There's a There There: Jo-Ann Neuhaus watched downtown D.C. grow. (Darrow Montgomery)

Folks who live in the District’s residential neighborhoods have a strong sense of entitlement to quiet, to parking, to darkness at night—all the things that come with the kind of house where you can have a driveway and a picket fence.

Living downtown is supposed to be different. This is the District’s public zone, after all, full of tourists and revelers. Aren’t noise and flashing lights what you sign up for when you rent an apartment or buy a condo in Gallery Place? The question practically asks itself: “I mean really, what did you expect?”

But downtown D.C. is still D.C., as Monumental Sports and Entertainment found out this past month. The company, which owns and operates the Verizon Center and its three pro sports tenants, wanted to add nine digital displays to the side of the building, advertising everything from iPods to insurance. All it would take is a tweak to D.C.’s special sign law, which Monumental argued would be a win-win for the city: $8 to $9 million in tax revenue over four years, plus a glitzier and more glamorous Gallery Place that would draw revelers at night.

“If you go to Times Square, people come there to see the signs,” said Randall Boe, Monumental’s general counsel, at a recent meeting of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2C. “Tourists come, and that helps build the neighborhood.”

Times Square might not have been the right image to evoke when pitching a change to a neighborhood that’s increasingly full of people who just want a good night’s sleep. Census figures show more growth downtown, percentage-wise, than any place in the city: The core almost doubled in size, going from 4,900 people in 2000 to 8,500 in 2010. Although the condo association nearest to the Verizon Center approved the signs, residents from surrounding blocks quickly took issue with covering the arena with flashing lights.

“I don’t think any of the other residents who moved in here thought, ‘I want to see big billboards,’” says Downtown Neighborhood Association president Nanette Paris, who says she could see the lights from her apartment at 8th and E streets NW when the Gallery Place movie theater first opened. And she doubts that the kind of people coming in will benefit the neighborhood much either, like residents do by patronizing high-end restaurants (though, of course, plenty of non-residents come to her neighborhood from elsewhere to go to the high-end restaurants, too). “What are those people going to do, stand around and gawk at the signs?” she asks. “Are those the people who are going to Proof, to Rasika?”

The problem, Paris says, is that in its rush to foster an entertainment zone downtown, the city sometimes forgets that residents create jobs and pay taxes too—and there are now enough of them to look out for their own interests.

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If the city’s priorities for Gallery Place conflict with those of residents, officials should have been able to see problems coming—mostly because the city caused them. Over the past two decades, the District government has worked hard to bring about the residential community that’s now asserting its rights.

It wasn’t easy. At first, starting in the 1980s, the federally-chartered Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation sold off land on the condition that developers use it to build housing. One of the first completed projects was the Lansburgh, a 400-unit apartment building (named for the department store that used to operate there) between 7th and 8th streets. Kevin Wilsey, who’s managed the building for the last 15 years, says it was a tough sell: Apartments didn’t rent, and they had to lower rates until they did. Wilsey himself had to move there from Arlington, which didn’t please his wife. I ask him what she was afraid of.

“I think nothingness,” Wilsey replies, laughing. And the city wasn’t doing much to help by fostering a club district along F Street. “You can’t set up a 5,000 seat nightclub next to a residential building; it just doesn’t work,” he says. (In fact, the 9:30 Club used to be right around the corner; it closed and moved to V Street about when the condos came.)

There were a few turning points. The privately-built MCI Center (now named Verizon) opened in 1997, drawing people downtown at night. Special zoning in the area took effect in 2000, giving housing developers the right to build more densely than usually allowed. Then-Mayor Anthony Williams even handed out tax abatements for residential development.

It worked. By the mid-2000s, condos were selling out, as the national real estate boom came to the District’s newest neighborhood. Jo-Ann Neuhaus, who had worked for the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation and is now executive director of the 23-year-old Penn Quarter Neighborhood Association, says she saw her annual holiday party swell from a small affair in the Navy Memorial to a full-blown gala in the National Building Museum. Residents don’t have the same feeling of abandonment as when there were only a few hundred of them scattered between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts avenues.

It’s taken the city a while to realize that downtown isn’t just a sterile office district, though. Until recently, Wilsey says, it would permit construction to start at 9:00 p.m., figuring that nobody would be around to hear it.

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Who are all these new residents, and what do they want?

