Boom Redefines D.C.'s Core Appeal
As Buildings, Entertainment Venues Spring Up, Wealthier Residents Move In
By Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 18, 2003; Page DZ03
In this rapidly changing city, no place is changing so quickly as the city core.
Gone is the era when downtown Washington meant grand department stores that served the entire region. Gone, too, are the empty decades that followed, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, when office buildings spread west toward Connecticut Avenue, stores shut down and many still living in Chinatown or Mount Vernon Square were those too poor to go anyplace else.
Now office construction is booming, from the East End to the West End, and retail means restaurants -- most of them expensive -- as well as bookstores and boutiques. Crowds swarm to the MCI Center, theaters and nightclubs, the Spy Museum and the Kennedy Center. For those interested in walking home from those venues, an unprecedented number of expensive apartment buildings are being built.
"It's really becoming everything its planners had hoped for 20 or 30 years ago," said developer Bob Carr, who has heard city leaders call for a "living downtown" since the early 1970s. "It's only going to get more vibrant."
Some blocks in downtown's East End, and around Dupont Circle -- those where the preservationists have triumphed over the bulldozers -- still bear the stamp of history. But their graceful facades increasingly conceal newly renovated, expanded interiors.
Other streetscapes look nothing like they once did. The rowhouses that long ago lined the West End and Foggy Bottom, for example, have been replaced by office canyons and the institutional buildings of George Washington University. And the mostly vacant land that for decades lay north of Mount Vernon Square was recently filled by the gleaming facade of the gigantic new convention center.
Many blocks are works in progress, with both the past and the future visible. A formerly desolate stretch of Massachusetts Avenue NW is vibrating with the construction of luxury apartment buildings which, when they are all complete, will fill almost every one of the empty lots that have blighted the boulevard for decades. A new residential building is rising on a former parking lot behind the shuttered Columbia Hospital for Women in the West End, while a sign in front of the old hospital announces plans for its transformation into luxury condominiums, with retail on the lower floors.
As the structures change, so do the people who live and work in them.
Although many city neighborhoods lost population between the 1990 and 2000 Census, the number of residents grew slightly in downtown's East End, generally defined as 14th Street to North Capitol Street between M Street and Pennsylvania Avenue; the West End, which includes everything west of 20th Street; and in Dupont Circle, just north of downtown.
Those neighborhoods also grew richer. Both trends seem likely to accelerate during this decade, as the frenzy of upscale housing construction continues.
Groundbreakings and grand opening ceremonies have become almost routine.
Just this month, work began on the Newseum complex at Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW, and people began moving into several new residential buildings -- including loft condominiums in the historic Mather Building at Ninth and G streets, which had been vacant and deteriorating for years.
For the lower-income African Americans and Asians -- many of them senior citizens -- who still make up most of the sparse population of Mount Vernon Square and Chinatown, the fulfillment of the District's 30-year-old dream of a "living downtown" is both frightening and exciting.
More than 4,000 luxury apartments have been recently built, are under construction or are planned for those neighborhoods and the adjacent Penn Quarter and East End. That would more than double the housing in those areas, which at the time of the 2000 Census had 3,880 units. Although construction so far has involved empty parcels or long-vacant buildings, some fear that rising housing prices eventually could mean the loss of their own, affordable residences.
"You have to watch out for what's going on," said Theresa Burton, 68, president of the tenants association at the Museum Square Apartments at 401 K Street NW. She said she recently met with her landlord, who promised not to opt out of the federal Section 8 subsidy program that keeps the 300-unit building affordable.
Yet others say they are excited, because the residential, office and retail projects could mean more jobs, and the arrival of wealthy new neighbors might mean better city services.
"The more people we have in the community, maybe the more attention we'll get," said Mark Dixon, 60, an Advisory Neighborhood Commission representative from the Mount Vernon Square neighborhood, just north of the apartments being built along Massachusetts Avenue. "Upper-class people come in there, paying that kind of money -- you know, they want services."
