Rock Creek Park An Administrative History

The Changing of the Guard

A new era for Rock Creek Park and related parklands began on August 10, 1933. An executive order effective that date, signed two months before by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, abolished the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital and the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway Commission and assigned their functions to the Office of National Parks, Buildings, and Reservations in the Department of the Interior. The Office of National Parks, Buildings, and Reservations was a new name for the National Park Service and one that proved temporary: the designation employed since the bureau's creation in 1916 was restored in an Interior appropriations act approved March 2, 1934. [1]

The administrative shift was part of a larger reorganization of the executive branch ordered by President Roosevelt during his first months in office (his action having been authorized in legislation signed by Herbert Hoover on his last full day as president). As it affected the National Park Service, the major aim of the reorganization was consolidation of the national monuments and battlefield parks administered by three government departments under one. Horace M. Albright, the enterprising young director of the Service, was chiefly interested in obtaining the parks and monuments of the Agriculture and War departments; but he did not object when Lewis W. Douglas, Roosevelt's budget director, drafted the executive order to include the Washington parks. A skilled political operator, Albright knew that possession of these parks would further enhance the Service's visibility among members of Congress and other national leaders. [2]

Under the National Park Service, Rock Creek Park and its adjuncts became components of National Capital Parks. The term denoted the administrative branch of the Service formed to manage the Washington area acquisitions as well as the parks themselves collectively. National Capital Parks inherited most of the civilian employees of the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks, including Francis F. Gillen and Frank T. Gartside. Gartside acted as NCP superintendent for the first two months of the new administration, whereupon C. Marshall Finnan, formerly superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park, received the permanent appointment.

Finnan stayed through July 1939. Gartside, Edmund B. Rogers, and Gillen successively acted in the position during the interval to January 1941, when Irving C. Root took the job. Root, who had been chief engineer with the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, was superintendent until July 1950. He was followed by a line of career Park Service managers: Edward J. Kelly through April 1958, Harry T. Thompson to February 1961, T. Sutton Jett to January 1968, I. G. (Nash) Castro to September 1969, Russell E. Dickenson from December 1969 to October 1973, and Manus J. (Jack) Fish, Jr., from then until this writing. From 1962 to 1969 and from 1976 to date, National Capital Region replaced National Capital Parks as the umbrella organizational term, and the head of the office was titled regional director.

Like most components of National Capital Parks, Rock Creek Park was not treated as a discrete unit of the National Park System for many years after it came under National Park Service administration. As a sub-unit of NCP it did not have its own superintendent and staff. Maintenance workers, park police officers, and others were detailed regularly to duty there, however, and the person assigned to supervise park maintenance was sometimes termed superintendent, as under the predecessor organizations.

Joseph J. Quinn, another legacy of Public Buildings and Public Parks, was chief of NCP's Rock Creek Park Division in the early 1940s and was called superintendent of the park in the mid-1950s. Keith R. Polhemus filled his role in 1958 as Chief, Rock Creek Park Section. In 1965 three new administrative divisions were established within the National Capital Region, and Rock Creek Park came under National Capital Parks-North, headed successively by Superintendents Joseph Brown, Julius A. Martinek, and Joseph Antosca. The three divisions were reduced to two in July 1972, Rock Creek being assigned to National Capital Parks-West under Superintendent William R. Failor, then Luther C. Burnett.

In 1975 the National Park Service listed Rock Creek Park as a separate unit of the National Park System, giving it the same nominal status as Yellowstone and Yosemite. [3] It did not yet have the same degree of administrative autonomy: when National Capital Parks-West was abolished that year, the park reverted to a division in the National Capital Parks headquarters managed by James J. Redmond. An administrative reorganization in October 1976 brought to the Rock Creek Division Pinehurst Parkway, Soapstone Valley Park, Melvin C. Hazen Park, Klingle Valley Parkway, Normanstone Parkway, Dumbarton Oaks Park, Montrose Park, Beach Parkway, and Blair Portal--tributary and other bordering reservations recently under George Washington Memorial Parkway and National Capital Parks-East jurisdiction. With its effective boundaries thus enlarged, Rock Creek Park lost its division status and became a distinct organizational entity in August 1977, and Redmond became a full-fledged park superintendent. Upon his untimely death in August 1983 he was succeeded in that capacity by Georgia A. Ellard.

The Urban Challenge

Until the 1933 reorganization the National Park Service managed mostly western wilderness. City parks--even large natural city parks--were alien to its agenda. Although Horace Albright and his successors appreciated the visibility and political value their bureau derived from administering the National Capital Parks, many if not most of their staff did not regard this urban inheritance as "real Park Service." A dichotomy between the National Park Service and the National Capital Parks persists to the present in the minds of many Service traditionalists.

Rock Creek Park was more like the Service's traditional areas than were other elements of National Capital Parks. This resemblance did not shield it from internal criticism, however. In June 1934 Malcolm Kirkpatrick, a landscape architect in the Service's Branch of Plans and Design, prepared a 16-page report titled "What Is Wrong With Rock Creek Park." He termed his critique a supplement to the Olmsted Report of 1918.

Kirkpatrick complained of the park's deteriorated woodlands from unchecked weed and seedling growth and a failure to remove dead timber (revealing a management orientation not shared by all). He noted the erratic flow of the creek from its use as a storm sewer, causing under-cutting of banks and deposition of sand and silt. "The automobile can be designated as one of the greatest detriments to the enjoyment of Rock Creek Park today; that is, Rock Creek Park as it is equipped to handle the burden of traffic upon it," he wrote; to alleviate the situation he suggested augmenting the creek fords with bridges. [4]

Kirkpatrick was offended by the aesthetics of previous park development. The rustic signs were "'rustic' in the worst sense of that word which implies apparently that to conform to natural surroundings, objects of wood must ape the growing tree. This is an absurd notion that yields absurd results." Toilet buildings and shelters were "drab and uninteresting." Existing road bridges represented "a fairly thorough cross-section of bad architectural and structural design."

"Thus to the National Park Service has come a heritage wealthy only in its possibilities...," he concluded. "Once a program is formulated, a rigid system of control must be inaugurated so that every step taken shall be in the direction of the established objective and within the bounds of good taste and common sense. No more of this haphazard freedom for subordinate field foremen." [5]

Dr. E. P. Meinecke, a natural scientist on the Service staff, recorded his views on Rock Creek Park at the same time:

The strongest impression I get is that of disappointment. I have every reason to expect, in a large city, the capital of the Nation, a Park representing that which is best in American landscape art, designed to serve a large and growing number of its inhabitants as a place of recreation and refuge from the turmoil and heat of the city. I find instead a curious mixture of more or less futile attempts at landscaping and of wild or rather unkempt growth, haphazardly developed, of amateurish attempts at embellishment side by side with crudest neglect. [6]

Meinecke found too much cleaning of the forest floor in heavily used areas, tending to soil erosion. Like Kirkpatrick, he commented on the scouring and undercutting of the creek banks from unregulated stream flow. "There is at present, little pleasure to be gained from visiting the creek itself," he wrote. "The water is dirty and the smell of decaying filth is anything but agreeable." He attributed much of this problem to an inadequate storm sewer gate in Piney Branch, which in heavy rain let raw sewage into the stream. [7]

