Bates Area Civic Association

If you are interested in the long term vision for park space in DC, check out the government’s Capital Space plan, which is still open for comment.

Also see below for Scott Roberts’ extractions of the document that pertain to Bloomingdale, Eckington, East Shaw and surrounding areas.

The CapitalSpace Plan envisions a beautiful, high-quality, and unified park system for the nation’s capital. We believe this final document is a better plan because of the public comments we received from more than 40 civic leaders, organizations, and individuals. The comments provided by the public and the proposed responses were presented by staff to the National Capital Planning Commission at the January 2010 meeting.

The National Capital Planning Commission will be considering the final draft CapitalSpace Plan for adoption at its April 1, 2010 meeting. If you wish to speak at the Commission meeting, you can register until noon on March 31. Information about registering to speak, the April Commission agenda, and the executive director’s recommendation, which identifies how the CapitalSpace plan will be used by agency staff and the Commission, are available at the Commission Corner of NCPC’s website at www.ncpc.gov.

Here is the link to this CapitalSpace plan document: http://capitalspace.gov/Draft_Plan/FinalDraftCapitalSpacePlan.pdf .

And here are Scott’s notes:

• On page 11 – Eckington reference – under “A Brief History“” — anyone know where the Eckington Center was located?

During the 1920s, some of the open spaces provided in the L`Enfant Plan were vacant, underused, and in danger of being eliminated to either better accommodate the automobile or provide space for additional housing.  At the same time, the need for recreation and open space in urban areas was increasingly recognized. The National Capital Parks and Planning Commission (NCPC`s predecessor) recommended, through what is known as the Eliot Plan, the creation of approximately 20 neighborhood parks throughout the city. In addition to open space, these parks would include recreation centers, libraries, and schools, and were planned to serve neighborhoods within a one-quarter-mile radius. However, only three were constructed before the Great Depression: Banneker Recreation Center, Eckington Center, and McKinley Center. The creation of similar parks continued during or after the Great Depression with the construction of the Wilson, Coolidge, Taft, and Springarn-Phelps Schools.  The concept of combining recreation and education facilities on one site continued into the 1970s, and its popularity is again on the rise.

• On page 26 – reference to the McMillan Reservoir and AFRH site — under “Challenges and Opportunities”

There are a limited number of sites in the city that offer opportunities to establish significant new parkland or publicly accessible open space as sites redevelop.  These include sites located in parts of the city with comparatively less access to parks than other areas.  Examples include the Armed Forces Retirement Home, the North Capitol Street Cloverleaf, McMillan Reservoir, and the RFK Stadium site. Many of these sites are already identified in the Federal and District Elements of the Comprehensive Plan as possible sites for parks and open space that can benefit underserved communities and meet long-term park needs.

• On page 27 —  a section on the Armed Forces Retirement Home site – under “Challenges and Opportunities”

Armed Forces Retirement Home

In July 2008, NCPC approved a master plan for the 272-acre Armed Forces Retirement Home (AFRH), which serves slightly more than 1200 military veterans.  This master plan included the leased development of the southeast corner for private residential, office and retail uses, providing a revenue stream to support the AFRH’s activities, as well as approximately 23 acres of public park space to serve the new development and the larger surrounding neighborhood.

To further improve access to publicly accessible open space in the upper north-central part of the city, Washington Central Parks, a non-profit organization, and other neighborhood advocates have identified an opportunity to connect existing public parks with publicly-held, but often publicly-inaccessible, open space into a linked system of public spaces.   Specifically, the concept is to connect Fort Totten on the north with open space on a redeveloped McMillan Reservoir sand filtration site to the south, using open space areas along the perimeter of the AFRH and the Washington Hospital Center as linkages in this system.  This concept presents an opportunity to thread together many recreational facilities and important cultural and historical elements, and to improve the overall access to open space for the surrounding community.

• On page 83 – LeDroit Park reference — under “Transform Small Parks“

A Brief History of Small Parks in Washington

Small parks are distinct features of the urban fabric of Washington and the result of multiple planning and improvement initiatives.   Within the L’Enfant Plan, triangle parks are typically open spaces at the intersection of diagonal and orthogonal streets.   When L’Enfant created the plan for the capital city in 1791, he envisioned open spaces in the centers of the residential areas to provide light and air to its inhabitants where the diagonal and orthogonal streets meet. It took almost another century as the roadbeds, curbs, and utility lines were constructed for these open spaces to be completed as parks.

While L’Enfant envisioned park spaces to serve the needs of residents of the new capital city, the largely undefined smaller open spaces only slowly took shape through the next century as the city plan was developed and streets were improved. In the mid-1800s, streets and neighborhoods began to be platted outside the boundaries of the L’Enfant Plan.   Some of the earliest suburbs—such as Uniontown (Anacostia) and LeDroit Park—  included small parks as a community amenity.   Until the 1890s, the subdivision of nearby farms and estates were platted with streets and building lots that did not relate to an overall plan and lacked coordination.   This occurred most notably in the northwest section of the city bounded by Florida Avenue, Rock Creek Park, North Capitol Street and Spring Road.

