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Skaters at the White House

Visit the CHILL F Street Gang at Stuart Hobson, our new home back on Capitol Hill

The Capitol Hill In-Line League (CHILL) desperately needs your help. CHILL is a group of parents and children from Washington DC's Capitol Hill neighborhood that gets together every Sunday morning to play roller hockey. Over the past year CHILL has been driven from place to place in a never ending search for a home. The history of our exodus is available in a popup window for those of you who like all the sordid details (if your browser doesn't support java script you can jump over to the history file).

CHILL is dedicated to ensuring that the kids of Capitol Hill are given reasonable access to the City's parks to play roller hockey. We are being frustrated, however, by our own National Park Service. We found an ideal location in the Anacostia Park Skating Pavillion. The Pavillion is a full size outdoor roller skating rink with no traffic early on Sunday morning. The National Park Service has banned us from playing roller hockey at the Pavillion, first on the ridiculous grounds that our skates would damage the concrete skating surface, and most recently on the grounds that they would be liable for injuries.

We can sympathize with the fear of litigation that leads individuals and small businesses to close their properties to risky activities. But our Government should be leading the fight against such fear, particularly with respect to relatively low risk, family activities. If the Government won't set a sensible example, where are families to turn? We are also sympathetic if the Park Service is concerned about other park visitors who might not appreciate a bunch of stick waving wackos buzzing around. But the Pavillion is a ghost town at the times we use it. There are no other skaters there to bother.

For several months, the U.S. Secret Services let us play on Pennslyvania Avenue in front of the White House. But that was clearly a temporary home, soon to be plowed under and seeded. Recently we found a pretty good site at Stuart Hobson School back on Capitol Hill. But Stuart Hobson isn't ideal, we need to get back to the Anacostia Pavillion. With your help, we can convince the Park Service to abandon their rigidity and demonstrate their committment to opening our public spaces to wholesome family fun. Put us back in the Pavillion by calling or writing your congressional representatives and appropriate subcommittee chairs, as well as the Park Service officials involved. We've provided a handy list of addresses to help you. If you do nothing else, please use our convenient mailto:URL to send a message of support to Senator Slade Gorton, the Chairman of the Park Service's Senate appropriations subcommittee, and to Robert Stanton, Field Director of the National Capitol Area Parks. So the recipients will know what you are writing about, please reference your support for David McDonough's 9/27/95 letter to the National Capitol Parks-East requesting permission to play roller hockey at the Anacostia Pavillion. They don't know the name "CHILL."

Stop by and visit the CHILL senior team at Stuart Hobson, our new home back on Capitol Hill, or check out the CHILL photo gallery for action shots at the White house and at Stuart Hobson.

This page is maintained by Don Heffernan. If you have registered your support with the Hill, please let me know. I would like to get a feel for how we're doing. Feel free to send comments or questions as well.