Category: Uncategorized

Just looking at the web reports and In Shaw has had 10,041 visitors. Okay people I’m only allowed so much traffic per month…. so shoo. Really, I’m not that interesting. If I were where’s my book deal? My trophy boyfriend/husband? Well, at least I have great neighbors (with the exception of the crack head a few doors down).

Oh and other news, which I’m sure will totally jinx it…. I haven’t seen my friendly neighborhood drug dealer for days. Has he and his crew moved on? Are they in jail? Or have they taken off for vacation? Was it the uptick in police presence? It’s like wierd. But I’m not complaining.

There are a couple of emails floating around on the different listservs about the empty firehouse on North Capitol NW. On the Bloomingdale DC list the RFP for the firehouse was posted. The only concern I have for it was there is a historic designation pending. I worry that it may add costs and make it a little less attractive price wise. Other wise, make it retail and so they can share parking with Soul Day Spa on that spot on the corner of North Cap and Florida.
But what is more exciting came from the Truxton Circle dispatch yesterday via the Scot Robert’s Bloomingdale listserv (wait how many f*ing listservs does Bloomingdale have?)…. Mike Benson of Cafe Saint Ex, which a bunch of you like, is interested in the firehouse. WOOT!!!
Now if my coding works there should be a link to the email regarding the RFP for the firehouse…. (okay click on comments for full post)
The following was on the Bloomingdale Listserv:
Subject: Fwd: [BloomingdaleDC] RFP coming for the old firehouse at N. Cap & Quincy NW

FYI – Bloomingdale keeps stretching further and further!
Subject: [BloomingdaleDC] RFP coming for the old firehouse at N. Cap & Quincy NW
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 02:47:08 -0700 (PDT)

See the information sheet below from reSTORE DC about the upcoming request for proposals (RFP) for Bloomingdale’s old firehouse at North
Capitol Street NW and Quincy Place NW. Susan Cheng, Konrad Schlater, and John McGaw of the DC Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development have been invited to this evening’s ANC 5C meeting to discuss the future of the firehouse. Tonight’s ANC 5C meeting is being held at Edgewood Terrace Senior Building, 635 Edgewood Street NE, 9th Floor (Crawford Hall). (Visit www.anc5c.org for more information.)
It’s exciting to see this attention over one of Bloomingdale’s beautiful buildings. Old Engine Company 12 Disposition: Information Sheet

Objective

The District of Columbia is seeking to sell or lease Old Engine Company 12, the historic firehouse located at 1626 North Capitol Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. The DC Fire Department determined that the firehouse is surplus property. In March, 2005, the Office of Property Management transferred the firehouse to ReSTORE DC, and any net sale proceeds will benefit the Commercial Revitalization Trust Fund, which assists in the retention, expansion and attraction of neighborhood-serving retail
stores. The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development (ODMPED) is soliciting input on the disposition of the firehouse from the affected Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, community and civic organizations. After this process is completed, ODMPED will then issue the Solicitation of Offers, select a developer, and finally, introduce a disposition resolution to Council.

Firehouse Description
Old Engine Company 12 is a Spanish Colonial style firehouse located on North Capitol Street, NW, at North Capitol Street and Quincy Place NW. Designed and constructed by the municipal architect in 1897, it is one of the DistrictÂ?s 29 pre-World War II firehouses. These firehouses, dating from 1864 to 1939, were designed as landmarks for their respective neighborhoods. They are significant not only for their architectural merits and diversity, but also for their socioeconomic impacts on their neighborhoods, as the firehouses influenced subsequent residential and commercial development. Engine 12 moved into new quarters in 1987, leaving behind one of the finest firehouses the city has known. Today it sits vacant.

Building Properties

Property Address: 1626 North Capitol Street, NW
Legal Description: Square 3101/Lot 1 (the Â?PropertyÂ?)
Site Area: 5,000 square ft
Building Area: 12,500 square feet (estimated)

Floor-to-Area Ratio: The allowed FAR for the property is 2.5, of which no more than 1.5 can be for residential uses.

Current Zoning: C-2-A. By right development for this area is defined as a community business center district designed for medium density shopping, business, housing and mixed uses.

Historic Designation: Pending hearing

Environmental Status: There is no registered Underground Storage Tank System (UST). A 500 gallon gasoline UST was removed in 1999.