This unregulated development prompted the creation of the 1893 and 1898 highway plans, developed in consultation with the noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. These plans extended major L’Enfant avenues, pre-determined locations for all city streets, and continued the tradition of creating small parks at the intersection of diagonal and orthogonal streets.  The small parks along 16th Street, Mount Pleasant Street, Rhode Island Avenue, and Georgia Avenue north of Florida Avenue are examples of small parks resulting from these plans.

In the late 19th century, the Office of Public Buildings and Ground of the United States Army Corps of Engineers improved many of the smaller triangular spaces as simple lawns or flower beds, or as small parks.  Significant improvements also occurred during the 1930s as part of the Works Progress Administration.

By the mid-20th century, urban renewal and other government programs intended to revitalize neighborhoods developed additional small neighborhood parks as part of mixed-use developments.   Many of these parks are located within the city block, and usually provide active recreation amenities such as playgrounds, picnic tables, and multi-use courts. Today, there are approximately 550 small parks less than one acre in size distributed throughout Washington. These parks function as sites for national and local commemoration, street medians, traffic circles and pocket parks in neighborhoods.

• On page 86 – references to Bloomingdale and Truxton Circle – under “Transform Small Parks“

Learning from Small Parks

Managing small parks by geographic area

As Washington has relatively few medium-sized parks and several neighborhoods with comparatively less access to open space, linking geographically clustered small parks can be an important strategy in providing multi-purpose, complementary amenities. Thirteen small parks near the intersection of Rhode Island and Florida Avenues, NW, were considered as a neighborhood cluster case study. The four parks south of Florida Avenue are within the boundaries of the L’Enfant Plan and are considered contributing elements for its historic plan designation. None of the parks exceeds 0.7 acres in size and ten are less than 0.1 acre. Ownership and management of the parks is diverse, and is reflected in their improvements. The largest park at the southwest corner of Florida Avenue and 1st Street, NW, is managed by the District Department of Parks and Recreation, contains playground equipment, a court and benches, and sees heavy community use.

The National Park Service park immediately across Florida Avenue is landscaped and helps define the Bloomingdale neighborhood.   The District Department of Transportation park at Florida Avenue and North Capitol Street is a busy transfer point for several bus lines. The remaining parks are minimally landscaped or paved. Truxton Park, formerly at the intersection of Florida Avenue and North Capitol Street, was eliminated by earlier transportation projects.

These small parks face many challenges:

• Size, location, and other restrictions, such as historic designations, can constrain use and design. These same factors, along with a lack of coordinated features, make these parks, and their potential, less visible to adjacent neighborhoods.
• High traffic volumes on adjacent streets pose challenges to connect park spaces, and bike and pedestrian access can be unsafe or unclear.  Encroachment by adjacent uses and inappropriate activities discourages use.
• Maintenance and programming responsibilities are divided between three agencies. Without coordinated maintenance, design standards or complementary uses, parks are not used, or perceived, as part of a network.  Small parks often bear the brunt of limited agency resources, resulting in less maintenance and fewer amenities.

• The Shaw/Rhode Island/Florida Avenue Cluster

The adjacent graphic identifies some of the physical opportunities to connect and define small park clusters in the Florida and Rhode Island Avenue neighborhood so that their impact is magnified.   Using the themes of connectivity, sustainability and placemaking, parks can be visually unified and create a distinct identity at the corridor or neighborhood level.

• On page 95 – reference to the Gage-Eckington Park in LeDroit Park – under “Moving the Plan Forward“

Redevelopement of sites for park use is one way to increase accessibility. The District of Columbia is redeveloping the former Gage-Eckington Elementary School into a temporary park for the Ledroit Park community. [Note that there is an image of the design for the park in the document.]

g)   On page 95 – references to the AFRH site and the McMillan Reservoir site – under “Moving the Plan Forward“

Address current and future park and open space needs

In addition to expanding the capacity of existing parks, the CapitalSpace partners are committed to future collaboration on strategies to develop new parks and open spaces and improving access to existing open spaces throughout the city, particularly in those areas that are comparatively underserved. The partner agencies will look for opportunities, jointly or within their own agency activities, to meet current and future park and open space needs across Washington, including:

 Identify and secure appropriate publicly-accessible open space and/or parks at publicly-held sites, particularly in areas of the city with comparatively less access to parks than other areas.   Existing plans and past regulatory actions of the partner agencies have established a continuing commitment to look for park and open space opportunities at several sites with significant open space assets, including the Armed Forces Retirement Home, the McMillan Reservoir, and the RFK Stadium site.