The Worst City Government
The Worst City Government Summer in Washington has a way of dividing the citizenry along class lines. People with money go to Kennebunkport. People without it go to the "rec. " Every year, more...
...Katherine Boo Please send nominations to: Worst City Government The Washington Monthly 1611 Connecticut Are...
...On the day I visited, more than 50 children played outside, while inside the center was deserted save the director, who chatted on a phone in his office...
...Broken bumper-pool and air-hockey tables are shoved in a corner, while a lone pool table appears to be the sole working aid to recreation...
...This rec center...
...and the District pays hundreds of playground supervisors and a 110-strong maintenance crew to keep those centers safe and in shape...
...While kids simply stay away, local drug dealers seem :o find a far corner of the play area quite adequate...
...Not that all the District's rec centers are dangerous...
...NW Washington, D. C. 20009...
...predictably, is in Georgetown...
...Isn't anyone supervising the kids outside...
...This is the Martin Luther King-Greenleaf Recreation Center, which serves, and supposedly supervises, hundreds of kids every day...
...On a concrete island among parking lots in Southwest Washington's Greenleaf housing projects, there's a small, fenced-off playground with a sandbox at its center-filled not with sand but with dirt and broken glass...
...but like Greenleaf, the slides and swings sit in a field that shines with Broken glass...
...Garbage, glass, and empty liquor botties litter the play area, and the only adults in sight are two middle-aged men offering sexual invitations to teenage passersby...
...There is, however, a decorative touch on one wall: "Alcohol + Drugs Aids = Death . " I found slightly newer playground equipment across the Anacostia River at Southeast's Congress Heights center...
...I'm supervising them,'* he explained...
...unsupervised, and filthy...
...Even the center at Barry Farms, the mayor's pastorally inspired housing project in Northeast, turns out to he a weedy, isolated playground strewn with debris from the construction sites that surround it...
...I did manage to find one with a meticulously clean field, a swimming pool, and longer hours than all the others-a center complete with a grandmotherly playground monitor and pastel paper ducks and tulips in every window...
...Inside the center on a 95-degree afternoon, the stench of urine is overpowering...
...But when I visited half a dozen local recs last month to check things out, safe and in shape is not what I found...
...I asked when he hung up...
...Every year, more than 200,000 Washington residents patronize the city's 100 rec centers...
Vol. 21 • July 1989 • No. 6
