In Praise of the Park
ON THE GROUNDS of the Laytonsville Public Golf Course, nestled in the gently rolling land of northern Montgomery County, stands an old wooden springhouse, roughly eight feet by twelve feet, that in an earlier era supplied water for the Dorsey farm. Crystal-clear spring water still bubbles up over a stone slab on the floor, seeps out, and nourishes a lush growth of spearmint, jewelweed, and other swamp-loving flora.
This spring is the source of Rock Creek.
No one knows exactly when Rock Creek was given its name, but Captain John Smith, the English adventurer who helped establish the Jamestown colony in Virginia, is believed to have first put it on the map in 1608. From its origin in Laytonsville, the creek twists and turns for twenty-two miles through Montgomery County and Washington, eventually emptying into the Potomac River, descending some six hundred feet along the way.
Over the years, people who aren’t content to leave well enough alone have tried to change Rock Creek’s course or eliminate the waterway altogether.
Were it not for some artful scheming and string-pulling perpetrated by a handful of prominent do-gooders nearly a century ago, in fact, the waters of Rock Creek today might low through a huge, snaking sewer line buried beneath one of Washington’s major boulevards.
Thankfully, however, the hand of man has not disfigured the creek and its environs. The natural beauty of some 1,700 acres cradling the meandering path of Rock Creek — stretching roughly from the northern tip of the District down to the Potomac River — has been preserved, protected, and defended.
It is, in fact, the largest natural urban park in the world. Unlike many great city parks, Rock Creek Park was neither built from the bottom up nor expensively restored to a natural condition. (Manhattan’s Central Park, for example, which is less than half the size of Rock Creek Park, came into being only through a massive construction project designed partly to take impoverished New Yorkers off the city’s relief rolls.)
Although urbanization nibbles at its every edge, Rock Creek Park remains much as nature left it. The park’s remarkable range renders its nooks and crannies virtually impossible to explore in their entirety. That, however, has not deterred Washingtonians from trying.
Two million or so people pass through Rock Creek Park every year for some sort of organized recreational activity; uncounted millions more walk, hike, jog, or bicycle within its borders. The entire park is crisscrossed by paths and trails (there are many more miles of them than roads), including nearly nine miles for walking and hiking, eight and a half for bicycling, and eleven for horseback riding.
Each year, hundreds of thousands of Washingtonians use the park’s extensive athletic facilities, which include twenty-eight tennis courts, four basketball courts, an eighteen-hole golf course, the Rock Creek Horse Center, and playing fields for football, soccer, volleyball, and the like. Thirty picnic groves, some of them hidden in the most picturesque corners of the park, are in such great demand that two-thirds of the 360,000 picnickers in one recent year reserved space in advance.
Its fragile ecology has been battered a bit over the years, but the park somehow has managed to survive. As an unspoiled natural island in the middle of a metropolis, the future of Rock Creek Park, all things considered, seems secure.
Outrageous Ideas
DURING THE CIVIL WAR, naturalist John Burroughs advocated an expansive plan for a park cradling Rock Creek. “A few touches of art,” he believed, “would convert this whole region into a park unequaled in the world.” In 1869, a civic committee urged the establishment of a Rock Creek park for more materialistic reasons.
“What has not Central Park done for New York, Fairmont Park for Philadelphia, and Druid Hill for Baltimore?” the committee asked. “They have greatly increased the valuation of the property of those cities and stimulated the influx of wealth and population,” it answered.
Eventually it took a cadre of the capital’s most powerful citizens to maneuver the creation of Rock Creek Park through Congress. Chief among them was Charles Carroll Glover, a partner in the Bank of Riggs and Company (he became president of the newly formed Riggs National Bank in 1896).
Glover assembled a small group of Washington’s movers and shakers in 1888 to push the plan. A subcommittee was formed to draft park-creating legislation, find members of Congress to introduce it, and coordinate lobbying for its passage. Another subcommittee was put in charge of organizing mass meetings. The Evening Star’s publisher, Crosby S. Noyes, pledged his newspaper’s support of the plan in a series of articles and editorials.
