Recreation in and around the central city of Washington has to be a
primary aim. The most people are in this area, many of them through
poverty or habits of life not given to farflung pleasures but
constrained to seek them where they live, or near at hand. The worst
environmental threats are here as well, despite the foresight and pride
that have saved much more open space and pleasant park land than most
other American cities can show.
The metropolitan river has to be cleaned up and made attractive. It used
to be the city's most supremely valuable amenity and potentially it
still is. Measures within reach can realize much of the potential inside
of a reasonably short time, so that productive and varied fishing and
good boating and a beautiful wide body of water will be within strolling
distance for people in the central parts of the metropolis on both sides
of the Potomac, and the recreational value of the lands already
preserved along its shores will be incalculably multiplied. Safe
swimming and other water contact sports in the open metropolitan
estuary, often mentioned as an aiming point for clean-up programs, may
be a somewhat more distant future prospect. Our studies in the past
three years have made it clear that pollution here is more complex and
diffuse in origins than had ever been supposed, and that sources of
dangerous bacteria are probably going to continue to exist for a good
while despite all efforts against them. The goal of swimming is a worthy
one and will probably be reached, but not quickly. In the meantime, more
public pools in the City and easy transportation to public areas farther
down the estuary may be required.
Some recreation areas within the city, like Rock Creek Park, presently
get too much use for their own good and for people's full pleasure in
them because they are superior to anything else accessible to many of
the city's people. This is a local manifestation of a national problem,
for even sections of the great national parks, like the one at Yosemite,
are presently being battered by overuse by a generation of city-dwellers
anxious to come in touch with natural and basic things. In such places,
people's very numbers shut them off from those basic things and coarsen
the quality of their experience. The only really satisfactory answer
will be to put additional, equally attractive places within reach of the
same people. In Washington this means developing other pleasant areas
within the city and making it easier for the city's people to get to the
other parks and natural places farther out. Improvement of the river,
development of extensive new parklands along the Anacostia including the
Kenilworth Dump site, more neighborhood playgrounds and swimming pools,
and other such action will all help to relieve the situation, which is
getting much official attention and is a specific subject in the report
recently published by the Potomac Planning Task Force, the group formed
under auspices of the American Institute of Architects.
The array of Federal, State, regional and county parks and other public
areas ringing the metropolis will be more accessible as public transit
improves. Another means to this end, and an especially organic and
appropriate one, will be the urban stretches of the Basinwide network of
hiking, bicycling, and horseback trails which will be discussed a little
farther along.
If, as prophets reiterate, ever-increasing percentages of the American
public in the future will be living in the great cities, a great deal
of nature and conservation education is going to be needed if the mass
of people are not to lose all understanding of natural things and all
sympathy with their working and their preservation. It cannot be
entirely a classroom sort of thing, no matter how many films and
preserved or caged wildlife specimens may be provided. There is need
now, and there will be more need hereafter, for rich nature preserves
and study centers within reach of Washington and specifically dedicated
to such use.
In general, suburbanites have more freedom of choice regarding the
places they play in and the ways in which they play there than do people
at the urban center. Many of them live fairly close to outlying parks
and open areas, and if good planning gains in strength and effectiveness
as the metropolis spreads, this neighborhood availability of outdoor
pleasures will increase, with more Rock Creeks and Pohick Creeks to put
stream-valley parks and pleasant small lakes and streams and such things
within reach of everyone, and more green open space just outside
people's doors. They are going to be needed, for public pressure on the
available recreation areas around the metropolis is already heavy.
Suburbanites also, however, are more mobile than almost any non-nomadic
civilian population in history. A great variety of things to do are
within driving distance of their homes on an afternoon off, or a
weekend, or a vacation. Therefore, the question of providing and
improving outdoor recreation for them, as well as for more mobile
residents of the central city, merges with the wider question of outdoor
recreation on a Basinwide scale, for residents and visitors alike.