May 2007 |
 |
"Creative tensions" on lower Maple Avenue
Police crackdown, plan for friendlier sidewalk ambience, "Children First" rally upcoming
In the 1960s Mayor Mike Miller persuaded his fellow town leaders to build a City Hall at the intersection where the long prominent row of two-story Maple Avenue houses dips to meet a shorter row of high-rise apartments. The mayor, who also had supported locating the apartments on the low flats, was certain the proximity of City Hall would lead to a prosperous street life at that end of the avenue.
A heart attacked ended the Miller era in Takoma Park just before the dedication of the new government center in 1971, and his friends said it was a shame, too, that he did not live long enough to see a nearby renaissance of bodegas and eateries and shops.
Thirty-six years later, alas, a Manhattan-style scene has yet to take hold on lower Maple Avenue. The scene that does exist is owned by older teenagers, who usually look the part of bullish toughs even when they are not, and is avoided by almost everyone who does not live on those blocks.
On the evening of April 12 two 18-year-old men from the District were hanging out in front of Peter's Sub at Sherman and Maple. A City policeman stopped his patrol car next to the men, asked a few questions and concluded they should leave. Unhappy at the suggestion, they appealed with quizzical shrugs and one incredulous hoot. "Why we got to do that?"
"I'm not kidding around. You got one minute, or you'll get ticketed."
Another squad car pulled up. The teenagers took off.
In his second month on the job Chief Ronald Ricucci had decided it was time to eliminate all public signs of criminal hubbub (loitering, trespassing, drunkenness and narcotics sales) on the sidewalks along the Maple Avenue apartments, and for about a week the cops were a bigger and more looming presence than the teenagers. Chief Ricucci's officers handed out seven trespassing tickets to young men oafishly killing time, issued four written warnings to teenagers harrying customers of the three commercial establishments, and filed 11 interviews of men trolling the sidewalks. Two of the incidents rose to the level of an arrest.
By trying to get rid of what the chief calls an "intimidating element" he is hoping to open up the avenue to other possibilities much as Mayor Rudy Guiliani did in the edgier New York boroughs a decade ago. "Yes, what we're doing is very similar to New York," he says.
The message he wants to deliver to "drug dealers, outside troublemakers, petty criminals and gang bangers," he says, is: "You are not welcome here, and the police will deal with you!"
The crackdown followed a meeting on April 5, presided over by City planner Ilona Blanchard, at which residents in the apartments and neighbors from adjacent streets spoke of their wishes for lower Maple Avenue. They were especially enthusiastic for adding more commercial enterprises to a street where the sales of lottery tickets at Maple Market is probably the briskest business. They mentioned a florist shop, an ice cream store, a coffee shop, a laundromat, an arcade and a buffet-style restaurant. Their wish list also included a median to divide the traffic lanes, wider walkways, more grass, street art with an international flair, flowering trees, hanging flower baskets, and more benches in spots where the ambience of a sidewalk park might be achieved.
Terry Seamens, the Ward Four City Council member who lives in a modest brick house on Ritchie Avenue but whose ward encompasses the high-rises and who is no stranger to the avenue, is pleased that City employees are trying to effect a change. He has been trying himself.
During his most recent run for election in 2005 Terry attempted to stir interest in lower Maple Avenue as a closed-to-cars venue for a crafts fair or flea market on weekends, a counterpart to the Sunday farmers' market in Old Takoma. Not much has come of that idea, but Terry and his wife Joyce, who regularly deliver boxes of food to shut-ins along the avenue, then queried tenants for other ideas.
Thus emerged a street festival that filled two sides of the Lincoln-to-Sligo Creek block with vendors, musicians and information tables on a Saturday afternoon last September. Although a cold rain spoiled the event, the festival organizers continue to be charged with purpose.
They recruited additional activists in the high-rises to form the Community Action Group with a goal of engaging an apartment populace that is characterized by high turnover rates and a limited interest in civic discourse. "We have a larger focus than the usual tenants' association," says Tebabu Assefa, who has brought attention to the group at the open-mike sessions of the City Council. "We want to address not just housing but safety on the street, jobs, social services — quality of life."
In March they published and distributed a four-color booklet with a questionnaire asking tenants to report on matters that most concern them.
On Saturday afternoon, May 5, the Maple Avenue group (joined by another group known as A Child's Voice) will be a host for a "Children First" rally in the parking lot at Piney Branch Elementary that from noon to three o'clock will feature mainly adult speakers and juvenile entertainers. The City Council has blessed the event by proclaiming May 5 "Children First Day."
Chief Ricucci is expected to stop by. In his desire to establish new standards on Maple Avenue he intends to go well beyond rousting kids from street corners. "I'd like us to get to know the law-abiding youth better," he says. "Ideally we'll set up programs where officers and teenagers can interact positively."
