Shirlington Redevelops Its Character
Flagship Building Will House Innovative Signature Theatre

By Annie Gowen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 30, 2006

After more than a year of delays and rising construction costs, Arlington County is finally set to unveil its new Shirlington town center, which officials hope will transform a small strip of restaurants into a thriving urban neighborhood and theater row.

Building crews are putting the finishing touches on the county's centerpiece of the new development: a $17 million flagship public library and theater on a new town square. The library and meeting space will occupy the ground floor of the new building; the upstairs will house the glamorous new digs -- including a sweeping curved staircase -- of Signature Theatre.

Last week, County Board Chairman Chris Zimmerman (D), ambled through the new building, where construction teams were still noisily at work, with Signature's artistic director, Eric Schaeffer, and its managing director, Sam Sweet.

"Isn't this great?" Zimmerman said, peering out of the top floor of the building, with its banks of windows overlooking the new square. Trees have been planted, and soon a fountain will bubble. A brick road extends for a new block from the existing Village at Shirlington, a lively row of restaurants on 28th Street, and the neighboring AMC Loews cinemas, which specialize in art-house fare. From July 1, the new block will be renamed Campbell Avenue.

The $225 million public-private development project was launched by Federal Realty Investment Trust, the company that created Bethesda and Pentagon rows. There are three new apartment buildings -- including nine luxury lofts overlooking the square -- a condominium building, space for more shops, a parking garage and a Harris Teeter grocery store.

"It's evolving to be more than just a restaurant row and movie theater, into a place where people actually live . . . a real town center," Zimmerman said.

The county is touting Shirlington as its newest "urban village" despite one of its major drawbacks: Although the area is just yards from Interstate 395, there is no adjacent Metro station. To counter that deficiency, the county is building a $2.5 million "transit hub" with a passenger waiting area for buses on South Quincy Street. Officials said they hope to increase bus usage from 1,000 to 2,000 riders daily.

Tulsi Gabbard Tamayo recently leased a new apartment in Shirlington after relocating from Hawaii. She said she was drawn to the area by its intimate feel.

"I was initially concerned about no Metro station nearby, but the Metrobus comes like every 10 minutes," she said. "I liked the relaxed, safe and open environment of the village area. In some other areas I checked out, I felt like I was locked in concrete blocks. The Shirlington atmosphere trumped the lack of the Metro station."

The project was conceived in 1999 amid some neighborhood protest. Those living in neighboring Fairlington worried about traffic. Others thought the project was too pricey, arguing that the county did not need to help Signature -- with its national fame and fundraising prowess -- in its quest for bigger digs. Signature Theatre has raised about $7 million toward outfitting its new space, which will have two theaters, one of them a main stage in a 299-seat hall. Signature will lease the building from the county.

Construction delays caused mostly by market demand for steel, concrete and work crews have slowed the project's completion. The delay was tough on Signature in particular, because it was forced to reorganize its performance schedule, Sweet said.

The theater company was founded in Arlington in 1989 and has won national acclaim for innovative production of musicals, particularly the works of Stephen Sondheim.

The theater company had hoped to stage its fall production of "My Fair Lady" in the new space but had to stay in its old 136-seat theater, a converted auto-body shop around the corner on Four Mile Run Drive. The change cost the company more than $200,000 in potential ticket revenue, Sweet said.

They are anxiously awaiting the opening of the new building, where patrons will finally have parking and actors will have roomy dressing rooms and rehearsal space, Sweet and Schaeffer said. Signature plans a weekend-long open house starting Jan. 12 and a red-carpet debut of the first work in the new theater, Sondheim's "Into the Woods."

The county recently bought Signature's old theater and hopes to use it to create a "cultural campus" or theater district in Shirlington, county officials said. That endeavor is proving more complicated than initially expected, as the county's cash-strapped smaller theater companies are still waiting to find out whether, or how, they fit into the plans. The county has nearly a dozen small theater companies. Most of them, as Signature was, were born out of the county's Arts Incubator program, which provides performance space in exchange for a percentage of companies' ticket sales.

"I detect in the theater community a weird mix of jealousy, envy and bitterness about the fact that, for many small companies, if they had even a small percentage of the money that's been advanced to Signature, it would make a huge difference," said Jack Marshall, artistic director and CEO of the American Century Theater, which performs in the Gunston Arts Center. "But you can understand the motivation. You've got a proven, successful entity that's managed to bring prestige to Arlington County and has been successful in bringing audiences to Arlington County from across the river . . . so I think that's the logic."

The county had initially hoped that two smaller theater companies, Classika Theatre and the Washington Shakespeare Company, would move into the old Signature building, but those plans are still in flux while the county tries to figure out how it will pay for an estimated $1 million renovation. Classika Theatre is losing its family theater space in Shirlington because of rising rents and isn't sure where it will end up, said Yulia Kriskovets, the company's director of development.

The Washington Shakespeare Company is being nudged out of its space north of Crystal City by another county development project; but that, too, is up in the air, according to artistic director Christopher Henley.

He views his company's eventual move to Shirlington as a "double-edged sword." With the move, likely to occur next year, the company will have to share theater space and lose its Metro access, which has caused consternation among actors and patrons.

But, "on the plus side, when everything that the county's planning comes online, it will be the densest concentration of theaters in the region," Henley said.

"There's an attractive synergy in being around that nucleus of theater spaces."