Last night on my evening stroll I walked by MPD cars parked at every intersection of Garfield Street in Woodley Park from Cleveland to Wisconsin and at most intersections of Macomb Street from Wisconsin down to Connecticut Ave. At one point, cops (including one in a truancy van) flipped on their lights and blocked traffic on Macomb. I figured the prez had something doing at the Cathedral, but that’s apparently not the case. Lots of other people are wondering what the deal was on the Cleveland Park listserv.

Enter MPD’s 2nd District Commander Mark Carter with the answer. He replied: “There was a dignity movement scheduled to come through the area.”

Well I’m really glad dignity is moving through Northwest D.C. But does anyone know what the H was going on there last night? I’ve a call out to Carter and will update if he calls me back.

UPDATE: OK, OK. I was poking a bit of fun. Yes, Carter meant “dignitary,” according to 2nd District Officer Keisha Anderson, who did call me back and let me know that there were “numerous” dignataries from several countries moving through the city last night. She could not say for what, primarily, she said, because she didn’t know.

Every day lots of people cross the Duke Ellington Bridge between Adams Morgan and Woodley Park. My husband, for example, has done so basically every day of his life for the past 11 years. It wasn’t until Saturday, though, that he saw someone try to jump off.

While walking to the Marriott Wardman Park to Twitter, blog, and otherwise write about all of Saturday’s excitement, he watched someone yank his car to a stop right in the middle of the bridge. That’s odd, he said (paraphrasing here. I was in bed), and then he watched the driver sprint to the opposite side of the bridge and forcibly grab hold of another man’s leg. Shortly thereafter another man grabbed his other leg and the first man yelled: “Someone call 911.” Which my husband did. The dispatcher (paraphrasing again) said, “Well, do you have him?” They did; the samaritans said they needed no more samaritans, just the cops.

The incident reminded me of “Jumpers,” a story that ran a few years back in the New Yorker and describes what happens when a jumper jumps, in this case off the Golden Gate Bridge:

In the four-second fall from the bridge, survivors say, time does seem to slow. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, “I must be about to hit,” three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner’s usual verdict, suicide caused by “multiple blunt-force injuries,” euphemizes the devastation. Many people don’t look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up,” Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.

The Ellington bridge is one of the few “suicide bridges” in the country that has barriers designed specifically to prevent the eggbeater treatment of a person’s organs. In this case, I think it worked.

There’s more to Woodley Park than feuding Indian restaurants. Who knew? While wandering around in the rain yesterday, I found one of the neighborhood’s new assets: the Stanford in Washington Art Gallery in what used to be a nasty little restaurant, Thai Town. (”Trust me,” says Stanford in Washington’s program cooridinator Janine Chen, “you should have seen the kitchen.”)

The building was built in the early 1900s and included a grocery store front, which has been partially restored, says Chen. It also includes Stanford U’s program, where students work at internships during the day and live in the building the rest of the time. The gallery space at 2655 Connecticut Ave. NW opened in October and is currently showing its third and most popular exhibit, “Leadership: Oliphant Cartoons & Sculpture from the Bush Years.”

Pat Oliphant, a classic and fantastic skewerist, lets loose on Bush and Cheney, of couse, with fine contributions to the Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Gonzales canons. One of his most brilliant works, though, concerns the Clintons‘ departure. Both are shown walking out of the White House gates loaded down with lamps, rugs, artwork—a lambast on B.C.’s obsession with his legacy and the prospect of H.C.’s return down the road. For a native Australian, Oliphant’s pretty prescient about U.S. politics.

But the exhibit’s greatest highlight, by my estimation anyway, was Oliphant’s description of a speech he gave to a D.C. room lousy with Republicans, including the sitting president at the time, Gerald R. Ford. Oliphant always drew Ford with a Band-Aid across his head, a comment on the late prez’s trademark clumsiness. Following Oliphant’s speech, the artist walked over to Ford and actually drew said Band-Aid on the man’s actual head. Ford, with his also-trademark good humor, sat perfectly still and grinned the whole time. A secret service agent, while also grinning, let Oliphant know that he would not be drawing on the president ever again. Later and as a tribute, Oliphant drew a panel with a laughing , handsome Ford—sans Band-Aid.

The traveling exhibit will be up through July 11.

photo by dbking

This afternoon, the D.C. Council’s public works and environment committee voted to strip $2 million meant to reconstruct Klingle Road NW from Mayor Adrian M. Fenty’s budget proposal. Furthermore, the committee voted to add language to budget legislation requiring the road to remain closed, effectively overturning a 2003 council vote to reopen the road.

For LL’s take on the whole sordid story and how it got to this point, read this.

Committee chair and Ward 1 councilmember Jim Graham supported spending the money, as did Ward 4’s Muriel Bowser. Ward 3’s Mary Cheh, Ward 7’s Yvette Alexander, and at-large member Kwame R. Brown opposed doing so. Ward 8’s Marion Barry, though not a committee member, also showed up to speak in support of keeping the road closed.

The full council is free to revisit the decision when the budget legislation moves forward next month.

Updates to come.

