{community life}
Everyone Loves the Buzzard Point Marina by Hayden Wetzel
T
ucked away at the far tip of Buzzard Point, just south of the mammoth PEPCO Power Plant, is the unassuming Buzzard Point Marina. (It’s actual address is V and Half St SW.) This cozy little place holds tight to a bit of land wedged between the Anacostia, a very plain 1970s office building and the plant – land formed when the Army Corps of Engineers shaped the waterfront in a dredging project of 1912. The Federal Government purchased the land in 1930 and control passed to the National Park Service in the late 1950s (accordNibbles, the mascot, guards the marina. ing to NPS). In the 1930s city planners envisioned Buzzard Point as a new industrial center for the District, a plan that never came to fruition. The former garden farms and minor factories had pretty much disappeared anyway, leaving only some boat clubs and yards (repair shops) along the riverbank. The waterfront next to Ft. McNair was developed in 1930 by the Corinthian Yacht Club, which had been displaced from the Virginia side of the Potomac, and in 1945 appeared the first newspaper ad for the Buzzard Point Boat Yard a short way to the east. Corinthian closed in 1964 in a dispute with its landlord, NPS, when it refused to admit black members, the space taken in The marina ca. 1980, with the power plant behind. 1991 by the current James Creek Marina. (The go – almost the only thing to catch your attention. old James Creek, later the James Creek Canal, Ft. McNair is on your right, past the big empty lot used to flow into the river at this point.) (soon to be filled with fancy condos). Then sudThe Buzzard Point Boat Yard owners had denly a wonderful discovery: after this desolation a opened a public marina at their facility by 1966. glimpse of green – some scraggly trees, two minor There continues to exist a vestigial B-P Boat Yard white-painted buildings, a small cinder parking lot, company operating the B-P Marina as a concession and boats in water! You’ve come to a little oasis. from NPS. It has had a series of one-year extensions It’s not really beautiful, or “Washingtonian” – it’s on its earlier five-year contract for at least thirteen homey. “It’s a great place to enjoy the water – not a years. The marina currently holds 90 slips on docks parking lot for boats, it’s more like a neighborhood, built in 1976 and in need of upgrades – one of the kind of like a second home,” as second-generation chief points of contention with NPS. slip-holder Terri Thompson describes it. Do you Visit the Marina and you will have a pleassee the Canadian goose bossing two plaster deer? ant surprise. Head south from Q on First St SW That’s Nibbles, the marina’s mascot. through the treeless wasteland that has characterThe marina has had a prickly relationship with ized Buzzard Point for about ninety years and adNPS for a long time. The Park Service delivered mire the beautiful art deco 1933 power plant as you
eviction papers in 1966, 1970 and 1980, citing inadequate facilities (repairs were hurriedly made). The Evening Star in 1980 described the marina as “that aptly named house of rotting hulks . . . Few of the boats that get to Buzzard Point ever leave except by travelling vertically down to the depths of the Anacostia. [It has] a reputation as a hospice for the terminally ill of the local yachting world.” The Post two years earlier painted a different if not completely contradictory picture – a laid-back, friendly place run rather casually and very much to the taste of the less-elite boating crowd: “[For renting a boat for the day] I’ll take Buzzard Point, where there’s a nice selection of battered daysailers as well as . . . cruisers, each with its own byzantine rate structure that seems subject to charge depending on who’s doing the renting and which way the barometer’s heading . . . What, then, is Buzzard Point’s appeal? . . . It’s a genuine sailing marina.” A few people lived fulltime on their boats, much against District regs. And now extinction again faces the little place. Last September NPS told the marina to pack up, listing a slew of problems, and promising to re-think the use of that area (park? new marina?) as part of its larger Anacostia River park plan. Slip-holders quickly organized the Buzzard Point Marina Boat-Owners’ Association and in December filed suit to halt the eviction, mostly on procedural grounds. That case will be heard in February. The marina’s owner (the Boat Yard) promises its own suit very soon on some other basis. In the meanwhile, boat-owners’ usage has predictably dropped (to 33 in the water, 9 on land, and 3 in repair), due to winter weather but more to uncertainty. Both sides have dug in behind walls of arguments (“They don’t upgrade their docks” vs. “They don’t issue permits for us to upgrade our docks”) and hints of darker motives (which I will not recount). The odds of the poor little rattle-trap marina surviving the grand planning of the new, beautiful Buzzard Point seem slight. I suggest you visit soon. u
February 2016 H 75