D.C. Convention Center's Hotel Set to Open in 2011
Merchants Say Delay Will Hurt Them
Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, seated at center, signs a deal to build a hotel across from the convention center. He's joined at the table by Reba Pittman Walker of the Washington Convention Center Authority and Norman Jenkins of Marriott.
(By Alejandro Lazo -- The Washington Post)
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Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Political leaders touted yesterday's signing of a deal to build a hotel across from the Washington Convention Center as a significant step in their quest to draw more visitors to the District.
Yet for merchants and residents, who will be neighbors of the hotel at Ninth Street and Massachusetts Avenue NW, the announcement prompted a new round of frustration that the long-promised project is still at least four years from opening.
In some cases, merchants said they opened shops in the neighborhood because they expected that a convention center hotel would provide a gush of business generated by thousands of overnight guests.
Instead, nearly five years after the center opened, the hotel remains a distant promise for those looking for a more immediate boost. Officials said yesterday that they expect the hotel to open in 2011.
"Twenty-eleven?" asked Debra Chatman, exasperated as she mulled over the time frame. Chatman, who plans to open a bakery on Ninth Street next month, said she decided to move to the area partly because she expected the hotel to create a built-in market for her pastries.
"We could go under by 2011 without business coming in," Chatman said.
Russell Breakwell, the owner of Breakwell's Coffee, said the prospect of a new hotel was among the reasons he decided to open 18 months ago at the corner of Ninth and P streets.
At the time, Breakwell said he considered himself a kind of urban pioneer, tapping in early to a neighborhood on the brink of a renaissance.
Now he says he's pouring his personal savings into keeping his business alive.
"How long can I continue?" he asked. "We'll all run out of money if something doesn't happen here."
The hotel's planned opening is "too far away," he said. "If it was the next year or the year after, I could hang on and weather the storm. When you start talking that many years away, we're going to have a very hard time."
In 1998, when District officials broke ground on the convention center, they promised that it would help revive a neighborhood in which stretches are dominated by boarded-up buildings. Without a hotel, however, the convention center alone has not been able to ignite a resurgence for small businesses in the area.