UPDATE, 3:50 P.M.: A subsequent amendment by Cheh moves the $2 million in local money to alley repairs and earmarks another $2 million out of the District’s federal funds for environmental remediation of Klingle Valley and construction of a recreation trail.

UPDATE, 4:17 P.M.: After the markup ended, Graham vowed to take the matter to the full council at the May 13 budget session. He also said he intends to hold a public “roundtable” on the Klingle issue in the two weeks interim. “I think there’s going to be a lot of discussion,” he says. During the hearing, Graham had proposed delaying any vote until such a roundtable could be held. Cheh & Co. voted it down; “The public had had ample time….I don’t know anything that’s been debated more than Klingle Road,” she said.

UPDATE, 7:30 P.M.: The Fenty response, from spokesperson Carrie Brooks: “The Mayor will defer to the judgment of the members of the Committee on Public Works and the Environment on this issue. Having served as a councilmember for six years, he certainly appreciates the legislature’s role in shaping the District’s budget.”

In this week’s column, LL detailed the political machinations beneath the latest resurrection of the interminable Klingle Road dispute. In the process of counting the votes on a $2 million budget line item to move forward with road reconstruction, LL chose to count At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown as a “Spineless Wind-Twister” thanks to his comments in favor of further debate of an issue that has been debated for 17 years.

Well, yesterday, Brown called LL up and gave him an earful for lumping him in with Ward 8 Councilmember Marion S. Barry Jr. in that category. LL visited Brown’s office and listened as Brown explained his deep convictions—and campaign promises—against spending local money on Klingle Road repairs.

So there you have it folks: LL is officially pulling Brown from the Spineless Wind-Twisters and putting him amoung the proud ranks of the Bleeding-Heart Tree-Huggers. That’s brings the running count to eight anti-road votes, four pro-roaders, and one unknown.

Brown’s conviction also means that the mayor’s $2 million Klingle Road line item isn’t going to make it out of the council’s committee on public works and the environment. Committee chair and Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham favors spending the money, as does Ward 4’s Muriel Bowser, but the other three committee members—Mary Cheh of Ward 3, Yvette Alexander of Ward 7, and Brown—are all now unequivocally on the record against it.

Look for that $2 million to be directed elsewhere at the committee’s April 30 budget markup.

Photo of Klingle Road by Darrow Montgomery

For five consecutive school years, a giant 25-foot-by-5 foot heap of dirt had sat on the playground of Oyster Bilingual Elementary School in Woodley Park. Finally, more than a year after City Paper first covered the story, the pile is gone, replaced with a climbing wall for kids.

The developer who built the school had used dirt mound to disguise a slab of unsightly concrete that was reinforcing the playground area. But the mound became the truly unsightly thing when it lost its grass and deteriorated into a pile of dirt and rocks. When parents first proposed transforming the mound into a climbing wall, according to ANC Commissioner Deborah Jane Lindeman, D.C. Public Schools wouldn’t allow it.

“The powers that be were just stubborn as all get out.” Lindeman says. She says that DCPS argued that the climbing wall and wouldn’t be fair to disabled/handicapped students, even though the parents’ plans also included an ADA-compliant climbable rock. Complaining to School Board Superintendent Clifford Janey didn’t do any good.

When DCPS finally gave the Oyster Community Council permission to finish the climbling wall last year, parents went to the local advisory neighborhood commission for a $17,100 grant to make the improvements.

Lindeman says she doesn’t understand why DCPS was so stubborn in the first place. “They kept claiming that it wasn’t ADA-compliant,” she says. “But neither is a mound of dirt and rocks and exposed concrete.”

In October 2005, the 2800 block of 28th Street in Woodley Park got some crucial utilities upgrades—the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority (WASA) replaced the block’s lead service lines, and shortly afterward, Washington Gas made some repairs of its own. All this construction left the pavement pockmarked, with a huge gash running along one curb. It was more trench than pothole, threatening to shred tires and making it difficult for parked cars to pull out.

When utility work is done that requires pavement to be torn up, and the D.C. Department of Transportation (DDOT) hasn’t also scheduled a regular repair, the outfit doing the digging must also repair the street. But almost a year after the repairs, neither had happened.

Bill Mankin, who lives on the street, says a DDOT employee told him repairs weren’t coming because the water and gas companies were fighting over who’d pay. “I was told this was done in a very chaotic way,” Mankin says. “We kind of all lived with the chaos.”

Jane Davis, spokesperson for Washington Gas, says her employers didn’t set new asphalt because DDOT had already planned to repair the road. She said that WASA, which didn’t return calls for comment, held off for the same reason.

DDOT spokesperson Erik Linden wouldn’t say why the repaving has taken so long. “We are actively working to have the road repaved right away and will keep the community posted on when that occurs,” he says in an e-mail.

As of Monday, DDOT is finally paving the block. Workers are busy destroying old pavement, dispensing workmen, rolling things flat. Says Jane Jones, a longtime resident of the block, as she stands on her steps, drinking a cola: “Our homes have been reassessed into the stratosphere. Having the streets so crummy adds insult to injury.”