that community that she doesn't like or she wants a good explanation for," said Jim Golden, legislative assistant for Anne Arundel County Council member Bert Rice (R-District 4).

"She is about as subtle as a train wreck. She will tell you what is on her mind."

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