By Anita Huslin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 20, 2007

In the hottest days of summer, Paris becomes the Riviera, when it transforms two miles of the Seine into a beach with cabana boys by day and concerts at night. Every July, Venetians crowd the canals on boats and gondolas to celebrate the marriage of the city to the sea. For a month every fall, the Baltic archipelago city of Stockholm sets a waterfront stage for an international jazz festival.

And in Washington, perhaps the world capital of festivals and celebrations, one of the more heralded annual events that focuses a spotlight directly on its waterfronts is . . . a cleanup project. Earlier this year, the Capital River Relief project plucked 50 tons of garbage from the Anacostia and Potomac rivers.

While hardly glamorous, the decades-long effort to restore Washington's waterways has cleared the way for bigger changes. With few large undeveloped tracts in the Washington region's urban core, the banks of the Potomac and Anacostia have suddenly become hot property.

More than $2 billion in revitalization projects are under construction in D.C. neighborhoods along the rivers, and another $10 billion worth of developments are in the pipeline. Downstream, a $2 billion mini-city is rising along the shores of the Potomac in Prince George's County. And all of this activity is prompting the city of Alexandria, across the river, to begin plotting its own waterfront renaissance.

Nearly 2 1/2 square miles of land are under redevelopment along the Southeast and Southwest shorelines of the District, an area the size of Takoma Park. On the Southwest waterfront, parking lots and concrete walls are slated to make way for condos, restaurants and shops, and 13 acres will be dedicated to a tree-lined esplanade, public piers and parks. On the Southeast side, where a grand staircase is being built from the new Nationals stadium to the edge of the Anacostia River, developers hope to take a page from such successful waterfront revitalizations as Baltimore's Fells Point, San Antonio's River Walk and Paris's Plage in transforming nearly 6 acres into homes, stores and offices. A 42-acre site formerly known as the Southeast Federal Center will be transformed into nearly 3,000 residential units, stores and restaurants, office space, and a riverfront park.

In addition, 22 miles of new walkways are planned to link the areas along the shoreline. And if planners have their way, more park space will be opened up for such uses as kayaking and boating.

The bulk of the work is still in drafting stages, and the projects' success in drawing people to the reimagined sites remains to be seen. Whether neighborhoods and communities will spring forth from office spaces and new housing developments will largely depend on whether architects are able to set a tableau that not only transforms places that have been abandoned, unsettled or neglected for more than a century, but makes them easy to reach.

"There are cities on the water and there are cities on the water, but you don't have any sense of that, and that's Washington," said Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit organization that gives an annual award to cities for waterfront redevelopment. For years, he said, he has viewed Washington's neglect of its waterfront as a lost opportunity, economically and culturally.

"It's a shame, because it has so much waterfront property and so little to do on the waterfront."

The Washington region lags behind other metropolitan areas in waterfront development for a host of reasons, many of them historical. Harbors that thrived in colonial times were made irrelevant by railroads and a deep-water port in Baltimore. By the 1960s, highways were built along the riverfront to minimize their impact on neighborhoods, but they also effectively cut off water access for most of Washington. The placement of heavy industry and military installations has also limited how most Washingtonians could use the rivers.

Complicating matters are the various jurisdictions and alphabet soup of agencies -- federal, state and local -- that must approve any changes to the riverscape. Each has its own vision of how the waterways should be used, and developers bring their own designs to various projects.

Frank Baxter's father bought a small frontage plot on the Potomac in the 1940s and set up a canoe and rowboat concession upstream from Washington's old flour and paper mills. Baxter still rents kayaks, a few canoes and an antique rowboat from an overgrown spot under the Key Bridge that he leases from the National Park Service.

One of the few small-business owners left along the river, Baxter watches each day as Park Service contractors bulldoze and grade a plot just downstream. He wonders how long he can remain and fears for the future of his livelihood as the new Georgetown waterfront park goes up.

Already, he has been asked to make changes: An old shack he used as an office has been torn down and replaced by a construction trailer. Extra gear is now kept in a portable storage unit. The original corrugated tin shack that his father, Jack, built in the 1940s so far has been allowed to stay. The tropical mural painted on the side is faded and peeling.

Baxter competes with two other boathouses on Park Service land along the Potomac. Both are run by a professional management company that rents kayaks, canoes, rowing shells and sailboats. Standing next to his pink-and-purple shack, with colorful deck chairs and handmade signs, he senses that his business goes against the Park Service's aesthetic grain. He fears being squeezed out by the riverfront improvements.

"We just want [the Park Service] to know there are people who want to keep it the way it is," said Baxter, steadying a canoe for a longtime customer who steps in, wearing a yellow inflatable airline life preserver. His business is simple and, he said, "something that people like."

Land-use maps show wide swaths of green space along the Potomac and Anacostia that have grown as the region has shifted its thinking about the rivers -- as natural assets to be restored and celebrated. The Park Service has acquired nearly 225 miles of contiguous shoreline from Cumberland, Md., to Mount Vernon; the nearly 8-acre Georgetown park was the last missing piece along a river system that is decidedly cleaner than it was a decade or two ago.

All of this is a point of pride for John Parsons, an associate regional director for the National Park Service, who has played a prominent role in the evolution of greater Washington's national parks. His philosophy, which has guided Park Service rules on the activities permitted on the land, is that more active uses -- like waterfront cafes, vendors or other commercial enterprises -- are better suited for non-park settings.

"So here we have all this green landscape, which a lot of people think is very dull and boring," he said. "The excitement of what is going on here is the private property along these shorelines that are about to be developed."

This has, at times, been a point of frustration for planners and officials, who would like to see federal parkland, because it occupies so much of the waterfront landscape, permit amenities like those found along the other great urban waterways -- cafes, performance artists, perhaps chair rentals or other vendors.

"Parks and trails are great, but they're generally pretty passive," Kent said. "Well, what do you do on a trail? What are the destinations? There ought to be 10 extraordinary destinations within that whole Potomac River area, including Alexandria, Georgetown and some very active park areas."

Glimpses of this vibrant vision are evident in the amalgam of plans for redevelopment below Georgetown, along the Washington Harbour area on the southwest side of the District, around the promontory occupied by Fort McNair and up the Southeast waterfront.

The District firm PN Hoffman, which was selected to be the master developer for the Southwest waterfront, has joined forces with Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse, the developers who helped drive the renaissance of Fells Point on Baltimore Harbor. Their 47-acre redesign promises to transform the Washington marina and channel area by expanding access for water traffic and creating new neighborhoods with parks, gourmet grocery stores, local retailers, a hotel and a waterfront promenade.

For national security reasons, Fort McNair remains off-limits to public access, so any linkages of the waterfronts will have to go around it. But along the Southeast side, JBG Cos. of Chevy Chase has been instrumental in launching the building blitz with construction of the Transportation Department's new headquarters between the Navy Yard and the Nationals stadium.

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."