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SC1100
Completed
Thompson Hotel ('20)
West Half ('19)
Novel South Capitol ('19)
Yards/Guild Apts. ('19)
Capper/The Harlow ('19)
New DC Water HQ ('19)
Yards/Bower Condos ('19)
Virginia Ave. Tunnel ('19)
99 M ('18)
Agora ('18)
1221 Van ('18)
District Winery ('17)
Insignia on M ('17)
F1rst/Residence Inn ('17)
One Hill South ('17)
Homewood Suites ('16)
ORE 82 ('16)
The Bixby ('16)
Dock 79 ('16)
Community Center ('16)
The Brig ('16)
Park Chelsea ('16)
Yards/Arris ('16)
Hampton Inn ('15)
Southeast Blvd. ('15)
11th St. Bridges ('15)
Parc Riverside ('14)
Twelve12/Yards ('14)
Lumber Shed ('13)
Boilermaker Shops ('13)
Camden South Cap. ('13)
Canal Park ('12)
Capitol Quarter ('12)
225 Virginia/200 I ('12)
Foundry Lofts ('12)
1015 Half Street ('10)
Yards Park ('10)
Velocity Condos ('09)
Teague Park ('09)
909 New Jersey Ave. ('09)
55 M ('09)
100 M ('08)
Onyx ('08)
70/100 I ('08)
Nationals Park ('08)
Seniors Bldg Demo ('07)
400 M ('07)
Douglass Bridge Fix ('07)
US DOT HQ ('07)
20 M ('07)
Capper Seniors 1 ('06)
Capitol Hill Tower ('06)
Courtyard/Marriott ('06)
Marine Barracks ('04)
 
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Photo Update Day
Saturday was a picture-perfect day, so I attempted to take some perfect pictures. (Not sure I succeeded, but oh well.) I've updated the Stadium Construction Gallery from the usual vantage points, and took some additional photos of South Capitol Street and the areas near the portions of the Douglass Bridge scheduled to be demolished this summer--and thanks to the inbound lanes being closed, I was able to take some shots that normally would require snapping them from a moving car, since I prefer not to execute deathwish darts into traffic (I do however send my thanks to the concerned motorist driving southbound who started honking hysterically at the site of me climbing over the kneewall into the closed traffic lanes).
I've also been making a slow slog through the online Near Southeast Photo Archive, trying to make sure that all angles of intersections are well-represented, so I shot a lot of 3rd Street vistas today; if you're so inclined, take a wander through the 3rd and 4th Street archives (just click on the map to choose an intersection) to see these updates, and also note that you can now see my shots along Tingey Street and from across the Anacostia River looking north as well, to see what lurks behind the DOT HQ. Over the coming weeks I'll be working on doing the same for more streets.
Normally at this point I'd send you through a list of the pages where I've posted new photos, and tell you to look for the ubiquitous icon, but thanks to the Photo Archive app, I can now easily display all pictures I took and posted today. You'll see intersections and directions underlined, if you want to see all the photos in the archive of that location, just click on the link.
 

Two New Entries in the Demolished Buildings Gallery -- Two Old Entries, Too
Within the past week, two of the unoccupied buildings in the blocks just north the stadium site were demolished: 1236 South Capitol, that funky neon-yellow bungalow sandwiched between the BP gas station and the Public Storage Building, and 1201 Cushing, a little white ramshackle building behind a wooden fence that you would never have seen unless you ventured down Cushing south of M. (In fact, *I* had never seen it until late last year.) The South Capitol Street site is being cleared so that the WMATA employee parking lot that was just moved a few hundred feet south from next to the Navy Yard Metro Half Street entrance can be relocated again (see my entry about this from back in November). The Cushing lot is the first demolition as the land gets cleared for Monument Realty's Half Street mixed-use project (55 M Street et al). These have now been added to the top of my Demolished Builings Gallery; and if you scroll down the page a good ways, you'll see two additional icons. First, I realized that I needed to include the little building demolished sometime in 2005 that was attached to the west side of Nation; then, while browsing through my photos, I found out that not only had the empty lot on the west side of the Good N Plenty carryout at Half and N contained a rowhouse within the relatively recent past, but that I actually had one photo of it, so it's added to the Gallery now as well. I imagine the Demolished Buildings page is going to get a pretty good workout over the next few weeks. UPDATE: Fixed the bad Demolished Buildings Gallery link. Oops.
 

AWC Board Meeting Tomorrow
There doesn't appear to be anything Near Southeast-related on the agenda, but I'll still note that the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation Public Board Meeting is scheduled for 5:30 pm tomorrow (Monday), at 5:30 pm at the Courtyard by Marriott at New Jersey and L. Of course, if you obsessively check my Calendar of Events, you knew this already!
 

