Commentary - Smokey Bear failing national parks in downtown Washington

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Let’s say you are a tourist from Paris or London visiting Washington, D.C., for the first time. Perhaps you simply drove in from Bethesda or Herndon to have lunch in the nation’s capital and take in a matinee at the Shakespeare Theatre.

You find yourself at the corner of 14th and K streets, you see an expansive city park, and you walk in for a respite from the midday heat. Here’s what you would see at Franklin Square:

Cracked sidewalks going back to gravel; a busted water fountain with the top broken off and the bowl dangling six inches from the ground; and trash and newspapers littering the patchy grass. You venture past park benches in disrepair toward the fountain in the park’s center. It’s not working; a few mallards navigate the empty cups and floating wrappers in the soapy water. The rats come out at dusk.

“It’s very Third World,” says Emily Durso, president of the Hotel Association of Washington. “I don’t like walking through Franklin Square. It’s depressing.”

At the risk of depressing readers in my inaugural Sunday column, I can’t help but expose the decrepit condition of our downtown parks. I discussed the matter with Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who’s been working to get the U.S. Park Service to keep up its parks in the city.

“It’s an embarrassment,” she tells me. “Sounds as if this has crossed the line to indecency. People think it’s a city park. It’s under federal control.”

It might surprise you to know that urban spaces such as Dupont Circle, Rock Creek Park and Ford’s Theater Park as well as suburban destinations like Suitland Park, Wolf Trap and Glen Echo Park are under Park Service domain. The feds control 8,500 acres in D.C. and 80,000 acres in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.

To their credit, the park rangers, park police and maintenance staff do a swell job of maintaining their parks and monuments, given the $150 million annual budget for the National Capital Region. You have to give them special credit for the programs at Carter Baron on 16th Street.

But the Park Service does not get a pass for the dreadful condition of our city parks, including the National Mall. I ask Norton whether she’s pleased with the maintenance of the Mall.

“Of course not,” she says. “The whole place is a wreck.”

She’s starting to get calls about the rats that have taken over Dupont Circle.

When I raise the matter with local Park Service spokesman Bill Line, he says, “For every person who levels criticism, we can find an equal number who say the parks look nice.” The rats, he says, are a “human problem,” because people leave trash around. What about Franklin Square’s disrepair?

“It’s reasonable to expect it’s not always going to look pristine, green and tidy,” he says. “We’re in an urban center.”

True, but Paris has an urban center. Ditto London, Moscow and Madrid. A Parisian venturing into Franklin Square might think he’s stumbled into the center of Baghdad.

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