But their proposal for creating Rock Creek Park did not exactly sail through the Senate and House of Representatives. First of all, there was the price tag (something around $1.2 million) and the projected 1,700-acre size, which to some seemed extravagant, at least when compared to New York City’s 624-acre Central Park. And then there was the controversy over the park’s name: if one House subcommittee had gotten its way, Rock Creek Park might be known today as Columbus National Park.
Although Washingtonians could properly have been expected to lend their support en masse to the idea of a majestic park in the nation’s capital, there was, within some quarters, virulent opposition. One reason: although the legislation declared the area to be a national park, District taxpayers were compelled to foot half the bill for the acquisition of land.
And rumors floated around town that a few wealthy Washingtonians were positioning themselves to profit from the establishment of Rock Creek Park by buying adjoining tracts for development. “Who will be benefited?” asked an anonymous broadside. “Ought the people of the United States and of the District to be made to pay scores of millions for a pleasure ground for a few nabobs to chase foxes in during the spring and fall?”
This brand of petty criticism, though, seemed to fall on deaf ears, and the park legislation finally was passed by Congress and signed into law in September 1890. A commission armed with condemnation authority was formed to begin buying up pieces of the whole, which induced some property owners to devise ingenious (and unsuccessful) schemes aimed at inflating the prices paid for their land. A few of them, for instance, argued that because traces of gold once had been found in Rock Creek, their parcels undoubtedly were sitting on top of hidden ore that could be mined for handsome profits.
No mother lodes or fragments thereof, however, have ever been discovered in Rock Creek Park.
Modest Proposals
AROUND THE TURN of the eighteenth century, “Saw Pit Landing,” situated on the west bank of Rock Creek near the place it emptied into the Potomac River, began to bustle as a trading post. Its success paved the way for the establishment of Georgetown in 1751, and a sizable stretch of Rock Creek came to play an important role in the thriving foreign shipping trade.
In those days, sailing vessels were able to navigate as far north as P Street, stopping at wharves and docks along the way to load locally cultivated tobacco and other commodities for export to England and other parts of Europe. Rock Creek’s importance as a commercial waterway was recognized as late as 1792, when the Maryland legislature passed an act to preserve navigation along its banks.
In the 1830s, as the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal neared completion, lime kilns were constructed along Rock Creek near L Street; they produced about two thousand barrels of lime a week for the mortar and plaster needed by Washington’s burgeoning building industry. Farther north, the waters of Rock Creek provided ample commercial opportunities, particularly for gristmills, paper mills, and sawmills.
But the commercialization of Rock Creek and the increasing congestion around it eventually inflicted a nasty toll on its once-pristine waters. A string of sewer pipes extending as far north as the P Street Bridge spewed raw sewage and other forms of filth into Rock Creek. “There is a continual smell emerging from these sewers,” a Washington newspaper reported in 1894, “which can be detected for some distance.”
The banks of the stream became open dumping grounds for garbage and anything and everything else. The rubbish heaps frequently caught fire, generating low-lying and foul-smelling clouds that hung over many of Georgetown’s slums and the adjacent neighborhoods of Washington.
By the turn of the century, this section of Rock Creek had become such an eyesore and nuisance to the nose that civic groups, in abject desperation, pushed a number of proposals to build a road over it, fill it up, or transform it into a massive underground sewer. Decades earlier, after Tiber Creek had become a stagnant, scum-covered channel — blamed for periodic outbreaks of malaria and smallpox — District public works crews simply buried it under Constitution Avenue. Many Washingtonians considered Rock Creek deserving of the same treatment.
In 1906, the National Society of Fine Arts debated a low-cost proposal to deal with the Rock Creek problem: The stream itself could be routed through a large masonry culvert and the remaining valley gradually filled up with dirt, ashes, discarded furniture, and the like. That accomplished, the newly filled land could be subdivided and sold as building lots. Proponents of this extraordinary idea, no nitwits they, outlined a number of important economic bonuses: bridges no longer would need to be built across the lower portions of Rock Creek, Georgetown and Washington proper would be welded together as a single community, and property values would not only be preserved but enhanced.
Northwest Passage
WHEN IT WAS OPENED in 1907, the Connecticut Avenue Bridge was the largest concrete bridge in the world. Its completion signaled the dawn of the automobile age in Washington, which, more than anything else, opened the valleys and vistas of Rock Creek Park for mass exploration.
