Anacostia Waterfront Gets a Long Look

Architects, Planners, Engineers Hired to Draft Revitalization

The District has launched an ambitious effort to chart redevelopment of the Anacostia River and its shorelines, a year-long process of community input and draft proposals that will be led by a $1.4 million team of top architects, urban planners and engineers from across the country.

The consultants -- from more than a dozen firms, many of which have competed for jobs rehabilitating riverfronts in U.S. and foreign cities -- will propose parks, entertainment venues and housing, retail and office projects on the banks of the Anacostia River and the Southwest Waterfront bordering the Washington Channel.

They are charged with protecting existing communities, creating new public access to the often hard-to-reach river and designing lively, productive uses for barren parcels such as the empty Southeast Federal Center and the weed-filled fields of Poplar Point.

"This is a huge undertaking that we're about to embark upon," D.C. Planning Director Andrew Altman told a standing-room-only crowd at a kickoff ceremony last week at Van Ness Elementary School. "We can have great open space and sustainable development, destination waterfront and jobs for our residents."

D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), whose hobbies include canoeing and bird-watching on the Anacostia, praised the river's "splendid scenery and fragile natural beauty."

Williams described how President Abraham Lincoln relaxed during weekend retreats to the Washington Navy Yard overlooking the river, abolitionist Frederick Douglass walked across the 11th Street Bridge from Anacostia each day to his job near the Capitol and John Philip Sousa held concerts at the water's edge.

The mayor envisioned a day when city children would walk or bicycle across new pedestrian bridges spanning the Anacostia and traverse a grand new river walk, enjoy boat rides or listen to afternoon concerts on the river's bank.

"A river that once divided our city, I think, is now going to bring our city together," Williams said. ". . . This river is very special. Not only does it connect neighborhoods, but it also connects us to our history across time."

Other elected officials at the ceremony included D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), council members Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6) and Harold Brazil (D-At Large) and Reps. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), Constance A. Morella (R-Md.) and Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.), who chairs the District subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee.

Residents of communities on either side of the river -- from tony parts of Capitol Hill to working-class Kenilworth Park in far Northeast and several rundown public housing complexes in between -- also attended the event.

They expressed a variety of concerns, with affluent residents worried about increasing traffic and parking problems as a result of new development and those from poorer areas concerned that improvements would raise rents and home prices and push them out.

Yvonne Clary, head of the residents' council in a nearby public housing development, struck a somber note at the start of an otherwise all-things-are-possible evening.

"Truthfully, we are concerned about our homes," she said. "There are some of us who would like to become homeowners. . . . We would like playgrounds, computer labs, job training and opportunities."

Government officials and the consultants responded by repeating their goal of improving existing communities, without displacing residents, with new commercial, residential and recreational areas.

The kickoff came a year after the District government and more than a dozen federal agencies signed a "memorandum of understanding" to develop the waterfront jointly. The last 12 months were spent gathering ideas for individual neighborhoods, cobbling together funding and hiring consultants. Authorities promised to start construction this year on a river walk along the entire 14 miles of shoreline.

Planning for communities on either side of the river is to begin in earnest April 7 with workshops in five different riverside neighborhoods. Public forums on the river's environmental challenges and on a study of the Southwest waterfront are scheduled later this month.

Times and locations of these and other meetings are listed on the calendar at the project's Web site, www.anacostiawaterfront.net.