Carpool in Ballston

Diversity, Density, Design. You need them all if you want a great urban neighborhood. Diversity of land use and architecture to keep things interesting and alive, density to populate the streets and design to keep people walking rather than driving.

20-somethings the city over are steaming mad about plans to tear down and redevelop as a condo tower Carpool, a former car dealership now popular bar and pool hall in Ballston.

But Ballston has other bars, so what’s the big deal?

The problem in Ballston is diversity. Or rather its lack thereof. An unextraordinary suburban strip until Metro arrived, everything in Ballston is big and new. It’s got the density. The design is clearly urban, though not quite perfect. It even has a good mix of commercial and residential uses. The problem is the architecture. Individually most of the buildings are reasonably attractive, but they’re also all very similar, and few are very detailed. Perhaps even more of a problem, the properties are too large. Each block has only three or four different buildings and therefore little visual diversity as one walks along beside them. The result is a neighborhood that comes off as banal to those used to more finely-grained DC.

Carpool, being one the last remaining smaller, older buildings, increases Ballston’s visual diversity and thus improves the streetscape.

But it ain’t that simple. Carpool is also a horribly suburban piece of building. The parking lot takes up more ground than the structure itself. There’s no door from the street, only from the side closest to parking, set far back into the interior of the site. It treats an otherwise nice enough side street like an alley. It’s one story and horizontal. Where similar bars in DC fit into the basements of other buildings, Carpool takes up a quarter of its block all by its lonesome. Simply unacceptable for a neighborhood trying to be urban.

Carpool improves Ballston’s diversity, but at the expense of its density and design. The challenge in Ballston and all other redeveloping areas is to find a way to make sure the three Ds meet in the most constructive way possible. In this case the onus will be on the architects to come up with a design that looks good from the sidewalk. If the building adds color and vitality to the pedestrian perspective, the loss of Carpool will be forgiven.

Parking at RFK. Didn’t we agree this was a bad idea?

Rule Number One in contemporary baseball stadium design: Put it in an urban area and make it a great experience for people, even if that means sacrificing convenience for drivers. We’re all familiar with it after a year of wrangling between Major League Baseball and the District government. We all know Rule Number One is the reason the new Nationals ballpark will be in Southeast, where city officials hope it will spur development of a new mixed-use node that would draw visitors from around the region for reasons other than just baseball.

But apparently, when it comes time to make the tough decisions, the National’s new ownership group plays by a different rulebook. The Lerner ownership group is demanding the city build above ground parking garages directly behind the outfield walls in order to provide 1, 225 parking spots to be used mainly by patrons of luxury boxes in the 41, 000-seat stadium. The city wants to put those spaces underground to allow mixed-use development that would contribute to, rather than detract from, the pedestrian experience. Happy with their jewel of an insulated stadium, the Lerners won’t budge.

This is a disaster. Ensuring that these handful of spaces for luxury patrons will be open on time is not more important than the long-term success of the South Capitol Street node as a vital city neighborhood. Acres of parking surrounding the stadium – be it on the surface or in garages – completely defeats the purpose of putting the stadium in an urban location. Planners are still hoping to get sidewalk-level retail, but even if they do, above ground garages will mean fewer people on the sidewalks and, with black holes instead of occupied space staring down, inevitably result in an “empty” feeling at the street below.

Hopefully, and BeyondDC can’t believe we’re saying this, the city will build these garages on the extreme cheap so that when office buildings go up nearby their parking facilities can be used and the dedicated garages torn down in short order and replaced with something useful.