Fort Lincoln Seeks a New Bounce

Planned Shopping Center, Housing Seen as Critical Impetus for Stalled NE Area

When it first was unveiled as a Great Society showpiece, the Fort Lincoln new town was envisioned as an urban version of Columbia or Reston, with grand federal offices and a monorail system.

But for 40 years, Washington's planned community in Northeast has languished half-built in one of the city's choicest natural settings.

Now, the city's construction boom is reaching Northeast, and city officials say a proposed shopping center anchored by a Costco -- and plans to build 300 new housing units -- offer the most solid hope yet of reversing years of frustrating false starts.

While the takeoff of Fort Lincoln has been predicted decade after decade, never before have so many ideas been backed by real financing and retail tenants.

Developers are completing financing and zoning arrangements for the new housing and shopping center. Costco has signed a letter of intent to locate in the shopping center, and developers are negotiating with two smaller chains that could be "junior anchors." The city has agreed to a $10 million subsidy to pay for site preparation.

"This is long, long overdue. It's still about 14 years behind schedule," said Robert King, 59, an original resident of the community and its Advisory Neighborhood Commission representative for many years. "Everything had to be scaled back. Now we're trying to bring some closure to it."

Work on a new apartment building for seniors should be underway by year's end, with construction of a townhouse subdivision and the 375,000-square-foot retail complex slated to start next spring or summer.

The new buildings would not fulfill all the promises made by the Johnson administration at the new town's inception. But the proposed projects would begin filling the remaining empty land bounded by New York, South Dakota and Eastern avenues -- an area of wooded hills along the city's Northeastern edge that holds commanding views.

To drive the quiet, hilly streets of Fort Lincoln today is to feel caught in a time warp. All 600 townhouses and many of the 158 rental apartments were built in the 1970s, and look it. At the six-acre park, the tennis courts are crumbling in spots, and the landscaping seems tired. There are a few subsidized apartments for the elderly, and a beer distribution plant.

Everywhere else, there are hundreds of acres of hilly, overgrown land.

It was supposed to be different.

President Lyndon B. Johnson commissioned a team of top urbanologists in the 1960s to develop an exemplary urban community at Fort Lincoln, a Civil War-era military site on the District's northeast edge that more recently had housed a detention center for youths. Those planners envisioned a community of 25,000 people of all incomes and demographic backgrounds -- a living example for cities everywhere.

There would be a 60-acre downtown, complete with high-rise office buildings, shops and a lake. Plans for a community college were discussed. The location, just off New York Avenue, a short drive to downtown, Capitol Hill or the suburbs, was said to be ideal.

But the federal government lost interest early in the process, and the District, struggling in the early years of home rule, had little success in driving the project forward. Only a few subdivisions were built -- the last one in the late 1980s.