Washington, D.C

D.C.’s poorest ward aims anger at Leonsis as Mystics eye move downtown

Published

2 years ago

January 1, 2024

D.C.’s poorest ward aims anger at Leonsis as Mystics eye move downtown

Soon after taking over the MLK Deli in Southeast Washington, Tyrone White found himself with an inviting opportunity: opening a concession stand at the new neighborhood arena where the Washington Mystics play home games.

In the past five years, White has sold enough crab cakes and chicken sandwiches at Mystics games to employ a couple of dozen workers at Entertainment and Sports Arena, located on the campus of the former St. Elizabeths Hospital in one of Washington’s poorest Zip codes.

Now White fears he could lose the revenue generated by the concession stand — enough to help him open a second deli in another struggling area — if Ted Leonsis relocates the Washington Wizards and Capitals to Virginia and moves Mystics home games downtown to the Capital One Arena.

“I’d have to cut back on jobs and opportunity for the community,” White said the other day at his deli on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, where his menu includes “Marion Barry Salmon Cakes,” a toast to the neighborhood’s favorite former mayor. “It would be devastating.”

As Leonsis and Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) touted the deal for the $65 million arena nearly a decade ago, the Mystics’ billionaire owner talked with passion about creating a new horizon for the neighborhood of Congress Heights in Ward 8, a corner of the city long defined by poverty and violent crime.

But with his announcement that he would shift Mystics games downtown to the Capital One Arena if the Wizards and Capitals relocate to Alexandria, Leonsis is seeking to remove a key attraction that D.C. officials are counting on to help fuel investment and propel the neighborhood’s renaissance.

When it agreed to the deal with the city, Leonsis’s company, Monumental Sports & Entertainment, signed a 19-year lease at the Ward 8 arena, a commitment that included not only Mystics home games but also Wizards practices.

“Our expectation was what it still is — the presence of the Mystics and Monumental was going to be the excitement we were going to build around,” said Monica Ray, president of the Congress Heights Community Training and Development Corp., a nonprofit that has advocated for the redevelopment of St. Elizabeths.

“I’m angry that they think they can get up and leave the promise and potential there,” Ray said. “It feels like Ted has forgotten his commitment to Ward 8. We should not be an afterthought.”

Her disappointment is not isolated. After Leonsis’s announcement, a Ward 8 council candidate, Markus Batchelor, described the Mystics potential move as “a blow” to spurring economic growth “where it’s needed most.” Ron Moten, a veteran Anacostia-based activist, threatened to organize a boycott of Monumental sports franchises and brands unless Leonsis reversed course.

Even if Virginia officials approve Monumental’s plan, the Capitals, Wizards and Mystics would remain where they are until 2028. In addition, the Mystics would maintain their offices and still practice at the Congress Heights arena. The Capital City Go-Go, Monumental’s team in the NBA-affiliated G League, also would continue to play home games in Ward 8.

John Thompson III, senior vice president of Monumental Basketball, said the Mystics need to move downtown because Entertainment and Sports Arena’s 4,200-seat capacity is too small to accommodate the team’s growing popularity. The Mystics won the 2019 WNBA championship on their home court.

Thompson also said that Monumental would remain a pronounced presence in Ward 8, helping community organizations through financial contributions. As part of its agreement with the city, Monumental is required to make $10 million in contributions, an obligation it says it has already exceeded.

“I can’t stress enough that we’re not leaving, there’s still a commitment to the neighborhood,” Thompson said in a phone interview. He added that Monumental would work with the city to “bring other events” to Congress Heights “to help fill the void” if Mystics’ home games move. “Our commitment to the community is not going to change,” he said.

Bowser’s administration, in a statement, said that the city’s contract with Monumental “requires” that the “Mystics play their home games and the Wizards hold their practices at the Entertainment and Sports arena until 2037.

“The District honors its contracts, and we trust and expect our partners to do the same.”

Leonsis’s plan to move the Capitals and Wizards to Alexandria has prompted a wave of concern about the future of downtown Washington, where the 1997 opening of what was then known as the MCI Center spawned a thicket of new office and condominium towers and spurred the opening of bars and restaurants.

As he promoted the new Ward 8 arena in 2018, Leonsis spoke of the development that occurred around Chinatown and Penn Quarter, saying, “Let’s do in Ward 8 what we ended up doing in downtown D.C.”

