Neighborhood Notes - Foxhall: 7 March 2001

The great Soccer Field Fence Debate at Hardy Park is in full throat in Foxhall! What started out as a move by DPR to protect the value of around $100,000 of field upgrading to irrigated, sod-farm turf has become a petition-signing, special-meeting battle of votes for neighbors hearts. Fencing is arousing 'way more attention than critical, long term issues: how we share the field as public space; how we cooperate maintaining it and how we "co-recreate" according to individual whim. There is a strong youth soccer league program at Hardy - a good thing, and a myriad other uses e.g. lacrosse, kite-flying, radio controlled helicopter, falconeering. Whose recreation is more important? Will a fence deter or enhance co-recreation?

We disagree with Robert Frost that "good fences make good neighbors" -- especially where shrinking public green space is everyone's concern. Access is the beauty of a public facility. However, social skills are vital for us to co-recreate in these settings. Fences can send exclusionary messages and breed resentment (e,g .Gramercy Park's recent controversies in NYC). We are NOT a gated community, although rising prices and infill development around here are swiftly creating an invisible gate.

Would DPR would pay for anything but a hideous chain-link fence around Hardy Park? An attractive ("expensive") fence along the busy and dangerous Foxhall side seems a reasonable alternative. However, aren't turf protection and minimal access control really the only rationales for fencing?

March 7th Friends of Hardy have invited Alan Aiches to speak,. As chair of the Palisades community zoning & streetscape committee, he’s drafting a long-term document for stem the quickly rising nearby threat to open space, trees and any zoning enforcement (This begins to feel like early 19th-century English townsfolk opposing the Enclosure Acts . . .)