In a city clamoring for both more public outdoor space and better representation in public institutions, the opening of Alethia Tanner Park couldn’t come at a more opportune moment.
The park, which has been in the works for close to a decade, honors a former enslaved woman who helped open the District’s first school for Black children.
Within hours of the fences coming down on the 2.5-acre park Thursday, families were checking out the new meadow. Sunbathers were already catching rays on the lawn. Cyclists and joggers passing by on the adjacent Metropolitan Branch Trail stopped to check out the unveiled space.
The park’s opening comes days after D.C. entered Phase Two of its reopening plan, which allows the public to once again access playgrounds, courts, and ball fields.
“It’s gonna be great,” Jessica Torres Yurcheshen, president of the community group Eckington Parks & Arts, told DCist while setting up some new signage in the dog park section on Thursday. “Especially at this time while people are indoors, I think they’re looking for outlets and I think this provides an outlet for people, for kids, [and] for the whole neighborhood.”
Washingtonians have been calling on Mayor Muriel Bowser to open more space since the city went into lockdown in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic in March. Since then, the city has converted curbspace for pedestrians and eateries in certain commercial corridors and unveiled five miles of “slow streets”; 18th Street in Adams Morgan will become a pedestrian zone this weekend in an experimental pilot.
But Tanner Park has been years in the making. Built by the NoMa Parks Foundation, it is located north of the New York Avenue bridge in Northeast, between the MBT and Harry Thomas Way in Eckington. At its center is a large lawn surrounded by different zones, including a playground for children, a connector between the adjacent neighborhood and the MBT, a boardwalk through a “meadow,” and a dog park near the Red Line tracks.
The name, which was chosen by a public vote in 2018, honors Tanner just as calls to remove and replace racist monuments gain steam again.
Tanner helped open the District’s first school for Black children, the Bell School, in 1807. And she supported several schools out of her proceeds from a number of ventures — including a fruit stand she ran in Lafayette Park, now the symbolic center of Black Lives Matter protests in D.C.
“It’s bittersweet, right?” said NoMa Business Improvement District President Robin-Eve Jasper told DCist on opening the park in this historic moment. “Our objective all along [was] to honor the memory of an entrepreneurial, independent woman of color.”
Formerly a fenced-off field, the site has been considered for a new park since the BID first unveiled its public realm plans in 2012. After a $50 million grant from the city in 2013, the BID acquired the site from Pepco in 2016 after years of negotiations. It was designed by the Charlottesville, Virginia-based firm Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, and construction began in 2019.
Sections of the park, which will be managed by D.C.’s Department of Parks and Recreation, have opened in phases. The rerouted MBT, with a softened curve at R Street NE, opened in December, followed by the connector between Harry Thomas Way and the trail in March.
The opening of Tanner Park is not the end of the NoMa Parks Foundation’s work. Development continues on the so-called NoMa Meander, a four-block-long pedestrian passage between First Street NE and North Capitol Street south of New York Avenue. The organization is also working on the redesign of the virtual circle, often called Dave Thomas Circle, at the intersection of Florida and New York avenues in Northeast.
It also was behind NoMa’s first official park, Swampoodle Park, which opened in November 2018.
Alethia Tanner Park is located at 227 Harry Thomas Way NE. The MBT and connector are open 24 hours. The park and playground are open from dawn to dusk, and the dog park from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m.
