t used
to be the city's most supremely valuable amenity and potentially it
still is. Measures within reach can realize much of the potential inside
of a reasonably short time, so that productive and varied fishing and
good boating and a beautiful wide body of water will be within strolling
distance for people in the central parts of the metropolis on both sides
of the Potomac, and the recreational value of the lands already
preserved along its shores will be incalculably multiplied. Safe
swimming and other water contact sports in the open metropolitan
estuary, often mentioned as an aiming point for clean-up programs, may
be a somewhat more distant future prospect. Our studies in the past
three years have made it clear that pollution here is more complex and
diffuse in origins than had ever been supposed, and that sources of
dangerous bacteria are probably going to continue to exist for a good
while despite all efforts against them. The goal of swimming is a worthy
one and will probably be reached, but not quickly. In the meantime, more
public pools in the City and easy transportation to public areas farther
down the estuary may be required.

Some recreation areas within the city, like Rock Creek Park, presently
get too much use for their own good and for people's full pleasure in
them because they are superior to anything else accessible to many of
the city's people. This is a local manifestation of a national problem,
for even sections of the great national parks, like the one at Yosemite,
are presently being battered by overuse by a generation of city-dwellers
anxious to come in touch with natural and basic things. In such places,
people's very numbers shut them off from those basic things and coarsen
the quality of their experience. The only really satisfactory answer
will be to put additional, equally attractive places within reach of the
same people. In Washington this means developing other pleasant areas
within the city and making it easier for the city's people to get to the
other parks and natural places farther out. Improvement of the river,
development of extensive new parklands along the Anacostia including the
Kenilworth Dump site, more neighborhood playgrounds and swimming pools,
and other such action will all help to relieve the situation, which is
getting much official attention and is a specific subject in the report
recently published by the Potomac Planning Task Force, the group formed
under auspices