The primary feature of Rock Creek Park--the creek itself--had been sullied for some time by its urban and suburban surroundings. In 1922 designated children's bathing places were identified as subject to very high fecal contamination, traced to sewage from Bethesda and Kensington, Maryland. The Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission could not correct the problem until the District of Columbia completed its interceptor sewer, to which the suburban sewerage would connect. The Army Medical Corps operated clorination plants above the bathing areas, but their efficacy in the running stream could not be assured. Bathing had to be suspended. [8]

As related in the last chapter, the volume of stream flow had also become a matter of increasing concern in the 1920s. In his capacity as executive secretary of the National Capital Park Commission, U. S. Grant III asked the U.S. Geological Survey in 1926 to monitor the flow in the Rock Creek basin. Funds were not immediately available to establish gauging stations, but A. H. Horton of the Survey arranged for the monitoring beginning in 1929. "The flowing water in Rock Creek is one of the chief attractions of the park," he wrote Grant. "[I]f the developments in the basin of the creek are affecting the amount of water in the creek I believe it would be desirable to obtain data which will indicate how serious the situation is and whether the effect on the flow of the creek is increasing year by year." Two years later the National Capital Park and Planning Commission considered a proposal to raise the Potomac River dam above Great Falls so that the impounded water could be gravity-fed to the Rock Creek valley through a conduit to augment the creek flow during dry periods. Grant determined that the scheme would be very costly, and it was not pursued. [9]

Government facilities were among the sources of creek pollution in the early 1930s. The Walter Reed Army Hospital on upper 16th Street discharged sewage into Rock Creek, and the National Bureau of Standards on Connecticut Avenue disposed of large quantities of chemicals in the tributary running past its property. In 1934 the National Park Service received a $25,000 allotment from the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works to study and plan for the elimination of pollution in Rock Creek and its tributaries. The resulting report declared the major problem to be the combined sanitary and storm sewers serving some 160,000 people in the District portion of the watershed: the intercepting sewers became overcharged during rains and spilled their contents into the creek. Separate systems would be needed--and they would be costly. [10]

The situation had not greatly improved by 1954, when an article titled "Our Capital's Rock Creek Mess" appeared in American Forests. "It is hard to believe that the foul-smelling, mud-laden, debris-choked water-course which winds its sickly way from Montgomery County, Maryland, through the nation's capital can be the same stream which Major Michler described...some 90 years ago," wrote its author, Bernard Frank of the U.S. Forest Service. Frank deplored the overdevelopment of the watershed with inadequate storm water and sewage controls and called for strict measures to prevent erosion during land development. [11]

In 1967 an Interior Department publication, The Creek and the City: Urban Pressures on a Natural Stream; Rock Creek Park and Metropolitan Washington, was able to report some progress. The U.S. Geological Survey and the Federal Water Pollution Control Administration had conducted detailed studies to monitor water quality in the creek. Two dams had recently been built upstream in Montgomery County under the Soil Conservation Service; Lakes Needwood and Frank (for the deceased Bernard Frank) behind them would collect silt and curb flood damage downstream during their expected 50-year lifespans. Montgomery County had adopted new grading and sediment controls for land development. Some defective sewers in Washington had been repaired, and the National Zoo had initiated a major program to halt the discharge of animal wastes into the creek. The report advocated stronger enforcement of existing anti-siltage and pollution measures and greater efforts to continuously remove trash and other debris from the stream.

In the mid-1980s there is still some pollution from combined sewers in times of prolonged rainfall, but most is from non-point sources--general street runoff. With the heavy development in the watershed accelerating runoff, the creek flow is more erratic than ever. Neither problem is readily solvable. [12]

The urban environs of Rock Creek Park presented other challenges unfamiliar to Park Service managers in their accustomed habitat. Most park users were local, and many used the park in ways that visitors to most other national parklands did not. Some of these uses were judged incompatible with the higher values for which the park had been set aside.

In 1936 Russell T. Edwards of the American Nature Association complained that the park had been converted to "an outdoor garage for the automobile washing industry." Evidently a traditionalist in matters of dress, Edwards was scandalized by the dishabille of the participants. "With a background of still reflecting waters with ducks and geese paddling idly about," he wrote, "you will find women in Mother Hubbards or nightgowns, I wouldn't know which, washing automobiles aided by, I presume, their husbands, stripped to the shirt and less." Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes agreed that the activity was unseemly and announced plans to forbid car washing--a prohibition not consistently enforced. [13]

Unfortunately, there were more serious offenses to occupy the attention of the U.S. Park Police, established under the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds in 1919 and inherited by the Park Service with National Capital Parks in 1933. "Residents describe the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway section between Taft Bridge and Calvert Street Bridge, particularly the south slope behind the Edgewater Riding Academy, as a 'jungle'--a habitat of unsavory characters, perverts, and delinquents," Assistant Regional Director Nash Castro advised the force in 1962. He ordered heightened surveillance of the area. [14] Surveillance would never be sufficient to thwart all evil-doing in the park, however.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the Park Service made a more concerted effort to bring "parks to the people"--particularly urban parks to inner-city populations. The National Capital Region sponsored "Summer in the Parks" and "Parks for All Seasons" programs aimed at black youth and others who had been little drawn to the traditional park values and activities. Amplified popular music concerts were prominent features of the new programs. Some were held in Rock Creek Park, but when park neighbors complained of the noise and "undesirable elements" attracted, most such programs there (outside the Carter Barron Amphitheater) were discontinued.

In 1972 a Washingtonian magazine article summarized the stresses and contradictions stemming from Rock Creek Park's urban situation:

It is thought to be the largest urban park in the country, perhaps in the world, yet it is very hard to get into. It is a wilderness preserve largely untrammeled by man, but the polluted stream, that flows through it is dangerous to touch. It has the potential to bring people together in enjoyment and relaxation, but it is a physical barrier four miles long and one mile wide separating the haves [west of the park] from the have-nots [east of the park] in an already divided city. It is without peer as a living example of our heritage from prehistoric ages to colonial times to the present, yet the majority of those who use it are commuters who never leave their cars. [15]

The Park and the Automobile

The greatest urban impact on Rock Creek Park and the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway was and is automobile traffic. Although virtually all national parklands felt the heavy influence of the automobile, few were so dominated by it.

Automobiles could not be accused of intruding in the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway, which was intended from its inception to accommodate them. "The road in the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway section is designed for high speed traffic as far north as Cathedral Avenue," reported Thomas C. Jeffers, a National Capital Park and Planning Commission landscape architect, in 1934. "Its real purpose is to provide a pleasant and speedy way of travel between Potomac Park and Rock Creek Park." Jeffers contrasted it with Beach Drive and the link through the zoo, which he declared must remain low speed and unstraightened. [16]

Upon completion of the parkway road in June 1936, Chairman Frederic A. Delano of the Park and Planning Commission suggested alternating one-way traffic south and north for morning and evening commuters respectively. This pattern was inaugurated in May 1937 and became a permanent feature of the parkway, reinforcing its status as a commuter route. [17]Among the regular parkway commuters during the first decade was Secretary Ickes, who in the early 1940s requested weekly park police reports on violators of the one-way traffic regulation and personally recorded the license numbers of offenders he spotted.

The completion and heavy use of the parkway road created new pressures on the valley road to the north. The link from the upper end of the parkway through the zoo to Rock Creek Park proper, built in the 1920s, was a major impediment to through traffic. It wound sharply along an S-curve of the creek and traversed two fords, which caused closure of the road during high water.

