danger of destruction
or irreparable damage, and the tone of the city as a whole has been
changing for the worse. The once magnificent upper estuary, as we have
seen, is afflicted with complex and ugly pollution that shuts it off
from the pleasant use it might otherwise sustain, and makes it a
detraction from the Federal splendor along its northern shore rather
than the enhancement it used to be. In places like the Alexandria and
Georgetown waterfronts, industrial dilapidation on the shorelines more
appropriately matches that pollution in mood, and on the Virginia side
here and there undistinguished, often jerrybuilt highrise clutter has
taken the place of the calm and wooded hills toward which the capital
city once could look.

Parks and open areas within the metropolis and out from it are often
crowded, trampled, and belittered during most times when people can get
away from making a living to visit them, and thus can furnish only a
little of the quiet and elbow room that might be their main contribution
to urban peace of mind. They are also subject to pressure and often
damage from outside, stemming from the economics, the politics, the
governing mood of restless growth. The blowtorch roar and black oily
exhaust of jet airliners coming and going at National Airport, for
instance, diminish and cheapen all the green space and monumental beauty
so purposefully arranged along the Potomac shore. And only the
bitterest kind of fight can occasionally save a park or a stream valley
or the river itself from a projected addition to the spaghetti network
of freeways and beltways and bridges and other high-use traffic channels
along which flow swirling, never-ending currents of cars. Or from
standard suburban development.

Rock Creek is a complex example of how the city threatens its own
amenities. We have glanced at it already--polluted by casual spurts and
dribbles of waste from hundreds of thousands of people, its basic
hydrology and therefore its very existence as a stream dependent on the
proper use of the rural upper third of its watershed. For it has already
suffered the loss of many tributary runs and branches in the lower
two-thirds during the process of solid development.

In 1966, the critical upper third of the Rock Creek basin was very
nearly turned over to suburban developers as a playground for bulldozers
by a lame-duck Montgomery County Council on a rezoning spree. When
protests against these actions, as well