What an excellent day for an exorcism.
Pro-preservation group Friends of McMillan Park will disseminate a tongue-in-cheek flyer at tonight’s commemoration event for the infamous Exorcist steps in Georgetown. The flyer, shown below, calls on residents to “call the devils out by name,” by which they mean the agencies and organizations that, the group says, have gotten a little too cosy with conglomerate developer Vision McMillan Partners. That group has planned to build a controversial mixed-use project to the tune of $750 million atop the 25-acre McMillan Sand Filtration Site, a publicly-owned piece of land bounded by North Capitol Street, Michigan Avenue, Channing Street, and First Street in Northwest. The canvassing comes just days after D.C. Auditor Kathleen Patterson wrote in a letter to D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson that the competitive bidding process for developing the site is so flawed that a new process is “warranted.”
VMP is, of course, on the flyer’s list of public enemies. (“Drive a stake through the heart of VaMPire project,” the flyer declares.) Also: D.C.-based Jair Lynch Real Estate Partners, the Greater Washington Board of Trade, the D.C. Zoning Commission, and the Coalition for Smarter Growth. Friends of McMillian didn’t forget Mayor Muriel Bowser and her office of planning and economic development, led by Deputy Mayor Brian Kenner, either, or the exceedingly-criticized-of-late pro-Bowser political action committee, FreshPAC.
“We expect tonight that many people will be diehard Exorcist fans; they may not know anything about McMillan,” says one of Friends’s directors Kirby Vining. “This is to see if people there care about the historic character of our city, if there’s any overlap. When it’s a city event [like a D.C. Council hearing], then we take the gloves off and let [public officials] have it.”
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Photo by Darrow Montgomery