Greater Greater Washington utterly transformed Washington’s urbanist community. Before GGW arrived on the scene there were a handful of local urban blogs (including BeyondDC), but not much of a community, and our influence was minimal. GGW changed all that. It’s had an incredibly positive effect on the progressive urban agenda for this city.
Regular readers may be aware that I have roots in Colorado. Although most of my formative growing-up years were spent in Gaithersburg, I was born in Denver and received my planning degree from the University of Colorado.
Therefore, I’m really excited to be part of what is essentially a GGW clone for Colorado. DenverUrbanism.com is a new group blog from the creator of the fabulous development-tracking website Denver Infill. The new blog will provide news and opinion about transportation, development, and other urban issues along Colorado’s Front Range.
Generally, my contributions to DU.com will be cross-posts of content originally produced for BeyondDC and GGW. Whenever I write about something with national implications, I’ll publish it both here and there.
But I’m only one contributor among a team, so if you’re at all interested in Colorado or want to help their nascent urbanist community get going, head over and check it out: DenverUrbanism.com
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Following Wal-Mart’s announcement that they will build four stores in the District of Columbia, this is the third in a four-part series examining the urban design of each proposal. Today: New Jersey Avenue.
This is by far the best of the proposals. Located on the fringes of downtown, it is appropriately dense and mixed-use. The building will be five floors, with small format retail lining the H Street sidewalk, Wal-Mart behind, parking underground, and 315 apartments on the upper floors.
Rendering of this proposal, looking northeast from the corner of H Street and 1st Street, NW.
Curiously, the building doesn’t actually touch New Jersey Avenue. Rather, the proposal extends First Street partially through the site to create two small blocks where there is currently one large block. The leftover block between First and New Jersey will be developed as a separate office building, presumably with ground floor retail (though that is not confirmed).
It might be more appropriate to refer to this as the H Street Wal-Mart. By putting the main entrance to Wal-Mart and several smaller stores directly on H Street, this building will help pull together the extant retail districts to the east and west. It will contribute significantly to the growth of H Street as a major continuous shopping district running from the CityCenter development at the old convention center site, through Chinatown, and then east to the Atlas District. Combined with the I-395 air rights development, this part of the city will soon be dramatically more active.
The architects deserve credit too. Unlike the Target at DCUSA, which has a plain, strip mall-like facade, the Wal-Mart proposal here calls for a building with traditional, human-scale details. Cornices, individual multi-pane windows, an interesting corner feature at the main entrance, and a thoughtful elevator shaft. This is a fully urban, fully pedestrian friendly building.
All the familiar social and economic questions about Wal-Mart remain, but urbanistically and architecturally, this proposal hits the mark. It may be the most well-executed new urban big box department store in America.
Unfortunately, calls to the developer seeking additional details were not returned. More renderings (though not a site plan) are available thanks to Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post Business page.
Approximate location and layout of the New York Avenue proposal.
Ever since Wal-Mart announced earlier this week that they intend to build four stores in the District of Columbia, the question on the mind of urbanists has been: What will they look like?
This is the second of a four-part series examining the urban design of each proposal. The first part looked at the Brightwood location. Today: New York Avenue.
This proposal occupies most of the triangle bounded by New York Avenue, Bladensburg Road, and Montana Avenue. The site is 15 acres, which approaches the 20 acre average for a suburban Wal-Mart location.
According to developer Rick Walker, this site will have 360, 000 square feet of overall retail development, consisting of a 120, 000 square foot Wal-Mart (the largest of the four that will be in DC), one other big box retailer, and a number of smaller stores. The proposal does not call for residential or office.
Essentially, this will be a very tightly-packed power center.
The image, which I created based on Mr. Walker’s verbal description, shows approximately (very approximately) how the site will be laid out. The red line is the 15 acre property. The blue area is the two-story big box space. Wal-Mart will occupy the top floor, with primary access from Bladensburg Road. The other big box retailer will occupy the bottom floor, with primary access from New York Avenue. The dark gray area along Montana Avenue will be a multi-story parking garage. The teal area will be small-format retail, with surface parking in front shown in light gray, in more or less typical strip-mall form.