First of all, they’re wealthy. While early on it was possible to buy condos in the $100,000 to $200,000 range—“These weren’t people who were buying in the Watergate,” says Neuhaus of that misty past—the average cost is now $535 per square foot, which comes out north of half a million for the smallest of units. The city didn’t prioritize affordable housing downtown, figuring its subsidies would go further in cheaper neighborhoods. And since all the apartment buildings became residential after rent control went into effect, all of them are market rate. That means rents of $3,000 a month for a one-bedroom in some buildings. According to surveys conducted by the Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District in winter 2011, a plurality of household incomes—35 percent—fall between $150,000 and $300,000 per year.

Downtowners are also childless. The BID’s data show 94 percent of respondents don’t have kids, which means there’s not much demand for things like playgrounds in the small parks nearby, which would be difficult to set up anyway.

All of that adds up to an awful lot of disposable income in the neighborhood. But in an area that’s a shopping and entertainment destination for the whole city, retail doesn’t really match the local demographics. Mid-market stores like H&M, Zara, and Forever 21 are doing well, but TJ Maxx is moving into the Homer Building on 13th Street*—not the higher-end Nordstrom, which downtown residents ranked number two out of a list of stores they’d like to see in their neighborhood (number one was Target). Residents only got a grocery store in 2008, the CityVista Safeway at 5th and L streets—a planned Balducci’s on 7th Street fell through during the economic collapse—but now 67 percent of residents say they shop for grocery items in the area (up from 10 percent in 2007). Downtown isn’t quite dense enough for retailers to make money just by catering to local residents; offices still abound, driving rents up, so stores have to serve broader audiences.

Neuhaus and Paris are downtowners by nature. Both spent long periods of time in Manhattan (to Neuhaus growing up, “the only house in the city that had a lawn was Gracie Mansion”). So they say they appreciate the urban lifestyle. But while downtown has been growing, it’s still a different kind of community than the surrounding neighborhoods. Wilsey’s building has very high turnover; he says many residents came to work at the Department of Justice or Federal Bureau of Investigation, and might take another job in a few years. As much as those folks might patronize local restaurants and businesses, they don’t tend to get involved in local politics (which, from the Verizon Center’s perspective, isn’t a bad thing at all).

That transient constituency isn’t going away, and unlike other cities where buildings aren’t capped by height limits, it won’t be diluted by other kinds of residents, either. The last big piece of downtown is getting built right now: CityCenterDC, which will have 674 condos and apartments total. Only 150 units are in the pipeline after that, compared to 5,444 in NoMa and 4,624 in Capitol Riverfront, by the baseball stadium.

So it looks like downtown is pretty much as big as it’s going to get. And it looks like it’s finally grown up enough to ask for what it wants.

* Corrected from an earlier version; Filene's Basement is leaving the National Press Building, but a replacement hasn't yet been announced.

Got a real-estate tip? Send suggestions to ldepillis@washingtoncitypaper.com.

If you Chinesify it, will people come? (Office of Planning)

Along with backing a gigantic new office building that will house international businesses at last night's U.S.-China Capital Cities Friendship Council gala, Mayor Vince Gray also expressed support for something dear to many people in the room: The continuing existence of a Chinatown in D.C.'s downtown core, which when he first became D.C. Council chairman, wasn't a sure thing.

"Chinatown was rapidly declining," Gray remembered. "Businesses were closing, people were leaving to go elsewhere, and frankly as somebody who grew up as a child, coming downtown, having great admiration and respect for Chinatown, my first reaction was, we can't let Chinatown disappear from our city, that would be a big cultural blow to us...We agreed that Chinatown ought to be a physical experience for people, that we ought to promote Chinatown busineses, that we ought to support people living in Chinatown."

It's actually a common challenge these days. The Atlantic just used D.C.'s Chinatown as exhibit A in the demise of Chinatowns around the country, as immigrants move to suburbs instead of inner cities; apparently San Francisco and New York City have seen their populations drop as services replace residents. (Interestingly, the 2010 census showed substantial increases over the last decade in the "Asian" presence in the two census tracts that have pieces of Chinatown—now at 9 percent and 22 percent of the total number—though the actual Chinese immigrant population is estimated at between 400 and 500 souls.)

In 2009, the D.C. Office of Planning responded to the D.C. Council's desire for action with the Chinatown Cultural Development Strategy, which laid out the case for and roadmap to a rejuvenated China-themed mini-district, saying it could become "a premier destination for experiencing international Asian and Chinese American art and culture by tapping into the 16.2 million visitors to DC each year as well as America’s 5th largest Asian American regional community...Forming a Chinatown Cultural District can attract New Chinese American and Asian-themed businesses by providing development incentives and coordinated marketing."

