The developers, land speculators and lawyers are pressing ahead with the beleaguered property owners, entrepreneurs and residents of Half Street Southeast, site of the proposed ballpark along the Anacostia River.
There is nothing really fair about the process, nothing really joyous about pushing tax-paying citizens off their properties in order to enrich the wealthy, ostensibly for a public good.
The hardy urban pioneers descended on this previously forgotten stretch of asphalt wedged between the Navy Yard and South Capitol Street and scratched out a living long before it became the solution of Mayor Anthony A. Williams and a fashionable destination point of those with dollar signs in their eyes.
They cleaned the place up as best as it could be cleaned up. They fought the drug dealers and the car jockeys and the petty criminals, and they talked of the recuperative powers of the Anacostia Redevelopment Initiative. They envisioned the day Half Street would be an eclectic promenade drawing visitors and tourists and commerce.
But that dream is no more, the project so last summer.
Baseball has returned to the city after a 34-year absence, and nothing is going to be allowed to stand in the way of the celebration, not even the previously sacred Fifth Amendment.
The pioneers along Half Street are merely negotiating the terms of their surrender now.
They do not all see it that way. They clutch their lawyers’ business cards as if they were security blankets. They won’t go down easily, not now, not after all these years of being the neglected stepchildren of the city.
Now the 28 property owners of the 21 acres along Half Street have something the city desperately wants, and now they know how it feels to be the object of so much political concern. Deep down, they like this sense of power, this capacity to be as obstinate as the city once was to them.
Someone from the city is looking to talk?
They will talk when they are good and ready.
Better yet, have the city lackey press 1, then 2, then 3 and upward, pressing until the person is screaming at the disembodied voices on the telephone line.
You think this neighborhood could be so much more than an auto repair shop, a trash compacting business, an asphalt plant, a sculpture center, an adult entertainment corridor and a smattering of row houses? Where were you all those years the property owners implored the city to provide the public services to which they were entitled?
Lots of outsiders are going to become awfully wealthy off this expanse. But it won’t be the denizens of Half Street. They will be the footnotes of the neighborhood, left to the dustbin of history.
Patricia Ghiglino, executive director of the Washington Sculpture Center on Half Street, calls them “sharks,” the line of smartly dressed snapping photographs and making pitches along the thoroughfare.
They want their share of the appreciation pie, as the ballpark goes up and the land around it soars in value, as it came to be in Chinatown with the opening of MCI Center in 1998.
Chinatown is the blueprint on Half Street.
Build it and Starbucks will come. TGIF, too.
Of course, Chinatown is actually Chinatown Disneyland today, a developer’s caricature of the old neighborhood, right down to the Chinese lettering on the distinctly American storefronts.
There is nothing like Chinese lettering on a CVS storefront to give you a feeling of Chinatown.
The visionaries who have identified Half Street as the new frontier are trying to ignore the trumping of one liberal tenet over another.
They still believe in the little people with all their hearts. But they believe more in big government.
So in this case, the little people of Half Street have to be sacrificed, with no tinge of regret, left to await the vast unknown.
The sculpture center is offering classes in the fall. But who knows after that?
The completion date of the ballpark is March 2008.
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