People are lining up for free Chop’t salads at the chain’s new location at Metro Center. My advice: tell them to stop chopping half way through. Otherwise you end up with lettuce pudding. Yuck.

SaraH caught this pre-lunch hour shot of the line:

The Post had a story on April 9 about a guy who thinks DC’s spoke-system grid was designed to depict a pentagram, thus proving the demonic core of the nation’s capital. The five-pointed star has terminuses at Dupont and Logan circles to the North, Washington Circle to the West, Vernon Square to the East and, finally, traveling along Connecticut and Vermont avenues, the White House to the South. The Mayflower Hotel is near the center of the pentagram, as is the strange model white house we discovered several months back at Scott Circle. The plastic toy, which someone eventually painted black, lines up perfectly with the real White House in the distance down 16th Street. Which leads me to wonder if the guerrilla art was really a satanic ritual. Woo! Fun with the devil!

Among the week’s big D.C. stories is the effort by the District to put together a network of anti-crime cameras that’ll be routinely monitored.

How many such cameras?

5,000.

Most of them will be monitored by the District’s own emergency-response office. The story, first reported in the Washington Times, hit the front page of the Washington Post this morning, topped off by the following quote by At-Large Councilmember Phil Mendelson, who in one short sentence exhibits a masterful understanding of why law-enforcement loves security monitors.

“We don’t want the camera swooping in on a cute girl in a short skirt,” Mendo told the Post.

A reader at the Prince of Petworth ponders a question I’ve been wondering about for a long time: What to call the Georgia Avenue Safeway? I’ve considered Psycho Safeway, stolen from the one in Portland that was near housing for a lot of crazy invalids; Stinky Safeway, because the place is just sort of nasty; and Sober Safeway, since they don’t sell booze.

The Library of Congress has just launched a Flickr pool featuring archival photos from the 1910s, ’30s, and ’40s, culled from the archives of the United States Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, and Bain News Service. The whole thing is worth flipping through–the LOC is looking for volunteers to tag them. The photo above is a shot of the Christopher Columbus statue at Union Station, taken circa 1943.

Last night, a motley group of businessmen, government types, ministers, and local residents packed into the Birney Elementary gymnasium in Anacostia to witness four developers lay out what they’ve envisioned for Poplar Point—the 130-acre tract on the Anacostia River east of South Capitol Street recently handed over to the District by the federal government.

Each group had 15 minutes to present their plan. They were allowed to have up to two persons do the presentation, and they weren’t allowed to use notes.

The whole exercise was a bit ridiculous, considering that whatever ends up getting built will go through so many approval and review processes, not to mention economic feasibility reviews, that it will likely look little like what hit the PowerPoint screen last night. More than anything, the meeting was a derby between the four developers to see who could ooh-and-aah the crowd the most. What mattered most in that regard: a soccer stadium, which D.C. United owner Victor MacFarlane has apparently successfully sold to Ward 8. Councilmember Marion Barry told the crowd, “We like all four proposals, but we like the one that’ll have a stadium first.”

Keeping that in mind, here’s a rundown:

Archstone-Smith/Madison Marquette: The Archstone Madison posse probably had the best presenter of the night: Calvin Gladney of local outfit Mosaic Urban Partners, who laid out a day at Poplar Point in a cool, well-rehearsed voice. Gladney & Co. promised a “major retail center,” perhaps along the lines of Gallery Place, “where as soon as it’s built people will want to come there.” Other sweeteners: These guys propose to set aside 20 percent of “small shop space” for local businesses and include a concert hall. “Maybe on some occasions Jay-Z would be performing there, or maybe on other occasions, it will be the Ballou High School marching band,” Gladney said. There was also talk of a “job incubator.” The big crowd pleaser, though, was the fact that Archstone included a soccer stadium in the plans. 2.4 million sq. ft. residential, 1.95 million office, 994,000 retail. Ooh-and-Ahh Grade: B+

Clark Realty Capital: These guys, part of the local Clark construction monolith, spent a little bit of time touting their local bona fides before moving on to what was undoubtedly the most ambitious proposal of the evening. The killer feature? The “Deck,” bitches, the “Deck”! That would be a three-block-wide lid over Interstate 295, which would do way more than any of the other proposals to connect Historic Anacostia to Poplar Point and the waterfront. Besides the Deck, there’s four other parts: The residential “Village at Poplar Point,” which would include a grocery store “along the lines of a Whole Foods or Harris Teeter”; the “Metro Soccer District,” which includes, yes, a soccer stadium; the “Preserve,” billed as “A Waterfront Version of New York’s Central Park”; and the “International Environment Center,” a business area billed as a “Silicon Valley for the Environmental Community.” That might include a “National Hall of the Environment,” a museum which would be on the tip of Poplar Point, facing the Capitol. Other things thrown in there: a 1,200-student K-12 KIPP charter school (which got the biggest cheer of the night from the crowd), a theater, and an open-air market. 3.8 million sq. ft. residential, 1.53 million office, 405,000 retail. Ooh-and-Ahh Grade: A