In 1933, even before the parkway road was finished, highway improvement advocates in the city were favoring construction of a road tunnel beneath a portion of the zoo to straighten the link. The Smithsonian Institution, which administered the zoo and the road segment through it, opposed the tunnel. So did the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which thought it would violate the park character of the road. But the highway interests, generally supported by the District of Columbia Board of Commissioners, persisted and broadened their vision. In 1938 Commissioner Melvin C. Hazen proposed extension of a double traffic artery through the zoo and north through the Rock Creek valley to East-West Highway in Maryland--a scheme opposed by the Evening Star newspaper as "about the worst thing that could happen to Rock Creek Park." [18]

Prompted by the District commissioners, Congress in the fiscal 1940 District appropriations act ordered planning for "additional highway and parkway facilities in the vicinity of, into and through Rock Creek Park, Rock Creek and Potomac connecting Parkway and National Zoological Park." But the National Capital Park and Planning Commission and the National Park Service, essential parties to the planning, succeeded installing action until 1942, when World War II shifted federal priorities and the through highway scheme was shelved. [19]

The zoo road became a live issue again in 1954, with the National Park Service and National Capital Planning Commission (as it was retitled in 1952) now eager to improve that segment. The Service advocated twin two-lane tunnels through the hill around which the downstream bend of the creek flowed through the zoo, with a bridge over the creek below the south portals. The Smithsonian was still reluctant and deflected Service requests for permission to start surveying and test boring for the tunnels. "This matter has been very carefully discussed in our offices, and I am afraid that it is the unanimous opinion here that it would be disadvantageous for the National Zoological Park to have the road you describe cut through its property...," Secretary Leonard Carmichael wrote Director Conrad L. Wirth in February 1957. "It is our considered opinion that an arterial type road cutting through this property would seriously interfere with the basic recreational and scientific functions of the Zoological Park." [20]

In a peremptory reply to Carmichael, Wirth spelled out the legislative intent of Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway as connecting Potomac Park and Rock Creek Park and virtually demanded a transfer of zoo land to the Service for the purpose. Unintimidated, Carmichael replied that much more time would be needed for the Smithsonian's lawyers and board of regents to consider the matter. The Service then took a more conciliatory approach, wooing Dr. Theodore H. Reed, the zoo director, with master planning assistance. In a 1959 letter to Carmichael, Wirth was deferential, promising to hold the new zoo road to two lanes and offering to allow the Smithsonian to choose its alignment. Carmichael finally authorized the survey and borings, and in March 1960 he announced the Smithsonian's approval of plans prepared by the Service and Bureau of Public Roads. The two-lane road would tunnel through "Administration Hill" and follow the east side of Rock Creek to Klingle Road; the zoo land north of the tunnel and east of the road would be transferred to the Service; and the Service, would build a parking lot for the zoo near the Harvard Street entrance, and a bridge to carry Harvard Street traffic across the parkway. [21]

After further design work, a contract for $1,536,584 was let to A. S. Wilkerstrom, Inc., of Skaneateles, New York, in June 1962. The tunnel and new road segment, eliminating the two fords, opened to traffic in the fall of 1966.

The improvement, so long advocated by the Park Service, proved a mixed blessing. The parkway below carried more northbound rush-hour traffic wanting to use the single northbound lane of the new road through the tunnel than it could accommodate, leading to long backups on the parkway. Pressures mounted to extend one-way northbound traffic to Klingle Street--but that would only relocate the bottleneck and clog both lanes of the tunnel, blocking it to emergency vehicles and creating possible hazards from exhaust fumes.

By the 1970s the Service realized the futility of parkway improvements to lessen traffic congestion: more lanes and fewer impediments only served to attract more traffic, with increasingly evident degradation of park values. In a 1977 planning document on Rock Creek Park the Service reviewed its past actions with regret: "[T]he conversion of the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway to exclusive use by one-way traffic during 85 morning and evening rush periods and the provision of first priority maintenance of an excellent road net directly encourage excessive commuter traffic Construction of a tunnel on roadway near the National Zoo represents inappropriate development since it directly encourages adverse increased commuter use of park roads." [22] Such are the insights of hind-sight!

The Service's position on the proposed four-lane arterial highway to Maryland has better stood the test of time. As advanced by Commissioner Hazen in 1938, the highway would pass through the zoo and the lower part of Rock Creek Park, extend north along the east side of Broad Branch Road to Military Road, then use Oregon Avenue widened on the park side to connect with a widened Beach Drive in Maryland. In delaying action on the proposal, the Service cited the 1918 Olmsted Report to buttress its view that no major roadway should occupy the narrow winding floor or steep wooded hillsides of the valley above the zoo (although certain crossings would be appropriate). [23]

The war sidelined but did not bury the highway plan, which reappeared in the Recommended Highway Improvement Program presented by the Regional Highway Planning Committee in 1952. The arterial along and through Rock Creek Park was now to be a link connecting U.S. Route 240 (present Interstate 270) in Maryland with downtown Washington. Proponents of the plan, including the District commissioners, argued that only a small part of the park--the most densely wooded and least used part--would be affected. They were joined in Maryland by the State Roads Commission and the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which was prepared to allow use of Maryland's Rock Creek Park for the highway and for a segment of what would become the Capital Beltway. [24]

The National Park Service resumed its opposition. It was aided by a group of Chevy Chase, Maryland, residents led by Gerald P. Nye, a former senator from North Dakota, who would be disturbed by a leg of the highway displacing or passing near their homes. In June 1953 Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay wrote Nye, "[T]he Department of the Interior will vigorously oppose any use of the Rock Creek Valley for arterial highway purposes or any other use contrary to the intent of Congress in the establishment of this important park area." [25] Park Service Director Conrad Wirth represented Interior on the National Capital Planning Commission, which would have to approve highway construction in the Maryland parkland acquired with federal funds under the Capper-Cramton Act. The commission opposed the highway down Rock Creek Park in the District, but it overrode Wirth's objections and allowed the Capital Beltway to pass through a portion of the park in Maryland.

In January 1955 the Service drafted legislation, introduced by Chairman James E. Murray of the Senate Interior and Insular Affairs committee, that would require the National Capital Planning Commission to rescind its permission for the beltway leg, restrict its approval of subsequent roads in the Maryland park, and proscribe additional roads in the District park without specific congressional approval. The bill won support from retired congressman Louis C. Cramton, Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant III (now president of the American Planning and Civic Association), and an array of civic and conservation organizations. It was opposed by the Bureau of the Budget, which thought it unnecessary in view of existing protections; by Maryland politicians and officials, to whom it represented unwarranted r federal interference in state affairs; and by the Washington Post, which editorialized, "[N]o assurance can be given that the enormous increase in traffic from Montgomery County into the District can be handled without an expressway along the edge of Rock Creek Park some time in the future." [26]

The highway issue was thoroughly ventilated in a Senate hearing on the bill, which was not brought to a vote in either house then or following its reintroduction in the next Congress. Planning for the beltway leg in Maryland proceeded amid state assurances that it would be a low-speed "parkway" from which commercial traffic would be forever barred--assurances that were forgotten when the beltway was completed in the mid-1960s and became part of the interstate highway system. But opposition to bringing U.S. 240 into the District via Rock Creek Park spread and solidified. When District and Maryland highway interests revived the scheme in 1957, the Washington Post admitted past error and declared, "This would be intolerable, and Washingtonians who love their park had better rise up and block any such encroachment." (At the same time, it favored an alternate route through Glover-Archbold Park as "the least disadvantageous course," because "unquestionably a connection with U.S. 240 must be provided.") Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton solicited statements from District Commissioner Robert E. McLaughlin, Secretary of Commerce Sinclair Weeks, and Gov. Theodore H. McKeldin of Maryland that they shared his strong objection to a Rock Creek highway; only McKeldin declined to join in. [27]