I'm skeptical of the extent to which that's happened over the last couple years. The Wah Luck House for Chinese immigrants is now essentially a retirement home, and its residents have to get on a bus to Falls Church for their groceries.

This month, though, the city came out with a draft plan for the neighborhood's public realm that at least addresses the aesthetic issues. Lots of the recommendations will do Chinatown a world of good: Repairing and widening sidewalks for outdoor cafes, allowing street vending, adding bike racks and benches and street trees, and opening alleys to pedestrians are fabulous ideas for bettering the neighborhood.

But a big chunk of the plan is devoted to the kind of superficial Chinafication that has made the neighborhood look like it's trying to hang on to something that disappeared long ago. We already have design review standards that require new buildings and signage to "contribute to the Chinese identity of Chinatown." Now, the city proposes to turn usually-blue wayfinding signs ornamental red, install Chinese-y lampposts and benches, design bike racks and crosswalks in the shape of stylized dragons, add a "Chinese-themed" sculpture to Chinatown Park, translate street signs into Chinese characters, commission "Chinese-inspired" murals for blank commercial storefronts, and install more decorative Zodiac pavers.

I don't think that's going to do much for the remaining Chinese residents of Chinatown, and creating a Disneyfied version of their neighborhood isn't a good way to honor their heritage. Furthermore, it's a bit rich of the city to go to such great lengths to maintain appearances when it helped cause the decline of Chinatown in the first place by bringing in big-time development and national chains that forced immigrant businesses out. And if adding Chinese characters to street signs were actually an attempt to help out the old folks who don't read English, the city should be translating Mt. Pleasant signs into Spanish.

If you want to support the small businesses that remain, fine. But once an ethnic community has lost the critical mass necessary to project itself, manufacturing authenticity is just going to fail.

And even after all that time, it's unlikely that people hoping for more activity there, like a play structure, will be satisfied. All that's planned is what the BID's Ellen Jones calls "refurbishment of the bones of the park": repair of concrete paths and iron fences, replacement of benches and trash cans, and re-sodding. The improvements will cost $200,000, paid for by the Park Service, downtown property owners, and the District Department of Transportation.

"We are aware that the surrounding community has a lot of aspirations for what could happen in the park," Jones says. "What we're doing is creating a pallette in good repair for the community to continue conversations with the National Park Service going forward."

Which will take forever, of course, given the number of hoops any downtown park improvements have to jump through.

"The level of review is not commensurate with the size of the park," Jones said, with the barest twinge of exasperation.

(And yes, Frank Rich and other Washingtonians-turned-New York boosters, we know there's just no comparison between the two cities. We don't want to hear it.)

Analogous regions of New York City await! (Lydia DePillis)

• Columbia Heights — Williamsburg: The Real Hipster Express
• Golden Triangle — Midtown: The Dudes in Suits Line
• Cleveland Park — Upper West Side: The Bagel Run (starts at now-closed Whatsa Bagel on Connecticut Avenue, terminates at Zabar's)
• Petworth — Flatbush: Special Caribbean Carnival line, only runs the weekend before July 4th (for the D.C. carnival) and around Labor Day (for the New York one)
• Dupont Circle — Chelsea: The Rainbow Ride
• Glover Park — Murray Hill: The Post-Collegiate Express
• Bloomingdale — Fort Greene: The Baby Carriage
• U Street — Harlem: The Busboys Bus
• Penn Quarter — Tribeca: The Chain Store Chariot
• Cato Institute (10th and Massachusetts) — Manhattan Institute (44th and Madison): Dork Bus, Right Wing Edition
• Center for American Progress (15th and H) — CUNY Grad Center (35th and 5th): Dork Bus, Left Wing Edition

Fremont: The center of the universe.

1. Wacko sidewalk art: Done well, in small, well-thought-out locations, this can add to a neighborhood’s sense of place and put its creativity on display. It sounded bizarre at the time, Mr. Uqbah may have been on to something.

2. Asian grocery stores: Seattle has a much larger Asian population, and a real Chinatown—called the “International District” to recognize other nationalities—packed with every kind of cuisine you could imagine. But perhaps the best part is the grocery shopping, from the department-store-sized Uwajimaya to the smallest corner market, which sell specialty ingredients for dirt cheap. District residents have to go Northern Virginia for anything similar, and often that's prohibitive.