WMATA Moving Forward with Bus Garage Relocation
At yesterday's WMATA board meeting, approval was given to begin working on the replacement of the Southeastern Bus Garage, the red brick building on the southwest corner of Half and M. They've established a $500,000 budget for a three-month feasibility study, which will evaluate the DC government's preferred relocation site for the garage, within DC Village, as well as the possibility of creating an interim facility at the site for an "early relocation." The budget for this is being funded by the sale in October of the parking lot across Half Street to Monument Realty. The bus garage site is one that Monument has been negotiating for, so that it can be the sole developer of that entire block of Half Street. As for the fate of the bus garage building itself, I don't know anything one way or the other, except that during Monument's Zoning Commission testimony two weeks ago, mention was made by Monument's consultant that there are "historic preservation issues" with the bus garage, with what I interpreted as an intimation that whatever is planned for the west side of Half Street will not move forward with the same amount of speed as is seen on the east side. I imagine it will end up at the very least that the facade of the garage will be saved--and it is indeed a pretty cool building, as far as garages go (though It'll be cooler once there aren't Metro buses all around it, though).
 

Where Have All the Naked People Gone?
Since they aren't operating in Near Southeast anymore, I'm not tracking them, but for those who are still interested, here's a good roundup by the Metro Weekly on what the owners of the Nexus, Wet/Edge, and the O Street nightclubs are up to in terms of finding new venues.
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Douglass Bridge Makeover Graphic; and a New Page of Photos
Today's Post has a big cool graphic showing exactly how the Frederick Douglass Bridge is going to get renovated this summer, with 800 feet of the South Capitol Street viaduct being demolished completely north of Potomac Avenue and another 580 feet of the bridge lowered so that the bridge meets street level at Potomac Avenue instead of O Street. It also shows that there will be new stop lights on South Capitol at Potomac Avenue and at N Street, and pedestrian-activated lights at O and P streets. The graphic (make sure to look at it, it really is well done) accompanies an article about the bridge's renovation. And remember, the northbound (inbound) lanes of the bridge will be closed starting this Friday at 10 am until Monday the 29th at 4 am. And plan your summer vacation to coincide with July and August, when the bridge will be closed entirely for the lowering. And here are some additional views of the portions of the bridge that will be demolished and lowered. (And I'm realizing I'd better create a Bridge Makeover page to pull these all together in one place!)
UPDATE: Yeah, a new page to track the Bridge Makeover, that's a really good idea.
UPDATE II: Here's DDOT's press release on the rehabilitation of the Douglass Bridge, along with a map of this weekend's detours.
 

$18 Million to Upgrade Roads - Capital Spending, or Stadium Cap Buster?
From Thursday's Post: "District officials acknowledged yesterday that the city will have to pay more than $18 million to upgrade streets near the Washington Nationals' new stadium, and some council members said the expenditure would push spending on the ballpark beyond the council's $611 million cap. [...] The commission's chief executive, Allen Y. Lew, said that though the stadium is proceeding on schedule for an April 2008 opening, the budget does not include money to handle transportation planning at the 41,000-seat ballpark. Team officials have said smooth access for up to 9,000 motorists driving to each game is critical to the success of the ballpark, along the Anacostia River near the Navy Yard and South Capitol Street." DDOT said in an interview that it has budgeted $18.4 million to widen and repave roads, repair cubs, add traffic lights and signs and plant trees near the ballpark, and that that money was allocated as part of planned upgrade work to the South Capitol Street corridor before the stadium was awarded to Near Southeast in September 2004. All this of course brings the curtain up on yet another round of DC Council Ballpark Kabuki Theater, with anti-stadium forces yammering about the cap being exceeded while pro-stadium forces contending that this doesn't violate the cap. Perhaps they'd prefer to spend Opening Day digging tour buses out of monster potholes on an un-upgraded South Capitol Street.
And, since I'm talking stadium cost cap, I'll finally mention this Examiner article from three weeks ago (Save it for a slow day, I told myself--HAH!) that a deal has now been struck to put artwork on display at the stadium after all, without violating The Sacred Cap (see my entry on the original story from December).
 

Yay!
Look, kids! Building Permits! (Thank you, CapSTAT.)

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Detail on What's Coming for the South Capitol Street Bridge
Dr. Gridlock's Get There blog has an entry about the upcoming work on the South Capitol Street/Frederick Douglass Bridge, confirming that as expected the bridge will be closed in July and August to demolish the existing viaduct between Potomac Avenue and O Street, so that drivers coming off the bridge will arrive at street level three blocks further south than they now do. This will give South Capitol Street a much nicer appearance, and will mean that the new Nationals ballpark won't have an ancient bridge ramp rubbing up against its western facade (right now at O Street the viaduct is not much more than about 20 feet from the edge of the stadium). There will also be new signals at some of the intersections. The blog post also mentions the first of the weekend closures of the bridge coming up this weekend, with the inbound lanes closing between 10 am Friday and 4 am Monday, detouring traffic to the 11th Street Bridges. (But alas, the demolishing of the viaduct will take with it two of my favorite stadium photo perches, though at least by summer most of the exterior work should be completed.) UPDATE: Here's a short piece from WTOP about the plans for the bridge.
 