Some skirmishing continued (highway dragons being notoriously difficult to slay). A 1958 Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission staff re,port on alternative extensions of U.S. 240 explicitly ruled out Rock Creek Park based on Interior-Park Service and conservationist opposition. A year later, however, the Maryland commission and the Montgomery County Planning Board resolved to restudy a route using the park. Once again Director Wirth made clear the Service position, with evident success--for a time. [28]

The next and last serious challenge came in 1966. The Lands Committee of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments and the National Capital Regional Planning Council, an affiliate of the National Capital Planning Commission, proposed a new feasibility study of a highway route along the western edge of Rock Creek Park south to Tilden Street, where it would cross to the east side and join the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway below the zoo. The Evening Star endorsed the plan, characterizing opposition to the earlier proposals as emotional and predicting that this route would "emerge as the most reasonable, logical solution" to the need for a northwestern freeway connection. [29]

By this time, however, longstanding assumptions about the need for such a connection--somewhere--were being challenged by other visions. From them sprang the planning and construction of Metro, metropolitan Washington's rapid rail transit system, in the next two decades. The massive governmental commitment to Metro rendered most freeway proposals obsolete, that for Rock Creek Park among them. The park would likely have been spared without the subway, so entrenched were its defenders; but if the highway plan were finally dead, Metro entombed it.

Bicycling

The 1960s saw a resurgence in the popularity of the bicycle as a mode of transportation and recreation for adults as well as children. Rock Creek Park made its first special effort to accommodate cyclists early in that decade, when Ross Drive was occasionally reserved for their use. In 1966 the section of Beach Drive from Joyce Road to Broad Branch Road was first limited to bicycle and pedestrian traffic on Sunday mornings. By that fall about three and a half miles of trail north of the Nature Center had been bluestone-surfaced for bicycle use. In the following years the Beach Drive automobile closure was extended to Morrow Drive, and the bicycle trail was extended.

These initial efforts were not altogether successful. The trail was overly steep in places, and the surface was not stable enough for thin tires. Bicycle use on the closed roads did not appear sufficient to justify their closure, and motorists complained. They also objected to sharing roads simultaneously with cyclists, who tended to hold up traffic. [30]

Cyclists made rapid gains in number and influence, however. In September 1971 they prevailed upon the Park Service to set aside one lane, of the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway north of Virginia Avenue for a week o promote commuting by bicycle in lieu of automobiles. The experiment, was well publicized and enjoyed a good response from cyclists, but its positive aspects were overshadowed by massive traffic tieups with severe inconvenience to the great majority of parkway users unable or unwilling to shift to bicycles. The political impossibility of continuing the lane closure--the goal of the bicycle lobby--was quickly apparent. The Service compromised by paving over the existing bridle trail between Connecticut and Virginia avenues for bicycle use; the crash project was completed by the following week.

During the 1970s good paved bicycle trails were completed north along Beach Drive to Broad Branch Road and from Joyce Road north to near the Maryland line. The missing link was the stretch from Broad Branch to Joyce roads. Beach Drive between those points continued to be closed to auto traffic during weekend hours, when commuters did not rely heavily on it; but when motorists and cyclists coexisted on the narrow, winding road, the association was unpleasant for both.

In its Statement for Management on Rock Creek Park prepared in 1977, the Service listed as an objective "To improve the quality of the visitor's experience by reducing excessive automobile commuter traffic on roads within Rock Creek Park, and encourage the shift of such traffic to mass transit, bicycle, and other more appropriate forms of transportation." In line with this objective, the Service in 1980 studied nine alternatives for completing the bicycle system. At one end of the spectrum, 5-1/2 miles of new bicycle trail paralleling Beach Drive would be built, entailing no effect on auto traffic. At the other end, major segments of Beach Drive would be permanently converted to bicycle use only, eliminating it as a through route for automobiles. [31] Michael A. Replogle, an engineer with transportation experience, advanced a tenth alternative in March 1981 on behalf of the People's Alliance for Rock Creek Park (PARC), an outside group. His plan would permanently close Beach Drive to through auto traffic both above and below Joyce Road as soon as the Metro subway system was opened to the Van Ness station on Connecticut Avenue.

In March 1983 the Service advanced a three-phase solution largely endorsed by PARC. Portions of Beach Drive above Joyce Road would be closed to cars on weekends and holidays during the warm months. One lane of Beach Drive south to Broad Branch Road would be reserved for cyclists and joggers during weekday rush hours, allowing cars the other lane in the prevailing rush hour direction. After 1985, when the Red Line of Metro was to be completed beyond Van Ness and reconstruction work on 16th Street was to be finished, a gate would be placed near Boulder Bridge permanently barring that section of Beach Drive to automobiles.

Three months later, however, the Service disappointed the bicycle forces and others interested in curtailing auto traffic by a change of position. It confirmed the weekend closings on upper Beach Drive between Picnic Area 10 and Wise Road and between West Beach Drive and the Maryland line--measures previously tried with good results. But it would not interfere with weekday traffic below Joyce Road. Instead, it would build a 2.5-mile bicycle trail paralleling that segment of Beach Drive down to Broad Branch Road. [32]

The Washington Area Bicyclist Association called the decision a "shocking turnaround" and "a totally inadequate response to the problem of high-volume, high speed auto commuter traffic in this magnificent national park." The National Parks and Conservation Association was equally critical. "Caving in to pressure from automobile commuters and some city officials, Manus Fish, NPS director of the National Capital Region, announced that a three-year planning effort would be disregarded, and he offered a new bike path instead," it reported in its National Parks magazine. "Because construction of a paved path through the narrow valley would disrupt the site and--most important--would do nothing to alleviate traffic problems, NPCA is opposed to the plan." [33]

The opposition to the new bicycle path, together with its cost, dimmed the likelihood of its early construction. At this writing the closings on upper Beach Drive are in effect on weekends during daylight savings time, and the drive between Joyce and Broad Branch roads is barred to automobiles on weekends year round. Further measures to curb auto traffic in favor of bicycles do not appear imminent. [34]

Equestrian Use

Horseback riding has been enjoyed in Rock Creek Park from its beginning. The cost of maintaining or renting horses has limited riding to the more affluent public, for the most part, and many equestrian users of the park have been persons of prominence in local and national affairs. Douglas McKay, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's first secretary of the Interior, and William P. Clark, President Ronald Reagan's second Interior secretary, were regular Rock Creek riders.

