Below is a Storify I put together with tweets from last night's public meeting on reopening the National Arboretum's southern entrance near M Street and Maryland Avenue NE. It sounds like a lot of residents at the meeting expressed support for the idea of reopening the entrance for pedestrians and bikes only. If you look at the meeting flyer at the bottom of the Storify you'll notice that is says "[t]he gate was closed for safety reasons following a homicide years ago." That's a claim I've seen tossed about a lot. The gate was closed in the spring of 1992 over budget concerns and worries over crime. The crime worries mostly seem to be about the possibility of Arboretum visitors falling victim to crime as they passed through Carver Langston, which was having a lot of violence problems at the time. As this April 15, 1992 Washington Post story "ARBORETUM CLOSES GATE WHERE WOMAN WAS FOUND" explains, an elderly woman was found "severely beaten" near the entrance. The crime was horrific, but the woman survived. So why did some people keep saying that the gate was closed because of a murder? I think I found the answer.
I used my library card to pull up old stories related to crime near the National Arboretum around that time, and I found an October 15, 1993 Washington Post article "Woman Found Slain Near National Arboretum" (use your library card to log in to read it).
"Police officials on the scene said the woman had been stabbed numerous times in the chest. There were no signs of a struggle where she was found, in a small clearing in the woods, leading investigators to speculate that the body had been dumped there by the killer."
Have people been conflating the two crimes? I can't say for sure, but it's certainly possible.
7 comments:
As alluded to in the Storify, the Arboretum is perpetually poor. It should charge for admission like other world-class arboretums. We pay user fees to go into national parks, which pays for upkeep. Let's pay user fees to get into the Arboretum.
Open the gates!!
Opening the gate would be great. Everyone knows it would lower crime and improve the quality of life for the residents of 5D. We should get a bike-share rack there too.
i'm surprised no one has brought up the 'gentrification' argument for not opening the gates. lol
KH's insistence on including Comm. Coomber is due to a personal conflict with Comm. Blacknell who actually broached the issue FIRST and Coomber makes a convenient, outsider boogeyman.
PolyAnon
Is there any way to get an archived version of this Storify, or an equivalent thread, back up in this article?
Sorry 1:11,
When Storify killed its content everything fell into a black hole. But you can look at tweets from that time period that used the hashtag commonly employed when discussion those ANC meetings. That tag is #ANC5D.
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