Few Places Left for Industrial Business

The ideas have brought interest from many tenants in the District who rent space for industrial-type operations.

St. Charles has run his auto repair shop near the corner of New York and Bladensburg for three years but will probably have to move because the owner of the land is selling the property to developer Jim Abdo, who is planning a mega-development of shops, restaurants and housing.

Before he moved to Northeast, his shop, D.S.C. Auto Repair, was on Ninth Street NW. "They kicked me out of there when the new convention center came," he said.

"We had to move. Now they're saying a shopping center is better than more cars here, and they're saying it's better than my piece of junk," St. Charles said, pointing to a banged-up car.

Next door to his shop, another mechanic agreed.

"It's not just hard to get a license, it's hard to find the space," said Alpha Sesay, who has had his garage in Northeast for seven years.

Near the auto repair shops on Bladensburg Road, family-owned A&R Auto Parts is finding it hard to stay in the area and is likely to move its wrecked cars and auto parts -- fenders, engines, transmissions, power-steering pumps -- from the three acres it now occupies to locations in White Plains, Md., and Fredericksburg, Va. (It's not a junkyard, the owners are careful to point out to visitors. A refrigerator is disposed of in a junkyard; the salvage yard is where parts are recycled, they say.)

"I see it as inevitable," said Richard Ackerman, whose father started the salvage yard on Bladensburg Road 57 years ago. "Things change. We've been here for so long. It's not unreasonable to think this area will be developed."

His 80-year-old mother, Muriel, chimed in. She and her husband, Robert, who is 91, stopped in to lend a hand for the day. "They want to clean it up," she said of Abdo's plans. "I don't blame them, but they're putting too many people out of business. . . . They want to fix up the gateway to the Capitol. I guess they want to pretty it up."

Abdo, who is buying 16 acres at New York and Bladensburg, including where the Ackerman salvage yard and the auto repair shops sit, calls the land underutilized. His plans call for 3.5 million square feet of development, with condos and a grocery store.

"I have a problem with maintaining industrial land on visual corridors of the city," Abdo said. "I think it's a mistake to maintain those if there's a higher and better use, like housing, retail."

In Southeast, just a half-block from the new baseball stadium near South Capitol Street and Potomac Avenue SE, a concrete plant is facing traffic backups on narrow streets littered with large potholes, as dump trucks haul dirt from the huge pit workers are digging to build the ballpark. The plant's landlord probably will redevelop or sell the site, forcing a move to Maryland.