Until the 1950s recreational riders were served only by stables outside the park, including Pegasus Stables in Silver Spring, Maryland, and Edgewater Riding Academy near 26th and D streets. In 1956 Helen Fenwick Kollock, manager of Pegasus Stables, and Mary K. Nelms met with Secretary McKay and Superintendent Edward J. Kelly of National Capital Parks to propose a stable in the park. The women would erect it near the existing Park Police stable, built the year before north of Military Road and east of Oregon Avenue, and present it to the government in return for a long-term operating lease. Horses for hire and boarding for individual owners' horses would be offered. [35]

McKay approved the proposal, but complications soon developed. The Edgewater Riding Academy property was condemned that year for the eastern approach to Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, and its operator, Francis J. Hannan, sought to relocate in Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. The prospect of two competing private ventures caused the Park Service to decide that it should build the park stable. In March 1957 it announced its intention to do so in fiscal 1958 as a project of MISSION 66, a 10-year development program that would improve facilities throughout the National Park System by the fiftieth anniversary of the Service in 1966. [36]

Hannan and his patrons formed the Lower Rock Creek Riding Association to lobby for a stable in Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. At the same time, opposition developed to the site tentatively selected near Oregon Avenue: a stable there would displace garden plots tended by members of the Good Will Garden Club of Chevy Chase. In June Director Wirth, Chief Landscape Architect Robert W. Andrews, and Sen. Francis H. Case of South Dakota inspected the Oregon Avenue site and a site by the William Howard Taft (Connecticut Avenue) Bridge advocated by the Lower Rock Creek Riding Association. They concluded that a stable was needed at each place. [37]

Notified that their gardening permits would not be renewed in 1958, the Good Will Garden Club members escalated their protest. A delegation including Rep. DeWitt S. Hyde of Maryland, Rep. Peter F. Mack, Jr., of Illinois, and Postmaster Roy M. North of the District of Columbia descended on Superintendent Kelly to complain, and letters followed from Sen. Carl E. Mundt of South Dakota, Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon, and Rep. Gracie B. Pfost of Idaho. Neighborhood residents voiced fears of odors, flies, disease, and especially "undesirable elements" forthcoming from a stable. "We believe our sixteen year old daughter will not be safe alone in our home, with the stable help required to care for forty horses, and the people who 'hang around' a stable, nearby," wrote one. The local Hawthorn Citizens Association passed a resolution in opposition, declaring that the stable would be a "definite threat to the long-established property in the area and a hazard to the welfare of the citizens." [38]

Nor did the Park Police welcome the prospect of a public stable adjoining their facility. Sergeants T. C. Tingle and A. D. Baye warned that it would increase the possibility of disease to their horses, leave them with less corral space, and endanger both their horses and the public by bringing them into close contact. Relaying these views to Superintendent Kelly, Acting Chief Raymond L. Selby concurred and sided with the neighborhood opposition: "The contemplated location is very near to a rather exclusive residential area. Rental stables notoriously attract a 'trashy' class of help and hangers-on, such as will be a continual source of friction with the neighboring residents." [39]

Yielding to the powerful forces arrayed against the Oregon Avenue site, the Service leadership announced in December a shift of location to a site south of Military Road and east of Glover Drive, where the park maintenance area then stood. In March 1958 the Service awarded a $104,000 contract to Sun Construction Company of Silver Spring, which completed the stable for opening that December. Mary Nelms obtained the concession for its management under the name Rock Creek Stables, Inc. William L. Warfield of Falls Church, Virginia, received an $87,500 contract for construction of the second stable, by the Taft Bridge. It opened in April 1959 under Francis Hannan's management as the Edgewater Riding Academy. Built on the same plan, the two stables each accommodated 40 horses. [40]

Rock Creek Stables experienced financial difficulties by 1960, and Mrs. Nelms sold her interest the following year. In 1970 its operator was forced to declare bankruptcy as a result of an accident claim. The Edgewater Riding Academy was dislocated in 1970 when the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority occupied its building for Metro subway construction (the Red Line would pass beneath Rock Creek at that point). To replace it, WMATA built a new stable near Rock Creek Stables in 1972 from an award-winning design by the noted Washington architectural firm of Hartman-Cox. Both concessions were then acquired by Rock Creek Park Horse Center, Inc., operated by James H. Warrick, Jr. [41]

In 1974 Robert Douglas began a program of therapeutic riding for handicapped children at the new stable, known as the Red Barn, with Park Service and other federal grants. The National Center for Therapeutic Riding was formed as a nonprofit charity in 1980 and attracted much favorable notice, aided by a visit from Nancy Reagan after she became first lady. Its quarters proved less successful: the Red Barn suffered from leaking skylights and a deteriorating roof structure to the point of threatened collapse in 1980. The Service condemned the building that July and razed it the following February. The therapeutic riding program moved to the older stable nearby.

Another de-stabilizing event occurred in 1980 when fire destroyed part of the small frame Park Police structure near Oregon Avenue; the stable was replaced two years later. Previously, police horses had acquired additional quarters when WMATA vacated the former Edgewater Riding Academy in 1979 upon completion of Metro construction in the vicinity. The paving of the equestrian trail along Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway for bicycles rendered the area unsuitable for recreational riding, so the police takeover met little or no public resistance.

The Pierce-Klingle House and the Nature Center

The most imposing structure in Rock Creek Park is one not generally visible and familiar to the public. Its obscurity stems from its secluded location off a city street not connected to the main park drives and from the private residential and administrative uses to which it has largely been devoted.

The Pierce-Klingle House, or Klingle Mansion, is situated on Williamsburg Lane above the west bank of Rock Creek less than half a mile below Pierce Mill. Joshua Pierce, a son of the mill builder, built the house in 1823 and enlarged it by an addition on the west side 20 years later. The Pennsylvania Dutch-style structure is of blue and gray granite and encloses 10 rooms within its three stories. A two-story stone and wood frame barn stands to the east, and a utility house and potting shed flank the rear.

An avid horticulturalist, Pierce named the property Linnaean Hill for Karl Van Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, and cultivated a wide variety of plants there. Upon his death in 1869 the property passed to his wife's nephew, Joshua Pierce Klingle; the Klingles occupied it until the early 1890s, when it was acquired for Rock Creek Park. Its future then became problematic. In 1908 Louis P. Shoemaker, a grand-nephew of Joshua Pierce, urged its conversion to "a reception hall for the protection, advantage, and pleasure of the public," with exhibits on the natural and human history of the park. [42] His suggestion was not adopted, and the house was kept in residential occupancy by park staff. Patrick Joyce, maintenance foreman under the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds, lived there before 1926, when Joseph J. Quinn took both the job and the house. Quinn was paying $15 a month in rent and employing the property as a maintenance center when he and the park were transferred to the National Park Service in 1933.

The Service's new superintendent of National Capital Parks, C. Marshall Finnan, thought the house better suited to become the superintendent's residence. Quinn was unhappy about the prospect of eviction and sought high-placed assistance in holding on to his quarters. "At the White House today I was handed a memorandum with reference to the house in Rock Creek Park that has been occupied by J. J. Quinn," Secretary Ickes wrote Park Service Director Arno B. Cammerer on March 15, 1934. "This memorandum sets out that Mr. Quinn has been ordered to move so that the house could be turned over to Mr. Finnan. I would like to discuss this matter with you." [43]

At Cammerer's request, Finnan prepared a statement on the historical associations and architectural interest of the house and urged that it be restored in a manner befitting its significance. "If the house continues to serve as a residence," he wrote, "it should most certainly be occupied by some one fully appreciative of the historical and architectural values, and who would be willing to furnish it, as nearly as practicable to do so, in the period and style from 1830 to 1840." Finnan had himself in mind, and Cammerer secured the secretary's approval by assuring him that the higher rent forthcoming from the superintendent would cover the restoration costs. [44]

Ickes remained personally interested in the house, writing again in May to ask how it could ultimately be used if restored. Finnan responded that it could become a historic house museum, exhibiting varieties of cut flowers in keeping with Joshua Pierce's horticultural interests; alternately, it could be rented to the highest bidder "until the entire investment of restoration is paid for and then it could be taken over by the Park Service for such uses as it feels will best suit the interests of the public and the administration of the park." He estimated that residential rent would bring in between $125 and $150 per month, "so that the project would be self-liquidating." [45]

The Service proceeded to renovate the house for Finnan's use, and he took up residence there in October 1936. Notwithstanding the original estimate, he approved monthly rent for himself of $85, justifying the below-market figure with language routinely used for employee quarters in the Service's remote parks: "This property is located in an isolated community where transportation facilities, schools, stores and conveniences are not readily accessible." [46] Finnan remained there until August 1, 1939, when he left for the superintendency of Zion National Park in southwestern Utah--a place more nearly fitting his rent justification.

