Here on this patch of land where thousands of homeless children slept, ate and waited for a better life, developers want to erect a playground named for Relisha Rudd.
They envision swinging, swooping and splashing as children living in 2,000 planned condos and apartments (“LEED Platinum”! “Rooftop lounge”!) find the joy of play. Rudd, who went missing in 2014 from the shelter that stood here, has yet to be found.
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Don’t call it a tribute. The Relisha Rudd Playground and splash park is a lament for the childhoods unencumbered with adult worries that were lost on that spot over 17 long years, when thousands of houseless children called abandoned hospital rooms home.
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It is a cry for the tens of thousands of Black girls like Relisha who go missing in America every year and rarely register in national media. What would be possible if they received the coverage and concern shown for Gabby Petito, a White blonde woman whose remains were recovered within a month of her disappearance this year?
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(Of the nearly 200,000 girls 17 and younger reported missing last year, more than 1 in 3 — over 70,000 — were Black, according to the National Crime Information Center.)
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It is a reminder that this year, there are still around 700 children in D.C. — the capital of our nation — who remain homeless, according to the Community Partnership in the city.
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And it’s a call to action that we must do better.
For years, Reservation 13 was a plot of land along the Anacostia River that was home to the jail, the morgue, methadone and STD clinics as well as the city’s family megashelter, carved out of the abandoned D.C. General Hospital. That shelter became infamous when one of its residents, 8-year-old Relisha, went missing.
While the city’s eastern residents — especially the Capitol Hill population swelling with new million-dollar homeowners — hoped that land would be the new site of a new Home Depot or a sports complex, D.C. announced last week that the coveted lease will be awarded to two developers planning to build even more quartz-countertop condos and apartments, a portion of which will be priced as “affordable housing,” as well as retailers and a hotel.
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In a nod to the land’s haunted past, the R13 Community Partners group — the developers and designers who will build the hotel and much of the housing on that spot — announced there will be a playground named for Relisha, who was last seen with shelter janitor Khalil Tatum, who killed his wife, then himself and took to his grave the mystery of Relisha’s location.
I remember standing outside the shelter in one of many vigils for Relisha with Jamila Larson, the woman who ran playtime programs for children at the shelter and remembered Relisha’s smile.
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“I still have a picture of Relisha in my office and think about her often,” Larson said, the week after what should have been the girl’s 16th birthday on Oct. 29. “Her picture inspires me to hold myself to the highest standard to do all we can to prevent children from falling through the cracks because her abduction was preventable. I ask myself all the time. Have there been enough changes citywide to show that her life mattered?”
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Since Relisha disappeared, the shelter has been shut down and demolished, a campaign promise that Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) fulfilled. For a while, the city was still storing hundreds of these children in tattered motels, costing taxpayers millions of dollars while doing little to improve these children’s lives or fix the array of social issues that fueled their situations.
Most of those hotels are back to hosting vacationers. This past February, the city opened the last of eight new smaller family shelters, one in each ward, that will offer safer and more dignified shelter space for families across the city.
Still, those advances are not solving some of the unrelenting issues in a city (and a nation) that refuses to put children first, regardless of their class.
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Larson was a social worker before she founded the Homeless Children’s Playtime Project because she understood the need for play in a child’s development and saw how few chances the city’s imperiled kids get for that. She didn’t know about the developer’s decision to name the playground after the little girl.
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And though she’s not opposed to the gesture, she knows it has little to do with the enormous needs of the region’s homeless children, especially given the shifting landscape of pandemic-tinged childhoods.
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Homeless kids had nearly two years of difficulty in simply getting access to virtual learning, let alone finding success where so many housed kids struggled as well. Take any struggle that a suburban kid in a stable house had — the loss of social interaction, maturity, emotional growth, access to mental and physical health — and double it for a homeless kid.
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“Until we prioritize giving all children, youth and families the opportunity to get their needs met, because we know homelessness can derail so many dreams, we have not done all we can to prevent another preventable tragedy like the abduction of Relisha Rudd,” Larson said.
Relisha’s playground will have a splash park and the latest equipment to make kids swing, climb and slide with glee. It’s a place and a feeling that every child growing up in America deserves. It should also make every adult think about Relisha and all the things she and hundreds of other D.C. children never had.
Twitter: @petulad
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