No Mass Tree-Cutting, and No Illuminated Night-time Golf Driving Range in Rock Creek Park!

If you have never visited the Rock Creek Park Golf Course (RCPGC) before, then you have been missing out on one of the very greatest and wildest places in the entire city.

I am 74-year-old DC native. I thought I had visited (with family and friends) nearly every park and museum in the entire DC metropolitan region. However, not belonging to a golfing family, I had never even thought of visiting RCPGC, even though I had driven by it literally thousands of times and am currently teaching in a school directly across 16^th Street from it!

Once I finally located the place on a map and went to visit the place for the first time, less than two weeks ago, I was flabbergasted both because I found it extremely beautiful and because nobody in my extended family had ever visited the place before.

But it’s about to be seriously damaged by a poorly thought-out plan to cut down over 1200 trees and to install a brightly illuminated driving range with TopGolf/TopFlight technology right in the center of the course.

The TopTracer technology and TopGolf empire of late-night driving ranges appear to be popping up very quickly all across the globe, but, not being a golfer, I had never heard of them until a NPS leader told me they were planning on using it/them. Not knowing what to expect, I recently went to their TopGolf National Harbor venue (near Wilson Bridge and the MGM Casino, just south of the DC-MD line), at a half-hour before midnight, on a Monday. I am not a golfer. I paid for a half-hour of hitting balls (badly) so I could see what it was like.

I found the whole experience to be a lot like playing a large, brightly illuminated, outdoor pinball machine located on a green Astroturf field. It’s all enclosed by tall poles and large nets. Did I mention it’s very brightly lit up? The company puts several illuminated pits in the big enclosed area for targets. The major difference between TopGolf and pinball is that you are using actual golf clubs and special golf balls manufactured with a little RFID chip in them.

After each shot, thanks to that chip and TopGolf’s tracking technology, you get to view a short, stylized video of your ball’s trajectory. The screen then goes into video game mode and displays how many “points” you got in whatever game you chose to play. If you really want to improve at golf, the display does give you some stats on the speed and distance of the ball, but no useful information about what mistakes you are making in trying to get the face of your club to whack that little ball properly in the first place. (I can see that I am very bad at that!) I was astonished when my server told me there is no way to replay your shot on the display!

Here are a few photos I took during my National Harbor Top Golf visit on 5/20/2024:

The same company also has smaller, indoor venues – which I’ve not tried — that track the virtual path of the ball purely electronically, without needing a large field.

I used Google Maps to look at half a dozen of their US outdoor ranges from the air. They all look nearly identical to the one at National Harbor, the first one pictured. Can you guess what state the others are located in?

TopGolf ranges belong where the lights are already bright and there is plenty of parking and traffic – like Hains Point or even RFK stadium.

They do not belong in the very darkest and wildest place in all of Washington, DC.

It’s true that the grass on much of the Rock Creek golf course is poorly maintained and that there are lots of alien, invasive vines and other weeds. The contrast with the National Arboretum, which is beautifully kept up, is amazing. Can anybody explain why the Arboretum, at 4 times the size of the RCPGC, has the budget and staff to keep that lovely place so well-kept, but Rock Creek Park in general, and this golf course in particular, has many of its big trees over-run with porcelain berry, English Ivy, and other nasty vines, and some of the roughs are almost pure ‘Asiatic tear-thumb’?

It is a national disgrace that there is so much deferred maintenance in so many of our National Parks, and that it’s getting worse!

The RCPGC was originally created in the 1920s, for Whites only, but the clientele today is more integrated. Most of its trees are at least a century old. They give very pleasant dappled shade on many of the various golf fairways, especially the very wild and rough ‘back nine’. During all of my visits, I saw exactly two trees that needed removing or trimming: one had fallen right across a fairway, and another dropped a large branch onto a car and a bus on 16^th street just south of the Joyce Road entrance, almost right in front of me! All the other trees I saw looked quite healthy and beautiful.

Right now, every single bit of Rock Creek Park is dark at night, because the Park Service made the bold decision in 1980 to turn off all the streetlights on each one of its roads. This darkness at night is good for both for humans and for wildlife in this city. Building a TopGolf driving range there would be sacrilegious.

The golf course is expecially dark at night.

How dark, you ask?  

Go see for yourself, any night. Wear long pants and sturdy walking shoes, and tuck your pants into your socks. Bring a flashlight if you want, but you might not need it. Take an S2 or S4 bus, or if driving, park on Rittenhouse Street at 16^th Street NW. Cross 16^th Street to the western side, and follow Joyce Road downhill about 90 yards until you see a wide opening in the trees, to the right (northwest) that will allow you to walk up a hill and across a fairway. Leaving Joyce Road, pick your way through the brush, climb the hill, cross the very first fairway, go up another little rise, and look around. You have arrived at a large open space near the small (and old) RCGC club house. Go a little further until the lights on the maintenance building and inside the clubhouse are on the other side of yet another hill.

At this point, you cannot tell that you are surrounded by a major city, except for the pink sky glow and the occasional aircraft.

Not a single direct light is visible, from any direction! Not one streetlight, not one headlight, not one apartment or condo window. The two useless ‘insecurity’ lights on the maintenance shed are fortunately aimed back at 16^th street, so they don’t cast their glare onto much of the course at all. Thanks to this absence of light, certain parts of the ‘roughs’ had beautiful displays of thousands of flashing fireflies, that very same night!

And it’s quiet! There is no nearby train line, and neither 16th Street nor Military Road make a lot of noise, compared to the railroads and highways surrounding the Arboretum.

(Bright lights are thought to be one of the causes of the alarming declines we are seeing world-wide in the numbers of insects. Without insects to eat, birds starve, and without wild bugs and bees to pollinate our crops and trees, so will people! Experiments have shown that people sleep better and are much healthier if they are not exposed to bright lights at night.)