Secretary Ickes ordered that the house not be assigned to Finnan's successor or anyone else connected with National Capital Parks. At his direction, it was advertised for lease at a minimum bid of $200 per month. When no such bids were received, a lease at $2,200 per year ($183 per month) was negotiated with Michael W. Straus, chief of the Interior Department's Division of Information, in February 1940. [47]

This arrangement came under attack in January 1947 when George D. Riley, staff director of the Senate Civil Service committee, charged that Straus, then commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, was improperly benefiting from it. He grilled Park Service Director Newton B. Drury, Associate Director Arthur E. Demaray, and National Capital Parks Superintendent Irving C. Root about the lease at a committee hearing, but no wrongdoing was found. Straus continued in occupancy until early 1952, when he moved to a new house outside the park. [48]

Jane Dahlman Ickes, widow of the just-deceased former Interior Secretary, asked Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman if she could rent the house. The Park Service decided that it needed the property for administrative purposes and so advised Chapman, who politely declined Mrs. Ickes' request. The Service envisioned using the house for ranger-naturalist offices, a unit of the engineering survey staff, and a checking-in station for the mounted police in Rock Creek park. [49] In practice, only the police used the house and barn during the remainder of 1952. Service auditors occupied part of the house in early 1953, but it was vacant at the end of the summer.

In February 1954 Under Secretary Ralph A. Tudor told Associate Superintendent Harry T. Thompson of National Capital Parks that Chief Justice Earl Warren was interested in renting the house. "I gave Mr. Tudor the historical background on the mansion house relating how it had been a constant public relations problem; that it was used this past summer as interim office space for field officers; that the heating plant would need replacement if it were to be occupied; that it presented a servant and maintenance problem and so on," Thompson recorded of their conversation. [50] Tudor was sympathetic and discouraged Warren's application.

The following year Matilda Young, director of the Children's Museum of Washington, sought to obtain the building for her museum. W. Drew Chick, Jr., chief park naturalist for National Capital Parks, and C. Kenny Dale, his assistant, had begun planning for a nature center in the house, and Director Wirth turned down the museum's request. [51] The Rock Creek Park Nature Center opened in October 1956.

Catering largely to school children, the nature center soon encountered opposition from neighboring residents. John D. Rhodes, a Senate reporter, took the lead, organizing a petition and visiting Associate Superintendent Thompson in April 1957 to complain of traffic and trespassing by the visitors. The Service had planned to build a hard-surfaced parking lot for the center that summer, but the opposition led Thompson to promise that the activity would be relocated after the current school year. [52]

Word of the decision aroused contrary sentiment. John G. Gruber, vice-principal of Suitland Junior High School, charged that neighborhood objections to the center were based on the importation of black children there. The National Parks Association and the Wilderness Society voiced support for its retention. Interviewed by a newspaper reporter, Thompson claimed that the relocation plans stemmed from the physical inadequacy of the house and the difficult access to it; but he admitted that Rhodes had "crystallized" the decision. The counter-opposition caused the Service to pledge in August that it would not discontinue the nature center in Klingle House until a new facility was ready. [53]

Planning for the new nature center had begun that June with the decision to place it east of upper Glover Road, on the site of a caretaker's residence. The five-room frame residence had been built with a Public Works Administration allotment in 1936 and was occupied by Joseph J. Quinn upon his eviction from Klingle House. With Quinn's impending retirement the house was no longer deemed necessary, and William M. Haussmann, chief architect for National Capital Parks, designed the nature center building to incorporate usable portions of it. [54]

The construction contract was awarded to Cee Bee Contractors of Coral Hills, Maryland, in June 1959. The building cost $258,500, its exhibits $41,500, the projector for its planetarium $6,000, and the access road and parking area $27,500--a total of $333,500. Delays in material deliveries postponed the scheduled December completion. With Director Wirth presiding, the new nature center was dedicated on June 4, 1960. [55]

During 1959, the final year of the Klingle House nature center, the Service considered other tenants for the building upon its forthcoming vacancy, among them the American Institute of Park Executives, the National Conference on State Parks, the American Planning and Civic Association, and the Junior League of Washington. When the Junior League appeared most satisfactory, the Service negotiated an agreement with that organization. It moved in on April 6, 1960. [56]

In 1963 the Children's Museum of Washington again tried to obtain the house. When Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall turned down the request, citing the problems experienced there with the nature center, the well-connected museum sponsors sought to work their will through the White House and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the president's brother. Failing in this, they bided their time until March 1965, two months before the Junior League's lease would expire. When Matilda Young then pressed Secretary Udall for the property, the Service initially decided to locate the offices of National Capital Parks-North there so that it would not have to choose between the two private groups. It then dropped this plan, renewed the Junior League's lease, and offered its Conduit Road School building on MacArthur Boulevard to the museum, which reluctantly accepted the arrangement. [57]

In 1972 the Service regained occupancy of Klingle House, the Junior League having moved to new quarters on M Street in Georgetown. In the succeeding decade it used the house for the "Green Scene," a horticultural outreach program; other science and natural resource program activities; and various administrative purposes. The house was expensive to maintain and not ideally suited for these functions, however, causing the Service to look once again for an appropriate tenant. It found one in the American Institute for Conservation, which on October 15, 1982, was given a five-year special use permit to use Klingle House as its headquarters. The rent of $800 per month would be devoted to restoration of the structure. [58] For the immediate future, at least, the house appeared in good hands.

Pierce Mill and the Art Barn

When Superintendent Finnan advocated renovation of Klingle House in March 1934, he mentioned Pierce Mill as another park structure deserving attention. The cost of restoring it as an operating mill would be "almost negative," he wrote. Secretary Ickes was intrigued by the idea. "[Finnan's] memorandum persuades me that we ought to consider restoring not only the Mansion with a view toward preserving it as a monument, but the old mill as well," he wrote Director Cammerer. "How much would this cost?" [59]

Thomas T. Waterman and Malcolm Kirkpatrick, an architect and landscape architect in the Service's Branch of Plans and Design, prepared plans and estimates, and Cammerer responded in May that the mill restoration would cost $19,250. The Service had already applied for the money as a public works allotment, he told Ickes, and could start work promptly if the project were approved. Perhaps expedited by Ickes' other role as public works administrator, approval was soon forthcoming. In November the frame porch on the upstream side of the mill that had been used by the teahouse concession was removed to clear the way for reconstruction of the water wheel and mill race. The Fitz Water Wheel Company of Hanover, Pennsylvania, prepared working drawings under a $500 contract and restored the milling machinery for $7,465. It was powered by an undershot wheel, less efficient than an overshot wheel but not requiring the high elevation of water supply needed for the latter. The project was completed in March 1936 at a total cost of $26,614. [60]

Mill operation began on October 27, 1936, under the supervision of Robert A. Little, a veteran miller employed by the Welfare and Recreational Association of Public Buildings and Grounds. The meal went to the cafeterias run by the association in government buildings and was sold to the public at the mill. To preclude charges of unfair competition with private enterprise, the association was careful to advertise its sales prices as "higher than in the stores." [61]

The mill ran sporadically and was never a high-volume business. Machinery breakdowns, fluctuations in the water supply, and the unavailability of trained millwrights caused operation to cease in 1958. Interest revived in the next decade, and in 1967 Blaine E. Cliver, a Service architect, recommended measures to resume operation. The water wheel and shaft had decayed beyond repair, and Cliver found the undershot design of dubious authenticity. On his advice the machinery was redone with an overshot wheel. [62] Because of the difficulty of getting Rock Creek water at a level high enough to power it, municipal water was piped to a short exposed race above the wheel.

