The view along 42nd Street. (Torti Gallas)

Safeway and Clark Realty Capital have released new sketches of their mixed-use plan for 42nd and Ellicott Street NW by Torti Gallas, which they kicked off a couple months ago. It's sure an improvement over the last one.

The local Advisory Neighborhood Commission, however, thinks the preservationists have gone overboard. Last week, it passed a three-page resolution with 26 Whereas clauses outlining the ways in which the landmark application is excessive and has unnecessarily confined AU's ability to design an attractive, useful campus. "While there is little dispute that Capitol Hall merits designation, the balance of the campus, including the reconstructed Dunblane House, have little historicity meritorious for designation," it reads. Other dubiously valuable buildings include three 1950s-era residence halls and a chapel constructed in 1921, the preservation of which complicates the creation of inviting campus spaces.

Along the way, says commissioner Jon Bender, State Historic Preservation Officer David Maloney plays an outsized role in the development of the new campus, which ends up influencing outcomes in ways the public may not understand. The ANC's resolution also complains that having to plan around a landmark application has also "adversely affected" modernization of the Tenleytown Fire Station, Janney Elementary School, and Wilson High School.

"What ultimately happens is that David Maloney becomes a senior design partner. David Maloney works with these folks to shape something that he believes—and usually correctly believes—is going to pass muster with HPRB," Bender says. "It's kind of a black box for the rest of the community why some things are foreclosed. It's bad public policy to have a situation where this stuff takes place in the shadows."

American University itself is more diplomatic. Assistant Vice President for Facilities Development and Real Estate Jorge Abud says that since they've known from the beginning that the campus was likely to be designated as historic, they were able to plan around it, with a few changes. "If we had a blank slate, the law school would be in one unified building," he says. "What we're doing now is doing three buildings. One an existing historic structure, and two others connected to it."

On the flip side of Bender's frustration: Maloney's involvement is also a way to smooth the road towards historic designation, preventing a situation where a development application is rejected entirely by the Board, which adds time and expense. The bigger problem, it seems, comes with allowing the preservation of buildings with little historic value in a configuration that makes little sense get in the way of enlightened urban design.

There may also be an element here of the famous Tenleytown tendency to try to minimize development just for the hell of it, which would be another sad abuse of the District's historic preservation law.

Babe's is back. (Shalom Baranes)

As the Washington Business Journal reported last week, Douglas Development is moving forward again on the long-troubled Babe's Billiards site in Tenleytown: Five floors of apartments with ground floor retail on the corner of Wisconsin and Brandywine Street NW, which will replace a one-story commercial building. Read all about it in their application to the Zoning Commission here.

To do that, UDC needs two things: A fancy student center where kids can hang out during the day, and dormitories, which it's never had before (the University currently leases about 100 units, primarily for athletes, at an apartment building across Connecticut Avenue). Nice facilities are essential to attract the caliber of students the University will need to raise its academic standing, UDC officials argued at an ANC 3F meeting on the subject last night–and it worked, sort of, with George Washington. 

At the meeting, there seemed to be little concern about the new student center, which will activate a huge dead plaza in front of drab, bunker-like buildings (inspiringly named "38" and "39.") Building two new residence halls for 600 students on the southwest corner of the campus, however, puts residents on edge–primarily because the campus plan doesn't call for increasing the current footprint of some 800 parking spaces, at the Office of Planning's behest. Won't all those students want to bring their cars?

The graying residents of Tenleytown seemed certain that they would, despite UDC officials' protestations to the contrary.

"I think we all know from our own days in college that that's not true," argued ANC commissioner Karen Perry.

"Having a car is like moving away from your parents," another audience member insisted. "Come on, it's lifestyle!"

