Jumping on the bandwagon: What did Sharon Pratt Dixon do for H Street or U Street?

From Wikipedia:

Sharon Pratt Kelly (1944–), formerly Sharon Pratt Dixon, was mayor of Washington, D.C. from 1991 to 1995.

From yesterday's Post, "Advice From an Ex-Mayor to the Next Mayor":

The quick fix may help your career -- long-term investments help the city. Investing in H and U streets, by helping to bring basketball to the heart of the city and refurbishing the Lincoln Theatre, produced benefits beyond my tenure.

Whatever investment was being made in the Lincoln Theatre likely predated this particular mayoralty. And what happened on H Street from 1991-1995 that helped anybody, then or ten years later? (She was integral to what is now called the Verizon Center, see "Md. Running Fast Break on D.C. Arena," a 1994 article in the Washington Post.)

And speaking of some worrisome trends, see "New Toys" from the current issue of themail:

A peculiar press release appeared in the E-mail this week. As you know, Mayor Williams wants to dispose of the city’s historic architectural landmark Martin Luther King, Jr., Central Library, and he wants the city council to approve of his costly plan to replace it with a smaller new library to be built on an awkward triangular corner of the old Convention Center site. Presumptive incoming mayor Adrian Fenty has said that he supports this plan, even though he has attended no public or council hearings on it and has never spoken with advocates of renovating and updating the MLK Library. Fenty seems intent on embracing all of Williams’s worst mistakes early in his term. In addition to throwing away MLK, one of the city government’s most important buildings, he wants to repeat Williams’s attempted power grab to take over the school system and thus to accept personal blame for all the failings of the school system; and he is now emerging as a champion of throwing good money after bad into the baseball stadium money pit. (See the entry for more);

and "Cronyism and Tangherlini," Steve Eldridge's column in today's Examiner. (As a kid said to Shoeless Joe Jackson or to O.K. Ockatur in The Great American Novel -- "Say it ain't so [insert name here].")

Remember:

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.

ATTRIBUTION: WENDELL PHILLIPS, speech in Boston, Massachusetts, January 28, 1852.—Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, p. 13 (1853).

Index Keywords: civic-engagement