Looking Past the Capital City

A rendering of PN Hoffman's vision for the Southwest waterfront. The plan includes a mix of residential, office and commercial development. (Pn Hoffman)

The city remained true to that spirit throughout the 20th century, building iconic memorials to Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson and neo-classical buildings designed to reflect the nation's gravitas as a world power.

"Monumental Washington is our brand," said Thomas Luebke, secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

Although the city will never lose that identity, Luebke said, it will only benefit as it fosters new geographical and cultural dimensions. "There's a flatness to the monumental vision," he said. "It would be nice to show more of the layers."

Cities have been known to acquire new identities: Boston, for example, which long ago shed its role as an important shipping port, and New York, once a manufacturing hub.

"Every major city has undergone this, although not as dramatically as Washington, because most were not single-function cities," said Alex Krieger, an urban planning professor at Harvard who has been a consultant to the District government.

Cities across the country have revived in recent years -- as crime rates subsided; as baby boomers became empty-nesters and traded homes for apartments; as suburbanites grew tired of long commutes; and as Hollywood promoted the joys of urban life with sitcoms such as "Seinfeld" and "Friends." In Washington, all those factors have combined to make a metamorphosis possible.

"There's a kind of epochal change in American culture," Krieger said. "Since we got tired of the slums on [New York's] Lower East Side, the image of a prospering America was a suburban America. That's not going away. But it's being recalibrated."

The evidence of that shift can be seen in Washington, where in recent years developers have built attractions such as the Walter E. Washington Convention Center and Verizon Center. They also rebuilt two of the three corridors that had languished for decades after being ravaged during the 1968 riots.

The development slated for the future is even more ambitious. Instead of rebuilding entire blocks, developers will create entire neighborhoods from scratch. In addition to the waterfronts, for example, developers have drawn plans for 29 projects in NoMa, the pocket north of Union Station. Along New York Avenue in Northeast, an industrial area lined with low-price motels is slated for apartment complexes, restaurants and big-box stores.

On the east campus of St. Elizabeths Hospital, a 170-acre expanse across from where the federal government plans to relocate the Department of Homeland Security, District officials hope to lure developers to build a mix of housing, offices and retail.

A paramount challenge, planners and developers said, is ensuring not only that the projects are built but also that each adds a unique dimension to the Washington experience.

"If we're not mindful we will be surprised when we wake up in 10 years and find we're in Disneyland," said Jair Lynch, a developer. "Instead of a fabricated experience, we want an experience that you can say has some history to it, and some authenticity."