So, this is the problem. UDC's grumpy neighbors are operating on memories of a time where a personal vehicle equaled freedom, perhaps in places where colleges were able to provide ample space for parking. That's just not necessarily the case anymore: Students are recognizing that owning a car is more hassle than it's worth, not to mention more expensive, in a city where parking tickets are handed out like candy and public transit is good enough to get you most of the places you need to go. Besides, allowing more students to live on campus would seem to imply that fewer of them need to commute. And let's also remember that the average UDC student is a lot poorer than the average Georgetown or GW student, meaning that going without a car (or keeping it at their parents' home, since most will come from the District) is a much more attractive option.

It's also true, though, that the campus plan envisions an enrollment increase from 3,200 students to 10,000 students in 2020, which is a lot (although it's worth remembering that the student body was 14,000 in 1980). And they can't just count on all those students not to bring their cars of their own volition. To that end, UDC proposes to actively discourage personal vehicles through "dynamic pricing" of parking (making the University-owned parking facilities more expensive during periods of high usage) and "aggressively marketing" Zipcars, as well as exploring the use of transit benefits for both students and staff. Plus, a Circulator route down Connecticut Avenue to Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights and out to Brookland is planned for the next phase of the system's expansion.

The final, unspoken element is something more intangible: Creating a culture of non-car-ownership. I went to school in Manhattan where no parking was provided for students and people would look at you strangely if owned a car. The District isn't that far away from having similar convenience (though allowing more amenities like cool bars and coffeeshops into Tenleytown would lessen the appeal of vehicles as well).

The bottom line is, if you make owning and parking really difficult, and make taking transit really easy, students aren't that dumb–they'll do what's best for them, with a little nudge.

Shaw library, design icon? (Darrow Montgomery)

D.C. Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper’s office, on the fourth floor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, is in some ways a reminder of failure: It’s too big, and a set of fraying modernist chairs, original to the 1973 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building, have grown too delicate to sit on. Cooper, a gray-haired grandmother with red glasses and clogs, is dwarfed by her own vast conference table.

Although Cooper was stifled in her ambition to replace a library deemed “functionally obsolete”—as she was in her last gig at the Brooklyn Public Library, where a proposed five-story showpiece never raised the $85 million it would have cost—she’s already built four new branch libraries, on top of several historic renovations and mixed-use facilities, with three more to be completed in this year. Together, they represent a significant chunk of the exciting modernist architecture being done in the District, which has long had a reputation for—to put it delicately—restraint.

Why is that notable? New City Administrator Allen Lew, after all, rebuilt a slew of falling-apart schools under then–Mayor Adrian Fenty, vastly improving the architecture at many and gracefully restoring historic buildings.

The difference is users. Schoolchildren are a captive audience, who have to go to school whether they like the building or not. Libraries, on the other hand, are optional. In an era when more and more of their traditional functions can be accomplished with a computer and a wireless connection, libraries have to work to draw people in.

“My hunch is,” Cooper says, “that you would be more willing to go in and see what’s different when it’s a glorious building like Shaw.”

That’s what the library board of trustees recognized in 2006, when they scrapped bland, cookie-cutter designs for a batch of new libraries—“There would have been a lot of disappointment if those plans had gone forward,” notes the board’s president, John Hill—and decided to go for something more ambitious. With a couple hundred million dollars to play with, Cooper toured the world for inspiration, and settled on a roster of fashionable and unabashedly modern designers who had done little, if any, work in the District before. (In the process, Cooper thinks, she found the recession’s silver lining: Some architects may have been more eager to take on the library projects because work elsewhere was hard to come by).

She didn't skimp on costs: The Anacostia library cost $445 per square foot, according to Library Journal. That’s considerably more than the national average for libraries built in the last five years, which is a little more than $300 per square foot. (The Tenley-Friendship branch, meanwhile, was even more expensive; it cost $2.9 million just to design, D.C. officials say. See cost breakdowns here.)

But the result is a striking set of buildings that sit like aliens in their neighborhoods, thoroughly unlike their surroundings—and intentionally so. “She wanted modern, she wanted bright, she wanted not the status quo, something a little edgy, in that she was pushing for something new and noteworthy,” says Christiane DeJong, part of the Davis Brody Bond Aedas team responsible for the Benning branch and award-winning Shaw library. “She wanted it to be known that these buildings belonged to the public.”