Dark nights are also good for anybody who wants to see anything of the universe we belong to and then realize that there is no planet B out there that we can go to if we mess up this one by paving over and lighting up its remaining wild places.

For over 75 years, local amateurs in National Capital Astronomers (of which I am now the president) have been working together with National Park Service rangers stationed at the Rock Creek Nature Center and Planetarium, one Saturday evening each month, to let members of the public explore as much of the sky as our telescopes can reach, for free.

Unfortunately, as you can see in this map, the field where we Explore the Sky, just south of the intersection of Oregon Avenue and Military Road, is only about 4200 feet from where this TopGolf driving range is planned. I am afraid that this TopGolf facility will have such a huge light dome that our 75-year-old tradition of letting the public explore outer space from inside DC will be much, much harder, if not impossible.

The NLT and their supporters claim that the lights on this TopGolf driving range will be very special: the beams can’t be seen after 50 yards, so the golfers can only see their ball’s trajectory on the video screen. They also claim the lighting is going to be approved by Dark Sky International (DSI), but nobody in the local or national DSI had even heard anything about this lighted golf driving range until one of us happened to read about it in the fine print of the plans, less than three weeks ago. We are supposed to meet with them on June 5.

If you remember anything from science, you know that light beams go on forever until they hit something. They don’t stop after 50 yards.

Every single golfer I spoke to about this told me that while they agreed that RCPGC needed refurbishing, they hated the ideas of installing TopGolf (or any illuminated driving range) there and cutting down 1200 of those lovely mature trees. About 90% of the public comments on this plan have been vehemently opposed to the plan to fell so many trees. Very few comments mentioned the lighting, probably because the writers didn’t know about it.

Dark-Sky advocates here in DC say that the NLT planners are not telling the truth about the levels of illumination that would be required at the proposed driving range. Looking at publicity shots of the Clermont National golf driving range, which was held up as an example, and looking at a random sample of TopGolf installations, it is clear to me that this illuminated driving range will be an utter disaster.

We had better get on the ball and do what we can to oppose those two parts of the plan: No night-time illuminated golf driving range, and leave almost all of the trees alone! If the rehabilitation plan that gets approved does involve a new clubhouse, better greens and fairways, a new putting area, and a new driving range, that’s fine – as long as they only use natural light.

Instead, we should advocate removing the invasive alien vegetation by pushing for a large enough National Park Service budget to complete a huge amount of deferred maintenance jobs, and to pay a competent gardening outfit (or hire a permanent NPS staff)  to do what’s needed to improve the lawns and brushy areas without tons of pesticides.

Introducing Black and Latino kids to golf on well-maintained, inexpensive, public, municipal or National Park golf courses is of course a fine idea. Doing a bit of research, I found that the vast majority of golf courses in DC, including Rock Creek and East Potomac Park, were off-limits to Black customers a century ago. At one point, the only one open to Black patrons was a tiny, poorly-maintained one located at what is now a set of volleyball fields just north of the Lincoln Memorial!

The end of racial segregation on DC links only began in June of 1941, when a number of Black golfers engaged in civil disobedience and went ahead and played an 18-hole game at Hains Point, despite harassment and threats by racist whites. The police just stood by. The bravery of those golfers prompted the Roosevelt administration to begin desegregating all federal parks and facilities, but Black golfers continued to be sporadically insulted and even attacked for many years thereafter.

National Links Trust (NLT) seems to only be about three years old. It’s so new that it even lacks a Wikipedia entry! As far as I can tell, their very first real enterprise seems to have been landing this FIFTY-YEAR contract to run all three public golf courses in DC. How did they end up with such a contract with no previous history?

Judging by what I saw of the nasty invasive vines at RCPGC, but granting that I have no personal experience with how it looked in years past, I’m not very impressed with their stewardship of this course so far. NLT’s literature boasts that their crews, along with volunteers, have removed “several hundred square yards” of invasive vines in the past few years. While that would be impressive if that was just one or two people accomplishing that, it’s much less so for an organization running all three public golf courses in the District of Columbia. A little math shows why:

The RCGC alone is about 103 acres, and one acre is 4840 square yards. Multiplying that on your calculator gives 498,520 square yards (nearly half a million square yards).

I suspect that at least 5% of the area of RCPGC is infested with nasty, alien invasive weeds of one sort or another. If that estimate is fair, then that’s about 25,000 square yards that need the same treatment. So, if NLT manage to clear 500 square yards of nasty weeds in two or three years, then they would need roughly a century or two at the same rate of progress to finish the job! Yet their IRS form 990, required of all 501(3)(c) organizations, says that at the end of 2023 they had $12.2 million in the bank and only $4.6 million in liabilities. What gives?

Why should they now be awarded a contract to start cutting over a thousand mature trees and begin installing bright lighting, when they have done next to nothing on removing the real problem – nasty, alien, invasive vines?

Right now, the NLT expects to start up their chain saws and bulldozers this fall (2024), but there are probably a few more steps where they can be stopped. If we don’t want the crazy parts of this plan to happen, we had better get organized, because the NPS and NLT have decided to ignore the thousands of citizens who wrote and spoke out against it — but not in an organized way.

If the Park Service heads decide to ignore all the opposition and continue with this plan, then perhaps folks will need to do some civil disobedience again, just like those brave, Black DC golfers did back in 1941.

EDIT: My original version had a misleading sentence. NPS and NLT do not appear to be planning to build an actual TopGolf site, which is good, because those are much like circuses and have no business in a national park. However, they are indeed planning night-time illumination at this site, and their own illustration shows bright lighting fixtures pointing in an upwards position.