By the end of April several of the teenagers who are accustomed to using the extra-wide sidewalk in front of Peter's Sub and Maple Market for a slouchy, funky hangout space and who give the impression of wearing a Do Not Disturb sign on their chests, but who nonetheless consider themselves law-abiding, were involved in earnest talks with Terry Seamens. "They came to me to complain about the police harassing them," he says. "I explained the reason for the police actions. We're now having a dialogue. There are tensions, but they are creative tensions."
Next for these teenagers is a sit-down with the chief.
The Takoma connection to Yoko's "Wish Trees" of the world
On the afternoon of April 1, with yarn and a broken vase and other ordinary inanimate objects, Yoko Ono created two hours of "performance art" of the type that early in her career defined her as a public person. For her encore Yoko invited the audience of Anacostia residents and a few Takoma Park guests to leave their seats at THEARC, a magnificent art hall in a ravaged District neighborhood, and asked them to write a message on individual strips of blank paper. Each paper had a hand-cut piece of cooking twine looped through a hole at one end.
| Photo: Victor Augustine |  | | Welmoed Laanstra and Nora Halpern |
Off-stage stood Takoma Park artist and soccer mom Welmoed Laanstra and her Bethesda collaborator, Nora Halpern. On the evenings leading up to Sunday, assisted by a throng of friends and neighbors in Takoma Park and Bethesda, they had tied 48,000 loops of twine in place.
It had been a draining chore, but, as Welmoed and Nora watched now, their spirits lifted. Members of the audience were writing messages that began with the words "I wish," and the strips of paper were then hung by the twine on limbs of three cherry trees in nursery pots.
This was a different art form, at once political and personal, and performed in recent years by fans and admirers of Yoko around the world but never before in the U. S. capital city. For this hectic, memorable weekend during which Washington would claim a spot on Yoko's map of "wish trees" Welmoed and Nora were her sidekicks.
Over dinner that evening the two local women, a generation younger than Yoko, spoke with awe about a brief, haunting video she had shown at THEARC. An amplified medley of birdsongs gets louder and louder as a photograph of Yoko with John Lennon and their son Sean slowly materializes on a white screen and then the singing fades as the photograph vanishes.
| Photo: James Rawlings |  | | Yoko Ono |
Ever discreet, Yoko spoke to Welmoed and Nora more about art than family. "She's very private, but behind her eyes there's such a depth of feeling," Welmoed says.
Welmoed, who is married to Washington correspondent and author David Corn, and Nora, a curator by training who is on the staff of Americans for the Arts, had teamed up for two other avant-garde exhibitions they call "Street Scenes" - one of poetry displayed on the sides of trucks, another of sidewalk art - but Yoko's project was from another galaxy, one of celebrities and divas, which still describes Yoko despite her relatively cloistered golden years. Nora, who is casually acquainted with her, had suggested in an e-mail that Washington's Japanese cherry trees with their own glamour might be perfect as "wish trees," and everything fell in place. "We were blown away," Nora says. "But I think Yoko appreciated that we were doing this at a grassroots level with volunteers. No glitz."
The next morning, at the base of the Jefferson Memorial, the three of them distributed more of the special paper strips. The day was warm, the cherry blossoms along the Tidal Basin in full blossom. The thousands of tourists and locals who queued up for the papers attached them to nine potted cherry trees positioned by the memorial. Later on it took four workers two hours to remove them.
In the afternoon the last act of the triumphal weekend played out at the Hirshhorn Museum's Sculpture Garden with a solitary Asian dogwood that museum directors are designating as a permanent "wish tree."
The potted cherry trees were trucked back to Anacostia for planting in public gardens, and the collected strips of paper with their "I wish" messages were flown in a customized box to Iceland to be a finishing touch to millions of other messages on a massive tower that will be unveiled this October.
The wishes of Welmoed's two soccer-playing daughters will be part of the tower. Maaike Laanstra-Corn wished for the polar bears to be saved, and her sister Amarins wished for an end to littering.
Welmoed is planning to hang a wish at the Hirshhorn as future cargo to Iceland as soon as she is through debating with herself. "I'm having a hard time formulating a wish that would contain all I would wish for to help our world," she says. "I guess that is a wish."
Hospital will move to White Oak, but also stay in Takoma Park
The call to Mayor Kathy Porter came on her home phone shortly after seven the morning of April 17. Jere Stocks, the Washington Adventist Hospital president, was speeding through a series of calls to give advance word about the latest and perhaps most upbeat chapter in a bedeviling several-sided dilemma that began in 2002 when it first became clear the straitened hospital needed to expand to survive.
More than a dozen people who have been prominent in Takoma Park as would-be dilemma-solvers received calls from Jere. "We have a deal in place," he said.
The deal involves at least two locations and a possible third and is open to further revising, but, as the mayor says, "It's better news than a lot of us were expecting."
The new plan is to relocate the hospital's main headquarters and main operations — the ER, the OR, labs and patient beds — to a 48-acre plot at Cherry Hill Road and Plum Orchard Drive in White Oak. At the same time the 13-acre campus at Carroll Avenue and Flower Avenue in Takoma Park where the hospital has been situated since 1907 is to remain an Adventist medical facility.