Forest City Washington: These guys blew it hard. FCW chief Deborah Ratner Salzburg got up at the beginning and explained they didn’t become aware of the no-notes, only-two-presenters rule until yesterday afternoon. Hence, Salzburg and a fellow presenter spent way too much time pumping up their own cred in the business community—spending, for instance, a good three minutes running down all the trusted inner-city types they’ve worked with: Al Sharpton, former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, former Ohio Congressman Louis Stokes (who was in attendance). They only got to their actual plans with about three minutes left in the presentation. About all that the crowd could take away: The plan involves three “fingers” surrounded by parkland. A few pluses for Forest City, though: They had probably the best-looking PowerPoint show (too bad they had to flip through the actual site plans super-quick) and they seemed to be the only ones who made a point of saying their proposal actually reflected what was realistic (hence, no soccer stadium)—even though theirs proposed the largest square footage of development. 4.3 million sq. ft. residential, 1.26 million office, 415,600 retail. Ooh-and-Ahh Grade: C-

General Growth/Mid-City Urban: These folks proposed the smallest amount of square footage (about 3.5 million less than Forest City) but their big thing is education, promising the “largest learning sportsplex” in the D.C. area—bigger than the Prince George’s Sports and Learning Complex near FedExField and bigger than the South Germantown Recreational Park in Montgomery County. There’s also a UDC satellite campus on the premises. And these guys, too, were big on green. “Green technology,” to be specific: “We will bring the Googles. We will bring the Microsofts. We will bring the Sun Microsystems,” said a presenter. As far as cool shit, the big deal was the aerial tram crossing the river. (At one point the presenter mentioned a tram “all the way to Roosevelt Island,” but good luck getting that past the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts.) They did have—by a long shot—the most amateur-looking PowerPoint show. But when it comes to the logo wars, these guys were the undisputed champs. Here’s some of the logos that appeared on a single PowerPoint slide: AMC theaters, Best Buy, Bed Bath and Beyond, Dave & Buster’s, the Sharper Image, Chili’s, Cheesecake Factory, Costco, Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret, the Body Shop, Barnes & Noble, Macy’s, TGI Friday’s, Lowe’s, Olive Garden, and Discount Shoe Warehouse. Damn, don’t you feel like shoppin’ already? 2.65 million sq. ft. residential, 250,000 office, 467,000 retail. Ooh-and-Ahh Grade: B

Judging from my first visit to West Elm, the new home-furnishings store at 11th & G Streets NW, I may never buy a thing there. But I will return, just to savor the lingering ambiance of the space’s former occupant, Woodward & Lothrop.

West Elm inhabits the north side of the first two floors of Woodies, which closed in 1995 after suffering a failed leveraged buyout by big-time mall developer Alfred Taubman. (The venerable department store chain’s operations were profitable to the end, but it couldn’t handle the debt with which Taubman saddled it.) Developer Douglas Jemal, who ended up controlling the building, had the exterior nicely preserved. Now West Elm has done its part for the (partial) interior.

Of course, it’s not Woodies anymore. Certain elements are familiar, while others are jarring. The staircase down from G Street is back in operation, but it’s now flanked by a new one to the second floor. The added stairs are open-slatted, and lead to a floating landing a few steps below the shop’s top floor. They are typical of an unfortunate aspect of West Elm’s makeover: In part, dignified old Woodies has been lofted.

Near the new 11th Street entrance, an “exposed brick” wall has been added. Upstairs, smaller brick dividers pick up the theme. Of course, they’re not real walls; they’re theatrical backdrops. So are the mismatched wood-slat floors and factory-style interior windows (which don’t actually function as windows at all). Such touches are appropriate for a store that will sell rugs and towels to residents of the new fake lofts constructed in D.C. over the last decade. But the faux-industrial look doesn’t suit this dowager building.

Still, the detailing on the interior columns remains, as does the ornate setting for the elevator bank (although the elevators themselves are new and crudely designed). The illusion that Woodies survives is easily shattered: Just look toward F Street and realize that more than half the department store’s grand hall is gone. (Part already went to H&M, which proved a much less fastidious custodian than West Elm.) But there’s still a bit of there there, which is more than can be said for most of Washington’s culturally and historically denatured downtown.

