Kingman Park

Kingman Park is a residential neighborhood in the Northeast quadrant of Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States. Kingman Park's boundaries are 15th Street NE to the west; C Street SE to the south; Benning Road to the north; and Anacostia Park to the east. The neighborhood is composed primarily of two-story brick rowhouses (most of which were built when the neighborhood was founded in 1928). Kingman Park is named after Brigadier General Dan Christie Kingman, the former head of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (for whom nearby Kingman Island and Kingman Lake are also named).

Prior to the 1920s, Kingman Park was a largely uninhabited, wooded area located near the D.C. city dump. The area was originally on the shores of the Anacostia River. Between 1860 and the late 1880s, large mudflats ("the Anacostia flats") formed on both banks of the Anacostia River due to deforestation and the heavy erosion it caused. At this time, the city allowed its sewage to pour untreated into the Anacostia. Marsh grass began growing in the flats, trapping the sewage and leading public health experts to conclude that the flats were unsanitary. Health officials also feared that the flats were a prime breeding ground of malaria- and yellow fever-carrying mosquitoes. By 1876, a large mudflat had formed just south of where Benning Bridge is today, and another, 740 feet (230 m) wide, had developed just south of the former flat. By 1883, a stream named "Succabel's Gut" traversed the upper flat and another dubbed "Turtle Gut" the lower, and both flats hosted substantial populations of American lotus, lily pads, and wild rice. In 1898, officials with the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the District of Columbia convinced the United States Congress that the Anacostia River should be dredged to create a more commercially viable channel that would enhance the local economy as well as provide land where factories or warehouses might be built. The material dredged from the river would be used to build up the flats and turn them into dry land, eliminating the public health dangers they caused. In 1901, the McMillan Commission (a body established by the United States Senate to advise the Congress and District of Columbia on ways to improve the parks, monuments, memorials, and infrastructure of the city as well as plan for urban renewal, economic growth, and expansion of the federal government) concluded that commercial land was not needed and proposed turning the reclaimed flats into parkland. The D.C. government agreed in 1905, the United States Commission of Fine Arts (a federal advisory agency with review authority over the design and aesthetics of projects within Washington, D.C.) and the Army Corps of Engineers concurred in 1914, and the National Capital Park and Planning Commission signed on (belatedly) to the park plan in 1928. Most of the reclaimed mudflats were subsequently declared to be parkland and named Anacostia Water Park (now Anacostia Park) in 1919. This left the Kingman Park neighborhood cut off from the Anacostia River.

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