Reply to Hearst Playground story in Current

Forum Index » Metropolitan DC Local Politics

Reply to "Hearst Playground story in Current"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't want to sacrifice mature trees for a kiddie pool that will get used 8 hours a day, 3 months a year and will be a stagnant eyesore the rest of the year. If Mary Cheh is going to push her high density agenda, she should at least preserve the little green space we have now. Pouring tons of concrete on to a field is not preserving green space. How about you sacrifice an extra five minutes for our urban environment and use one of the already constructed pools.

[/quote]

Our neighborhood, and your street specifically, is not lacking mature trees and those are trees that in some cases are nearing the end of their time on earth.

But since you don't like cement, seem concerned about preserving trees and just expressed a desire to see the park used more efficiently then to be consistent you surely would support taking out the lightly used tennis courts and replacing them with a more heavily used swimming pool?  Surely since you are new convert to environmentalism you'd prefer the city lose the tennis courts over some mature trees to accommodate a pool?

And maybe I'm missing something but what does a swimming pool have to do with a "high density" agenda?

Not that you would understand this but part of smart growth (of which high density near transit is but one component) is siting neighborhood services like a pool in neighborhoods where people need them so they don't have to spend a lot of time and contribute to pollution and congestion by driving to things in other neighborhoods when there is demand for them locally,[/quote]

A pool at Hearst wouldn't really be that accessible by public transit. Unless taking Metro to a bus to get there is your idea of accessible. Mostly it would be walkable for those in a half mile radius.

The tennis courts won't kill the trees. Excavating for a pool will. Tennis courts can be used 8-10 (and possibly more given the weather around here) months a year. A pool will be open Memorial Day to Labor Day and otherwise will just be a useless eyesore the rest of the year.

I'm interested in the person who said they saw to scale representations of how everything fits at Hearst. Those certainly weren't presented at the meetings or on the survey. [/quote]

Your definition of Public Transit is Metrorail, which the pool is comfortably within walking distance of.

I realize as a Cleveland Park resident you would probably never set foot on a Metro Bus but the park is less that 1000 feet from a Metrobus stop and that stop serves 7 routes that offer one seat rides from Georgetown all the way to Friendship Heights and across the park on the H Buses to Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights (which no doubt will cause the immediate neighbors to hire private security) so it simply is not true that this location is not transit friendly.

Don't apply your own narrow definition of public transit to everyone else.

As for your other arguments again the question remains do you want public facilities to serve more or fewer DC residents?  Sure the tennis courts can sit unused 8 months of the year but even when they are used there is no way any rational person can say that square footage nets the same recreational use as a pool does.

And sorry if you think a pool is an eyesore (who knew CP residents were such sensitive snowflakes??) but sometimes when you live in a city you have to tolerate some things that offend your rather  absurd sensibilities.[/quote]

As a Cleveland Park resident who commutes on the Wisconsin Ave. bus lines, I'm glad to see you extolling Metrobus.  So then you should be familiar that there are already two DC public pools accessible to public transportation and just a ten minute bus ride away from Hearst Park.  The first, at Jelleff is even closer to Wisconsin than Hearst.  The second, at Volta, is about a 5 minute walk from the Wisconsin bus stop.  I get Mary Cheh's desire for a political "win" with her own ward pool, but it seems a somewhat artificial distinction and frankly a waste -- to think that much of the existing facilities and ambiance of Hearst could be lost for a pool open just 1/4 of the year, when there are two, good, close-by, transit accessible public pools already.[/quote]

Then you must be commuting in the middle of the night because no way can you get from CP to either Volta or Jelleff in 10 minutes - I just looked up WMATA's own schedule for the 31 and it estimates 25 minutes from Tenleytown to Georgetown during the day and if you in fact ride on the 30's buses (or any other routes) you know that WMATA's printed schedules are wildly optimistic.

And in any case like everything else in this discussion you are thinking about this purely from your perspective - that it is 20-25 minutes from CP to one of the other pools when in fact people going to the pool will be starting in Chevy Chase, Barnaby Woods, AU Park, Palisades etc and for those folks it is suddenly a 45 minute trip instead of a 15 minute one and again it is a trip that no one can do on foot and almost no one will do on a bike.

Also remember that the largest concentration of public school students in the city are in Tenleytown (again comfortably within walking distance) and the DPR open pool dates overlap with the DCPS schedule by a full month.

So nice try.

But I guess the rest of us should continue to be inconvenienced so you don't have to be?

And by the way something is a political win for a politician because it is popular with his or her constituents which happens to be the case with this proposal.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics