Wisconsin Avenue Beautification
Project
Spring 2007
Dear Neighbors & Friends,
After 13 years of serving our community, the Wisconsin Avenue
Beautification Project is closing up shop, unless someone can be found
to continue the effort.
Kersti Colombant, hands-on coordinator of the project, and I are
retiring after 10 and 13 years respectively. With our remaining
funds, we will finance professional maintenance—and we need your help
to complete the season.
Please consider making a contribution .
I wonder if you know what we have accomplished over the years with
your support? 13 years ago, this stretch of Wisconsin Avenue was
loaded with dead and ailing street trees, cigarette butts, weeds, dirt
and trash, with the occasional stretch of blackened chewing gum
splattered on the sidewalks.
Now it is host to 30 established street trees and curbsides planting
spaces filled with liriope, fountain grass and Russian sage.
Neighborhood volunteers have laid down 180 bags of mulch, weeded, cut
back or raked plantings, and collected trash during clean up days
twice annually. We hired a service to mow grassy areas from April to
October.
Individuals — mainly Kersti and her husband, Denis — have
watered and weeded monthly during the growing season, and collected
trash year round. New perennials, annuals and bulbs have been planted
every season.
We partnered with American University and the National Park Service to
plant Tenley Circle, which American University now maintains; and we
collaborated with the DC Department of Parks and Recreation to create
Fessenden Street Park.
With a modest budget and a lot of hard work, we have attempted to
beautify and care for our community—an effort 2nd District Police
Department officers have shown their support for by volunteering
during clean up days in recent years.
I'd like to close with a rousing chorus of appreciation to those of
you who wrote a check or plunged your hands into the weeds, lifted
mulch bags and wielded rakes on the avenue. I'm proud that we joined
together to improve our neighborhood.
And thanks most especially to the wonderful Kersti Colombant,
beneficent gardener to our community for over a decade, who put in
countless hours of cheerful, sweaty, knee-and-elbow-
crunching labor
and fund-raising on our behalf. You are a queen among women, and
certainly among gardeners!
And thanks also to Ken Bailey, our treasurer extraordinaire, Barb
Exstrum who never missed a clean up day and supported us with
supplies, Sarah Whitener, who helped get us off the ground with
tireless efforts, and so many others.
We do have enough left in our coffers to have the spring clean up done
professionally, and with your help, can see out the summer.
Enjoy the spring!
And if you or anyone you know would like information about carrying on
the project, please let us know.
With warm regards-
Jo Cooper
Wisconsin Avenue Beautification Project Founder & Chair
Cooperjm@aol.com, 202.244.9479
Make checks payable to :WABP and send to WABP
4439 Davenport St. N.W. Washington D.C. 20016