Mayor Bowser promises action to fix the park field
Mayor Muriel Bowser attended last night’s meeting of the LeDroit Park Civic Association to announced her priorities and take questions from the audience. During the question period, the Association’s parks committee chair discussed the shabby state of the field at the Park at LeDroit. Ms. Bowser directed her two Ward One staff liaisons to add this to their “hotlists”.
The company that constructed the fields at the four-year-old park layered sod on top of construction fill that they piled over old asphalt pavement. The result has been a patchy field with areas of dead grass and protruding construction material. During the fall tree planting with Casey Trees, volunteers broke several pieces of Casey Trees’ equipment trying to dig holes into which the 45 trees were planted.
In May of last year, I led a neighborhood walk-through with then-Councilmember elect Brianne Nadeau and we stopped by the field to inspect its poor condition. Don’t give up hope! The Civic Association is building a campaign to get the field repaired for good.
Never thought I’d heard about something like this happening again, but this is a repeat of what happened to me as part of a Casey Trees planting crew at Francis Middle School (now Francis-Stevens) in the West End (here).
We had to get out the heavy equipment to dig holes for our trees when we found out that the grassy area to the west of the school was just a couple inches of crappy fill dirt on top of old asphalt.
Guess the city still thinks that’s an appropriate way to hide things. Shame that half-assing it like that is considered a viable option for a grassy space.