A brief history of sidewalk advocacy in the neighborhood

A brand new curb ramp and sidewalk on Davenport Street NW.

by Marlene Berlin

The newest sidewalk on Forest Hills was completed in late August. The gap it filled in, along Davenport Street, was on the District’s radar for nearly two decades.

This segment of a 2008 DDOT map of sidewalk gaps showed which Forest Hills streets have no sidewalks (in red) or have a sidewalk on one side of the street only (in yellow).

The sidewalk gap along Davenport Street between Linnean Avenue the middle of the 3000 block (near the big sycamore tree) was marked in red in the Office of Planning’s 2008 map (above). It was also highlighted in Murch Elementary’s 2009 Safe Routes to School Plan.

The Davenport sycamore was protected during the work.

Also in 2009, neighbors on these two blocks succeeded in blocking the sidewalk from being built. I was present when they came out in full force at an ANC meeting. But time passed. Views toward sidewalks evolved, and leadership changed. In 2012, the late Tom Whitley, an ANC commissioner, gathered support from the community and DDOT for a sidewalk on Brandywine Street by Forest Hills Park. And one by one, more sidewalks were installed: on Davenport to the east, on the 2800 block of Albemarle, along Linnean from Ellicott to Broad Branch Road, and on Reno Road, among others. Forest Hills and Van Ness were becoming a walkable neighborhood of sidewalks.

The Davenport Street sidewalk when it was still a work in progress in August 2025.

George Branyan, in 2008 the head of DDOT’s pedestrian program, worked tirelessly with ANCs and neighbors to get sidewalks installed. We got to know each other, as I was a newly minted pedestrian activist promoting DDOT 2008 pedestrian plan and leading the pedestrian initiative at Iona Senior Services.

Branyan is still at DDOT, managing its Active Transportation Branch, which is responsible for planning, designing and building pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure. Last year he and I discussed local opposition to DDOT’s plan for a new sidewalk on the south side of Albemarle Street. The sidewalk there, once you turn off Connecticut Avenue, ends at the Soapstone Valley trailhead.

And in a rare statement from me, in all my years of sidewalk activism: I told him the Albemarle sidewalk wasn’t needed or desired. There was already a sidewalk on the north side of the street. A sidewalk for the other side was not listed among the sidewalk priorities ANC 3F sent to DDOT in 2022. Nor was it on the Murch Safe Routes to School Plan. The sidewalk did, however, rank high in DDOT’s relatively new scoring system.

By then, ANC resolutions on sidewalks and developing the Murch Safe Routes to School Plan had taken significant time and effort on the part of community members, who once again stepped up to take on the algorithm. ANC 3F, aided by its Streets and Sidewalks Committee chaired by Paul Harrison, refreshed its resolutions to close the sidewalk gaps on 30th, Davenport, Linnean, 32nd Street, and Fessenden. Neighbors and commissioners got DDOT officials – including the head of DDOT’s Sidewalk Gap Program – to come out to see for themselves what was needed and what was not. And they heard loud and clear that the community priorities were elsewhere.

After this meeting, the message got through. Advocacy trumped an algorithm. And we are getting the sidewalks that the community wants.

The lesson here: Don’t give up. Democracy can be a slow and frustrating process, but small victories can eventually stack up into big ones, like the sidewalk network that has developed over the years in our neighborhood.