As mentioned a few days back, it was decided that instead of closing the intersection altogether, traffic would become one way northbound during the deck construction, with any traffic headed south of the freeway needing to turn left at G Street and then right on 4th Street to come under the freeway. But traffic can still come south of G in order to turn left into the Results parking lot or right to take the 3rd Street ramp to the Southeast Freeway.

As you can see in these terribly exciting photos, northbound traffic is currently in a small "chute" of sorts just south of Virginia, just west of where digging has begun. Then the area opens up under the freeway.

Pedestrians heading either north or south of the freeway are on the sidewalk on the east side, then must cross to get to a temporary walkway west of the "chute" on the south side of the intersection.

I went by about four times, at 1:30, 3:00, 5:00, and 8:30 pm. I saw no big backups on either side of the freeway, though did see one person turn into the Results driveway to then backup and head north back to G.

There are flaggers watching the traffic during construction hours (and also were taking a few seconds to glare pointedly at crazy ladies taking photos of the configuration), but when I passed by at 8:30, there were no workers on site, and I watched two vehicles come south under the freeway past the Road Closed signs. There was no northbound traffic, so they were able to do it, but it's something that people using that intersection outside of the hours that the workers are on site might want to be watching for.

I asked CSX representatives about the first few days of work, and whether there might be any tweaks coming now that they've seen it in action. This is their statement:

"We appreciate the community’s patience and cooperation as we work to install the temporary street deck at the intersection of 3rd Street and Virginia Avenue. CSX is working as quickly as safety allows to install the temporary bridge and restore two-way traffic to 3rd Street. In the meantime, in conjunction with DDOT’s traffic experts, we continue to make adjustments to the directional signs and traffic control devices through the 3rd Street and Virginia Avenue intersection, to optimize the flow of traffic through the area. We are placing new signs north of G Street on 3rd Street to help increase awareness of the one-way traffic below the freeway, and are hopeful that more drivers will obey the signs as they become familiar with the temporary changes."

As the deck construction eventually works its away across the entire intersection, watch for the patterns to change. It is expected to be "several weeks" before the deck is completed and two-way traffic is restored.

If you have questions or concerns about this or any other part of the Virginia Avenue Tunnel construction, the next Coffee with Chuck is on Wednesday, March 16, at 8 am.

* JDLAND HAPPY HOUR: Don't forget! It's tomorrow (Thursday, March 10), at 5:30 pm at Scarlet Oak, at New Jersey and K Streets, SE. And given the weather forecast, perhaps we'll be al fresco.

* ROCK AND ROLL MARATHON: This Saturday, March 12, is the annual Rock n Roll marathon, which brings with it not only thousands of runners but numerous road closures. #NeCaBaRY gets off pretty easily (compared to areas north of the freeway and in Southwest), with just southbound South Capitol Street closed from E Street across the Douglass Bridge. See the site for details.

* COFFEE WITH CHUCK: Well, it isn't exactly a spring-has-sprung event, but still worth including on a calendar roundup that the next monthly meeting for residents interested in the latest Virginia Avenue Tunnel doings is on March 16, at 8 am at the CSX office at 861 New Jersey Ave. SE (RSVP here).

* PSA 106: The monthly meeting on issues of public safety is scheduled for Wednesday, March 16, at 7 pm at 200 I St. SE.

* ST. PAT'S CONCERT AT THE FAIRGROUNDS: Another year of events at the Fairgrounds just north of Nats Park kicks off on Thursday, March 17, with a free St. Patrick's Day concert featuring The Pietasters and opening act Warden.

* CHERRY BLOSSOM BEER AND WINE FESTIVAL: Speaking of drinking (what, like St. Patrick's Day isn't a drinking holiday?), the Cherry Blossom Beer and Wine Festival and its 100+ beverage options comes to the parking lots at 1st and N Street on March 26th from 1 to 4 pm. Tickets can be had for $35 until noon tomorrow (March 10), and $45 after that.

The full photo gallery is here, with a slew of photos of the lobby, the amenity spaces, and the model units, a 1 BR/den, a 2 BR, and a 385-square-foot "micro" unit complete with built-in Murphy bed.

But of course I can't just expect you to click on that link to see all the pictures, so here's some previews (click to pop up/enlarge). The gallery has the captions, though!

The official web site has specifics on amenities and the floor plans and rents, which start at just under $2,000 a month and then head well north of $5,000 for 2-bedroom units--though note that 66 of the units are earmarked as affordable housing units for people earning up to 50 percent of the area median income. I was told that about 50 units have already been leased.