Megachains aren’t always a fitting companion to history, but in the U Street corridor, the two are scheduled to become a package deal.

This fall, a CVS drugstore will open adjacent to the African-American Civil War Memorial at U and 10th Streets NW. The store will occupy the ground floor of the Prince Hall Grand Lodge. Now people stocking up on toilet paper and chewing gum will spill out onto the memorial site—not exactly what neighbors and planners envisioned. Derrick Woody, coordinator of the D.C. Office of Planning’s Great Streets Initiative, would have liked to see a restaurant or cafe with outdoor seating, coupled with an apparel store and perhaps a small welcoming center.

“Our vision was to have a use that drew people into the neighborhood and helped to animate that space,” Woody says. “I don’t see that people are going to be sitting outside of the CVS.” Frank Smith, founding director of the African-American Civil War Memorial, sees the reality pretty clearly: “Unfortunately, when you don’t own the property, your choices are limited [as] to what you can do.”

As September’s first school bell approaches, two neighboring jurisdictions are putting the finishes on remade high schools. Arlington’s Washington-Lee, just a few blocks from Ballston Metro, and Alexandria’s T.C. Williams, which is near the vague center of that amorphous city, follow (slightly) different fads in contemporary mega-building architecture. Neither approach successfully hides the structure’s awkward bulk.

Washington-Lee is predominantly brick, but with jutting glass-clad protrusions of the sort that have become all too common in downtown office buildings:

Although more horizontally oriented than most structures in the medium-rise Ballston commercial district, the ungainly new W-L is tall for a suburban school. It looks squashed into its site, jostling the curb on its tighter-fitting sides. Its glassy towers project upwards as if forced out when someone gave the building a hard squeeze.

Also mostly brick, T.C. Williams takes the postmodern historicist approach, presenting an almost-symmetrical face to King Street:

The building’s backside is blank except for a series of loading docks—they must be planning to sell tractor-loads of Pepsi and Cheetos—and looks like the equivalent aspect of Wal-Mart. But the more prominent exteriors use quasi-classical detailing, including columns, pilasters, peaked rooflets, and a rounded, semi-detached entrance pavilion on the incredibly long facade that runs roughly perpendicular to King Street.

It’s tempting to suggest that Arlington is trying to look all-business, while Alexandria hoped to create a building that more closely resembles the backwater neoclassical pile that impersonated T.C. in Remember the Titans. But Alexandria has long had a taste for “colonial” architecture that’s hopelessly outscale, like the hulking Old Town Holiday Inn that would probably shock a reanimated George Washington as much as the latest follies in Dubai.

If the new T.C. is way too big for the 18th century, the true expression of its late-20th-century aesthetic is yet to come. Once the city tears down the old building, a merely functional brick shed that opened in 1965, its land will used for the successor’s massive new parking garage.

The biggest new wedgie in town is on the northeast corner of this new 12-story office building, whose one-from-column-A name is “Columbia Center.” (A better tag than “Center Centre,” I suppose.) The Monument Realty–developed structure, which is supposed to be completed by “3Q 2007,” is rising on 15th Street NW, just north of the Washington Post building on the site of the paper’s former parking garage. That corner’s angled extremity stretches all the way to the top floor, suggesting that the structure is some sort of aborted pyramid. Look around the side, however, and you’ll see that this is just another downtown office box.

The front facade is mostly glass, with a transparent four-story entryway at the southwest corner that’s the focus of the development’s marketing effort. If Hickock Cole Architects, who designed the building, devised this unusual off-center entrance to maximize the retail space, they deserve credit for good intentions. Too bad the ground-floor shops will be overshadowed by the odd horizontal shield that appears to float at the second-floor level.

That large piece, which stretches across most of the building’s front, resembles some oversized bit of clear plastic detritus, perhaps left over after unpacking a high-tech gizmo. (A 12-story iMac, perhaps?) It looks cheap, as does the entire affair. The term of art for these glassed-in white-collar corrals is “jewel box,” but no one with real valuables would put them in such a graceless container. Instead, the building suggests an acrylic chest that a six-year-old girl might fill with costume jewelry. Moderately radical geometry aside, Columbia Center is just another low-style attempt to dress up the old midtown-D.C. box.

Last fall, I immodestly proposed a remake of the square that includes the Q Street entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro Station. One reason the time was right, I noted, was that Riggs Bank had been absorbed by PNC, a Pittsburgh institution. That meant less need for local office space for the bank, so that the retail buildings on the west side of the 1500 block of Connecticut Avenue NW, which Riggs converted to office space in 1997, could return to their previous use.

