Envisioning City Life Along the Rivers

Adjacent to the DOT headquarters, Forest City Enterprises of Cleveland is building a 1.8 million-square-foot project that will flesh out the Southeast side with housing, retail, offices and a three- to four-acre park. That will be linked to a 22-mile path tracing the waterline from Bladensburg down to Fort McNair, then up along the Washington Channel to Georgetown.

Harriet Tregoning, director of the D.C. office of planning, believes that linkage will make the design of new neighborhoods, stores, parks and office projects a more holistic exercise that will ultimately give the waterfront its due.

"Our calling card is amenities," she said, "and I think that the waterfront is one of those unique amenities that we've really come to realize is a strength of the city. That's how we're going to continue to be a city that's great."

Down river from the southernmost tip of the District, developer Milt Peterson is capitalizing on the city's complex challenge of connecting communities to the water by building his own $2 billion mini-metropolis on the Potomac in Prince George's County.

He has linked his project to the District, first by buying J. Seward Johnson's iconic sculpture, "The Awakening," to place on the beach of National Harbor, and then luring the National Children's Museum. Those will be added to an otherwise un-D.C. setting, with a grand plaza with a jumbo retractable video screen, resort hotels, wall-to-wall waterfront restaurants, entertainment piers, a beach for kids to play on, and ferry service to Alexandria and eventually, he hopes, the District's new baseball stadium. In addition, Nashville-based Gaylord Hotels is building an adjacent 2,000-room hotel and conference center.

Peterson, a Northern Virginia developer who made his name creating suburban town-center communities such as Fair Lakes, calls the site of his National Harbor project "like Marilyn Monroe on the water . . . it's beautiful and it's got great sex appeal." He's banking on that, and on the site's accessibility via a new Beltway interchange and water taxis that will begin operating when the community opens next April.

"It doesn't have to be difficult to make it a great experience for the family," he said. And the everything-under-one-roof amenities offered by Gaylord have enabled the hotel and convention center to book more than 1 million room nights before it has even opened.

Bill Struever, one of the primary developers of the Southeast waterfront, says Washington, however, has an advantage in that the Southeast and Southwest sides are already part of the city landscape. Unlike National Harbor, they are not being created from the ground up, and the inspiration for much of their redevelopment should reflect that, he said.

"The great thing about cities is they have a history, culture, tradition," he said, "whereas the suburbs are made out of whole cloth, and there is no authenticity to them."

This will be one of the features that Alexandria, with its Old Town core, hopes to exploit as it watches all the waterfront activity in neighboring jurisdictions and works to maximize its own.

Waterfront redevelopment "has been on our radar for more than eight to 10 years," said Alexandria Mayor William D. Euille. "Within the coming next April of the Gaylord resort, certainly that has upped the ante a little for us to be responsible and do the immediate short-term planning to be receptive to potential visitors. It would be irresponsible on our part not to."