The ideal redevelopment for this corner would be a mixed-use town center that could induce a larger-scale transformation from suburban strip highway to walkable urban neighborhood. This part of town is crying for major improvements, and something along the lines of Clarendon Market Common might be the first step in such a reinvention.
Unfortunately, this proposal misses that opportunity.
On the other hand, it could also be a lot worse.
This corner is Washington’s most suburban in character. It is probably the one place in the entire District of Columbia where Wal-Mart’s traditional suburban approach might have worked. Although it’s unfortunate that the proposal won’t be transformative in the way a mixed-use project might be, it is at least good news that even here at this simplest of sites, we’ll be getting something better than the standard one-story asphalt ocean big box.
It seems likely that this will be the least urban out of the four proposals. If indeed this is as car-oriented as Wal-Mart’s plans for Washington get, at least it shows how far we’ve come since the Rhode Island Avenue Home Depot.
This one isn’t exactly urban, but it’s not Fairfax’s Wal-Mart either.
The Curtis Chevy car barn. Image from Google Street View.
Ever since Wal-Mart announced earlier this week that they intend to build four stores in the District of Columbia, the question on the mind of urbanists has been: What will they look like?
Can Wal-Mart be fit into an urban context? Will we be getting walkable, transit oriented stores like the Columbia Heights Target, or the typical sprawly suburban model with acres of parking out front?
In all four cases the architecture is still in preliminary stages, making it impossible to obtain complete site plans. However, after speaking with the developers working on each of the projects, some information is nonetheless becoming available.
This post will be the first in a multi-part series discussing the urban design of each of the four stores. First up: the location in Brightwood, on the former site of Curtis Chevrolet, on upper Georgia Avenue.
Average suburban Wal-Marts often occupy sites with over 20 acres of land, but the Curtis Chevy property is barely four acres. Clearly, Wal-Mart won’t be able to build its usual model at this location.
Dick Knapp of Foulger-Pratt Company, the developer for the Brightwood site, confirms as much, saying “This is not your father’s Wal-Mart. They’re moving in to tighter spaces and they’re going vertical.”
The plans would replace the old car dealership buildings with a new 102, 000 square-foot Wal-Mart store. The only way to fit that large a store on that small a property is to eliminate surface parking and bring the building right up to the street, so that’s what will happen. It isn’t yet clear whether the entire store will be able to fit into a single story or whether a second floor will be necessary, but in any event the parking will be located in an underground garage directly below the store. The entrance will face the sidewalk 20-30 feet back from the curb. That will make for either a comfortably wide sidewalk or a narrow landscaped strip.
When asked about preservation of the existing buildings, Knapp responded that due to a now-canceled redevelopment plan for the property that would have replaced the car dealership with 399 apartments, Foulger-Pratt has already received city approval to demolish all the buildings on the site except the facade of the car barn, a historic structure used by the dealership to store vehicles. Wal-Mart is hoping to obtain permission to take down that facade as well, but such permission has not yet been secured.
Unfortunately, the development won’t be mixed-use. If Foulger-Pratt would stick a few floors of apartments above the retail uses, that would add new customers for the surrounding businesses and help revitalize central Brightwood as a place to live, not only to shop. It’s regrettable that the plan misses such an opportunity.
The goods news, though, is that Wal-Mart appears dedicated to providing a fundamentally urban store at this location. It will greet the street and it will not have any surface parking out front. These are real victories for the community, and represent a real evolution for Wal-Mart as a corporation.
Important questions do remain. Will the car barn facade be preserved? Will Wal-Mart’s frontage along Georgia Avenue be an uninterrupted blank wall, or will the architects take steps to give it pedestrian-scaled details? What sort of effect will Wal-Mart have on Brightwood’s independent businesses, and what will be their labor practices?
But from an urban design standpoint, we may be looking at one of the most progressive and walkable Wal-Mart designs in America. That, at least, is good news.
Much has already beenpenned about the competing interests of Washington’s urbanist groups. Specifically, about the Committee of 100 with its preservationist bent versus the blogosphere and its smart growth bent, led by Greater Greater Washington.
I’ve thought about the divide as well, and I agree with those who say that it’s the result of a massive divergence in how the older generation and younger generation think about cities.
