City recreational needs
Recreation in and around the central city of Washington has to be a primary aim. The most people are in this area, many of them through poverty or habits of life not given to farflung pleasures but constrained to seek them where they live, or near at hand. The worst environmental threats are here as well, despite the foresight and pride that have saved much more open space and pleasant park land than most other American cities can show.
The metropolitan river has to be cleaned up and made attractive. It used to be the city's most supremely valuable amenity and potentially it still is. Measures within reach can realize much of the potential inside of a reasonably short time, so that productive and varied fishing and good boating and a beautiful wide body of water will be within strolling distance for people in the central parts of the metropolis on both sides of the Potomac, and the recreational value of the lands already preserved along its shores will be incalculably multiplied. Safe swimming and other water contact sports in the open metropolitan estuary, often mentioned as an aiming point for clean-up programs, may be a somewhat more distant future prospect. Our studies in the past three years have made it clear that pollution here is more complex and diffuse in origins than had ever been supposed, and that sources of dangerous bacteria are probably going to continue to exist for a good while despite all efforts against them. The goal of swimming is a worthy one and will probably be reached, but not quickly. In the meantime, more public pools in the City and easy transportation to public areas farther down the estuary may be required.
Some recreation areas within the city, like Rock Creek Park, presently get too much use for their own good and for people's full pleasure in them because they are superior to anything else accessible to many of the city's people. This is a local manifestation of a national problem, for even sections of the great national parks, like the one at Yosemite, are presently being battered by overuse by a generation of city-dwellers anxious to come in touch with natural and basic things. In such places, people's very numbers shut them off from those basic things and coarsen the quality of their experience. The only really satisfactory answer will be to put additional, equally attractive places within reach of the same people. In Washington this means developing other pleasant areas within the city and making it easier for the city's people to get to the other parks and natural places farther out. Improvement of the river, development of extensive new parklands along the Anacostia including the Kenilworth Dump site, more neighborhood playgrounds and swimming pools, and other such action will all help to relieve the situation, which is getting much official attention and is a specific subject in the report recently published by the Potomac Planning Task Force, the group formed under auspices of the American Institute of Architects.
The array of Federal, State, regional and county parks and other public areas ringing the metropolis will be more accessible as public transit improves. Another means to this end, and an especially organic and appropriate one, will be the urban stretches of the Basinwide network of hiking, bicycling, and horseback trails which will be discussed a little farther along.
If, as prophets reiterate, ever-increasing percentages of the American public in the future will be living in the great cities, a great deal of nature and conservation education is going to be needed if the mass of people are not to lose all understanding of natural things and all sympathy with their working and their preservation. It cannot be entirely a classroom sort of thing, no matter how many films and preserved or caged wildlife specimens may be provided. There is need now, and there will be more need hereafter, for rich nature preserves and study centers within reach of Washington and specifically dedicated to such use.
In general, suburbanites have more freedom of choice regarding the places they play in and the ways in which they play there than do people at the urban center. Many of them live fairly close to outlying parks and open areas, and if good planning gains in strength and effectiveness as the metropolis spreads, this neighborhood availability of outdoor pleasures will increase, with more Rock Creeks and Pohick Creeks to put stream-valley parks and pleasant small lakes and streams and such things within reach of everyone, and more green open space just outside people's doors. They are going to be needed, for public pressure on the available recreation areas around the metropolis is already heavy.
Suburbanites also, however, are more mobile than almost any non-nomadic civilian population in history. A great variety of things to do are within driving distance of their homes on an afternoon off, or a weekend, or a vacation. Therefore, the question of providing and improving outdoor recreation for them, as well as for more mobile residents of the central city, merges with the wider question of outdoor recreation on a Basinwide scale, for residents and visitors alike.