Save Klingle Valley

This dualistic and conflicting "roads AND forested natural parkland" mandate has plagued Klingle and Rock Creek Park throughout their history, and was of particular concern for Rock Creek Park's chief designer, Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr..

Most of Rock Creek's tributaries were used mostly for scenic driving and cross-town traffic until the construction of the Zoo Tunnel in 1966. This linked up the tributary parkways with the Potomac Parkway and suddenly Rock Creek became a commuter route. In its Statement for Management on Rock Creek Park prepared in 1977, the Service listed as an objective "To improve the quality of the visitor's experience by reducing excessive automobile commuter traffic on roads within Rock Creek Park, and encourage the shift of such traffic to mass transit, bicycle, and other more appropriate forms of transportation."

As northwest Washington was being developed, early plans were made to use many of the forested stream valleys as a network of parkways. Congressional legislation was drafted as early as 1912 to add a parkway strip along the existing Klingle Road up to Woodley Road. In the early 1920s the Office of Buildings and Grounds was still pursuing this objective and was seeking to have a highway style parkway connecting the proposed Klingle Parkway with the Normanstone Parkway, running northwest above Mass Ave from the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway.

This plan was just one of many parkway and highway projects that never materialized due to citizen opposition. (See recent Post Magazine article on freeway fighters.)

In the 1950's there was considerable momentum to build a GW-style parkway along the old C&O Canal between Great Falls and Cumberland, with the Washington Post editorializing that "the old canal [is] no longer either a commercial or a scenic asset." and should be a highway. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas turned this debate around and the C&O became a National Park.

Also in the 1950's there was a plan to build a mega-highway called Route 240 through Rock Creek National Park connecting the Capital Beltway and the proposed Inner Loops.

This "ramp to nowhere" is a relic of the proposed Interstate 266/66 interchange near Georgetown, cancelled in the early 1970s. Interstate 66 originally was planned to cut into downtown D.C. through Dupont Circle and connect with Interstate 95 north of Union Station.

Cartoon about the North Central Freeway, a planned ten lane wide extension of Interstate 270 through the inner city of Washington (destroying thousands of homes), Takoma Park, downtown Silver Spring, Sligo Creek Park, Wheaton Regional Park, Northwest Branch Park (where it would have had an interchange with the Outer Beltway, now called the ICC), and on to Columbia, MD.

The 1950's also saw a plan to build an inner-beltway between Dupont and Adams Morgan. Many of our low-rise neighborhoods are a result of this highway planning. Were it not for these plans, we would probably see mostly high-rise apartment buildings like are on Conn Ave today.

By the '70's planners had learned that the better "connected" and largely white communities in Northwest made highways there impossible. So they planned through Northeast DC instead. The North Central Freeway was stopped only due to activists like Sam Abbott and Angela Rooney.

The renewal of official interest in the proposed parkway along the old C and O Canal between Great Falls and Cumberland will stir the enthusiasm of many Washingtonians...By utilizing the old canal--no longer either a commercial or a scenic asset--it is estimated that the parkway could be built for $100,000 a mile. The lovely Potomac Valley could thus be made available to sightseers, campers, fishermen, and hikers with little distraction from its beauty...

Fishermen, hunters, hikers, campers, ornithologists and others who like to get acquainted with nature first-hand and on their own are opposed to making a highway out of this sanctuary.

...In the early twenties, Justice Brandeis traveled the canal and river by canoe to Cumberland. It was for him exciting adventure and recreation... It is a refuge, a place of retreat, a long stretch of quiet and peace at the Capitol's back door--a wilderness area where man can be alone with his thoughts., a sanctuary where he can commune with God and nature, a place not yet marred by the roar of wheels and the sound of horns.

It is a place for boys and girls, men and women. One can hike fifteen or twenty miles on a Sunday afternoon, or sleep on high dry ground in the quiet of a forest, or just go and sit with no sound except for water lapping at one's feet.

I wish the man who wrote that editorial...would take time off and come with me. We would go with packs on our backs and hike the 185 miles to Cumberland. I feel that if your editor did, he would return a new man and use the power of your great editorial page to help keep this sanctuary untouched.

One who walked the canal its full length could plead its cause with the elegance of a John Muir. He would get to know muskrats, badgers, and fox; he would hear the roar of wind in thickets; he would see strange islands and promontories through the fantasy of fog; he would discover the glory there is in the first flower of spring, the glory there is even in a blade of grass; the whistling wings of ducks would make silence have new values for him. Certain it is that he could never acquire that understanding going 60 or even 25 miles an hour.

We should not want it to be supposed that we are insensitive to the call of a warbler, the blush of buds in late winter, the crunch of autumn leaves under hiking boots, or the drip of water from canoe paddles...

We are pleased to accept Justice Douglas's invitation to walk the towpath...He has only to name the time and the starting point of the journey and to prescribe the equipment to be taken along.