Kingman Park is the area north of Eastern High School (north of C Street might be more accurate) and south of Benning Road. At the west it separates from Capitol Hill at 15th Street and then spreads all the way to the Anacostia River; the curvy road between the houses and RFK parking lot is Oklahoma Avenue. Oklahoma, by the way, used to be a creek and later was drained and paved as Cold Spring Road; it became Oklahoma in the 1920s. The northwest corner – above E Street and west of 18th – is Rosedale, which used to be a sub-neighborhood of Kingman Park but is now increasingly an independent community. Rosedale has distinctly older houses than Kingman.

In fact, there was almost nothing in Kingman Park until the late 1930s and early ‘40s, when developers built on the former farmland. As an article in the Washington Courier put it in 1946, the area was built “in a period when a building boom watered a ‘Jack-in-the-Beanstalk’ growth in Northeast.” They built blocks and blocks of tidy, modest brick houses – row houses and (to the north) two-story apartment buildings. Everything is brick. Kingman Park might have more bricks that any other neighborhood in the city. And everything is still there, almost exactly as the original builders left it, except that the trees are bigger and the bushes filled out.

“Kingman” was Brig. Gen. Dan C. Kingman (1852-1916), who, as chief of the Army Corps of Engineers, oversaw dredging of the Anacostia River and creation of the artificial island that carries his name. Don’t confuse this with the namesake of the Kingsman School on 14th Street – that was Dr. Richard Kingsman, a member of the Board of Education and public health advocate in the early 20th century.

And what will you see when you visit Kingman Park? There is nothing spectacular there, but it is inviting and friendly in a very quiet way. The neighbors know each other. My friend, Linda Hamilton, can name everyone on her block, even the newcomers. She and her friends continue a tradition of cleaning the streets of litter every Wednesday, which helps explain the wonderful tidiness of the place. She tells me there used to be a plaque “Kingman Park” in a triangle park on Oklahoma Avenue – how sad that it is gone now. Oklahoma Avenue itself is a very pretty place, with a gentle S-curve, brick row houses on one side and a long green park on the other. My favorite street (and one of my favorite in the city) is 21st Street between D and E streets, the houses are somewhat more ambitious than other streets and lined with a double row of really massive trees. Mid block between 20th and 21st streets, and D and E streets, is a very large, empty square recently sold by the original builder (the Sager family) and used as a community garden.

This is all in south Kingman Park. North of E Street, the streets suddenly become very narrow – so narrow that several of them have no street trees at all – and the houses give way to low apartment buildings. The modern Gibbs School is here and also Friendship Edison Charter School (replacing the old Blow School on Benning).

The Kingman Park Civic Association was founded way back in 1929 and seems to have fought a running war with the managers of RFK ever since – noise (the Grande Prix races of a few years ago, for example), litter, planned development on the stadium’s parking lot. The current battle is over proposed construction of the SEED Charter School on the current soccer field across from neighborhood center St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church. Yard signs about this are almost as common as “for sale” signs (the area is clearly getting an infusion of Capitol Hill buyers).

A more welcome change is the gradual but steady conversion of Kingman Island into a sort of ecological park. The inauguration of this project was just kicked off in May, in fact. And let’s celebrate the return of RFK’s semi-weekly farmers market (and flea market too). How nice to see the neighbors chatting as they can again buy vegetables under the Metro overpass. It’s a nice break from weeding the garden or shooting some hoops in this pleasant community.