For 50 years, Tildon has implored the government of the District of Columbia to pave his alley. Tildon’s letters to the Department of Public Works, the Water and Sewer Design Branch, the Chief of Street Maintenance, the Public Space M a i n t e n a n c e Administrator, the Department of Highway Engineering, the Department of Street Construction and Maintenance and the Department of Transportation Services make up a small mountain of paper. Some date back to the 1950s. Tildon wrote and called more than 20 D.C. government officials, many of whom wrote back. Several examined the alley themselves. One even took pictures and drew up a diagram for a sewer easement. But the alley is still dirt.

The people who answered Tildon’s letters are mostly retired or dead.

Tildon may be unique in his persistence, but he is not alone in his complaint. Paved alleys are rare in this area of Deanwood just a few blocks from Prince George’s County line. The D.C. government terms these alleys "unimproved." Many are overgrown, impassable and filled with sheds, household debris or junk cars.

Neighborhood residents who want alleys paved and maintained say their elected representatives have not been much help.

"I don’t have a magic wand," said William Wright, spokesman for Ward 7 Councilmember Kevin P. Chavous. "When the streets are broken or the lights are out or the grass needs cutting, we rely on city services just like everyone else. The folks we are serving don’t understand. They want us to do more. But it has nothing to do with what we are doing in here, it’s the frayed services out there."

In the meantime, Tildon’s neighbors spread gravel, dirt or mulch over the deep mudholes to stem the flood that runs over their lawns and into their basements with each rain. But mostly the rainwater gets passed around from house to house and yard to yard, running off one property into another.

A pump spews water from one man’s basement out a bare pipe into the alley, where it gushes into another man’s basement with each rain. That man moved out about two months ago, leaving behind the third abandoned property on the block.

An 82-year-old retiree born and raised in Northeast Washington, Tildon is committed to staying in the house he bought in 1939. Back then it was an abandoned five-room bungalow with a leaky roof. Tildon made a $100 down-payment in nickels, dimes and quarters.

Now, it is a trim green and white house with a sturdy fence and a garden of peonies, tulips and lilacs. Here, Tildon and his wife Inez raised five children while he worked as a laborer at the Washington Navy Yard for $19 a week. He raised the house three feet off its swampy foundation, put on a new roof, replastered the walls and added three new rooms. He kept up his fight to pave the alley the whole time.

Petitions in 1953 and 1968 came to dead ends. At a public hearing, neighbors rejected a plan to pave the alley with cement because it would have increased their property tax assessments. The assistant chief of the city’s Street Maintenance Division wrote in 1986 that they alley would be graded. It never happened.

Refusing to give up, Tildon convinced city officials in 1991 to design and approve an easement draining the alley to an existing storm sewer under 50th Street. The alley would be paved with asphalt at no cost to residents, who approved the plan.

The easement was never built. Tildon said city officials told him it was "unfeasible" and "too expensive."

In recent years, Tildon has written to Ward 7 Councilmember Chavous and to his predecessor, H.R. Crawford, about the alley. He wrote and called Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. He spoke to the mayor.

"I am just trying to get this done right," he said. "Different men keep promising they will do this and do that and look into it and they don’t do nothing. This community is steadily going down."

His wife agrees.

"I don’t think the city is really interested in doing anything about it," she said. "Sometimes I think it is because we are not big enough politically."

Homeowners east of the Anacostia River are used to feeling forgotten. Cynette Starr of the 1000 block of 49th Place has been waiting for curbs on her street since 1978. Her neighbor has tried for years to get the city to cut down an ancient, cracked mulberry tree that sits on District property before it falls on someone.

After years of complaining about the dead trees on her block, Candies Cook got a promise in writing more than a year ago from the Tree and Landscaping Division of Public Works that they would be cut down. They came and marked the trees with orange paint. And there they stand to this day.

When it came to draining the alley behind her house, it was the same story. A big stagnant pond forms every time it rains, filled with runoff from a makeshift garage operation a few doors away. After waiting decades for a drain, she put down leaves and mulch this spring.

"I’m quite disgusted," she said. "I just don’t understand. I paid the taxes they ask me to pay, and I pay it on time. But 52 years and you can’t get a catch basin? That’s ridiculous. I’m an old woman and I had to get out there and scatter those chips myself."

Copyright 1998, The Common Denominator