Beach Drive (named in 1901 for Lansing H. Beach, who directed its construction and later became a District commissioner) was one of the first improved roads in Rock Creek Park and played an important role in making it a popular place for picnicking, horseback riding, automobile touring, and other kinds of recreation.
Automobile traffic had not yet crowded the narrow winding roads within the park, but Coolidge prosperity changed all that. The introduction of the Model A Ford in December 1927 brought the automobile within financial reach, of tens of thousands of Washingtonians, and soon Niagara Blue roadsters and Arabian Sand phaetons were rolling through Rock Creek Park’s byways.
And while the wealthiest of the capital’s residents continued to summer in Newport, Bar Harbor, and any number of like places, most city dwellers found the shaded sanctuaries of Rock Creek Park the only affordable refuge from Washington’s abominable heat and humidity.
In the early 1930s, work began on a new parkway stretching southward from the gates of the National Zoo to just above Constitution Avenue. For nearly twenty years, the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway Commission had been assembling parcels of land — 160 acres in all — on which to build a sleek and curving parkway shielded at almost all points from the signs of civilization enveloping it.
In great measure, the parkway’s grand design is in harmony with the winding tract through which it runs. Except in its southernmost segment, the dense concentrations of population — often less than an eighth of a mile away in either direction — are invisible from the roadway and the running paths alongside it. Former President Jimmy Carter apparently admired the parkway so much that landscape architects in Atlanta studied its design in connection with plans for the Carter presidential library.
Within the upper portions of Rock Creek Park, the invasion of automobiles still was confined largely to weekend pleasure seekers, but even that had its price. Rock Creek’s many fords became convenient places for car washing, and as early as 1936 a representative of the American Nature Association publicly complained that the park was quickly becoming “an outdoor garage for the automobile washing industry.”
Car Sickness
EVEN BY THE EARLY 1930s, the waters of Rock Creek were so sadly polluted that the safe recreational activity was to look at them — and, in some places, preferably from a distance.
“The creek is nothing less than an open sewer,” the Star editorialized in 1932, “and it is a question whether the relatively recent ban against bathing should not be followed by an equally strict ban against wading.”
Rock Creek’s twin sources of pollution, sewage and silt, seemed destined only to get worse as new residential developments crowded the perimeters of the park. The principal sewage main in northwest Washington had been designed in 1889 to accommodate a future population of 500,000; by 1950, the combined storm and sewer network was struggling to serve more than twice that number. And the postwar building boom in Montgomery County, by displacing topsoil during construction, was sending hundreds of tons of silt down Rock Creek every year, muddying its waters even further and increasing the frequency of flash floods in its valleys.
The tremendous population growth in suburbia left Rock Creek Park as an elongated obstacle for commuters. Some drivers tried to zigzag through it during rush hours, but many more merely jammed up the major streets that divided northwest Washington like slices of pie, particularly around the entrances to the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. The city’s public transit system might have been able to help, but the rapidly changing commuting patterns did not exactly match the aging streetcar lines, and proposals for shifting bus routes made their way through the District’s utility commission at about the pace of rush-hour traffic on Connecticut Avenue.
So it should have come as little surprise that by 1953 Rock Creek Park itself came to be viewed, at least in the eyes of those searching for places to plant new highways, as an ideal route for a major expressway in and out of the city.
“It’s the only way you can get through without running smack through hundreds and hundreds of houses,” explained Donald Gingery, a member of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. This followed a statement from Douglas Brinkley, the District’s chief highway planner, with a less-than-reassuring ring to it: the proposed Route 240, he said gamely, “will bring many more people into the park to appreciate it.”
But to some, the proposed highway was a thing of inestimable horror: a two-hundred-foot-wide swath of parallel pavement that would split Rock Creek Park in the middle in some places and all but smother it in others. Guided by visions of ruined grandeur, opposition to the expressway plans was instantaneous and intense. “We think an additional six-lane arterial highway into Washington through Rock Creek Park is about as necessary as a six-lane highway to the moon,” said the leaders of a newly formed citizens’ coalition.
Former Republican Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota, chairman of the Citizens Action Committee for Fair Road Planning, declared war on the highway planners. “The minute the State Roads Commission undertakes a belt route or any part of 240 in the park, the matter is going straight to court,” he promised. “The law forbids it.”
