The question seemed apt for a mayoral forum at Eastern High: What should be done with the site of nearby RFK Stadium after the Nationals vacate the  ’60s relic for new digs down by South Capitol Street?

Mayoral candidate Linda Cropp proposed the land be used for “economic development,” which sounded safe and sensible enough. After all, it didn’t commit to anything.

Candidate Michael Brown offered a new vision: Get the Redskins to put their training camp there. Rival Marie Johns then suggested a sports center linked to career-oriented sports management classes at Eastern High.

Finally, Vincent Orange call for  “a campus for special education.”  But it wasn’t clear where he wanted it—at RFK or on Reservation 13, the former DC General campus south of RFK. Does he even know the difference?

That’s the dilemma in Hill East: Our waterfront on the Anacostia River includes dozens of sites that could be used wonderfully – or awfully. The riverside can be a stunningly beautiful place – potentially one of those unusual gems in American urban living. Or it could be filled up with foolishly conceived, half-baked nonsense or the jerry-rigged solutions to whatever crisis shows up next.

So when candidate Adrian Fenty proposed nothing at the March mayoral forum – no grand design for the RFK site – it almost seemed refreshing. Nothing is one less possibility to worry about.

Whatever is done with the RFK site, Fenty said, the surrounding community should have its say. And who in the surrounding community would complain?

Well …

The Touch of History

One longstanding frustration for many Hill East residents has been the way our waterfront tended to be viewed by others. Newer residents should learn this history; it keeps repeating.

In the 1990s, a major complaint on eastern Capitol Hill was that the Anacostia waterfront seemed to be considered the appropriate “dumping ground” for whatever projects people elsewhere didn’t want. When residents balked at the idea of opening a 200-bed halfway house for pre-trial detainees (they’d come and go through the community daily), the corrections director at the time said he didn’t think the community would notice.

Then followed proposals to turn the waterfront into the city’s car impound lot, to build a giant crematorium (for what purposes, it wasn’t clear), and there were always suggestions to expand the jail or the homeless shelters, mental health clinics and methadone services already there.

With the closing of DC General, Res. 13 suddenly loomed as a vast open space waiting for politicians and city functionaries to fill. So they parked junk vehicles and machinery there, for example.

And now, the RFK site and the National Park Service land that runs along the river has our local government drooling. What new empires could they build there?

The scariest thought is that our waterfront from the Navy Yard to Benning Road will, in bits and pieces, become like the old phrase,  “money burning a hole in your pocket.” You want to use it, even if you don’t actually need or want something very worthy.

Did we really expect mayoral candidates to come up with visionary answers on the spur of the moment? Worse yet, do we want District functionaries thinking of our waterfront as unused land on which to solve the next crisis? Is our neighborhood really just a good place to park buses and trucks during events at the Convention Center, as now happens?

A few long-time local activists say they live in perpetual dread of what our local government will dream up next.

Ten-Story Buildings

But Hill East neighbors don’t know what they want, either. Few residents spend all that much time thinking about the waterfront; there’s no consensus. We’re busily occupied in careers, raising children, having a life or trying to find a parking spot at the suddenly crowded Safeway.

How many people even realize that the part of our waterfront called Res. 13, just north of RFK, is slated to be lined with ten-story buildings? This place of ducks and geese could end up “feeling” like M Street SE where the Federal Center Southeast project now reaches for the sky.

Do residents of Hill East care if this happens? Or will they be glad if it does? It’s hard to tell. Who among us has time for endless meetings about traffic flow or zoning and form-based codes or to monitor the hospital debate and what political candidates are saying?

The Hill East Waterfront Action Network (which I helped start) sounds like it’s trying. But beyond a core group, it doesn’t have enough members who are truly active to be a major force on these issues. Then, there are the free-lance activists with their own views.

A few want to preserve a waterfront with underbrush and trees as habitat for birds and critters. Do they believe the call of nature will chase the ten-story buildings away? It’s hard to imagine that will happen.

Then, there’s the SEED School proposal – to build a walled 15-acre campus for 600 students in the far northern end of the RFK parking lot.

Some protest that it was President Bush’s idea – or, at least, has his blessing – and they say they resent such federal interference in our “rights” to local self-determination. But our mayor backs the SEED school, too –the same mayor who backed that ill-conceived Grand Prix race on the same RFK parking lot.

Yet the possibility that hundreds of District children could have a life-changing experience that sends them off to college instead of to a high school where the test scores drop off a cliff, is also very seductive. In terms of real lives that are affected, how long can we wait for the local schools to right themselves?

Still, the venerable Kingman Park Civic Association doesn’t want a walled school campus on land they believe was previously earmarked for a park and recreation area.

And so it goes with Hill East neighborhoods – bits and pieces of the waterfront are always at issue, and who knows where the big wheel of land-use fate will stop spinning or what will be proposed next?

A Quiet Dream

Given this history, and after years of watching mayoral candidates and others juggle with our future, a different consensus may soon be heard from neighbors of RFK. Dare I say it? Many in Fenty’s “surrounding community” are quietly hoping that RFK won’t be turned over to the District at all.

The RFK site – lest we forget – is the eastern terminus in a monumental plan for a capital city, and it might be best for the local community to keep it that way: No NFL training camps. No new schemes to boost the city’s tax base. No more quick solutions to the crisis of the moment.

Let’s keep the RFK Stadium site as part of the monumental plan for a world-class capital city. A good idea will eventually arise -- and probably not from the aforementioned functionaries and politicians.  Let’s take a deep breath and pray for time and wisdom on this one.