Building Permits Approved for 909 New Jersey
With the daily Building Permit feed continuing to be on the fritz, it's back to finding out about approved permits on Mondays, via the Never-Ending PDF File. Today's news (on pages 182 and 186, for those of you following along at home) is that the building permit has been approved for 909 New Jersey Avenue, JPI's 244-unit residential project on the block where the Nexus Gold Club recently closed; an excavation permit was approved as well. In one of the articles on the Nexus closing, JPI said it was planning to begin demolition on the site in March. In other permit news, a bunch of soil boring permits were approved (page 183) for the Monument Realty/Half Street site.
 

Next PSA 105 Meeting - At Capitol Hill Tower
The next Police Service Area (PSA) 105 meeting, which covers Capitol Hill as well as most of Near Southeast, is scheduled for Saturday, Jan. 27 at 10 am, and is being held in the 1st floor community meeting room at Capitol Hill Tower--and they're offering a tour of the CHT building after the meeting as added incentive.
More posts: Capitol Hill Tower
 

DC Gov't Feeds Taking a Timeout - First Capitol Quarter Permit Approvals
I've been flying a bit blind for the past couple of weeks when it comes to reading the tea leaves on new projects, because the New Building Permits daily feed that the DC government started last year has decided to take a breather, with no new information since the end of December. There's still the old-fashioned PDF weekly update list, but it doesn't include some of the types of permits that the feed had been including, not to mention the fact that as of this week it's 270 pages long, and can't easily be filtered like the feed to just show Near Southeast data. (Waaah!) And e-mails and questions to CapStat about the state of this feed and other issues go perpetually unanswered (Waaah! again).
Given all of this, I can only very belatedly pass on that in early January the first building permits were approved for 10 townhouses in the Capitol Quarter mixed-income project--the approved houses are on the 300 block of Virginia Avenue, which is interesting given that this is not where they plan on building the first units (along 4th and 5th Streets south of K); I imagine those approvals are not far behind, given that construction is supposed to start in the spring.
As for one of the other feeds, the list of Service Requests--where you can see when people have complained about illegally parked cars, or streetlights not working, or rats needing to be controlled--has been put on hiatus until they do some reworking of the database, with an estimated return date of March 2007. At least they told us this one was going away for a bit.
UPDATE: Surprisingly, my whining above about the Building Permits feed and the lack of response from the folks who run it got noticed by the right people (thanks to the link from DCBlogs, I think), and they say they're aware of the issue. Hopefully it'll get back on track soon.
More posts: Capper, Capitol Quarter
 

New Monument Half Street Renderings and Web Site
Monument Realty has created a web site for its mixed-use project on Half Street in the Ballpark District, dubbed HalfStreetDC.com. Not a lot of info there right now (at least nothing that JDLand devotees don't already know!), but there's a contact form to fill out if you're interested in getting information from them as the project progresses. There's also a spiffy rendering showing their vision for Half Street, as seen (I believe) from N Street looking north toward M. They were also kind enough to pass along to me a nice version of the rendering of the 55 M Street office building that will sit atop the expanded Navy Yard Metro station, and I've added that to my Monument Half Street page as well. (I had a cruddy version of this same rendering posted for the past week or so, nice to replace it with something decent!) My post from last week about the zoning hearing on this project also has more information.
 

Happy 4th Anniversary to Me!
I almost forgot my own anniversary! It was on January 19, 2003 (a beautifully clear but cold day) that I made Mr. JD drive me around Near Southeast while I shot a bunch of pictures out the passenger window, which I then posted on the web to show the two or three people who visited JDLand. Little did I know that that little excursion would turn into the monster time-waster that we all know and love today as the Near Southeast DC Redevelopment web site. Here are pictures that I took on that day, and you can see how some locations have changed a lot, but how many others still look pretty much the same. We'll see what those look like four years from now, I guess (if I'm not renting a suite at St. Elizabeth's by that point).
As for the site itself, it wasn't much at the beginning, but by late 2003 it had found the basic look-and-feel that continues to this day. But maybe it's gotten just a touch more in-depth since then, thanks not only to my obsessive-compulsiveness but also my desire to demonstrate to people the possibilities of "hyperlocal" web sites.
Finally, this is also a day for me to say a big thanks to everyone who visits the site, and I hope that you continue to find it useful (or at least slightly entertaining) in the future....