None of my more extravagant ideas for the square are on anyone’s public agenda, but the shops on that block are coming back. According to the Washington Business Journal, local retail broker John Asadoorian has been hired to lease the space that was once home to Kemp Mill Records, Beadazzled, Burrito Brothers, Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips, various ice cream parlors, and Rascals (a gay bar). There’s 20,000 square feet of available space, most of it behind façades clearly designed for retail use.

At $100 per square foot, the shops won’t rent to small, independent, or start-up businesses. But however corporate the block’s new retailers, they’ll create activity that will enliven the area. It never made sense to have a retail dead zone at the center of the one of the city’s liveliest neighborhoods, and next to one of its busiest Metro stations.

Of course, the original flip to office space didn’t have to happen. If the city had instituted the sort of retail requirements that exist in most well-planned cities, Riggs would never have been able to convert the Connecticut Avenue frontage to offices. So the return of shops to one side of one block doesn’t say anything about the larger issue of lively retail corridors. Citywide, D.C.’s retail strategy is still based on wishful thinking and the kindness of strangers.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, Washington experienced an architectural counterrevolution. Many of the city’s new office buildings were designed in a style—variously termed “postmodern,” “historicist,” or “contextual”—that drew on 19th and early-20th-century models. Glass curtain walls and poured concrete were out. But architecture schools still instill reverence for the “new,” even if most of what they prize as novel is now almost a century old. So it was inevitable that the vogue for huge glass boxes would return, and recently it has. But D.C.’s latest examples of the new appear oddly antique.

The recently completed office building called 1101 New York Avenue NW (which actually fronts on I Street) shows how the mid-20th-century “International Style” has degenerated. Although the 12-story structure is clad entirely in glass, it lacks the bold, simple geometry essential to the work of such Bauhaus masters as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The bulk of the box is reduced by dividing the frontage into two large protruding bays, with the center of the facade recessed. The corners have a series of shallow notches, designed to facilitate more window offices. In short, 1101 New York has the massing of a old masonry (or recent historicist) structure. Designed by old-school modernist Kevin Roche, the building is a neoclassical edifice in unconvincing Bauhaus drag.

Like most contemporary Washington white-collar palaces, 1101 New York shortchanges the street level, and provides a hostile environment for retail businesses. But perhaps the worst thing about the place is its stripped-down portico. This crude shelter over the main entrance is the architectural equivalent of a cheap plastic sun visor you might buy on the boardwalk in Ocean City. Ironically, such an overhang could have been integrated much more elegantly into a neotraditional design. It was the decision to go “sleek” that made this feature turn out so gawky.

The D.C. government is considering two big projects to increase retail businesses in two very different neighborhoods: Georgetown and H Street NE. Yet neither plan addresses basic retail-boosting strategies that the city should have adopted decade ago.

In Georgetown, developer Herb Miller is looking for at least $20 million in tax increment financing (TIF) to redo Georgetown Park, the mall his former company developed and that his current firm recently bought back. This remake might include a Nordstrom’s, which would be the first new department store to locate in D.C. since Neiman Marcus opened in Friendship Heights in 1977.

The odds might seem to be against this deal. Former Mayors Marion Barry and Tony Williams, as well as erstwhile Pennsylvania Avenue Development Commission director M.J. Brodie, all tried to lure department stores into the city, preferably into the “retail core” around Metro Center. When their campaigns began more than 25 years ago, there were three department stores downtown. Now there’s one.

Yet Miller has a successful record. In addition to developing Georgetown Park, he built (with TIF money) the architecturally gruesome but impressively lively Gallery Place complex. And it’s possible that Nordstrom, having saturated the suburbs, is finally ready to expand into a major East Coast city. (It does have downtown stores in the West, but on this side of the country, it’s avoided cities, save for little Providence, R.I.) Now that Georgetown has been upscaled to the point of tedium—which may explain why Georgetown Park is struggling—perhaps prissy Nordstrom can feel comfortable there.

The department store chain certainly wouldn’t take to scruffy H Street NE, where the city plans a $27 million fix-up in hopes of attracting some 300,000 additional square feet of retail. The idea is to build on the “Atlas District,” with its arts center and nearby bars and live-music venues.

Interestingly, both Georgetown and H Street NE would be along the route of the long-touted crosstown Metro line, which could link in Rosslyn to the Silver Line to Tysons Corner and Dulles. Building that Metro extension—which no one is seriously discussing these days—would cost a lot more than $27 million, but it would make both Georgetown and H Street NE more attractive to shoppers and shop-keepers alike.

