[...] In 1968, when Harry C. Press, an African American radiologist at Howard University Medical Center who lived in Wheaton, applied to the Wheaton Haven community pool, the pool's board rejected him, Wiltse writes, "and then passed a bylaw restricting membership to whites." A few months later, an African American woman named Grace Rosner tried to visit the pool, as a guest of white members Murray and Rosalind Tillman. Rosner was admitted, though the next day the association's board rejiggered the bylaws essentially to prohibit white members from bringing black guests to the pool. In a lawsuit that eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, Rosner, and the Press and Tillman families (with the support of Montgomery County), won a 1973 decision forcing Wheaton Haven to open its doors to African Americans.
By then, however, swimmers of all ethnicities were welcome at the new public swimming pool that the county had built five years earlier next to Wheaton High School. The opening of the county's first integrated, government-financed pool signaled the demise of the private community pool trend and presaged the changing cultural landscape of Wheaton itself. Through the '70s and '80s, Wheaton, which had been a white, lower-middle class community, became more richly marbled, attracting increasing numbers of African American and then Asian and Latino residents in search of a quiet, inexpensive place to live with a relatively short commute to downtown Washington.
But as Wheaton developed, so did the sorts of urban troubles its residents had come here to escape: traffic jams, drugs, crime. "When I was growing up, Wheaton was, like, the best place you could ever want to live," says Ryan White. But by the early 1990s, he says, he noticed things were taking a turn for the worse. "It was, like: 'People get shot in Wheaton. People get hit by cars.' I started seeing things in Wheaton I didn't want to be around."
By the '90s, as Montgomery marshaled resources and courted businesses to breathe new life into neighboring Silver Spring, Wheaton's vitality continued to flag. In areas such as the Connecticut Avenue Estates tract, across Randolph Road from the pool, homeowners were moving out, adding their houses to Wheaton's declining rental market, which had bleak effects on the neighborhood. Membership in youth gangs climbed, particularly the notorious Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, began climbing, says Officer Robert Musser of the Montgomery police department's gang unit. Wheaton now has among the largest concentrations of gang members in the county. [...]
| We actually remember spending most of our pool time at the Boys and Girls Club on Forest Glen Road in Silver Spring, but we can vividly recall the time and the terrain recounted in Wells Tower's Washington Post article "The Deep End"
posted in articles on September 4, 2004 6:51 AM | t (0)
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