The mill ran again in July 1970. Miller Robert Batte tended it, aided and succeeded by Brian Gregorie. A tropical storm in September 1975 damaged the machinery and forced another suspension of operations. Repairs were made, but operation continued on a sporadic rather than steady basis. For most visitors on most occasions, the picturesque appearance of the mill and the interpretive exhibits and leaflets explaining its operation had to suffice. At this writing the park was reactivating the mill for regular service, so its future may be livelier.

Two other historic structures nearby enhance the setting of Pierce Mill. The earliest of Isaac Pierce's buildings remaining is a blue granite springhouse, built in 1801 and now straddled by the divided lanes of Tilden Street. Directly west of the mill is one of several barns built by Pierce. Predating the mill, it has a frame front and sides of blue granite, which like that for the springhouse was quarried along Broad Branch.

In May 1971 the barn was reincarnated as the Art Barn, displaying art exhibits under an agreement with the Associates of Artists Equity. This arrangement received special legal sanction in 1984, when Congress authorized the secretary of the Interior to negotiate a five-year contract with the Art Barn Association (successor to the Associates of Artists Equity). [63] Using the barn in this manner, however distant from its historical function, would help insure its preservation.

Camp Good Will, the CCC, and the Army

Camp Good Will (pages 26-27) continued in operation under the National Park Service. In the fall of 1931 Frank T. Gartside had proposed its relocation to Fort Hunt, Virginia, where more open space was available. The move did not occur, and it remained in Rock Creek Park north of Fort DeRussy. In 1933 its operator, the Family Service Association, reduced it from an, overnight facility to a day camp as an economy measure. Nearly a thousand Boy Scouts from Washington and Maryland convened at Camp Good Will in June 1936. The charity camp then spent its last summer there before moving to the Chopawamsic Recreational Demonstration Area (now Prince William Forest Park) in Prince William County, Virginia. The remaining buildings received some use by Scout groups in 1937 before their demolition in February 1938. [64]

A Civilian Conservation Corps contingent then occupied the site, designated Camp NP-14, Rock Creek Park. Before and during its use of the area, the CCC performed a range of improvements in the park and Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. Its enrollees cleared the creek channel and stabilized its banks with riprap, planted trees and shrubs, built more than two miles of bridle path with log hurdles for jumping, and constructed an addition to the Park Police lodge, which had been built with a $13,500 public works allotment on Beach Drive below Joyce Road in 1936. [65]

During World War II the U.S. Army took over the site, naming it Camp King. It constructed roads and barracks, which it removed upon Its departure In 1944. The army was also active elsewhere In the park. The 93rd Detachment of the 212th Anti-aircraft Search Light Battery moved onto the old reservoir site at 16th and Kennedy streets with two trucks and four trailers a week after the Pearl Harbor attack. The War Department subsequently sought and obtained a permit to keep the unit there for the duration of the war, but the detachment left In November 1944, nine months before the cessation of hostilities. [66]

Interpretation, Recreation, and Entertainment

One of the justifications for consolidating federal parklands under the National Park Service In 1933 was the Service's reputation for communicating, through educational or interpretive programs and media, the values of its parks to the public. The offices previously responsible for Rock Creek Park had done little of an interpretive nature, and the Service sought to make its mark there In this regard.

Donald Edward McHenry, the first Service naturalist assigned to National Capital Parks, began a series of Friday night campfire programs at Pierce Mill on June 5, 1936. McHenry, Dr. Harold C. Bryant, the Service's assistant director for research and education; Dr. Paul Bartsch, curator of mollusks at the Smithsonian Institution; and Superintendent C. Marshall Finnan spoke that month to a total attendance of about a thousand. [67]

The campfire programs at Pierce Mill--shifted to the Interior Department auditorium in inclement weather--continued to feature an array of Service and Smithsonian officials. Among the speakers in 1939 were Minor R. Tillotson, the Service's regional director from Santa Fe, on the Grand Canyon; Acting Associate Director John S. White on "Years of Adventure in Our National Parks"; Assistant Secretary Alexander Wetmore of the Smithsonian with "Birds on the Wing"; and Carl P. Russell, head of the Service's branch of research and information, on "Behind and In Front of the Scenes in Our National Parks." [68]

In 1940 the outdoor programs were relocated to a wooded recreation grove near 16th and Kennedy streets. There a special campfire program on August 29, 1941, celebrated the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the National Park Service. Former director Horace M. Albright presided over the ceremonial lighting of a large birthday cake. Among the candle lighters were William Henry Jackson, whose photographs had won support for the early western parks; J. Horace McFarland, who had promoted the Park Service bill as president of the American Civic Association; Assistant Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman; and Service officials Hillory A. Tolson, Conrad L. Wirth, and Ronald F. Lee. [69]

111 In 1938 Donald McHenry developed a nature trail in Rock Creek Park. The quarter-mile loop trail, east of Beach Drive north of the Bingham Road intersection, displayed some 200 labels identifying plants and other natural features. [70] Then and during the war McHenry and his naturalist staff, including George A. Petrides and W. Drew Chick, Jr., led bird-watching expeditions and nature walks along other park trails. They obtained much volunteer support in these programs from the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia.

The 1954 American Forests article by Bernard Frank, "Our Capital's Rock Creek Mess", stimulated the Washington chapter of the Soil Conservation Society of America to generate wider public interest in the Rock Creek watershed. The contemporary threat of the arterial highway through the park was a further spur to action. The first Rock Creek Park Day, on May 15, 1955, was an effort to focus attention on the park and increase awareness of its values.

Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant III chaired the commission for Rock Creek Park Day, and its steering committee included Irston R. Barnes, president of the Potomac Valley Conservation and Recreation Council; Fred M. Packard, executive secretary of the National Parks Association; James Craig, editor of American Forests; and Drew Chick, then chief naturalist of National Capital Parks. A horse show, dog show, and bird and nature walks were among the special events offered, and speakers proclaimed the need for watershed protection. The day was sufficiently successful to be repeated on October 7, 1956, when Mamie Eisenhower served as honorary chairman and the nature center in Klingle House was first opened. With some exceptions (notably in the early 1970s), Rock Creek Park Day continued as an annual event. It is usually observed on the last Saturday in September. [71]

As in the earlier years, proposals were occasionally advanced for recreational development in the park that would intrude upon its natural qualities. In 1936 the National Capital Park and Planning Commission advocated a recreation center at Military Road and 27th Street. The commission's recreation plan justified the development on the grounds that it would be isolated from the rest of Rock Creek Park by Fort Drive, a parkway proposed to link the Civil War defenses of Washington. Superintendent Finnan and landscape architect Malcolm Kirkpatrick strongly opposed such use of any part of the park, citing the 1918 Olmsted Report. [72] The center was not built. Athletic fields and related facilities were constructed on the east side of the park at 16th and Kennedy streets in 1937-1938, but they supplanted the obsolete Brightwood Reservoir and thus did not constitute a new intrusion.