The Committee of 100 and its preservationist brethren think about cities in terms of the mid-to-late 20th Century, when proposals for massive highway and urban renewal projects threatened to essentially bulldoze most of the city and turn it into a giant suburb. Fighting those proposals was the necessary urbanist agenda of the day, and current residents owe preservationists a great thanks for saving our city from the wrecking ball decades ago.
But the experience of fighting a never-ending rear-guard action against bad ideas left that generation neurotic about new development. The city spent so long building crap that the preservationist contingent simply can’t wrap its mind around the possibility that change might be good. 50 years of mostly horrible, anti-urban development has convinced an entire generation that all new development must be bad.
Then there’s the new order. The younger generation of which I am part. Unlike the older generations that watched livably urban cities empty out, my generation started with empty cities and has watched them fill back in. The crap of the late 20th Century is what we were born in to. It’s our starting point. Since then, almost every change to the city has been for the better. Neighborhoods have revitalized, ghettos have disappeared, transit options have expanded. The city is a far better place now than it was when my generation first started paying attention in the early 1990s, so we’re comfortable with change. We think of it as a positive force. We want more of it.
Thus the great divide. One generation’s experience tells it that change must be negative, and another generation’s experience tells it the opposite.
Only time will tell if we’ll be able to find common ground.
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Will Vince Gray be the second coming of Marion Barry, or will he continue the progress started under the District’s two most recent mayors? Will he allow the city to be run by the good ole boys clubs of the past, or follow through with his promises for One City? These questions have a lot of Washingtonians nervous and looking for signs regarding what sort of mayor Gray will become.
Now he has a chance to put campaign rhetoric aside and stake out a meaningful position.
The Committee of 100, one of the old school groups that gathered neighborhood power decades ago and has become generally dedicated to opposing change, has sent a letter to Gray demanding that he fire the two strongest proponents of progressive urbanism from Fenty’s administration: DDOT director Gabe Klein and Planning director Harriet Tregoning. If Gray follows through, it will be a strong signal that he intends to move backwards on transportation and planning issues, and that urbanist’s fears from the election were correct. If Gray keeps Klein and Tregoning, it will be an equally strong signal that he will continue the sort of reforms that made Fenty initially popular, and which most District residents still favor.
The Autumn Streets photography series is a special feature BeyondDC is running this season exploring some of Washington’s more famous or important streets. The first three installments were 16th Street, 14th Street and H Street. Today: Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol.
As usual, photos are available via either the flickr slideshow below or with narration in a thread at SkyscraperPage forum.
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Taiwanese researchers have come up with the elegant idea of replacing streetlights with trees, by implanting their leaves with gold nanoparticles. This causes the leaves to give off a red glow, lighting the road for passersby without the need for electric power.
It gets better:
This ingenious triple threat of an idea could simultaneously reduce carbon emissions, cut electricity costs and reduce light pollution, without sacrificing the safety that streetlights bring… In an added bonus, the luminescence will cause the leaves’ chloroplasts to photosynthesize, which will result in more carbon being captured from the air while the streets are lit.
I don’t think street lights are near the top of anyone’s hit list for ugly urban clutter. In fact, many can be quite lovely. But I have to admit the prospect of cities that look like the glowing forests from ‘Avatar’ thrills my imagination.
Could it actually work? The article is sparse on details. How much does it cost to do this? What do the glowing trees actually look like? Would they reproduce? Does it still work in winter when the leaves have fallen off? I can think of a hundred reasons why this might never be applied to cities on a large scale, but what if it’s so crazy that it actually works? And what else are the mad scientists of the world dreaming up?
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A few short decades ago the United States built the Interstate Highway System, one of the greatest public works of all time. It’s a good thing we built it when we did, because we couldn’t afford it today. We can’t afford to build much new transportation infrastructure at all these days, whether road or transit.
Why? It’s not as if we’re a less wealthy nation now. On the contrary, we’re wealthier. The problem is that the gas tax, the primary source of revenue for federal transportation capital investment, has been shrinking every year.
The gas tax isn’t indexed to inflation. It was 18.4 cents per gallon years ago when gasoline was less than a dollar per gallon overall, and it remains 18.4 cents per gallon today. Since revenue generated from the gas tax stays the same while the rest of the economy grows, that means the gas tax revenue doesn’t have the buying power that it used to.