And now, the Ginnie Cooper generation is coming to a close. She probably won’t get a chance from Mayor Vince Gray’s cash-strapped administration to replace or even renovate the rest of the system. Still, in only five years, Cooper forcibly injected not just the libraries, but the entire city, with the biggest shot of popular modernism it’s ever seen, and likely ever will.

—-

One big reason Cooper’s libraries are opening to such excitement is because the buildings they replaced were so abysmal.

D.C.’s library buildings have come in three basic forms: The classical, Andrew Carnegie-funded collection built in the 1920s and 1930s, which includes Georgetown, Mount Pleasant, Takoma Park, and Southeast Petworth. A set of sensibly squat brick buildings designed in the 1950s through the D.C. Public Works Program—from Woodridge to Cleveland Park to Washington Highlands—are barely distinguishable from each other. Then there was the bunker generation, built during the city’s decline and born out of a sense that the District didn’t deserve anything better (Shepherd Park and Lamond-Riggs are some of the last remaining examples).

Some designs were so bad that federal planning authorities tried to save D.C. from itself. In the early 1960s, the Commission on Fine Arts rejected designs for the new Benning Library as inadequate, but city officials (then appointed by federal authorities) built it anyway, saying policy required “the strictest economy and simplicity in construction.” The Watha T. Daniel Library plan, drawn up after the 1968 riots that devastated Shaw, was so prison-like that the National Capital Planning Commission directed the city to open it up with larger windows, bigger setbacks, and arcades. Again, the city rejected the advice and plowed forward, even when the feds attempted to get an injunction to stop it.

(And how did the MLK Library end up so unloved? Perhaps because city and federal authorities were so thrilled to get someone with Mies’ reputation, even in the twilight of his career, that design quality was simply assumed—the Commission on Fine Arts rubber-stamped the plans without requiring the usual presentation.)

Skip ahead to 2010. The new Cooper buildings reflect not only evolving design standards, but a transformed idea of how libraries ought to function.

“[The old libraries] were protecting something of great value,” says Davis Brody Bond Aedas’ Peter Cook. “A library often had to retrieve those books for you… Today’s libraries are very different institutions. You’d be hard pressed anymore to find librarians who go, ‘Sshhh.’”

To understand what he means, spend a few minutes working at one of the tables against the windows of the Anacostia library. Instead of entering a bomb shelter, you feel like you haven’t even left the neighborhood, since it’s visible all around you. Instead of fluorescent bulbs flickering from oppressively low ceilings, the room is flooded with natural light; you always know what time of day it is. Computers are full. New rules even allow eating in some buildings, and the stacks feel more like a recreation center than a repository of sacred knowledge—the Deanwood library is, in fact, built into a rec center, for easy access between swimming lessons and football practice. They’re even welcoming from blocks away: The Shaw library shines like a beacon to those approaching from Rhode Island Avenue and 7th Street NW, while the Anacostia library’s bright green awning extends like a front porch, inviting visitors in.

Not everyone loves the Ginnie Cooper style of library construction. Neighborhoods waged wars over whether Tenley-Friendship and Benning should be mixed-use. Local residents protested the globular concept for the Washington Highlands library, saying it made them feel like they were in an aquarium. Putting design aside, Robin Diener, who heads up the Ralph Nader-founded watchdog group D.C. Library Renaissance, thinks that big pot of money should have been spread out between all the libraries, not frittered away on fancy architects. People just want their libraries to be clean, safe, have sufficient computers, and most importantly, stay open, she says—and since Cooper has also been laying off staff and cutting hours, Diener would seem to have a point.

It’s true, the new libraries didn’t come cheap. Could the District have paid too much? If you don’t think cutting edge design is important, then it would be difficult to say no.

