Signs of Change Line the Shelves

The supermarket is the anchor of a shopping center that will include Ward 8's first full-service restaurant, an IHOP part-owned by a District police officer, and an ice cream parlor. A bank and a hardware store have opened.

To Gloria Whitfield, 72, a retired cashier who lives a block from the Giant, the new retail signifies that she will no longer have to drive her '78 Buick to Ward 7 or to the suburbs to buy groceries or eat brunch. Instead, she'll be able to walk to get much of what she needs.

Although the Safeway where she shops is less than two miles away, just across the Ward 7 boundary, "it was insulting to not have anything here," she said. "It seemed like everyone else had it in their neighborhood. We couldn't get a pizza delivered. We couldn't get a newspaper. Now we're getting it all."

Or beginning to.

Even with its first supermarket, Ward 8, with a population of about 70,000, lags far behind more affluent areas of the city. In Northwest, wards 2 and 3 each have six supermarkets serving roughly the same number of residents, according to a study last year by the D.C.-based Food Research and Action Center. The report concluded that Ward 8 offered the city's least nutritious food options.

The ward's main commercial arteries are lined with fast-food joints and convenience stores, places such as the Congress Heights Discount Shop on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, where patrons order from the sidewalk, talking to a cashier through a small square window protected by steel bars. Signs advertise 50-cent sodas and a sale on cheese doodles.

"If you walk to the end of my block, I can buy drugs, I can go to the liquor store, I can get sugar, fried food -- everything that's detrimental to me," said Malcolm Woodland, a research fellow who lives with his mother in Congress Heights. "However, I couldn't find a piece of fruit. I couldn't get fresh meat or produce."

The new Giant, Woodland said, will "boost the local food selection. You will see different health outcomes. But it's only one neighborhood. Ward 8 is large."

The Giant's opening at Camp Simms, as the former National Guard base is known, comes 24 years after the administration of then-Mayor Marion Barry (D) purchased the parcel from the federal government for $1.8 million.

For years plans to develop the site were bandied about without a shovel ever breaking ground. Then, in 2005, then-Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) sold the property for $500,000 to a development team that included William C. Smith & Co. As part of the deal, the developer agreed to build the supermarket, as well as affordable housing within Asheford Court, an adjoining complex of brick-faced, single-family homes, some of which are selling for as much as $600,000.

Asheford Court and the Shops at Park Village, as the shopping center where the Giant is located is called, are a part of a wave of development in Ward 8, where more than 6,000 housing units have been built since 2001.

A mainstay of the development is across Alabama Avenue from the Giant. Replacing Frederick Douglass and Stanton Dwellings is Henson Ridge, a mix of market-rate and subsidized homes. A few blocks away, the District has opened THEARC, a $27 million arts and recreation center.