In fact, when you take inflation into account American drivers are only paying half as much in federal gas taxes as they were in 1975.
That’s a double whammy, because not only do we have half the budget we used to, but instead of spending it all on new infrastructure we have to split it on maintenance for all the new roads we’ve built during that time. So we have less money, and most of what we do have is already spoken for. The leftovers available for new construction are a pittance, relatively speaking.
And that’s under the best case scenario from a revenue-generating standpoint.
What happens if Americans drive less, as we’ve been doing since 2008? Then the revenue starts dropping in real terms, not just inflationary terms. Triple whammy. VDOT’s budget in fiscal year 2008 was $4, 797, 323, 761. For fiscal year 2011 it is $3, 736, 056, 514. That’s almost a quarter decrease in real terms.
No wonder we can’t build the sort of things we used to be able to build. No wonder our infrastructure is crumbling. No wonder China is blowing us away.
The good news is that bipartisan support is building for a hike in the federal gas tax. The president’s bipartisan debt reduction commission recommended raising the gas tax by 1 cent per month for 25 months, until it is 43.4 cents per gallon (more than twice its current rate), and then indexing it to inflation after that.
If legislators have the courage to enact such a change they would be doing the country a dramatically important public service.
Of course, that would only be the first step of what would have to be at least a three-step process to really fix our nation’s infrastructure for the long term. The second step would be to spend that new cash on multi-modal infrastructure projects that reduce our need to drive long distances for daily needs. Investing in better rail, transit and non-motorized infrastructure would make our country less congested, less polluted, and less reliant on foreign oil.
The third step would be to abandon the gas tax and adopt a new revenue system, since gas tax revenue will become less reliable as multi-modal transport options become more available. With gasoline likely to become more sparse in the future anyway, that’s a problem we are likely to face sooner or later regardless of steps one and two.
While it’s true that increasing the gas tax may be a band aid (or a first step) rather than a permanent revenue solution on its own, it is also true that it’s desperately needed band aid. We simply can’t keep up with the infrastructure demands of our economy with such inadequate funding.
Today I’m in the mood for something a little more frivolous. Therefore, in the interests of nerdy transit fun on a Friday afternoon, here are the 10 largest DC regional bus agencies ranked by the quality of their current standard livery:
Number 1: WMATA Metrobus WMATA’s new paint job for buses looks great, and the idea to show local and express buses in different colors was an inspired move. My only complaint: That you can’t see the local red or express blue from the front, where it would be most useful to riders waiting at bus stops.
Number 2: Fairfax City CUE Clean, modern, unique. I’m a big fan. Best bus most Washingtonians have probably never seen.
Number 3: Arlington ART Simple, but in a good way. The wavy green is instantly recognizable and more fun than the standard stripe-on-white-background.
Number 4: DC Circulator The wavy red is good in all the same ways as ART’s green, and the addition of yellow adds a little more interest. So why rank Circulator below ART? All those destination names printed on the side of the bus are cluttering and confusing; you can’t get to Georgetown on the 14th Street route, so Georgetown shouldn’t be in big letters on its side.
Number 5: Fairfax County Connector Fairfax’s ketchup and mustard scheme rounds out the top 5 as the last of the paint jobs I personally like. Others say it’s tacky. What do you think?
Number 6: Montgomery County Ride-On Solid colors are more noticeable and better looking than horizontal stripes. Ride-On’s new livery at least has that going for it. But it seems backwards. Rear-facing chevrons and trim make the bus look like it’s perpetually slowing down, and I can’t help but think the pastel colors will begin to feel dated quickly. The old paint scheme was a lot better.
Number 7: Prince William Omni-Ride The best of the three bus systems that still use a horizontal stripe on a white background. Omni-Ride tops the other two because its stripe is the thickest.
Number 8: Alexandria Dash Looks like its from about 1985. The diagonal bit is something. Not much, but something.
Number 10: Loudoun County Transit The dishonor of last place goes to Loudoun, for not even trying. Logo sticker on a plain white background. Y-a-w-n.
Honorable mentions: No list of cool bus paint jobs would be complete without mentioning REX, Metro’s Go Green, and Dash’s streetscape liveries. They’re all great, but as special schemes are not eligible for the main ranking.
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