Also, given Arris's location just north of the Yards Park, it boasts some sweeping views from its roof and a number of units, which as you might imagine I was powerless to resist. (The views to the east aren't bad, either, but it was too early to take photos in that direction.)

Check out the full gallery for many more photos than these, including shots of the progress on the Yards Park marina and of the initial work underway at Philz Coffee, Arris's first retail tenant. Forest City as always remains tight-lipped about any other leases, though I did pass along the impatience of a number of my readers for announcements on that front.

With that, Arris moves into the Completed column, as the first delivery of 2016 and the 32nd (!) since I started this little project back in early 2003.

PS: if you are wanting to visit the building, be aware that the leasing center is actually around the corner at 301 Tingey Street, in the ground floor of the Foundry Lofts--for now anyway, because the plan is for the leasing center, which covers all of Forest City's buildings at the Yards, to move to the empty retail space on 4th Street, between the Twelve12 lobby and TaKorean.

Want to meet some of your fellow neighbors/office workers/generally interested citizens from in and around Near Southeast/Capitol Riverfront/Navy Yard/Near Capitol Ballpark River Yards (#NeCaBaRY)?

Then come hang out at Scarlet Oak this Thursday, March 10, starting at 5:30 pm--and give me the chance to meet you, as well.

Even if you don't ever comment on blog posts, even if you're thinking you won't know anyone, at least stop by and say hello, and join in what I'm sure will be a rollicking conversation about the Nats, the new I Street, and whether any of us could ever possibly live long enough to ever see the Southeast/Southwest Freeway demolished. If that doesn't entice you to swing by, I don't know what could.

I'll also have some coveted JDLand t-shirts available for purchase, for $12.

A peachy time will be had by all!

The festival, which attracted more than 40,000 people last year, will be held Saturday, April 16--and with the festival listing its entrances as being at New Jersey and N, First and N, and First and M, it appears to be on the footprint of the Yards, at the former Spooky Building 213 and (eventual Spooky Park) site. (If so, there's a lot of dirt to be covered over in the next five weeks!)

The festival bills itself as the "largest one-day celebration of Japanese culture in the United States," and the "grand finale of the National Cherry Blossom Festival." Alas, the official festival web site has not yet posted a 2016 program guide, or festival map, but tickets are on sale for $8 in advance--they'll be $10, cash only, at the gates. There are some details available on the food/beverage and "Bring Japan Home" offerings.

It doesn't sound like this is a permanent move, with WBJ quoting the president of the Japan-America Society as saying that “We’re already thinking ahead to 2017 to see where we might need to go."

The Cherry Blossom Parade is from 10 am to noon along Constitution Avenue, with Sakura Matsuri running from 10:30 am to 6 pm, so judicious non-attendees will definitely want to avoid the Green Line that day.

Later this week, 3rd Street will be restricted to a single lane of traffic, northbound, from a little ways north of I Street up until through the light just north of the freeway overpass.

In other words, if you want to drive from north of the freeway to south of the freeway, you won't be able to do it on 3rd Street until after the temporary decking is built, which is expected to take "several weeks." At that point, two-way traffic will be reestablished.

Fourth Street will be the fall-back for heading southward, so if you are coming south on 3rd, you'll need to turn left at G Street (the "Results" block) and then right on 4th. (If you are southbound on 3rd, you will still be able to turn right onto the freeway ramp.)

CSX says that "the new plans were developed with DDOT’s approval following community requests to avoid closing 3rd Street during the tunnel project, especially in light of traffic associated with baseball games at Nationals Park."

In other tunnel news, "CSX is pleased to announce that the street-level portion of the demolition of 370 feet of the existing tunnel in the 200 block of Virginia Avenue has been completed several weeks ahead of schedule. While some track-level demolition remains to be completed, the noise associated with this work should diminish significantly for residents near the intersection of 3rd Street and Virginia Avenue, and no additional early-morning or Sunday demolition work periods are expected."

PS: Not my greatest headline, but thanks to the world of search-engine-optimized URLs, it's kind of bad to change it after I've tweeted/Facebook'ed the link. Was trying to make clear from the headline that people coming south from the Hill will be impacted, but it's really just at the Virginia Avenue intersection where the construction is taking place.

However, with so many active construction sites, by the time I walk around to visit all of them and do all of the photographing and database-ing and project page-updating and slider-updating, my energy wanes when it comes time to write actual posts.