3. Local Food: O.K., the District is doing pretty well at this, with the dozens of farmers markets open around the area. But MacDonald’s hasn’t been compelled to advertise that its potatoes come from a nearby town yet, has it?

4. Modernist houses: The diversity and creativity of Seattle’s recent architecture is really exciting. While classic craftsman bungalows remain standard, there are quite a few elegantly designed, super environmentally-friendly single family homes scattered among them. Unlike in D.C., you’ll never hear someone say that a given design doesn’t “fit” with the rest of the neighborhood, and I find the resulting innovation to be refreshing.

The Burke-Gilman trail is an absolute gift.

5. Inviting shorelines: Seattle is blessed with bodies of water seemingly everywhere you look. But every inch of shoreline not taken up by luxury houses is prized and put to good use, with marinas, beaches, bike trails, docks, etc. The District, of course, has lots of this as well—and the Yards park will be an exciting addition—but vast amounts of waterfront are unattractive and underused. This is why the Anacostia River Cleanup is so important—it makes the land next to the water more valuable as well.

6. Biodiesel fueling stations: The number of biodiesel-fueled cars on the road in Seattle these days is pretty impressive, and now they can fill up at a couple locations for not too much more than at conventional gas stations.

What's going on here? Now you know.

7. Notices of proposed land use action: It’s a small thing, but significant: The city government posts placards on parcels slated for development with an overview of the plans, plus information about where to learn more. D.C. does this with liquor license applications, but not actual buildings (unless you count the Fenty administration taking credit for whatever construction is underway). This makes no sense—how much curiosity could be easily satisfied with a sign saying what’s going on at a particular site?

8. Electric buses powered by overhead wires: I know, I know, this isn't allowed in the Federal City. But perhaps sometime down the road, when people realize that wires are preferable to smog, we’ll get buses that run on clean electricity rather than fossil fuels. They’ve worked out well enough in Seattle.

BONUS

Something both D.C. and Seattle are doing right: Bicycle wayfinding signs, which make it so much easier to orient oneself.

Something both D.C. and Seattle have enough of: SoHo retreads.

About an hour ago, DDOT staff ripped paper off new signage announcing a new paradigm: Cars will no longer be able to turn through Chinatown's busiest intersection. Rather, the red light brings all traffic to a stop at once, and pedestrians cross whichever way they need to go–which will hopefully ease the sense of hopping from corner to corner if you need to cross diagonally.

Despite abundant notices, confusion and hesitation reigned at the very beginning.

"No turns! No turns! No turns at all!" a DDOT official yelled at one of the yellow-vest-clad crossing guards, amid loud whistleblowing. The attendants are scheduled to be in place for two weeks while drivers–who seemed to be more confused than pedestrians–get used to the change.

For downtowners, it's been a long time coming.

"The Downtown BID has been asking DDOT to do something with this intersection," said Ellen Jones, the BID's director of transportation programs, pointing out the "complicated stew" of bus routes and valet services situated on one corner. It's the third most dangerous intersection in the city, where four pedestrians were struck in 2008 (2009 data is still forthcoming).

According to George Branyan, DDOT's pedestrian program coordinator, they usually try such experiments for about six months before assessing whether they're working. There is one Barnes Dance-like arrangement near a school in each ward, he noted, but none have the foot traffic that 7th and H does.

The more relevant test may come Friday night, or the next big event at the Verizon Center–this morning has so far been tame.

Located directly north of Chinatown's glistening, freshly-repainted arch, the building at the northeast corner of 7th and H Streets is looking particularly dingy these days. On the street level, there are construction barriers, and there's an "Eichberg" sign hanging across the western exterior wall.

But it doesn't seem like much is going on—and this area is easily one of the busiest in the District for street-level retail and restaurant business.

So what's the deal?

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, DCmud reported an update on the property. The building's owner, Yeni Wong and her Gallery Towers LLC—who planned to develop a 9-story mixed-use project called "Gallery Square"—were issued a notice of foreclosure back in October, according to the blog. Here's more:

According to the website of developer DRI, a Transwestern Company, 675 H Street was to become home to two buildings: one would restore the corner space and rise 9 stories over the arch, the other would be a new Class A office building behind the main storefronts. The total project would have yielded 110,000 s.f. of office space and 50,000 s.f. of retail. The planned development never came to fruition and between October 2008 and February 2009 Gallery Towers had 4 liens placed on their Chinatown property. In the meantime, Eichberg Construction briefly began work last summer after fencing off the site, but work quickly halted.