But the kind of architecture that reinvests neighborhoods with a sense of pride and erases the mistakes of the past is important, even if that means not every neighborhood gets something new. If you start looking at statistics already being collected on the new buildings—the rate of new card registrations in the old libraries vs. the new ones, or overall number of items checked out—you get much better bang for your buck.

The Shaw building, for example, has drawn so many children that librarian Eric Riley has had to schedule more storytimes and devote more rooms to kids than planned. If there’s one more thing he could have, he says, it would be a room for teens to have all to themselves.

“It’s just way, way crazy to see,” Riley says. “The fact that we’re getting so much use, that speaks more than anything else.”

Anacostia from the inside. (Lydia DePillis)

Not much to look at now...(courtesy of HPRB)

Last year, during the game of musical chairs that had D.C. government agencies moving around to different buildings all over the city, the Office of the Chief Technology Officer decided to move some of its data center operations to the newly-purchased warehouse at 225 Virginia Avenue instead of the Unified Communications Center, as previously planned. As it happened, that made the move $979,000 cheaper.

Today, during the Council's marathon final budget negotiations, Councilwoman Mary Cheh passed an amendment to move that money to a squeaky wheel in her own Ward 3: The Jesse Reno School at 4820 Howard Street NW, which was built in 1903 as a school for the Reno City community of escaped slaves in modern-day Tenleytown. Its most recent use was as a school for special needs children, but the eight-room, Renaissance-style building has lain vacant for many years.

This year, the Tenleytown Historical Society got it landmarked by the Historic Preservation Review Board, while the neighboring Alice Deal School looked for the funds to renovate it for use as a performing arts facility and school nursery. Cheh found the $4 to 5 million necessary during the last two budgets, according to her office, but "for one reason or another" the money fell through. In the mean time, the $979,000 will stabilize the building, which has suffered from vandalism and water damage, as well as pay for an architect to draw up the plans.

It's been nearly five years in the making, but construction of Tenleytown's new library is finally underway. The mayor kicked off the project with an official groundbreaking this morning.

As I wrote this spring, the city once planned to build a more ambitious mixed-use development with housing at the site. A public/private partnership could have funneled money to nearby Janney Elementary School.

But the developer’s plans never got the go-ahead, and the community got testy, with some people “filing public documents requests, threatening lawsuits and making unsubstantiated charges of corruption,” according to the Washington Business Journal.

At a press conference in March, Mayor Adrian Fenty gave the Tenleytown community his blessing: Yes, after four years of back-and-forths, they could build their library.

Image by Drewsaunders, Flickr Creative Commons

I can't keep up with—nor do I want to keep up with—all the twists and turns in the Tenleytown Library saga. By this point, there have been so many acts in this drama, it's damn near impossible to recall them all.

But if you're new to this epic, allow me to offer a pithy summary: The Tenleytown library closed ages ago. The city wanted to construct a big, mixed-use development project (plus a library) at the building site, but residents disapproved. So now they want to move forward and simply get a new library. But the city officials are still hooked on the old concept.

(If you want more details, check out these recent updates: Tenleytown Library Project Moving Forward Despite Fenty Expectations 11/21/2008 and Albert Stands Ground On Tenleytown Library Project 1/22/2009.)

Anyway, now "the children" are involved! According to a press release I received from the Library Renaissance Project, parents will be rallying at 7:45 a.m. in the morning outside the old library site:

Parents in Tenley to Hold “Library Now” Rally

Washington, DC – February 24, 2009 – Parents of students at Tenley neighborhood schools, including the historic Janney School and St. Ann’s Academy, and their neighbors, will rally on Wednesday morning to demand the City proceed with DC Public Library (DCPL) plans for a new Tenley library

What:         Library Now Rally
When:         7:45 am, Wednesday February 25, 2009
Where:       Site of demolished Tenley Library, Wisconsin Ave & Albemarle St, NW

The Tenley-Friendship communities have been without a full-service library for over four years, since their branch was closed in December 2004.