But the loss of Mystic home games — about 20 in a season — is likely to shrink opportunities in Southeast, including for those who have served prison sentences and who pick up work. When the team plays in the neighborhood, for example, 37 “ambassadors,” most of whom are Ward 8 residents, earn as much as $17.50 an hour greeting fans, cleaning up and driving shuttle buses between the Congress Heights Metro station and the arena, Ray said.

Robin McKinney, 50, a D.C. government clerical worker who lives in Anacostia, makes $25 an hour plus tips driving a shuttle bus on game days — extra income she says she needs to keep up with mortgage payments and support her seven children.

“When the season comes around, you know you have a job,” said McKinney, an elected Ward 8 advisory neighborhood commissioner. “You cannot survive in the District unless you have a full-time and a part-time job. If the Mystics don’t play over here, I’d be out of income.”

In a pavilion next door to the arena known as Sycamore & Oak, 20 Black-owned start-up businesses occupy small shops and sell art, pottery, jewelry, cosmetics and food. On game days, thousands of potential patrons pass through.

“When people are coming and going to the game, they stop here or even just look in,” said Tahneezia Hammond, the owner of Glam Station, a boutique at Sycamore & Oak. “Any exposure is good exposure. It’s good for spreading the word. We want the team to make this more of a destination.”

At the same time, there are also business owners in Congress Heights who say they have not benefited from the Mystics’ presence, nor from development at St. Elizabeths, a sprawling campus that is behind a fence and set back from the neighborhood.

Players Lounge, a bar located on Martin Luther King Jr. SE, has been a Congress Heights fixture for more than 50 years, its luncheon and dinner patrons having included Barry when he was mayor and later when he represented Ward 8 on the D.C. Council.

Steve Thompson, owner of Players, said Mystics fans rarely visit the lounge, a dimly lit joint where the menu includes half smokes, fried chicken and pig’s feet. The walls are decorated with banners celebrating Washington’s football team (before they became the Commanders), and a framed photo of Barry and funeral programs of regulars who have died.

“They drive into the Mystics games and then drive on out, they have no reason to come over here,” Thompson said. “If they left, I don’t think it would affect me. By them being inside the gate, they’re almost segregated from us.”

A ’20-year narrative’

On a September morning in 2015, as they announced plans for the new arena, Bowser and Leonsis stood on a podium on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE, showering each other with praise and talking of a new horizon for Ward 8.

The neighborhood’s “welcoming embrace,” Leonsis told a crowd that included Wizards stars John Wall and Bradley Beal, “made the decision very, very easy on where we would commit and grow and really commit to a 20-year narrative in helping you and working together to make this a fantastically well-developed neighborhood.”

“You’re now a national news story,” Leonsis said as he has boasted of choosing Ward 8 to build the NBA’s “best” practice facility for the Wizards. “We’re all going to work on and we’re all in this together, creating jobs, being able now to attract other businesses to come here and they will create jobs.”

The construction of Entertainment and Sports Arena was a centerpiece of the redevelopment of St. Elizabeths East, an 180-acre campus that also is to be home to a new hospital, retail and restaurants, and nearly 1,000 units of housing, about a third of which have been completed.

Moten, who has helped arrange musical events at Sycamore & Oak, including a Go-Go Santa at Christmastime, said the arena and pavilion made it possible for Ward 8 residents and Washingtonians across the city to think of the neighborhood in new ways.

“It helps to get rid of the stigma that Southeast has been trying to get rid of for years,” he said. “When you’re a new business and you say you’re over by the arena, it gives you credibility. And when the people come, it’s icing on the cake. They see the arena and they see Sycamore & Oak — I like to call it ‘Black Wall Street.’”

Referring to Leonsis, Moten said, “You gave people hope and now you took away hope.”

White, the owner of the MLK Deli, where the walls are lined with framed photos of King, is not ready to give up. He hopes the Mystics stay where they are, and that patrons buying his steak and cheese sandwiches at the arena know his business is owned by someone who grew up in the area and “looks like them.”

“It’s super cool and it motivates other people to see they can do whatever they want,” he said. “It’s bigger than the arena. And it’s deeper than food. It’s the feeling of, ‘We can do anything.’”