Potential Uses

Offerors have maximum flexibility in their development proposals to address the various selection criteria. Offers should address the disposition of Old Engine Company 12 as an historic building and include uses that will stabilize and enhance the neighborhood. Uses that are most desirable are those that will serve the immediate community, such as:

· Retail,
· Office,
· Housing and
· Cultural.

Of these uses, the ODMPED has a strong preference for ground-floor retail and cultural uses. These ideal uses would enable the building to retain its historic role as a community/civic landmark in the District as well as allow the building to be accessible by more of the public. Any proposal with a housing component must include a minimum 20% of housing gross floor area as housing affordable to households at no more than 80% of HUD Area Median Income. Any proposal with an office component will need a zoning text amendment, which the ODMPED would support. The ODMPED believes that office use on the upper floors would provide a greater
supply of daytime customers likely to support a ground floor retail business, especially if the proposed use of the space is for a restaurant.

Process: Tentative Timeline of Events

JUNE

ODMPED will brief Councilmember Orange and staff.
ODMPED will brief ANC 5C.
ODMPED staff to conduct meetings/conference calls with community members and civic associations.

JUNE-JULY

Issue solicitation by June 30 / July 1, 2005.

JULY

Responses to solicitation due by July 30, 2005.

AUGUST

Within 60 days of the selection of the developer, we will generate a Purchase & Sale Agreement for the property.

SEPTEMBER

On behalf of Mayor Williams, ODMPED will introduce a disposition resolution to Council with the Purchase and Sale Agreement attached to the Committee of the Whole (COW).

OCTOBER/NOVEMBER

Council holds a public hearing and votes on the Proposed Resolution by November 1, 2005.

Questions? Please contact Susan Cheng, Capital City Fellow, at 202-727-6880 or Konrad Schlater, Project Coordinator, at 202-727-6934.

Prepared by the office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

I hate my tub. There is a tub in a 5 star London hotel I want to marry and live the rest of my wrinkly skinned life in. I miss that tub. My tub, is too short even for a 5 foot 4 inch me to have a decent bath in and is generally pointless in it’s existence. So the opportunity to have an indulgent evening involving lots of water is denied to me.
So I’m looking at the two spas around Truxton Circle. First is Soul Day Spa in Bloomingdale, facing Truxton on the other side of Florida. The second is Exclusives in Shaw over on Rhode Island Ave. Problem is I’ve never done a day spa. I rarely paint my nails, waxing seems like a form of torture not approved by the Geneva code, and I grudgingly go to my hairdresser to get my hair done. But I’m dying for a professional massage and some needless pampering.
BL has been to Soul Day Spa and gave it positive reviews. I could have sworn I saw Exclusives on one of those grab people and give them a makeover shows. But Exclusives has a coupon and I’m naturally cheap.
It seems strange, there are a lot of things we don’t have on this end of Shaw, but we can go to a spa.

Just from the Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062300783.html
The Supreme Court favored the city in the eminent domian case. This is so wrong. I need to read more about how this happened and wtf were the judges thinking.

Update: Well I was going to drown my sorrows in the court decision at a bar with Nora, but she had other plans, so I stayed home and made pina colada ice cream. Take one pint of Haagen Daz Coconut Pineapple ice cream, add lotsa rum. After that and a game of Civilization, I felt less angry.

Quick mention. As part of my lunchtime reading I picked up a City Paper and found an article about homemade street memorials featuring Truxton Circle on page 11. Yeah, you can’t put a timetable on grief but there is a very good reason one sits Shiva for 7 days, because the community can only bear the grief for so long as it needs to move on and the grieved need to let it do so. Yes, most of us, including myself aren’t Jewish so sitting Shiva doesn’t apply, but you get the idea, very public grief for a short while, then the community/neighborhood moves on, you can continue to grieve but the rest of us have to continue with life. Not months on end where liquor bottles and dolls get moldy.

I’m on the Do Not Call registry for a reason. I don’t like to be bothered. I have gained the skill of getting off the phone with fire/police/vet “charities” quickly. I’m still working on annoying calls from my mortgage company trying to sell me a 2nd mortgage. So I don’t care to come home to find a message on my phone from Mr. Bobby Green from the Capitol Area Minority Contractors Assoc reading from a statement about the stadium.
A- I don’t even like baseball so I’m not too keen on paying for a new stadium for a team that just might up and leave before it’s all paid for
B- I already got the mailing you all sent, no I really don’t need a follow up call. If I didn’t really feel for you with the colorful mailer, the call ain’t gonna make me care more.
C- Don’t mention Vincent Orange. ‘Cause now I’m thinking he put you up to it to get his name out.

