A BRIDGE AND TWO CITIES

摘要

For now, the nth Street Bridge Park here in Washington is a lovely abstraction that covers three football fields in images by the design team of OLIN and OMA. The two firms won a competition this past fall to design the park atop the bare piers of a bridge over the Anacostia River that was recently replaced. In their proposal, the park will have playgrounds, picnic areas, an orchard, boat launches, and event spaces around a new set of cool, heaving bridge decks. The District of Columbia government and a nonprofit partner it chose held the juried competition and seem to have done everything right so far. The project leaders say they have held 450 community meetings, which seems high, but then there are a lot of interests at stake. The bridge runs between the relatively rich Capitol Hill neighborhood and Anacostia, the heart of a ward in Southeast D.C. that for several decades has been black, poor, and harassed by crime. Its representative on the D.C. Council before he died in November was former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry. The nth Street Bridge project sponsors make meaningful points about the need to re-engage Anacostia the neighborhood with the Anacostia River, which is now the focus of a serious cleanup campaign. It talks about the bridge park's ability to connect across what has been "a dividing line for generations," create new jobs, and give people a new place to play.