At Walter Reed site, officials push for a town center

It has been more than a year since patients walked down the ramp from the massive concrete hospital, wheelchairs rolled along the paved paths that crisscross the lawns and nurses headed to work stepped off the No. 70 bus at the corner of Georgia Avenue NW and Butternut Street NW.

Walter Reed Army Medical Center closed a year ago, and District planners, Army officials and residents from surrounding neighborhoods have been thinking about how every inch of the campus may be used in the future, from the stately hospital building where President Dwight D. Eisenhower died to the 1,000-space underground parking garage built in the 1970s.

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The base’s closure has been painful for businesses along Georgia Avenue NW that fed and supplied those frequenting Walter Reed, but the city has proposed a town center development in the hospital’s stead, and a number of affordable-housing builders and schools have already claimed portions of the site. By early next year, District officials hope to begin a search for a private development partner.

Walter Reed is surrounded by neighborhoods — Shepherd Park, Brightwood and Takoma — whose residents typically have to leave the city to shop.

“The residents there have been craving retail along Georgia Avenue for years,” said Ernest D. Jarvis, a senior vice president at First Potomac Realty Trust. The son of former D.C. council member Charlene Drew Jarvis, he grew up in nearby Colonial Village.

With Walter Reed vacated, Jarvis said, “This is the time that the neighbors can have, in the future, a thoughtful mixed-use project.”

Some elements decided

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is reviewing the plans and a D.C. Council committee is scheduled to consider them Oct. 16, but some of what will be built at Walter Reed has already been decided. The State Department wants to build a row of embassies for more than 20 nations, similar to the International Chancery Center at Connecticut Avenue and Van Ness Street NW, on 43.5 acres it plans to acquire on the west end of the campus.

Uses for the remaining 66.6 acres have been identified through a public engagement and selection process managed by the project’s Local Redevelopment Authority since the campus was pegged for closure by the Pentagon in 2005.

Two nonprofit organizations, So Others Might Eat and Help USA, plan to provide up to 115 homes for the homeless on the southern end, while two schools, Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School and Latin American Montessori Bilingual Public Charter School, want to open facilities near 16th Street NW. Howard University — which asked for a majority of the campus as a place to relocate its medical offices and clinical research facilities — plans to open an ambulatory care unit in two buildings on the eastern end near Georgia Avenue NW.

That’s where things stand today. To deliver enough retail to satisfy existing residents and stem the flight of sales tax dollars to the suburbs, Mayor Vincent C. Gray’s economic development team has mapped out a town square development totaling 3.1 million square feet of development, more than 550,000 square feet of it in existing historic buildings, plus 14 acres of open space.