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Washington, D.C

Army Corps: Reservoir expansion ‘doesn’t fix, but improves’ DC’s drinking water supply for future Potomac River emergency – WTOP News

Published

5 hours ago

March 2, 2026

Press Room

Army Corps: Reservoir expansion ‘doesn’t fix, but improves’ DC’s drinking water supply for future Potomac River emergency – WTOP News

Developing a regional solution to enable all local water companies to share drinking water in the event of a future Potomac River emergency remains a long-term challenge facing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But the Corps is leaning-in to near term solutions, for now, because current issues “are quite, quite dire.”

In an interview with WTOP, Trevor Cyran, Chief of the Civil Works project management office of the Baltimore District Corps of Engineers, elaborated on the Corps’ ongoing three-year feasibility study funded by Congress and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

Last week, during a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing, lawmakers pressed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to explain what’s being done to secure solid backup options for the D.C. region’s drinking water.

D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton challenged the Corps after learning that the study that Congress authorized to identify a secondary water source for the region was being narrowed to only expanding the current Dalecarlia Reservoir, adjacent to the Washington Aqueduct, which remains the only source of drinking water for D.C., Arlington, and parts of Fairfax County, Virginia.

“Expansion of the reservoir is not a secondary water source,” Norton said. “With only a one day of backup water supply, human-made or natural events that make the river unusable would put residents, the District government and the regional economy at risk.”

Cyran said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers doesn’t disagree.

“We’re trying to find a quick win that addresses some of the near-term issues, because they are quite, quite dire,” Cyran said. “The Dalecarlia expansion would add approximately 12 hours of water storage into the system,” he said. “So, while we know that doesn’t fix the problem, it improves the situation.”

Recently, drinking water in D.C., Northern Virginia and Maryland has remained safe because the January collapse of a portion of the aging Potomac Interceptor regional sewer line happened downstream of the main Potomac River water intake serving the Washington Aqueduct.

“We’ve moved forward with the Dalecarlia expansion, as our most probable recommendation,” said Cyran. “The Corps is laser focused on delivering something right here, right now that can actually help with the issue, while still exploring some of those long term solutions.”

Cyran said the dangers to public health and the economy are substantial, with the Potomac as the sole drinking water source. “It’s not a great situation — we’ve seen a very real risk come to fruition recently, with the spill.”

While drinking water has been unaffected by the spill, the advisory for the public to avoid contact with the Potomac River remains in effect in the District and Montgomery County, where the Potomac Interceptor spill happened, along the Clara Barton Parkway.

The advisory is expected to be lifted Monday, by the D.C. Department of Health, as E. coli levels have recently returned to the typical range for D.C.’s rivers. The District’s Department of Energy and Environment is now doing daily testing of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.

How would increased storage at Dalecarlia Reservoir look?

According to the Army Corps, expanding the Reservoir over 54 available acres would provide approximately 70 million gallons per day, doubling the capacity at Dalecarlia. Since the land is already owned by the Washington Aqueduct, it would not require acquiring any land.

Cyran said it’s not yet certain whether the expansion would provide an extra 12 hours of storage of raw water from the Potomac, or finished water, after it had gone through the Washington Aqueduct’s water purification process.

Regardless, either option would result in the Aqueduct having more water on hand, if drawing water from the Potomac was suddenly unsafe.

Another near-term option that wouldn’t require land acquisition would be advanced treatment, Cyran said.

“We could implement something that allows us to treat for a wider array of contaminants, if you had a spill,” said Cyran, although noting the recent spill from the Potomac Interceptor, which poured approximately 240 millions of raw sewage into the Potomac, “might not be a good example” of how the technology would work.

The Army Corps list of possible solutions includes reusing water. In November 2025, DC Water outlined its own plans to recycle water from the utility’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest of its kind in the world.

Quarry storage cannot happen quickly

During its ongoing study, the Army Corps has identified possible long term regional solutions, including the potential use of the Travilah Quarry in Montgomery County, Maryland, and two quarries in Loudoun County, Virginia, owned by Luck Stone.

10 years ago, in December 2016, WTOP first reported that the Travilah Quarry, located on Piney Meetinghouse Road in Rockville, was quietly being considered by DC Water, WSSC Water, and Fairfax Water, as an alternative source of water, if the Potomac River were unavailable.

“The three utilities, and the Interstate Commission on the Potomac River Basin, along with the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments have been working over the last several years to look at alternatives to get better interdependencies, to have more resilience in our system,” said Tom Jacobus in 2016, while he was general manager of the Aqueduct.