In the West End, longtime residents continue their years-old fight against the spread of George Washington University students and facilities into their neighborhood. At the same time, they see a flurry of construction of expensive new residential buildings -- welcomed by some residents as an antidote to more student neighbors, and feared by others focused on how few moderately priced apartment buildings are left.
"Our building is very diverse. We have bike messengers, we have students, we have professionals, we have young immigrant families," said free-lance writer Deborah Akel, who has lived for 11 years at the Tiverton, a 45-unit, rent-controlled building a block from the Columbia Hospital site. "Now, with these buildings they're putting up, it's all upper-income, very wealthy people."
In Dupont Circle, too, the trend is toward ever greater affluence. When Janet and Norman Brown rented a small apartment at 16th and R streets NW in 1958, their neighborhood included modest rooming houses as well as mansions and embassies.
The Browns left for nearly 20 years to raise their children in a neighborhood of single-family houses a few miles north, then bought a Dupont Circle rowhouse once their kids were grown.
Almost all the rooming houses were gone. The modest apartment buildings increasingly were filled with Latino families.
Now, many of those structures have undergone luxury makeovers. Most immigrant families have moved to less expensive neighborhoods, to the north and east, fueling a decline in the Hispanic population near Dupont Circle. A construction fence was recently erected around the apartment building where the Browns once lived, suggesting that it, too, will undergo an upgrade.
"You rarely, rarely hear a kid's voice playing in the alley," said Janet Brown, 72. "The whole population changed -- to younger people with higher incomes, and older people with higher incomes."
The schoolyard at Ross Elementary School, near 18th and R, is still full at recess and enjoys much community support; one woman buys hundreds of Christmas trees each year, then sells them and gives the school the profits. But many youngsters who attend Ross live several neighborhoods away.
(Two other downtown schools that once served the residential communities around them now sit surrounded by office buildings. Stevens Elementary, at 21st and K streets NW, which Amy Carter attended while her father was president, and Francis Middle School, at 24th and N, cater to Washingtonians who work downtown but live in other parts of the city.)
Brown said neighbors on her block no longer meet in the alleys in the late afternoon with a drink to exchange greetings and the day's news. Instead, they chat over organic vegetables at the farmers market that operates in a bank parking lot on Sundays, or at one of Dupont Circle's many coffee houses.
The affluent who reside in Dupont Circle and other close-in enclaves say they are drawn to the city core by convenience.
These neighborhoods are flooded with Metro stations and office buildings, and they are within walking distance of most of the city's restaurants, theaters and museums.
John J. Mahoney attends frequent evening business meetings in the Penn Quarter, just a couple of blocks from the condominium at The Pennsylvanian that he and his wife purchased several years ago.
"When you get out at 9:30 or 10 o'clock at night, it's nice," said Mahoney, 60, who before moving downtown lived in a rowhouse on Capitol Hill. Chuckling, he mentioned a colleague who lives in Herndon. "I'm home before he gets his car out of the garage."
But work is only part of it. Mahoney, who owns a real estate title company and is interim chairman of the D.C. Sports and Entertainment Commission, walks to Wizards games at the MCI Center and to just about every new restaurant that he or his wife hears about. Mornings, he gets his exercise while taking in the dramatic urban scenery, walking around the U.S. Capitol some days, the new convention center on others.
The convenience is at least as important for lower-income residents. Many of the Chinese Americans who live in the Wah Luck House, a federally subsidized building in Chinatown, attend a lunch program at nearby St. Mary's Church several times a week, and rely on a Chinese doctor with offices around the corner on I Street NW.
Naipang Wong, a social worker with the Asian Services Center, said his clients who live in Wah Luck House and other subsidized buildings will not be directly affected by the construction of expensive new residences, "as long as they [developers] don't touch the existing ones."
A spokeswoman for Aimco, the Denver-based company that owns Wah Luck House, said her firm has extended its contract with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to rent to low-income residents through next fall, and is weighing what to do with the building after that.