There are simpler things the city can do, of course. Retail requirements and street-frontage regulations for major streets should have been instituted back in the 1970s, at the dawn of Home Rule. Parking lots that separate streets from shops—as at the dreary H Street Connection strip mall—should never have been allowed. City officials now say that $1 billion in annual sales tax revenue is lost to the suburbs because D.C. is—in the retail-biz parlance—”understored.” A lot of that cash would have been retained if the city hadn’t permitted large new buildings with minimal or no retail space to be erected on prominent sites.

Such urban essentials as maintaining and improving infrastructure, establishing zoning regulations that require effective retail spaces, and improving law enforcement—an issue on H Street NE, but also in Georgetown—would do more to transform D.C. than any Nordstrom’s. Yet city officials still have a lottery mentality. They continue to behave as if they can fix everything with one big score, rather than doing the slow, hard work of providing the basic services and consistent planning that would allow the city to mend itself.

DDOT these days is exploring all sorts of ways to make the city more pedestrian friendly. That quest includes a first-ever public meeting on pedestrian issues that our city planning expert, Mark Jenkins, skewered in this very space.

I didn’t attend, but I have a belated recommendation: End the tyranny of right on red. No single traffic rule—actually, permission—so routinely horrifies and puts in danger the noble pedestrians of the District of Columbia. At any well-traveled intersection, the right-on-redders are constantly pulling up into the crosswalk, cutting off and, I’m sure, occasionally clipping those on foot.

And why wouldn’t they? Think about the dynamics of the right on red: As you approach the intersection in your vehicle, you spot the red. You see that the lightpost has no sign prohibiting the turn. At that point, as you creep up to the light, you pivot your head to the left, waiting for a break in the traffic, so that you can do your right on red without sideswiping someone. You spot a break in the flow, and execute your R on R.

Oh, but what about that poor jogger who just (legally) started across the crosswalk! You didn’t see him because you were looking the other way, worried only about other cars.

Step 1: Scrap R on R. Step 2: Actually enforce traffic laws.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority will adjust several D.C. bus routes as of Sunday, June 24, and one more a week later on July 1. These changes, some of which will make life harder for Metrobus riders, reflect one longstanding Metro bias and two relatively new wrinkles in the agency’s muddled approach to bus planning.

The June 24 shifts affect slightly such major lines as the 42 and the 50s; the most significant cutbacks will be on the S and 90 lines. One route, the X6 shuttle to the National Arboretum, will be eliminated. The July 1 adjustment is that the 98, which links Adams Morgan and the U Street Metro during party hours, will get 50 percent more service.

It’s hard to argue against the X6 cut. I’m one of the few Washingtonians who’s ever taken a Metrobus to the Arboretum, and even I have never been on an X6. But the 90 and S changes are another matter. They will increase waiting and travel times, as well as crowding, on two heavily used lines.

The S cutback is modest in scale, but devastating in effect: During evening rush hour, the northbound S4 will leave from 13th and I Streets NW, not 10th and Pennsylvania. (The S2 will continue to run the entire route.) This means riders on the line’s southern section face a 50 percent service cut—and at rush hour, no less.

The reduction reflects a decades-old Metro penchant for removing bus service to downtown. On the theory that such lines duplicated Metrorail, many bus routes that once served the F Street corridor or the Federal Triangle have been cut back or routed away from the area. Most infamous of these changes was the 1995 retrenchment of the 42, once one of Metrobus’ busiest routes. The line used to run from Mount Pleasant to Stadium-Armory via F Street and Union Station—a true downtown “Circulator.” The eastern part of the route was erased, and the F Street section moved to K Street, a change that was expected to suppress ridership, and did.

The 90-line changes are an example of one of Metro’s newer obsessions: truncating routes in order to improve on-time statistics. As of June 24, all 90, 92, and 93s will end at the Duke Ellington Bridge rather than McLean Gardens. The 96, which begins at Capitol Heights Metro, will be extended to McLean Gardens; it will be the only 90-line bus to go there. Statistics may improve, but service will decline.

Meanwhile, the little-used nighttime 98, whose route is duplicated by the other 90s, will run every 10 minutes, instead of every 15. A three-month test of the expansion, pushed by the Adams Morgan Partnership, will be subsidized by $70,000 in D.C. money.

Thus the “privatization” of city bus planning, but not funding, continues. Heavily used routes are trimmed, while little-ridden shuttles devised by business groups are increased. (The prime example of this is, of course, the underperforming Circulator, routed by the Downtown and Georgetown Business Improvement Districts but largely bankrolled by D.C. taxpayers.) If you want better bus service in your neighborhood, it seems, don’t call your councilmember—organize a BID.

Photo courtesy of WMATA