Ward 3 resident Andrea Rosen: "Soccer at McMillan Park"

From: HistoricWashington@yahoogroups.com
To: HistoricWashington@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sat, 10 Jan 2015 23:45:26 -0500
                             
Subject: [HistoricWashington] Soccer at McMillan Park
     

On November 6,  the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) held a public meeting on the subject of view sheds across McMillan Park, vistas that have been carefully preserved in the siting of new buildings for decades.  Only two months earlier, NCPC staff had concluded that Vision McMillan Partners' (VMP) dense development plan for McMillan Park would have "'substantial impacts' on historic viewsheds toward the U.S. Capitol."  (See http://districtsource.com/2014/09/mcmillan-plan-would-impact-historic-viewsheds-says-ncpc-staff/ for more details and the NCPC's modeling imagery.).

Testimony presented by the Executive Director of Lincoln's Cottage, situated on the grounds of the AFRH campus, concurred with the September staff report.  She noted that the Capitol dome is still visible from the room in the cottage where President Lincoln worked on the Emancipation Proclamation, and that Lincoln himself wrote about this view of the Capitol dome under construction, saying that he took it to symbolize that the Union likewise would be repaired.  However Lincoln's and present-day visitors' view of the dome would be blocked by the 115-foot "medical" office buildings that are crucial to VMP's plan.  In contradiction to these experts, VMP's architect produced what I'm guessing was a CAD line drawing purporting to be "modeling" of the view from the Armed Forces Retirement Home Campus; as primitive and inscrutable as the image was, the architect claimed it illustrated that views of the Capitol from significant points on the campus were already blocked by a building on the campus itself.  Inexplicably, the NCPC took the VMP architect's assertion at face value.

   

As if that weren't surreal enough, once-and-acting director of the Office of Planning Ellen McCarthy decided that this was an opportune occasion to hammer home one of the city's and VMP's central tenets to bolster their case that demolition of the National Landmark is warranted:  that the underground filtration arcade is so compromised that a soccer team would likely crash through the surface.  Ms. McCarthy knows this to be an untruth because she is undoubtedly aware of the two engineering reports, one done for OP and the other done for VMP, that state that most of the underground cells are more or less structurally intact.
                       

So a group of McMillan friends decided on New Year's Day 2015 to prove Ms. McCarthy wrong; a sense of humor is essential to surviving the Orwellian antics of our city government:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhcm6AhPEzg

    

Andrea Rosen