Oops.

So here's a few tidbits while I recover, and if you want to see new pictures taken in Sunday's glorious sunshine, I invite you to check out the updated sliders as well as my pages on Dock 79/Florida Rock, 909 Half, Agora/Whole Foods, Insignia, F1rst, Homewood Suites, the Bixby, the Virginia Avenue Tunnel, and Southeast Blvd., where I, ahem, finally posted photos of the finished project a mere 13 months after it opened.

In the meantime:

* JBG HALF ST. ZONING: Last Thursday the Zoning Commission heard testimony on JBG's plans for its 420ish-unit combination condo/rental building planned for just north of Nats Park at Half and N.

Urban Turf has a detailed summary of the hearing, but having watched it myself, I can boil it down to: the commissioners didn't really spend much time talking about the not-a-typical-DC-box design, which they seemed to like. Instead, most of the discussion was centered around zoning issues of setbacks and LEED certification. It comes back for an expected vote on April 11.

However, developers working on designs of future projects might want to know that Commissioner Peter May took a moment to tell the hearing that he's "getting tired of all of the glass buildings" coming to the commission, apparently losing interest in "seeing the inside of everyone's apartment and the inside of everyone's office."

* BRIDGE PARK DELAY: Did we say 2018? How about late 2019? A feasibility study will be happening soon to see whether the piers that were left in the Anacostia when the old 11th Street bridges were demolished are going to be able to in fact be used for the bridge park. One other note: the project has currently raised a little more than $11 million of the expected $35 million construction costs.

* OKAY, ONE PIC: A JDLand gold star to Clark Construction for what has to be the tidiest excavation hole I've looked into. This is the hole from which JBG's 1244 South Capitol residential building will arise, just north of the ballpark's western parking garage.

* JDLAND HAPPY HOUR: Been wanting to meet fellow residents/office workers/JDLand readers? Then mark your calendar for Thursday, March 10 at 5:30 pm at Scarlet Oak, and come say hello and hang out! I'll even have a few coveted JDLand t-shirts available for purchase.

You get to choose up to five movies from the list, and the image at right in absolutely no way would be trying to tell you which movies to pick.

The series will run this year from June 2nd through August 18.

Earlier this month Forest City filed a two-year extension request with the Zoning Commission, as the continuing bureaucratic machinations to move DC Water's fleet maintenance and customer care operations off of the site at 1st and O SE have moved slowly enough that Forest City has been unable to file for a building permit by the date required in the zoning approvals received in early 2014.

While there have been steps that have moved the process forward, including the official execution of a lease with Showplace Icon theaters back in July, Forest City writes in its letter to the Zoning Commission that the lack of a building permit filing "is due to continuing challenges in identifying and developing appropriate relocation facilities that are acceptable to DC Water. DMPED and DC Water have worked diligently--with continued assistance from Forest City--to identify appropriate relocation facilities [for the operations], but substantial work still remains."

Land in Prince George's County has been acquired for the fleet operations, but Forest City says that DMPED and DC Water "are currently negotiating an agreement on the scope of improvements to be built out at the new site," and that once those are completed, "the improvements must be designed, permitted, and built."

As for a potential new customer care operations site, there is apparently work underway between DMPED and WMATA "to acquire a property that would serve as a new location." But, while "the parties are actively discussing the terms of the site control with DC Water," there would still need to be design and construction before a move could happen.

The letter goes on to say that DMPED and DC Water--the entities with "sole responsibility" for the moves--"estimate that the relocation of one of the two operations could be completed within 10 months," but that "out of an abundance of caution and in recognition of the complex negotiations and construction required" for either or both of the operations to be relocated, Forest City is requesting the two-year extension, because even after relocation, the movie theater parcel will need environmental remediation before construction can proceed.

There are also plans for two residential buildings to be built along 1st Street, once both sets of operations are moved and the construction of the movie theater is finished.

(For those zoning fanboys out there, I'll be a bit more precise and say that technically Forest City is requesting a two-year extension of the consolidated PUD approval for the movie theater parcel and the first-stage PUD approval for the remaining parcels, plus a two-year extension of the original first-stage approval, because doing that would reset the clock on the twelve-year time frame originally approved for filing for a second-stage PUD for the remaining parcels. {pantpantpant})

Finally, while only tangentially related, I'll remind readers that not all of DC Water's operations will be leaving this plot of land between Nats Park and the Yards, and that DC Water's plans for its new headquarters to be built on top of the existing O Street Pumping Station immediately to the south of the movie theater site received final approvals from the Zoning Commission in recent weeks, and construction should/could be underway there this summer.