Recently, the Janney School Improvement Team (SIT) rejected the City’s plans with developer LCOR for a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) that would delay a new library until 2013.  The PPP would also include construction of a 150 unit apartment building above a new library, but would not provide funds for, or speed up improvements to Janney — the principal reason long given by officials for supporting the PPP and justifying delay to the long awaited library.

Meanwhile, DCPL’s new plans for a stand-alone library are fully funded, and have been developed with — and embraced by — the local community. In November, after months of work with LCOR failed to yield adequate or timely results, Library Trustees voted to move ahead independently.  A construction contract for DCPL’s new Tenley Library is expected to come before the DC Council next month.

Image by Dawn Endico, Flickr Creative Commons

A week ago today, I attended an auction downtown for a prime piece of property in Tenleytown, at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Brandywine Street, N.W.

After a tension-filled bidding war with a representative from American University, developer Doug Jemal came away with the win. For five million dollars, he strolled out of the building with rights to the property and a thick roll of architectural plans within his possession (though someone else was carrying them, so Jemal was free to glad-hand).

At the auction, I talked to some attendees—many of whom were "just there for the show," as one person put it—about what might become of the parcel. One developer thought luxury apartments with retail on the bottom. No one believed the new owner would continue the condo project, once slated for the land.

Now, DCmud is reporting that Jemal won't be doing either:

Jemal contends that his company will repurpose the shuttered pool hall at the site, instead of aiming for new construction. With underwriting for residential projects increasingly wanting, residential development was never likely, at least in the short term. More distantly, project approvals for the Maxim, as well as project plans by Cunningham & Quill Architects,’ transfer under the terms of the sale, leaving a clear path toward residential development for one of DC's few developer that seems capable and inclined to buy and hold.

But at least one executive of a prominent developer that examined the site thinks the only real strategy is a long term retail plan. "The problem with the site is that anyone picking it up needs to carry it for a long time. Doug Jemal, more than anyone else in the city, has a greater ability to bring in high profile retailers...You can't pay that amount ($5m) and get a short term lease; I think in a way it could be good for the site. The FAR price was high by any standard, [Jemal] was bidding like a guy who had an idea for how to utilize the site; its certain to remain retail for at least a decade."

It's a prime piece of real estate, right there at the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Brandywine Street NW. It has potential in all the mixed-use ways that make urban designers drool.

And so Tenleytown's Maxim building started out with a bidding price of $5 million today in a foreclosure auction at a downtown law firm. The previous mixed-use project for the property fell through.

When the bidding started, the scene resembled a typical recent day at the New York Stock Exchange. No one wanted to buy at the starting price. Silence. An estimated 60 people crowded around a conference table.

So then someone threw out a bid of about 2.5 million bucks, and auctioneer Tranzon was in business. Bidders then went back and forth, driving the price up to $3.7 million. Then they lost interest, perhaps considering that this strip of Wisconsin Avenue has long been a boring and unhip place to do anything in the District of Columbia.

A ceiling appeared to have been hit. $3.7 million–that was $1.3 million lower than where the bidding started. So the auction recessed for a bit, while officials from Columbia Bank discussed whether they'd move forward with the auction.

They came back and said, indeed, they'd be selling the property–not exactly a huge vote of confidence in our economic outlook.

But none other than maverick D.C. developer Doug Jemal was there to save the day. The regular-guy-projecting rich man proceeded to engage in a round of bidding against a representative from American University. The bidding ended at–surprise!!!–$5 million. Jemal came away the winner.

Afterward, I caught up with Jemal in the building's elevator. His son stood next to him with a thick roll of architectural plans under his arm.

I asked Jemal why he'd waited to up the ante until the very end. I never saw him put up his hand once during the first round of bidding. "I'm allowed to do whatever I want to do," he replied.

Reporting by Ruth Samuelson, phoned in to Editor Erik Wemple. Late additions by Ruth Samuelson.