100 Bryant St. N.W. in Bloomingdale, which was bid up to
$380,000 in a January Auction.

Back in January, the Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) held an auction for some 30 vacant homes and properties around D.C.

Sure, most were slummy—boarded up windows, austere yards, watermarked brick—but buyers recognized the few jewels, and in two cases threw down nearly $400,000.

In total, the properties could have generated up to $4.845 million if all the sales went through. Unfortunately, some didn’t.

Read More “DHCD Lists Four Vacant Properties for Sale” »

Sometime this summer—ahh, summer—I passed by the Howard Theatre and literally remarked aloud “Oh good, they finally started work.”

Well here, I present the video proof of that progress:

The footage basically shows workers chipping away at the stucco facade, which has been covered since the 1940s, according to the Howard Theatre nonprofit’s website.

Read More “Progress at the Howard Theatre” »

Renderings by Metropolitan Development, who will rebuild on Kelsey Gardens’ land.

Washington City Paper has a long tradition of covering Kelsey Gardens in Shaw.  Back in 2005, we wrote about former councilmember H.R. Crawford manipulating tenants to move them out of the building. Then, last May, I wrote about a murder that occurred at the complex, and the plan to redevelop it.

“There were a few lingering residents. But the place was basically vacant,” I recorded at the time. Read More “Kelsey Gardens Groundbreaking in February 2010″ »

Today, I received an announcement about an upcoming announcement. Those usually don’t fall into my “bloggable” category. But this one was intriguing.

Next Friday, the District will issue a request for proposals to redevelop six sites around the city into affordable housing.

In the Shaw/Logan Circle areas, the sites include:

922 French St., NW (Shaw)*

View Larger Map
Read More “City Redeveloping Random Houses/Lots Across the District into Affordable Housing” »

This week’s Dupont Current has more details on the CityMarket at O project, which just received $1 million from D.C. Council emergency legislation.  The funds will be used to pay architectural, engineering and other pre-development costs (with a groundbreaking expected in summer 2010).

The city previously offered to assist with those costs by funneling money from a hike in downtown meter fees. But, according to the story, “mayoral aids refused to release the money until the meter fees were actually collected. The Evans emergency bill was crafted to correct that.” Read More “CityMarket at O Groundbreaking Expected in Summer 2010″ »

The CityMarket at O Street is a huge mixed-use project that will include more than 600 residential units, 87,000-square-feet of retail, and a colossal new Giant Food Store, partially inside the old market building at the corner of 7th and O Streets. At least this is the description that’s recorded on Roadside Development’s website. It’s possible the group’s made adjustments. The plan has been sitting up there for a while. 

Last fall, I wrote about the CityMarket project. Since then, I’d heard developers were struggling to find funding.

The project seems crucial to the continued rejuvenation of Shaw. There’s no great supermarket in the area—nothing like the new Safeway in Mt. Vernon Square, the Harris Teeter in Adams Morgan, and the Giant up in Columbia Heights. The current O Street Market shell is an eyesore. And the parking lot at the site is just an empty, underused space. 

The D.C. Council clearly recognized the importance of the project and yesterday agreed to fork over $1 million to Roadside Development to help with financing, according to the Washington Examiner.   Read More “D.C. Council Gives $1 Million to Shaw Giant Development” »

In the end, the developer’s decision was legal—The historic carriage house could be demolished. Its roof was caving in toward the back, and engineers had deemed it structurally unsound. But that diagnosis hasn’t quieted the preservationists of Blagden Alley and Naylor Court, two of the last remaining 19th-century alley communities in Washington.

Close to a year later, people still have their suspicions that the tear-down was a cop-out, an easy solution to the carriage-house preservation vs. demolition debate.

The incident in question occurred around July 4, 2008. Crews started demolishing the structure behind 1316 9th St. NW at the start of the long weekend, when people are planning to hold barbecues and watch fireworks. Neighbors will tell you the timing was definitely on purpose.

Hal Davitt, then the head of the neighborhood civic group, and his wife, Marthlu Bledsoe, returned to their home to “God knows how many calls” about the carriage house, according to Bledsoe.
“We went tearing over there,” Bledsoe says, “and I must say, it was appalling.”

Davitt says he’s “not completely convinced” that it was necessary to knock down the structure.
All around Blagden Alley and Naylor Court, there are buildings similar to the one torn down July Fourth weekend: Some appear ready to collapse, others have been taken care of and preserved.

One’s an unmarked Pilates studio; another’s a boxing gym. A few of them have cinder blocks cemented inside old doors and window spaces, while others are roofless shells that hark back to their original days as horse shelters, shored up with dilapidated wood and mismatched bricks.

For his part, developer Grant Epstein of Community Three Development said the July demo was a last resort. “This thing was built over 100 years ago—it doesn’t meet any safety standards or codes that are around today.” But he’s embracing the alley way-of-life by building two of his condos with alley main entrances: “If more people do that, the alley will come back to what it was—a place where people live,” he says.

Blagden Alley and Naylor Court—which sit inside a rectangular area bounded by O Street on the north side, M Street on the south side, and 10th and 9th Streets to the west and east respectively—became a D.C. historic district in 1990. In their application for the designation, Davitt and others argued the alleys “illustrate important areas of significance in the history of urban development in Washington D.C.: architecture, community planning and development, black ethnic heritage and social history.” Read More “Forget Me Lots: Preservationists Fight the Slow Death of Shaw’s Historic Alleys” »

Save America’s Treasures, a program under the National Park Service, has just awarded the Howard Theatre Restoration Inc. $350,000, according to the Washington Business Journal.

Built in 1910, Shaw’s Howard Theatre is America’s first full-size theater made for African-American audiences. Exactly a century after its birth, the structure—located at 7th and T streets NW—is expected to undergo a major revitalization effort in 2010. The project will cost $25 million. Read More “Howard Theatre Receives $350,000 in Assistance” »