The cover story of the latest issue of the City Paper is on Marvin Gaye Park, which features the Marvin Gaye Park Trail (formerly the Watts Branch Trail). If you've never ridden it, I recommend it. It's very nice. I never realized how old it was.
In the early 1970s, control of the park was transferred from the National Park Service to D.C., and in 1977, the city received $500,000 in federal funds for Watts Branch improvements. A bike trail was constructed based on a community-developed plan the following year.
[n 1997, a national foundation asked Friends of Meridan Hill] asked the neighborhood kids what they wanted to see—a bike trail, an amphitheater, a safe, clean place to play—and they turned the wish list into a call to action. The call helped Washington Parks & People get a grant to launch its Down by the Riverside Campaign in 2001, and the revitalization began.
The park as it exists today begins at Minnesota and Nannie Helen Burroughs avenues in a grassy area with benches called Lady Bird Johnson Meadows. There, a six-foot circular, mosaic portrait of Marvin Gaye begins the dedicated trail. It runs east along the stream through quiet neighborhoods and past the D.C. government’s Lederer Youth Garden before connecting with the sidewalk on Nannie Helen Burroughs. The trail picks up again near the school founded by the avenue’s namesake and continues to the Watts Branch Playground and Marvin Gaye Recreation Center on the Maryland line.
The heart of Marvin Gaye Park, off the 600 block of Division Avenue NE, is surrounded by single family homes, vacant buildings, a Chinese carryout, and liquor and corner stores. That section of the trail curves around H.D. Woodson, the D.C. public high school that underwent a $102 million renovation a few years ago.
Murphy says her family visits the park daily, sometimes multiple times. She and her children use the trail to bike to pre-school, and her kids use the playgrounds near Heritage Green and the recreation center after school. “My four-year-old son’s favorite thing to do is walk with his dad to the footbridge near the amphitheater and look for dolphins,” she says. “I don’t have the heart to tell him that Watts Branch doesn’t have any marine mammals.”
Though not a rail trail, the trail runs in the same ROW as the old WB&A rail line for several blocks and not far from the old Chesapeake Beach rail line. You can even see an old abutment for the WB&A just off the trail west of Division Avenue.
It would be nice to see the trail expanded into Maryland.
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