Yards Park - or - Fried Chicken, Anyone?

It’s Sunday morning and I am visiting Yards Park in Washington, DC’s Southeast quadrant for the first time.  I’m in the middle of walking from the Navy Yard Metro station through Yards Park to Popeye’s in the Barracks Row section of the District.  I chose Popeye’s as today’s next-to-last stop more for its biscuits than for its world-famous fried chicken (yay!), and because I could cover some heretofore unknown ground (unknown to me, anyway) during my walk.  I’m down here this morning scouting out Yards Park’s boardwalk to see if it will be suitable for my training runs.  I’m starting training for the Army’s physical fitness test. 

I am a 49-year-old male who is on the mend from October 2009 kidney failure.  As part of my recovery, I have taken on a renewed interest in physical fitness.  As such, I plan to take the U.S. Army’s physical fitness test in October of this year and score at least 300, which is a maximum score.  I took the test way back in 1982 as a 20-year-old recruit and scored a 265.  To “max” the test as a 49-year-old, I will have to (a) perform 59 pushups in two minutes – no sweat, thanks to my “100 push-ups” training regimen; (b) perform 66 sit-ups in two minutes – also no sweat, since I’ve always been a natural at doing sit-ups and maxed them the first time out; and (c) run two miles in less than 14:24.  The running part will be the biggest challenge because I started smoking at age 17 and just stopped this last New Year’s Day.  My lungs feel much better and I can already feel improved lung capacity during my treadmill workouts, but there is no substitute for actual running.  You either do it, or you don’t.  Period-end-of-discussion.  That’s why I’m scouting for an outdoor running training location.

My trek to Yards Park takes me past Nationals Park, the jewel of the redeveloping Southwest/Anacostia Waterfront district.  It seems to be a nice enough place to watch a Major League Baseball game or concert or whatever, but it does not possess the ambience or feel or history of the old Yankee Stadium or its neighborhood, “da South Bronx”. I’m a New Yorker born and bred; I moved to the District of Columbia in 1999 to advance my career and get a change of scenery.  I’d been to the old Yankee Stadium about six or seven times in my life to see the Bronx Bombers play baseball and hold court.  Suffice it to say that Nationals Park looks like a nice place to visit.  So much for that.

It took a while, but now I can smell water.  Is the smell coming from the fountain 30 feet away, or is it coming from the Anacostia River 200 feet away?  It’s the river.  This area – known locally as the Waterfront -- is being redeveloped from bow to stern, and so far the results are impressive, from Fisherman’s Wharf about two miles east to the newly-named Yards Park and the don’t-even-think-about-having-any-fun-around-here Washington Navy Yard.

So here I am at the Yards Park fountain.  What’s missing?  The brothers and sisters, that’s what!  One would expect to see a few more black people here in the middle of a city that is mostly black.  I’m snapping as many photographs as I can, and I can’t resist the feeling that I am a scout or spy of some sort.  My, oh my.  There’s a white kid with a soccer ball and soccer uniform, including cleats, and dogs are being walked on politically correct leashes.  This has got to be some level of -- wait a minute.  Is this suburbia?  Not quite.  This is gentrification!  I’d only seen it once before in my life:  about twelve years ago, when I would spend weekends with my then-future wife in East Harlem.  I vividly remember a few years before that in 1996, when I was looking for my very first all-by-myself apartment, that 96th Street was the de facto Maginot/Mason-Dixon line when it came to Manhattan real estate – if you weren’t black or brown, you didn’t want to be looking north of 96^th Street for a place to live.  Here I was a few years later wondering what white people were doing on Lexington Avenue and 116^th Street!  Were they lost?  In its defense, the Yards Park area has quite literally not been around very long, so it’s possible that the tens of thousands of black people who live within a twenty-minute walk do not yet know that it exists.  Okay – so how did all the white folk hear about it?  Times change, places change, and people change.  Perceptions also change – but they take their sweet time about doing so.

My walk from Yards Park to Popeye’s takes me through Barracks Row, a quaint neighborhood of townhomes, brownstones, and the Marine barracks where servicemen and -women and some civilians live.  The main drag/business district is on 8^th Street SE, and I walked up 8^th St for about five blocks to get my chicken and biscuits.  This area is decidedly multi-racial and upscale in a hoi polloi kind of way.  There’s a nice mix of restaurants, bars and specialty shops.  I picked an exceptionally good day to walk up 8^th St, as the warm weather and Memorial Day weekend enticed hundreds of denizens and visitors out to lunch, brunch, see, be seen, and just have a good time.  I must say that there was some serious eye candy out there!  Me likee!!

Half an hour later, I’m on the 36 bus about 15 minutes away from a 10-minute walk home.  I just left Popeye’s with four pieces of dark meat chicken, onion rings, coleslaw and two biscuits.  Now on to home, the Indianapolis 500, Hilva, and the Coca-Cola 600.  So, what have I learned today?

-         Nationals Park looks pretty antiseptic from the outside.

-         Yards Park was apparently built for white people.

-         Barracks Row is an excellent location for people-watching.

-         I can make it walking around on my feet if I have to!  I just have to be smart about it.

-         I can make it walking around in the hot weather.  I just have to be really smart about it.

-         I most definitely live in The Hood.  There’s nothing upscale about Hillcrest Heights, Maryland.

-         If and when necessary, I can fabricate writing topics to fit any desired purpose.

-         I need a bigger memory card for my ten-year-old Canon PowerShot A20 camera.  Will I get one?  No way.  I have a newer camera (a PowerShot A80) -- with a memory card three times as big -- that I haven’t used yet because I spent $500 on the A20 and my wife found the A80 in a taxi cab one day.  It looks like technology and economics will finally win out over foolish pride.

Upon arrival at home, I gave the biscuits to my wife, and scarfed down the chicken and onion rings.  I can’t wait until fried chicken time comes back around (I allow myself the indulgence about once a month)!