Division Avenue on the city’s far eastern edge was my late-night stomping ground for years — but I would go there only with cops.
Here, where the right-hand corner of D.C. juts into Prince George’s County, cops counted bullet holes in dead bodies and closed drug markets one night to see them open up like Middle Eastern bazaars the next morning. One cop told me: “You were at Division Avenue? We don’t control that.”
But that was then — in the 1980s and 1990s — when crack killed communities and Marion Barry’s cops waved the white flag.
Now there’s a farmer’s market where the heroin market used to be. Kids sell veggies where junkies peddled smack. And the green swath along Watts Branch creek that used to be called “needle park” is now Marvin Gaye Park, named after the Washingtonian who grew up near the creek and sang soulful tunes in the Crystal Lounge, right across the street.
The park had its official unveiling last weekend. It was a testament to thousands of volunteers who cleared the piles of trash, and hauled out the abandoned cars, and cut through the brush that had grown into a jungle over the trash.
But like most volunteer endeavors, this uplifting story of turning urban decay into urban dreams could not have taken place without the dreams and drive of one individual — in this case, Stephen Coleman, founder and executive director of Washington Parks & People.
On Sunday night, Coleman was bailing out the window on the second floor of the grand mansion his group owns on 15th Street, across from Meridian Hill Park. On Monday we took a rain-soaked tour of Marvin Gaye Park, past the greenhouses where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech about sit-ins in 1961, past the small meadow in Deanwood that Lady Bird Johnson dedicated in 1966, to the swath of green along Division Avenue, and down to the broad park where the Watts Branch empties into the Anacostia River.
For some activists and dreamers, housing is the key to healing the city. For some it’s the schools. For Steve Coleman, it’s the parklands.
“We focus on places where people think there’s no hope,” says Coleman, a tall, lanky 45-year-old who came to town in 1983 to try and trim military spending. In time, he fell in love with D.C., turned his energy to affordable housing and then parks in 1998. “We show them there is hope.”
And a place to play and celebrate and perform. Coleman and his small staff turned Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park along 16th Street from needle park to a nurturing place. They aim to do the same with Watts Branch, and parks across the city.
“We need more people to believe parks matter,” he says, wiping the rain from his brow. “The two forgotten aspects of our city are our people and our parks. We want to bring them together.
“That’s where the magic is,” he says.
The magic is even stronger in places where bullets and heroin once reigned.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected].
