I live across the street from Walter Pierce Park and tried Googling him, thinking he must be the one who owned Peirce Mill, which is not too terribly far away, but found nothing. Asking around, a neighbor said an activist who lived around the corner shamed the city council into making the empty land a park rather than another apartment building. Any elucidation would be appreciated.
— Matthew Roberts, Washington
When redevelopment forced Walter Pierce’s family out of their Southwest Washington home in the 1960s, his uncle suggested that the place to resettle was Adams Morgan. That diverse neighborhood, he reasoned, was too close to Connecticut Avenue to ever risk turning into a ghetto. And if it didn’t become a ghetto, its houses wouldn’t wind up being condemned, the first step in the process that had ousted the Pierces.
Advertisement
The Pierces moved to Ontario Place NW. Across the street — in the crook of Adams Mill Road and Calvert Street NW — was a vacant lot that was waiting for the right development opportunity. Before that could happen, the teenage Pierce decided to turn it into something that was sorely lacking in the neighborhood: a playground.
Walter, his brother, Ronald, and others built makeshift playground equipment and organized games there. After serving six years in the U.S. Navy, Pierce returned to the District and founded a youth club that he dubbed the Ontario Lakers: Ontario after Ontario Place and Lakers after the basketball team in Los Angeles.
“They were champions at the time,” Ronald Pierce told Samir Meghelli, chief curator at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. “He said, ‘Well, if they’re the champions and we’re going to have a program, we may as well name our group the Ontario Lakers.’”
Advertisement
The youth group flourished. Pierce sold Christmas trees on an Adams Morgan corner to raise funds for the Ontario Lakers. He also organized an annual basketball tournament that he called the Ghetto Invitational. It attracted teams from around the city. Local phenoms such as Anthony “Jo Jo” Hunter and Donald “Duck” Williams played in the tournament.
Pierce was especially proud of the trophies his tournament gave out.
“That’s where it’s at,” he said. “That’s their trip. If they’re great athletes, they want a house full of trophies to show it.”
Meanwhile, the future of Pierce’s ad hoc park was in jeopardy. The owner of the tract, Maurice Shapiro, had been renting it to the community for $1 a year. But in 1976, developers began negotiating with Shapiro to purchase it for $2 million so townhouses could be built there.
Advertisement
“Nobody had ever really taken on the job of, ‘All right, what would it take to make this [park] permanent?’ ” said Marie Nahikian, who, like Pierce, was active in the Adams Morgan Organization (AMO). “It certainly was Walter’s dream and Walter’s vision.”
Pierce and Nahikian — trailed by kids wearing Ontario Lakers uniforms — went to Capitol Hill. They wheeled a TV on a dolly from office to office to show politicians a video of the park. The pair knew Congress would have to appropriate funds to purchase the land.
Between the District and Congress, the money was found, prompting Frank Smith, the acting chairman of the AMO (and later a member of the D.C. Council), to tell The Washington Post: “It points out once again the helpless situation that this city is in. We are colonists subject to the outside will of Congress.”
Advertisement
The park — known as Community Park West — was officially dedicated in 1977.
Pierce’s activism was not limited to ballfields and youth sports. He fought the same forces that had pushed his family out of their home years earlier.
“We in Adams Morgan will not sit back and watch our community be sold out from beneath us like Georgetown, Southwest and Capitol Hill,” Pierce said in 1973, after a real estate developer had bought a stretch of homes on Willard Street NW, evicting tenants.
Much of the tenant-friendly legislation that renters in Washington enjoy today is thanks to work that Pierce did, said the Anacostia Community Museum’s Meghelli. Pierce’s activism is a central part of the museum’s exhibit “A Right to the City.”
Pierce died in 1991. In 1994, the park he had first envisioned as a teenager was renamed in his honor.
“People have to learn how to live together and stop messing over poor people,” Pierce once told a reporter for the Washington Evening Star. “We’re interested, we want to do something for others, and we want to build this community.”
Next week: Answer Man goes beneath the surface at Walter Pierce Park.
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLmwr8ClZpqrXZZ6tbHEp5ignaJixKK4056pZqiZmr%2BksYyjrKysXayur8DEnWSaZaChrqSxjK2mZqiclsZuv85mn55lnZaxpnnHoqpmp6ejerGt0aRma2hiZXxxhI5raWieZ5qwo4XFnGSea5VuenJ9xJpkcWloZnp3fJWebWlrkpd%2BpIC%2BrKuoqqljtbW5yw%3D%3D