INSIDE 2020, WHAT WAS
THAT? An editor looks back. P. 4 WANT A PALEO DIET? Try basement crickets. P. 6
VOL. 18 NO. 1
HYATTSVILLE’S COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER
HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM THE HL&T!
JANUARY 2021
Magruder renaming Rorschach on racism, remembrance
By Paul Ruffins Between Oct. 1 and Nov. 15, the City of Hyattsville invited residents to submit suggestions for renaming the city’s major park. The Hyattsville Life & Times (HL&T) has analyzed all 830 submissions. They provide a fascinating mind map into local thinking about our nationwide debate over race and remembrance. Recent conversations about renaming the park began in February 2018, after
Stuart Eisenberg, a columnist for the Hyattsville Preservation Association, revealed in these pages that the park was originally gifted to the city on racist terms. Former mayor William Pinkney Magruder gave the park to the city in 1927 via a deed that said the park was to bear his name, and to be for the use of white residents only. Such racially restrictive covenants, now illegal and unenforceable, were common at the time.
A later research memo that Eisenberg shared with the city, in August 2020, suggested that Hyattsville City Councilmembers, rather than Magruder, may have written the restrictive requirement. The memo also indicated that the Hyattsville Community Development Corporation, which Eisenberg directs, is doing further research on the Ku Klux Klan’s influence in the community at the time of Magruder’s gift. Back to the park; suggested names seemed to fall into six broad categories.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS, BITTER COMMENTS AND INSIDE JOKES There were many nominations for wellknown Maryland activists such as Harriet Tubman (7 votes), Frederick Douglass (1) and Elijah Cummings (3), and for national political figures such as President Trump (3) and Barack and Michelle Obama (7). Some suggestions, like Pandering (2) and Virtue-signal Plaza, dismissed the SEE MAGRUDER ON 12
An update on construction by the park By Kit Slack
The Rhodes River anchored, with cutting head of dredge in view
the Town of Bladensburg was founded in 1742, its harbor was nearly 40 feet deep. However, the rapid cutting of trees caused by the development of farms,
A rusty chain link fence separates the playground in Hyattsville’s largest city park from a big stretch of asphalt, about 4 acres of former parking lot. Though a gate to the playground is welded shut, someone tore down a 6-foot stretch of the fence. A shiny new panel of fencing is propped near the gap, ready to be installed as a patch. On the hill across the street from the parking lot, where an office building once stood overlooking the park, cone-shaped piles of dirt and crushed rubble have sat undisturbed since the summer. Werrlein Properties, a developer, (see p. 9), owns the former
SEE DREDGING ON 12
SEE DEVELOPMENT ON 13
PAUL RUFFINS
Science of the city: keeping the river running By Paul Ruffins During December and January, when the Bladensburg waterfront is at its quietest, the Rhodes II is at its loudest, work-
ing hard to solve a 200-year-old problem. The Rhodes II is a boat that carries a 715-horsepower, 77foot dredge operated by Southern Maryland Dredging.
The problem is the continuous silting up of the Anacostia River at the Bladensburg waterfront. According to the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, when
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