Goodbye, yellow brick dream

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There was no joy at 1338 Half Street in Southeast Washington yesterday, no sense of baseball-inspired elation inside the Washington Sculpture Center that stands on the site of the proposed ballpark.

Reinaldo Lopez and Patricia Ghiglino, husband and wife, artist and business woman, sat on the second floor of their yellow brick dream, scanning the front-page photograph of jubilant grown-ups in red baseball caps cheering the news that the basket-case Montreal team would be opening next season in the nation's capital.

The 60-year-old Lopez looked at the picture before him and dismissed it with a wave of disdain.

"It looks like a bad Cowboy movie to me," he said on this sun-splashed day in the city. "They are stupid people in red hats. They are ridiculous, pathetic. They are old men trying to be 15 years old again."

There was no rancor in the voice of Lopez, only a hard-earned sense that his life did not count in the city's grand quest to secure a baseball team.

His is the tiny voice that is being muffled by the developers, land speculators, city officials and a public eager to embrace baseball again after a 33-year wait. His is the tiny voice that has no sway in the celebratory atmosphere.

Everywhere Lopez turns, they are talking baseball and the idyllic plans that have been drafted on this portion of the Anacostia River waterfront.

They are not speaking of Lopez and Ghiglino and the other little people who have scratched a living out of this forgotten stretch of the city. They are not speaking of those who will be told to part with their properties and businesses in order to accommodate the wealthy.

"We are invisible," the 53-year-old Ghiglino said. "We do not exist."

Lopez and Ghiglino are merely names on a property listing who can be told to go away with a check in the $600,000 range. That check will not begin to compensate their 11 years as owners of the building. It will not tell of all their work and sweat. It will not tell of all the upgrades they have put into the building. It certainly will not tell how they turned down a $2.5million offer for the property two years ago.