RealGM

Leonsis is weighing whether to build a glitzy Wizards basketball practice facility on the site of the former St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mostly vacant campus in Southeast D.C. that is considered one of the District’s largest redevelopment opportunities.

At St. Elizabeths, the Wizards would practice amongst some of the city’s poorest communities and could serve as a central component of a long-promised revival that could also include a Microsoft Innovation Center, offices for technology firms, new shops and affordable housing.

The campus is one of three final locations that Leonsis and his company, Monumental Sports & Entertainment, is weighing for the facility, along with a property on the campus of Howard University and a location atop parking garages near the Silver Spring Metro station.

The idea is to build a complex similar to the Kettler Capitals Iceplex, in Ballston, which serves as a practice center for the Capitals hockey club, another Leonsis team, and as a community skating rink for Arlington County, said Randall Boe, Monumental’s executive vice president and general counsel.

Boe said Leonsis expects to make a selection next month, which could mean the facility would be under construction by the next summer, when NBA teams go to the free agent market looking for talent.

Among the players that might be available is four-time NBA scoring champion Kevin Durant, a native of Seat Pleasant — seven miles from St. Elizabeths — whom the Wizards are hotly pursuing.

“It’s a huge recruiting tool for free agents. This is where the players go to to work every day,” Boe said.

payitforward wrote:St. Elizabeths -- a name and place familiar to poets, as that's where Ezra Pound was hospitalized after WWII.

montestewart wrote:

payitforward wrote:St. Elizabeths -- a name and place familiar to poets, as that's where Ezra Pound was hospitalized after WWII.

"Hospitalized" in the sense that he was in a hospital. Apparently, all the examining physicians found him sane, but Pound had a few influential friends. St. E's was more a cushy incarceration than a hospitalization.

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/31/books/researchers-dispute-ezra-pound-s-insanity.html

payitforward wrote:

montestewart wrote:

payitforward wrote:St. Elizabeths -- a name and place familiar to poets, as that's where Ezra Pound was hospitalized after WWII.

"Hospitalized" in the sense that he was in a hospital. Apparently, all the examining physicians found him sane, but Pound had a few influential friends. St. E's was more a cushy incarceration than a hospitalization.

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/31/books/researchers-dispute-ezra-pound-s-insanity.html

Yes, hospitalized in the sense that he was in a hospital -- he certainly wasn't nuts. I.e. not in the usual way the term is used. (In every other way he was a total whack job.)

I haven't read any of the materials the linked article points to, and I can't imagine being interested enough in the particulars of this long-ago situation that I ever will. But the claim that one hospital psychiatrist could have protected him from prosecution had anyone really wanted to try him is ridiculous on the face of it. The point is nobody wanted to put him on trial. The reasons for that were complex and various and not so very worth going into here. Start by remembering the Nuremburg trials -- we'd already tried and executed many Germans for actual horrible deeds of death-doing.

It's worth mentioning that Ezra Pound was a great poet. One of the greatest in the English language in the XXth century. No doubt his achievements in this regard were also part of what made it seem likely to be more trouble than it'd be worth, a mare's nest, to bother trying him.

montestewart wrote:If they tear down St. E's and put up a Wizards practice facility, WTA will have a fit!

Ruzious wrote:

montestewart wrote:If they tear down St. E's and put up a Wizards practice facility, WTA will have a fit!

There should be plenty of room for a CVS and a Walmart near the practice facility.

montestewart wrote:...It was Pound's numerous friends in the literary world, including some of the biggest names in American letters, who came to Pound's rescue. People like Ernest Hemingway and William Carlos Williams spoke out against his actions, and their own patriotism was not in question, but they advocated for him and attempted to minimize his actions. I get the sense the St. E's psychiatrist was merely the rubber stamp to the "insanity" characterization....

fishercob wrote:ZONKER!!!!

long suffrin' boulez fan wrote:Do you all think this could be prelude to the Wiz getting a D league team?

How great would that be for player development to have them practice and play games at this facility?