In September 2005, soon after taking over as the head guy, Jere made calls to the same Takoma Park list to announce a plan to sell off the 13 acres.
"I'm happy that we can now afford to do what's in everyone's best interests," he says. Without having to liquidate the land in Takoma Park the hospital board found a way to finance the $11 million sales price for the White Oak parcel, purchased from private owners earlier in the month.
As for what type of facility the board members might choose to build here once the hospital is demolished, Jere says his druthers is for a stand-alone emergency room, as the Adventists did at Shady Grove a few years ago when reconfiguring their other secular complex in Montgomery County.
Under the old plan for this end of the county the Adventist board was going to buy a small Long Branch property on Flower Avenue in the Long Branch area, adjacent to the Giant grocery, and construct medical offices and an urgent-care room to treat broken bones and other injuries that don't usually put lives in jeopardy. But since neighbors of the Long Branch property are not jumping with joy at the prospect of midnight ambulances that part of the plan is also being reconsidered. Perhaps those buildings may fit better at Flower and Carroll.
"At this point there are a lot of details to be worked out. We will sit down, talk to people, have some meetings, get input," Jere says. As the Voice went to press, he had already scheduled a public forum for May 1.
It will probably be at least five years, though, before demolition crews move in. In the meantime, the current hospital will remain open for business.
Meaghan's Hispanic heritage: Self-taught & award-winning
"Most people might not consider being Filipino as being Hispanic," says Meaghan Mallari, who is both, although she learned to speak Spanish not from her Takoma Park parents but at school and in summer visits to El Salvador.
 | | Meaghan Mallari |
About to graduate high school, from Blair, Meaghan is a prototypical American success story, a high-honors student, an editor of the school's semi-professional newspaper, a Gold Star Scout, and a veteran of 20-plus seasons in Takoma Soccer. She is also someone who has found a lot of satisfaction in the culture she inherited from her father, Bill Mallari.
"My dad encouraged me, although he himself never got connected to his heritage," she says. Bill is unschooled in Spanish because his own father, a Filipino immigrant who did speak the language, had wanted his son to be "completely Americanized."
For Meaghan, a turning point occurred early on, when she was only in kindergarten. She was taking chemo treatments for leukemia that ultimately went into remission but was then at a scary stage. "It was a dicey time," remembers her mom, Elly Porter, who had enrolled Meaghan in the Spanish immersion curriculum at Rolling Terrace Elementary. But a full day of writing, reading and math in a language that did not feel native? Would the extra stress be too much?
As it turned out, Meaghan had the good luck of an attentive teacher, Georgiana Jimenez. "She didn't really teach me to speak Spanish. All I really did was roll my R's for her, But she made me love the way it sounded," Meaghan says. By the time Meaghan reached Blair she could slide from English to Spanish in the middle of a conversation.
The summers of her sophomore and junior years she lived for several weeks in El Salvador with a family in the rural village of Corozal and worked as a carpenter's assistant, helping build a community center through a program of the Washington Ethical Society and International Partners to El Salvador. During off times the village men brought out a soccer ball. Without hesitation Meaghan and her American girlfriends inserted themselves into the action. "The local women don't play, of course, so we were he only girls in the game."
Last fall, as a Blair senior, under the tutelage of another teacher, Dora Gonzalez, Meaghan and her friend Natasha Prados came up with an idea that, even for a school with a cutting-edge reputation, was pioneering. She says, "We felt there ought to be a Spanish version of the on-line Silver Chips," the web-based daily newspaper for which she is the managing editor. In addition to translating articles from English she has been writing articles that are original to the Spanish edition "and that pertain to the Hispanic community, for example, Latinos in politics and family separation due to immigration."
She adds, "It was a struggle at first. It was a struggle to gain an appreciation for what we were doing."
On April 25 any lack of appreciation officially came to an end. The Hispanic Heritage Foundation, at its 10 th annual awards ceremony, awarded Meaghan a silver medallion and a $2,000 grant toward her college bills at the University of Maryland. "Meaghan is soaring now!" says her mom. "Okay, I am starting to cry! I am so proud."
Comings & Goings
 | | This image of Zeese's arrest was taken from YouTube. |
• Kevin Zeese, the 51-year-old Takoma Park political crusader who ran last year for the U. S. Senate on the Green Party ticket, left town briefly on April 26 for the confines of police custody. He was arrested in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building at an anti-war protest that included a solemn funeral-like ceremony with taps and a chaplain's prayers for the next U. S. soldier to die in Iraq. "I was urging the police to respect the funeral," he says.
• David Uhlmann and Virginia Murphy, stalwart organizers and coaches of Takoma Soccer for the past 12 years, will finish up their final season this spring before moving to Ann Arbor with their daughter Emily. David has been appointed the first director of the Environmental Law and Policy Program at the University of Michigan Law School.
No comments have been posted to this article.
Want to post a comment to this article? Click here.
|