More posts:
 

Update on Little Red Building Liquor License App.
Yesterday there was a status hearing before the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board in reference to the liquor license application by the owners of the Star Market, better known as the "Little Red Building" on the corner of 2nd and L streets (next to the Courtyard by Marriott). I wasn't at the hearing, and admittedly am not following this particularly closely, but I've been told that the parties on both sides (the license applicants and the people who've been registered in opposition) have been ordered to attend a mediation session that should happen sometime before the application's next status hearing, scheduled for Feb. 28.
 

Navy Yard Groundbreaking on DC Cable 16
(A news item for the three of you who aren't horrifically tired of Navy Yard Metro station expansion groundbreaking news items, a group which doesn't even include me by this point.) If you have cable TV in DC, you can see last Tuesday's station groundbreaking ceremony on DC Cable 16 Friday night at 9:30 pm and at various times over the next week or so.
More posts: Metro/WMATA, staddis
 

Official DDOT Notice of First Douglass Bridge Closures
From DDOT:
"As part of ongoing improvements to the Frederick Douglass Bridge (sometimes referred to as the South Capitol Street Bridge), the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) will perform periodic off-peak bridge maintenance repairs beginning Friday, January 26, 2007.
"These periodic weekend repairs include expansion joint replacement and under-the-bridge steel repair work. Work will also involve painting and replacing handrails and installation of new lighting.
"Due to the nature of these repairs, DDOT will temporarily close the northbound/inbound lanes starting at 10 am on January 26. The lanes will reopen on Monday, January 29 by 4 am--in time for morning rush hour. During the closure, inbound drivers will follow signed detours on I-295 North to the 11th Street Bridge providing direct access into the District.
"DDOT encourages the use of Metro as a transportation alternative. Pedestrian and bike access will remain on the bridge during the weekend closures. All closures may be subject to change and are weather permitting. In the event of inclement weather, lane closures will be rescheduled to the following weekend."
 

New: Near Southeast Photo Archive
In the past four years, I've posted a heck of a lot of photos of Near Southeast on this site. (Though it's only a fraction of the number of photos I've taken of Near Southeast in the past four years.) As projects move forward, I tend to continue to display the oldest photos of a location but then pair them with newer photos as the landscape changes. The photos that "age off" a project page are still on my site, they're just not easily visible--until now, thanks to the new Near Southeast Photo Archive. You can either use this map to choose an intersection and compass direction to view ("show me all pictures at New Jersey and M looking northward"), or you can watch for the new Click to see all available photos of this location. icon now available throughout the project pages, which you can click on to see the archive of all photos at that particular location (like, say, South Capitol and P Street looking east-northeastward, which provides you with a pretty cool month-by-month photo timeline of the stadium construction). Be sure to read all my caveats detailing the many ways that this app isn't perfect, but I've always struggled with a way to harness the bazillion photos on the site without making the project pages any more unwieldy than they already are, and I think this is a good step; and I may now start to upload more photos even if they don't make it onto a project page, just to flesh out some intersections that aren't well represented on the site. Again, look for the Click to see all available photos of this location. icon to access the archive, and let me know what you think.
More posts:
 

Text of Evans/Catania Bill to Abolish AWC
Jack Evans's office was kind enough to pass along a copy of the bill he introduced (along with David Catania) to abolish the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation and the National Capital Revitalization Corporation. There's no hearing date set yet, I'll let you know whenever I hear about it.
 

Navy Yard Station Expansion Groundbreaking
Thanks to correspondent John for passing along news that slipped through (no advisories from Metro or the Mayor's office, darn them!). Tuesday (Jan. 16) at 10 am Mayor Fenty will be making remarks at a groundbreaking ceremony for the Navy Yard Metro station's expansion project. This is to increase the station's capacity from 5,000 riders an hour to 15,000, and is to be finished by Opening Day 2008, while work continues above it on Monument Realty's mixed-use project along Half Street. And maybe after the mayor's remarks, everyone can parade over en masse to the Nexus Gold Club auction. (And I do see now that the event is buried on the Mayor's schedule. I thought that religiously checking the News Releases and the Advisories was good enough, alas.)
UPDATE, 1/16: Here's Metro's press release summarizing today's event.
UPDATE II: There's also now a post on the Post's DC Wire blog (I know, it stunned me, too) about the groundbreaking, and some background on how exactly the $20 million to cover the station expansion was found; I imagine this will be similar to whatever story is in tomorrow's paper, though hopefully without the somewhat misleading "More DC Stadium Spending Woes" title. ("Woe" would be if the station weren't expanded before Opening Day; paying for it is just a shell game that governments go through all the time, and it's not like it really has anything to do with the stadium itself.)
UPDATE III: If you want video, here's WJLA's report on the event.
UPDATE, 1/17: And we'll bring this linkathon to a close with the Examiner story on the groundbreaking and the expansion.
 
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