Now, a decade later, the logistical, real estate, and financial challenges of obtaining a quarry which could be interconnected between DC Water, WSSC Water, and Fairfax Water remain.

“We’re not saying they can never happen, we’re just saying they cannot, in any way, shape, or form, happen quickly,” said Cyran. “Travilah is still an active quarry, so that can’t even be considered for storage until they’re done mining, which might be 30 years from now.”

The Dalecarlia Reservoir expansion would not be regional solution, Cyran said.

“That would only benefit folks who are tied directly to the Aqueduct at this time,” he said. “However, while we’re going to be looking at other alternatives that we could potentially spin off and continue to look at, that would address some of those more regional issues.”

‘We can’t hand half-baked ideas to Congress’

While an interconnected, resilient system, that could provide additional water sources and storage to DC Water, WSSC Water, and Fairfax Water would be optimal, Cyran said the Corps is limited by a Congressional paradigm that limits its feasibility study to four years and five million dollars.

“We can’t hand half-baked ideas to Congress,” Cyran said.

With the Corps’ current focus of implementing near-term improvements, quickly, the agency will continue to use its expertise to envision a more resilient, long term solution.

“We are committed to looking at this issue and try to explore some regional solutions, within the paradigms of the legislation that we have to operate within,” said Cyran. “If Congress wants to consider something else to expand our authority, we could maybe look at a bigger solution, with more time and money.”

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Washington, D.C

New AAPI-led Jaemi Theatre Company launches in DC

Published

17 hours ago

March 1, 2026

Press Room

New AAPI-led Jaemi Theatre Company launches in DC

Jaemi Theatre Company, a new AAPI-led theater company based in Washington, DC, officially launches this spring with its inaugural project, BAAL, a staged reading at the 2026 Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival on Friday, March 6, at 7:30 PM at the Atlas Performing Arts Center.

Jaemi Theatre Company co-founder and playwright Youri Kim

Founded by Artistic Director Youri Kim and Artistic Associate Juyoung Koh, Jaemi Theatre was born out of a recognition that DC, one of the largest theater markets in the United States, had no company dedicated to centering Asian stories or led by Asian artists. The name “Jaemi” comes from a Korean word meaning “fun,” and in its Sino-Korean form, 在美, means both “to live in America” and “to live in beauty.”

“I kept hearing from companies that it was hard to find Asian actors, and I heard it so often that I started to believe it myself,” said Youri Kim. “But through building community with other AAPI theater artists in the area, I realized the talent was always here. What was missing was the infrastructure to connect us. Jaemi is that infrastructure.”

BAAL, an original work written by Youri Kim (not to be confused with Bertolt Brecht’s 1918 play of the same name), is a body horror drama set in a dystopian city where the air is toxic and birth is outlawed. In the city of Baal, citizens are forced into an impossible choice: terminate or sacrifice a family member. The play uses the language of biological mutation and bodily control to examine how systems of power decide who gets to exist and on what terms, questions that resonate deeply within AAPI and immigrant communities navigating structures that seek to define, contain, and assimilate them. The staged reading features a cast of seven and an original sound design.

BAAL plays as a staged reading Friday, March 6, 2026, at 7:30 PM in Lab Theatre II at the Atlas Performing Arts Center (1333 H St NE, Washington, DC). Tickets ($29.75) are available online.

Looking ahead, Jaemi Theatre plans to host a founding party and fundraiser this fall, and will launch an Asian Writer Play Submission program in the second half of 2026. The program will pair playwrights from selected Asian countries with Asian playwrights based in DC for a workshop development process, building a pipeline that connects diasporic voices across borders.

For more information, visit yourikimdirector.com or follow @jaemitheatre on Instagram.

About Jaemi Theatre Company
Jaemi Theatre is a newly formed AAPI-led performance initiative based in Washington, DC, co-founded by Artistic Director Youri Kim and Artistic Associate Juyoung Koh. “Jaemi” is Korean for “fun” and, in its Sino-Korean form, means “to live in America” and “to live in beauty.” The company creates interdisciplinary performance rooted in diasporic imagination and radical storytelling. Jaemi is a home for the unfinished and the unassimilated, where performance holds contradiction without needing to resolve it.

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