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Diana Kohn is Takoma Park's unofficial historian. Diana is also a longtime environmental activist who works at the Institute for Environmental Energy Research. |
Fighting Development: A 40 year battle
The current public uproar over burgeoning development around the Takoma Metro pales in comparison to the passions aroused when development schemes were first raised 40 years ago.
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The drawings above andbelow represent some of the outrageous engineering visions proposed as part of the North Central freeway planning. |
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Photos courtesy of HighwaysandCommunities.com |
For years the State Highway Administration planned a massive freeway system, linking the Beltway with downtown Washington. In October 1964, Takoma Park got wind that Alternative #11 of the North Central Freeway would demolish 400 houses to accommodate a 10-lane freeway slashed across our city.
Ed Hutmire relayed this news to his neighbors, Ruth and Sammie Abbott, and Ruth remembers that "as soon as Sammie heard, he grabbed the phone and never stopped for 15 years."
Opposition seemed hopeless, but Sammie, a long-time union organizer from New York, put his talents to work rounding up neighbors to testify at the one and only announced public hearing. More than 200 of them showed up, forcing a second day of hearings. Before long the Ad Hoc Committee to Save Takoma Park was born.
Some local politicians, particularly Mayor George Miller, supported the freeway. But in those days before email, Sammie turned his mimeograph machine and his skills as a graphic artist into a formidable weapon. His flyers were a steady stream of calls to action.
Neighbors in Takoma DC joined in and Sammie saw the wisdom of an alliance with neighboring Brookland where African American homes had already been sacrificed for the freeway. Across the nation, other cities were facing the same onslaught and Sammie became a founder of the Emergency Committee on Transportation Crisis that coordinated national strategy.
By 1968, after years of opposition to revised alternate routes, the State Highway officials surrendered. Despite their earlier distaste for the idea of a public transit solution, they embraced the idea of a Metrorail and created the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMATA) to carry out the new mission. The unspent freeway money helped fund the new system.
Frances Phipps, a local activist then and now, believes that killing the freeway was key to getting the Metro built sooner rather than later.
Takoma Park activists supported the shift and saw Takoma as an obvious Metro stop - until it became clear that it would usher in a new push for development. Mayor Miller and City Council embraced commercial expansion as the way to save Takoma Park. In January 1971 they supported the Transit Area Impact Plan that called for leveling all houses on the blocks bounded by Eastern, Tulip, Piney Branch and Maple to make way for high rise offices and ten-story apartment buildings. Piney Branch Road and Philadelphia Avenue would be widened to six lanes. This time Save Takoma Park's strategy was to work with the County Planning Board to replace the plan with a "limited growth" model, preserving Takoma's residential character.
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Meanwhile WMATA's vision for making Takoma the last stop on the initial phase of the Red Line included a 450-car parking structure on the site as "park and ride" spaces for outlying Maryland commuters. Save Takoma Park saw this as a new excuse for development and argued that this was inappropriate in a residential community. |
The cartoon above evokes both the artistic skill and political fervor of Sammie Abbott. |
In this case, it was a political ally who helped achieve victory -- Ida Mae Garrett, the Maryland alternate delegate on the WMATA board. Through shrewd maneuvering she prevailed on WMATA to use the money earmarked for parking at Takoma to accelerate completion of the Silver Spring station, where there was plenty of room to acommodate extensive commuter parking. Takoma ended up with a more modest 150 spaces for local commuters and, more importantly, it freed up a couple acres to act as a parkland buffer.
Even though the block of stores on Cedar nearest the tracks (the original commercial district no less) was sacrificed to make way for the bus lanes of the Metro station, there was a feeling of having stopped the wheels of development. People got used to the way new Cedar made a right turn off Carroll, around the green space at the edge of the Metro site.
Fast forward to 2005. With WMATA once again pushing a development agenda, these struggles of the past provide context for the current debate over "smart growth." The status of the green space is under seige as WMATA backs townhouses for the site and refuses to be bound by the agreements the community made with prior boards. (Unfortunately Save Takoma Park never formally filed the 1971 arrangement.) However, the guidelines won in the Takoma Park Sector Plan of 1971, specifying "transit oriented development must enhance the effectiveness of a mass transit project," offer some firm ground to pursue the case with the Federal Transit Administration.
The current call to testify at the WMATA public hearing on November 2 (or, better yet, to file written comments by Nov. 14), feels like deja vu to many of the leaders who go all the way back to the Save Takoma Park days of 1964. Imagine what Sammie could do with email.
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