One of the greatest park incursions resulted from the 150th anniversary celebration of Washington as the nation's capital, in 1950. The previous May, Congress authorized the National Capital Sesquicentennial Commission to erect a structure or structures for the celebration, and in November Secretary of the Interior Oscar L. Chapman approved a site in Rock Creek Park near 16th Street and Colorado Avenue for a large amphitheater. National Capital Parks architect William Haussmann and engineer Robert C. Horne designed the facility, for which Secretary Chapman broke ground on December 17. The completed amphitheater with its extensive parking lot and approach roads cost $563,676 and seated more than four thousand. [73]

The theater opened on August 4, 1950, with "Faith of Our Fathers," a dramatic production by Paul Green commissioned for the sesquicentennial. President Harry S Truman and his family witnessed the event. The drama continued for the rest of the summer and resumed for the 1951 season, but it did not enjoy the success of "The Lost Colony," Green's long-running outdoor production on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. Because the theater was operated by the sesquicentennial commission, the Park Service had to obtain its approval to arrange military band concerts there on Sunday evenings, when "Faith of Our Fathers" was not playing.

Carter T. Barron, executive vice chairman of the commission, died on November 17, 1950, and the amphitheater was named for him a week later. Carter Barron--the name alone having become synonymous with the facility--devolved to National Capital Parks custody on July I, 1952, when the commission disbanded. Super Attractions, run by Irvin and Israel Feld, booked the theater that August to stage Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, but the impresarios were unable to arrange a full season of entertainment planned for 1953.

The Sixteenth Street Highlands Citizens' Association, composed of neighboring landowners, protested the commercial use of Carter Barron. But Secretary of the Interior Douglas McKay, finding such use in "the broad interest of the National Capital community," announced in April that Washington Festival, Inc., headed by Constance Bennett, would produce a 12-week program that summer. The productions, including "Show Boat," "Annie Get Your Gun," "The Merry Widow," and "Brigadoon," earned lukewarm reviews and insufficient revenue to cover costs. Washington Festival folded at the end of the season, and Super Attractions returned in 1954. For the rest of the decade and into the next it booked ballet, opera, popular musicals, and the National Symphony Orchestra at Carter Barron. [74]

According to Jacqueline Trescott of the Washington Star-News, "This Ed Sullivan mix of attractions worked through the mid-60s when music began to dominate the schedule and the cost of elaborate productions was finally too burdensome." Ballet ceased in 1969. "Our audience was gone...," Mrs. Israel Feld later recalled. "The whole Washington scene was changing. After the riots [of April 1968], people were afraid. And our new patrons didn't want operettas and Broadway plays." By 1972 the new patrons, mostly black teenagers, had caused Carter Barron to become "the summertime-palace of second-string soul," in Trescott's words. [75]

During the 1970s Carter Barron's traditional audience was further dispersed to the new Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Virginia, and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington--the last two also under Park Service custody. Reflecting the viewpoint of its departed patronage, a Washington Post drama critic in 1984 called Carter Barron "now more celebrated as a parking lot." [76]

The Mouth of the Creek

With all that was done to preserve and enhance the natural quality of its valley, Rock Creek remained a blighted spectacle at its mouth--a point of great potential attractiveness, as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., had observed in 1925 (page 63). The National Park Service acquired possession of the mole at the creek's juncture with the Potomac, but the land just west of the mole and along the west bank of the creek below K Street remained in industrial use.

In 1956 the Service initiated planning for a water sports facility on the mole as part of its MISSION 66 development program. Architect William Haussmann visited boathouses at the U.S. Naval Academy, Philadelphia, Princeton, and Syracuse in preparing the design. His plan included restoration of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal dam at the creek mouth and its tidelock across the tip of the mole. The total cost was estimated at $521,500. [77]

The fact that interceptor sewers discharged into the Potomac nearby caused some concern within the Service. Associate Superintendent Harry T. Thompson pressed strongly for the development, contending that pollution was less there than downriver and that the District of Columbia was planning corrective measures. He prevailed, and the Service publicly announced its plans for a scaled-down facility, minus the dam and tide-lock restoration, in January 1958. [78]

David V. Auld, the District's director of sanitary engineering, again raised the pollution issue, and John Nolen, Jr., retired staff director of the National Capital Planning Commission, recalled Olmsted's desire to keep the view at the creek mouth open. Nolen favored moving the boat center upriver to the mouth of Foundry Branch, above Georgetown. Haussmann agreed that the Foundry Branch site was "certainly preferable from the esthetic point of view," but vehicular access to it was difficult. Controversy continued into the following year, with District public health authorities and the Washington Post opposing the mole location on health grounds. [79]

In March 1959 Harry Thompson, then superintendent, made a final plea for the mole site. Director Wirth informed Secretary of the Interior Fred A. Seaton of the Service's plans to proceed at that location, and in July Seaton finally concurred. On September 22 a $92,289 contract for a parking lot and approach road and bridge over Rock Creek was awarded to Allied Contractors, Inc., followed two months later by a $196,272 award to James L. Partello, Inc., for the boathouse. [80]

117 The National Capital Water Sports Center, as the completed facility was initially known, was dedicated September 24, 1960. Harry Thompson gave the welcoming address at the ceremony. Five months later Thompson died, and on March 22, 1961, Wirth recommended to Secretary Stewart Udall that the center be named the Harry T. Thompson Boat Center. Udall quickly approved the honor for the man who had labored so actively on its behalf. [81]

The boat center, renting canoes and other small craft under concession contract and housing racing shells for area schools and colleges, brought public recreational use to the mouth of Rock Creek. [82] In doing so, it rendered even less appealing the railroad tracks and grimy industrial infrastructure along the creek and riverfront next door. By the early 1980s the redevelopment of lower Georgetown (below M Street) was well underway, and the owners of the privately held waterfront land between the creek and 31st Street were planning an elaborate complex of residential condominiums, offices, and a hotel.

The block directly adjoining the creek and the mole was encumbered by a 20-foot building height covenant, the result of a 1941 transaction between the government and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, its owner at the time. The present owner and developer, seeking to build a luxury hotel and an office building on the block, wanted relief from the height restriction. In exchange, it was willing to grant benefits of equal economic value to the National Park Service, which held the covenant for the government. Under the agreement reached by the parties in 1984 the two buildings would rise to between 50 and 60 feet but would be set well back from the creek and riverfront. The developer would grant perpetual public access along the river and creek and pay for stabilization and landscaping of both creek banks and restoration of the canal tidelock.

The agreement came under fire from some local citizens who opposed all private development along the Georgetown waterfront. Supporters of the agreement countered that development was inevitable, in the absence of major appropriations to buy the private land; that the kind of development planned next to the creek was the best that could be expected there and certainly better than the status quo; and that the exchange granting increased public access and parkland improvements was "very much in the public interest," in the words of Regional Director Jack Fish. [83]

The opponents sued to block the agreement, and on May 30t 1985, U.S. District Court Judge Barrington D. Parker ruled that the Park Service had illegally alienated National Park System property by easing the terms of the covenant protecting the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. If allowed to stand, the decision would stall the planned enhancement of Rock Creek's mouth. At this writing the developer and the Service had filed an appeal. Although the outcome could not be predicted with certainty, there were high hopes that Olmsted's vision of an attractive confluence might yet be realized by the centennial of Rock Creek Park in 1990. [84]

Guided Walk (1957)