My DC Water and Yards at DC Water pages give more details and background on these projects, should you so desire.

Brian Leventhal, one of the owners of both Brooklyn Winery and the coming DC venture, told the commission that this will be a full commercial winery, processing fresh grapes brought in from various US locations (including Virginia).

And since "you can't have wine without food," there will also be a 90-seat interior restaurant open seven days a week, which will also have outdoor seating.

In addition, the 2nd floor will be an events space, which the winery hopes will become a "very coveted wedding space," as well as a location for corporate and political events. There will also be tours of the winery, and bottles will be available for purchase (with "Bottled in the District of Columbia" on the labels).

Leventhal also showed some slides of Brooklyn Winery's operations to the commission, which you can see here.

Forest City's Jonathan Gertman testified that the company is targeting June 1 for the start of construction, and Leventhal said that they are hoping to be open by September of 2017. A liquor license is already in hand.

I posted a few weeks ago the early designs for the building, which will be a sibling of sorts for the Lumber Shed (and eventually there will be a third retail pavilion nestled between the two). The image at the top of this post is a slightly more realized version, though note that the red dots and lines aren't actually part of the design (I grabbed it from the zoning filings). The entrances will be on the wall facing west toward the Lumber Shed, and the restaurant will be on the south end of the building, where outdoor seating will look toward the Anacostia River.

Other than concerns about whether a winery would be a permitted use or an associated use under the zoning overlay, and some small frustrations about not being exactly sure what the differences were between the original approvals back in 2009 and the new case, all the zoning commissioners were enthusiastic about the project and the design. Michael Turnbull said that "I think this is going to be such a cute little building, and I think it'll be a fun place to go," while Robert Miller called it a "very exciting project, a very attractive building, a unique activating use in this Yards area," and that he looks forward to sampling it.

The commissioners felt no need to request additional information or changes, and with the Office of Planning recommending approval, and with ANC 6D's unanimous vote in support earlier this month, the commission took final action and approved the case 5-0-0.

The large "Point Cloud" and its sibling "Cube" seen in the image provided by the organizers were designed by New York-based light artist and architect John Ensor Parker, and will be joined starting on Feb. 27 by "giant luminescent rabbits," with a special family-friendly event from 3 to 6 pm that Saturday, "to delight in the sight of the enormous glowing bunnies, while enjoying children’s activities, including a giant Lite-Brite."

Also on Feb. 27, from 6 to 10 pm, there will be another light show set to music, performed by electric violinist DC Manifesto.

It's free and open to the public.

But I managed earlier this week to squeeze in an abbreviated trek to the construction sites where recent change is the most visible. And, I have to say, by the time folks arrive in the neighborhood for Opening Day, it's just going to be a vastly different place than it was at the end of last season, even if these buildings are still quite a few months from completion.

The first shot is of the 277-unit apartment building at 82 I Street (now called ORE 82, I believe), where masonry work is speeding right along, and making that stretch of I quite the Red Brick Row.

Next, we move a few blocks to south of M Street, where the combination F1rst apartment building/Residence Inn construction is about to put an end to the Hampton Inn Grain Silo effect, illustrated here with a heavily cropped shot taken from a block away, at New Jersey and M. I'm also including an up-close shot of the spot where the apartment building and hotel converge, because the renderings haven't been all that clear in showing that there is a break above the ground floor between the two:

Next, let's take a moment to highlight the fact that Donohoe's Insignia on M 324-unit apartment building is at last truly above ground and visible, nearly a year and a half after excavation started. Here's the project as seen looking south along New Jersey from L, and looking at its M Street frontage behind the Metro station canopy:

In the Wait, Where Did That Come From All of a Sudden? category, we have the Homewood Suites at Half and M, with nine of its eleven stories almost completed, while three blocks to its north, the as-yet-unnamed 383-unit apartment project at 909 Half Street is starting to display exactly how large of a building it will be.

Finally, on the northern end of things, I'll offer a rear view of Agora, seen from 2nd Street and offering clear evidence of how the parking for the Whole Foods will be on the two floors immediately above it. (This photo is also my choice because winter sun angle and shadows make it almost impossible to get a decent shot of the New Jersey Avenue side of the building right now.) And then to wrap things up, I'll give you one hole in the ground, at Skanska's 99 M office building.