Wah Luck House is just down the block from the Friendship Archway, the colorful Chinatown landmark built as a joint project by the cities of Washington and Beijing in 1986. At the time, it was reported to be the largest Chinese arch in the world.
Next to the arch, a project known as Gallery Place is under construction. When completed next year, it will include 192 condominiums -- all of which are already sold -- an office tower, a multiplex cinema and big-name retail shops.
Like other nearby new construction, Gallery Place will include Chinese architectural details and signage, as a way of paying homage to the historic presence of the Chinese community here.
But the projects have replaced many of the Asian groceries and some restaurants. And the expected influx of residents into the buildings under construction almost certainly will lower the percentage of the neighborhood population that is Asian.
In the 2000 census, Asians made up 8 percent of all residents in the neighborhood cluster that includes Chinatown, the East End, Penn Quarter and Mount Vernon Square -- nearly three times the city average of 3 percent.
At least a couple of the high-end projects have offered some benefits to the poor. The developer and lead contractor for Massachusetts Court, a 371-unit building rising at Fourth and Massachusetts, recently completed a $100,000 renovation of a nearby homeless shelter called Gospel Rescues Ministries.
Burton, the tenant leader from Museum Square, said she was heartened by the charitable effort. She said the work made it likely that the shelter would continue operating in its building at Fifth and H streets NW, near several new luxury residences, for the foreseeable future.
Scattered among the redeveloped city blocks and the noisy construction sites are a few parcels that still await transformation.
The District has selected a development team to build apartments and amenities at the old convention center site, but its choice is being challenged in court by another development team that competed for the project and lost. Details of what would be built have not been finalized.
Development proposals are also being weighed for city-owned land east of Mount Vernon Square, which decades ago was the site of the National Wax Museum. City officials want apartments, a grocery and possibly arts uses on the site.
An effort to build the project, launched two years ago, fell through last year, and the National Capital Revitalization Corp. is expected to pick a new development team early in 2004.
Developers who have submitted proposals are promising jobs and other opportunities to existing residents of the neighborhood, ANC commissioner Dixon said. One developer took community leaders to tour the Harris Teeter grocery store in Pentagon City, using it as an example of the type of store that could be included in the Wax Museum project.
Two dozen blocks to the west, residents of Foggy Bottom have written more than 100 letters to the Trader Joe's grocery store chain, begging the company to locate in the Columbia Hospital complex once it is rebuilt. Foggy Bottom Association president Ron Cocome said the chain seems interested but has not made a commitment.
Members of the association have supported efforts by Trammell Crow Co., the developer of the hospital project, to let the company build more residential units and retail space than city zoning regulations would otherwise allow.
In exchange, the developer offered the neighborhood group an unheard-of $5 million donation.
That amount was reduced to $3.9 million when the city's historic preservation review board limited the amount of new space that could be included in the project.
Cocome said the neighborhood group will use $1.4 million of the grant as an incentive to Trader Joe's or other retailers it wants to lure to the neighborhood -- a bakery and a hardware store also would be ideal additions, he said.
The remaining money, about $2.5 million, could go to pay legal bills in the neighborhood's ongoing fight against George Washington University, an institutional presence that Cocome and other community leaders almost uniformly cite as the greatest threat to their residential community.
"You can't go to any part of our neighborhood where you don't feel that you're on campus," said Cocome, a 20-year resident who works nearby at the Kennedy Center.
He rented an apartment for years at Columbia Plaza, a moderately priced complex overlooking the Potomac River on Virginia Avenue NW, then bought into the cooperative at the Watergate because, he said, so many GWU students had moved into his building.
Cocome called the university's spread "part of the heartbreak" of living in Foggy Bottom.
"It's potentially so great. The possibilities are so great, because you're so close to the downtown and the Kennedy Center and the museums," Cocome said. "It's such a beautiful city . . . It has such potential . . . and we see so much of it just not coming to fruition."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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