If he were wailing away on a guitar in Nashville, Dakota Shelton could pass for a country western singer. He sure has the name for it. Smokes Marlboro Reds, after he lights them under his T-shirt to shield the flame from the wind. Has them rugged features. Alas, Shelton was wailing away on a power tool Thursday around noon to break up concrete bannisters in D.C.’s Meridian Hill Park. “Started at 7 this morning,” Shelton says.
Shelton’s labors come at the tail end of a nearly 10-year project to restore Meridian Hill Park, a unique array of fields and formal gardens along D.C.’s 16th Street corridor, descending from Columbia Road. Thursday’s visit to the park was my first in more than 30 years of living in D.C. Shame on me.
The park was a study in whites and pinks: Along the winding paths above 16th Street, dogwood blossoms were just starting to open their white petals; hot-pink flowers were bursting on the red buds dotting the upper paths. The grass was struggling to get a foothold in the two flat fields at the top of the park.
My suggestion: Visit Meridian Hill this weekend and again later in the spring when the Park Service turns on the fountains that cascade down a 50-foot staircase through a formal garden into a pool that supports water lilies and, last season, a school of koi.
I caught up with Bob Jacobs and Dorothy Cox, who work at L’Arche, a nearby faith-based community for intellectually disabled.
“It’s nice the park’s been cleaned up,” Cox said. “When I first came here, it was a drug haven.”
That would have been in the 1970s an ’80s, when the park was briefly renamed Malcolm X and drug gangs ruled. After a teen was killed in 1990, neighbors formed Friends of Meridian Hill Park and fought for its resurrection. It was well worth the battle. Legend has it that Meridian Hill owes its name to Thomas Jefferson, who advocated the idea of having the Earth’s prime meridian run north of the White House to the “meridian” hill. Landscape architects George Burnap and Horace Peaslee designed formal Italian and French gardens. It’s a piece of Paris, replete with a statue of Jeanne D’Arc.
The Park Service began the current restoration with $6.2 million in 2003. It has revamped the waterworks and fixed the walkways and walls, which have proved to be a chore. Back in the 1930s, the rage was concrete aggregate, a medium consisting of small, colored pebbles mixed with concrete and formed on steel rods. It looks neat, but it’s falling apart.
Which brings us back to Dakota Shelton and his boss, Frank Camden, who owns Blue Ridge Restoration out of Lexington, Va. It takes craftsmen to blast away rotten aggregate, mix matching batches and restore the walls and pillars, with rock that comes from Illinois to Winchester.
“This one was gone,” says Camden, his hands on a pillar along 16th Street. “There was nothing left.”
Now it’s as good as new and looks it, too.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