And there's more from Penn Quarter Living, "the tale is a little more convoluted than it seems as the loan on the property was sold to Douglas Development prior to the bankruptcy filing. Of great interest to retail watchers is the spectrum of retailers who signed deals…CVS (the pharmacy would return to their originally occupied space, Eagle Bank (a regional bank based in Bethesda, MD) and J. Pauls (part of the Capital Restaurants group with a notable presence in Georgetown)."

I was 11 years old, over 50 years ago, when I first met Abe. He built Temple Emanuel in Kensington, where my father was the second president. He was just a mid-size developer then. So, I always had great respect for him, since I was a kid. He was always a very humble man, who could deal with anyone in any capacity. I didn’t know him well professionally until the last 15 years. We could never have built Gallery Place without his help and cooperation. At any rate, the city wanted the connection we built in the atrium between the two.

When the city was bankrupt, I was the chair of a 116-person task force of how to rebuild the heart of downtown. That was in 1995. That’s when I started working with him–before I even was considering participating as a developer. It was really a collection of anyone that wanted to participate from citizens associations to developers to the secretary of the Smithsonian–it was quite an eclectic group of people who believed in our city. And the rebirth of our city. Although he was a developer, Pollin was a man with an incredible vision and respect for our city and love for our city.

We basically developed a visual plan of what could be downtown. Two hundred years ago, 7th street was the main street of the city, and then it died out in the 1950s, and our idea was to bring Main Street back alive. They had already built the Shakespeare Theatre on 7th. The goal was to use 7th as the retail core of the city, to literally connect it: At one end, you had the Smithsonian with 30,000 visitors a year. We put the convention center at the other end. It was truly a community effort, but if it wasn't for Abe Pollin nothing would have happened because he started it. For him to go build the Verizon Center with a risk associated with it–most people would have done it only if the government paid for everything. And bringing his teams into the city at a time was quite a bold and risky proposition. If you walked through downtown then, people were afraid to even go to downtown. People thought it was dangerous.

If he hadn't committed to the first major project downtown, I don't think the rest of it would have happened.

Interview cut, edited, and condensed.

Image courtesy of Western Development

And you'd be right!

But here's the devilish part: Not only have these lily-livered scammers resorted to false domain names; they now write personably and with few grammatical irregularities!

Below, a simple guide to spotting similar scams:

1. The location is too good to be true.
2. The alternate location, mysteriously different from the first, is too good to be true.
3. The pictures are too good to be true.
4. The leaser claims to be using move.com, a reputable apartment rental site, but is in fact using a domain workaround (say, http://www.move.com.au.tt via http://joynic.com/) in order to break your heart.
5. If step #4 confuses you, check the source code (apple + U on Macs).
6. There's a COMPELLING FORUM ON YAHOO ANSWERS DEVOTED TO VERBATIM SCHEMES.
7. Don't let your imagination run away with you, no matter how apartment-less or desperate or chemically altered you may be. And remember: That slightly grotty apartment in Shaw (or Brightwood, or Edgewood, or what have you) isn't so bad after all. Because it actually exists. And the landlady made you tea when you visited, rather than trying to rob you blind.
   

The Washington Business Journal is reporting that D.C.'s Chinatown arch is getting an upgrade, replacing all dragons with Chipotle chile symbols and McDonald M arches. Famed Penn Quarter/Chinatown restaurateur Jose Andres's face will be drawn into the middle of the arch. He'll be flanked by sketches of Hooters girls.

Okay, that was not true!!!

(Though if the arch were accurately attempting to portray the neighborhood, it would be.)

But, the Chinatown arch is getting an upgrade to the tune of $287,000, the WBJ reports.

An assessment by AEPA Architects Engineers PC — the original architects of the arch — shows it is in need of a major face lift, since column paint is peeling off and its joint fillers are completely eroded.

In addition, the metal band around the base needs to be replaced and tiles have fallen off of the roof.

D.C.-based AEPA will do such restoration work as scraping off existing paint and repainting the columns, decorative beams and lintels, as well as repairing and restoring the worn-out decorations.

The job will take eight weeks and will be completed by late July/early August.

Image by Carl C, flickr Creative Commons