The Nye forces took the offensive. Three years later, the expressway plans still were entangled in red tape and lawsuits. And by September 1956, District highway officials had given up any hope of bringing a freeway through Rock Creek Park, principally because it seemed unlikely that the Montgomery County segment of the expressway ever would be approved.
Why the change in plans? “Some people,” complained the city’s assistant highway commissioner, “are just too hard to get along with.”
Hazardous Wastes
AS THE BATTLE over the expressway raged full tilt, people began to wonder whether Rock Creek would, before too long, even be worth saving. In the summer of 1952, twenty picnic groves were closed when one of the District’s trunk sanitary sewer lines started spilling raw sewage into park areas north of Military Road. To reduce the stench and prevent further contamination, the ground had to be plowed and sprayed with disinfecting chemicals.
The problem, as best engineers could determine, originated where a forty-six-inch sewer main of the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission connected with the District’s older thirty-six-inch line. Pressure in this bottleneck was so great that, at times, liquid — or something resembling it — spouted up through nearby manholes, seeping down into the already discolored waters of Rock Creek.
Farther south along Rock Creek, where District lines carried a combined flow of storm water and sanitary sewage, heavy rains brought overflows of diluted sewage into its waters. And through the early 1960s, the National Zoo discharged animal wastes, exotic and otherwise, into the stream almost every day. The zoo’s director, however, insisted that Rock Creek “doesn’t smell worse going out of the zoo than it did when it came in.”
The other source of pollution, silt, continued its exodus from Montgomery County through Rock Creek, increasing its tendency to flood. Automobile traffic normally made its way through the creek’s natural fords, but it eventually reached the point where the slightest flash rainstorm would force park personnel to haul out the ford barriers.
In 1955, for example, the two fords near the zoo were closed all day for roughly one-third of the year and closed for portions of sixty-two other days. Disgruntled motorists drove around willy-nilly, never knowing whether the next potential passage through the park would be open or closed. And during one particularly severe rainstorm in 1956, about half of the park’s picnic tables were washed away or left coated with a slimy layer of brackish silt.
When the U.S. Department of Interior issued a report on the sorry state of Rock Creek in 1967, Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall asked, “How can we expect to clean up any river in the nation if we cannot clean up Rock Creek?” But that prospect seemed so hopeless, or at least so distant, that the National Park Service prepared to install special devices in the creek near the District line to begin chlorinating its fouled waters.
Back to Nature
TODAY THE FIRST systematic efforts to clean up Rock Creek are under way, guided by the Rock Creek Watershed Conservation Study, a volume the size of the District’s telephone book. These days, folks who fish in lower Rock Creek must be content with durable species like carp, catfish, hogsuckers, shiners, and sunfish; someday, if the National Park Service has its way, trout and bass again may flourish there.
Automobiles made nearly 28 million passes through Rock Creek Park in 1982, up from 16 million just two years earlier, principally because more commuters are using the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway to enter and leave downtown Washington. The worsening congestion has brought a small increase in the crimes reported within park borders (and that may be attributable to stepped-up surveillance and apprehensions by police), but Rock Creek Park is still probably the safest four-square-mile area in the District.
The National Park Service’s annual operating budget for Rock Creek Park has hovered around $2 million in recent years, supporting roughly seventy-five full-time employees (more than two-thirds of them maintenance personnel). By any standard, that seems like an exceedingly small price to pay for maintaining a vast natural museum within easy reach of Washingtonians and visitors to the nation’s capital. Ninety-three years after its creation, rock Creek Park remains, as Congress intended, a “pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.”
“Rock Creek was as wild as the Rocky Mountains,” historian Henry Adams once wrote. “The brooding heat of the profligate vegetation, the cool charm of the running water, the terrific splendor of the June thunder-gust in the deep and solitary woods, were all sensual, animal, elemental.”
With some sacrifices to the city crowding its ragged borders, Rock Creek Park is much the same today. It is nearly impossible to imagine what Washington might be like without it.
Sidebar: Rock Creek Curiosities
This article originally appeared in the October/November 1983 issue of Regardie’s.
Bill Hogan