communitylife
Amidon Sidewalk Park An Urban Space Ripe for A Facelift
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ying along the southern edge of Amidon Elementary School’s playground, at the corner of 4th and G Streets, SW, is a little strip of a park – double rows of benches set back from the street, a modest abstract brick sculpture with some bricks missing, and boxes for trees that are no longer there. Occasionally you see people sitting in the shade reading, but mostly they walk past and take little notice. Few people have any idea how this parklet was planned or built. The Urban Renewal project that built most of Southwest Washington in the 1960s and early ‘70s created four community parks in a part of the city that had had none at all before. (The only recreational space in the neighborhood had been the old Hoover Playground – not part of the enlarged King Greenleaf Rec Center.) The rebuilding of Southwest took the area’s park and recreation acreage from about 30 acres to over 60 and created four new parks, some of them actually collections of sites: • Town Center Parks, the two wooded parks on I Street at 3rd (the smaller one next to the library) and at 6th (the Duck Pond); • Waterfront Parks, along the Washington Channel, the largest of these between N and P Streets (including the Titanic Memorial) and four smaller ones scattered between the restaurants to the northwest; • Lansburgh Park, over the old First Street between H and M, with handsome pavilion structures, but otherwise pretty neglected now; • And finally, little Amidon Side72 H HillRag | March 2012
Article and Photos by Hayden M. Wetzel
walk Park. Daniel Kiley, as some neighbors Of these four, Amidon Sidewalk think), and opened in 1967. The is definitely the least known. In fact, RLA annual report for that year most people probably think it’s just shows several boys on Sherman’s an extension of the G Street sidewalk, brick “play sculpture”, Sherman’s son which in many ways it is. This little being one of them. The park never strip park runs alongside the Amidon had an actual name, but is called School playing field on G Street SW “Amidon sidewalk park” in RLA’s at 4th Street: a dual row of benches, a brick construction and some more benches. Cuts in the pavement show where trees were, but they are now gone. Before the razing of the area in 1954, the area where the Amidon school building and its playground are now, was covered with houses. H Street was closed to make a “superblock” for construction. Plans called for the Amidon playground to run up to G Street, but the Redevelopment Land Agency – the city agency implementing the urban renewal work –planned widened and enhanced sidewalks along 4th Street, given its prominence in the new design of the area. This was called “The Amidon Promenade” by planners, although the name was later dropped. In 1961, at the time that the style of fence around the playground was being decided, RLA separated this little strip for a public park (a “modest little project” the papers at the National Archives note). The park was designed by the RLA design office under the direction of its chief, Stanley Sherman (not the nationally-known Current state of the Park
annual report. In 1971 the area was transferred from the National Park Service to the DC government. Over the years this small area of green and benches has served the neighborhood, but it has not been very well maintained. The sculpture has lost some bricks and a row of