Well at least he didn’t call during dinner time.

I’m having evil thoughts.
Once upon a time, long time ago, when DC real estate prices were starting to go crazy, like 2001, I made my friends an offer. If they bought a house or condo in Shaw I would give them $1,000 to help with closing costs. Did I have $1,000 just to give away? Not really, but I could sell some precious tobacco stock if needed. I figured it was worth $1,000 to have the people I loved blocks from where I lived, instead of out in the burbs. I offered it to Liz, to Gn, and MH. Liz bought in Alexandria and the other guys never bought anything. After some time the tobacco stock got sold to pay for the new kitchen.
Now I’m thinking, if I’m willing to pay to have people come to DC, would I be willing to pay for people to go away? How much would you pay for the crack head a few doors down to just pack up and move? What is it worth to you? $500? $2,000? $10? Of course, half the problems don’t even live here, they just hang out.

Just got this message from Jim Berry:

Dear Neighbors,

At tonight’s ANC meeting, Mr. Thomas Gore, the Executive Director of Associates for Renewal in Education, is making a presentation about the above proposal to develop the Slater and Langston School buildings. After he concludes his presentation, he is likely to ask the Commission to support the proposal. I plan to strongly discourage the Commission from taking an action on this proposal at the present time, essentially, for the reasons that I shared with Mr.Gore when he and others made a recent request for the support of the Bates Area Civic Association, Inc.

That is, the DC Office of Property Management is currently developing a Request for Proposals to develop the Slater and Langston School buildings. Once that RFP is issued, Mr. Gore and ARE have an equal opportunity to respond to its elements in hopes of gaining the city’s final approval for their project. Similarly, other developers are likely to respond to the RFP and this will give us some measure of choice as to what uses we would prefer for those buildings in the future. The decision about the fate of these two buildings is a major one because whatever is developed at that location, we will have to live with for the next 30plus years.

As some of you know, we have been urging the city to develop those two buildings for a long time. And, now that we are in position to see what possibilities the market might bear, I think it would be unwise to pre-empt the RFP decision-making process by committing ourselves to a proposed project, without allowing ourselves any alternatives to consider and/or compare the ARE proposal with.

At this month’s BACA meeting, we referred the matter of ARE’s proposal to our Land Use, Planning and Economic Development Committee. In turn, this Committee is charged with the responsibility of examining and evaluating the details of the proposal to let us know what it really means for us and to make recommendations as to how we should respond to it.

It is also important to note that at the last meeting the BACA’s Land Use, Planning and Economic Development Committee made a recommendation that the civic association request a grant from ANC 5C to organize a “small area planning session” that would enable us to have a facilitated, community-wide conversation about the various assets that exist within our service area with an eye towards coming up with some recommendations that will reflect our vision of how we would like to see economic development evolve in our community over the next five to 10 years. Naturally, the Slater and Langston buildings would be two of the assets that we would be talking
about at this planning session to determine what we believe to be the most appropriate and productive future use of those buildings. The co-chairman of the Land Use, Planning and Economic Development Committee is scheduled to appear on the ANC agenda tonight to make the grant request. So, for this additional reason it would be highly premature to commit ourselves to any proposal at this time.

Specifically, at the BACA meeting, the gentleman from Chapman Associates talked about forming a partnership with ARE “to develop a state of the art early childhood education center and senior housing” at this location. In order to make the deal work, the developer said that he would propose to construct a nine story building of rental housing on the grounds in which the Slater and Langston buildings are presently situated. In addition, he plans to locate other rental housing in the Langston building. All of this to accommodate the business interests of ARE to operate an early childhood education program on the site. On these grounds, I am opposed to the proposal because I believe that the cost to the city and to us of,
basically, giving this valuable land to the developer to saturate the subject site with rental housing just to accommodate ARE’s business interests, is way too high a price for us to pay.
This morning, Mr. Gore circulate a flier around the community in an attempt to rally folks to attend the ANC meeting tonight in support of his proposal. He also urged residents to contact Council Member Vincent Orange’s office to “encourage me to vote in favor of” the ARE proposal. Be assured that I don’t take my direction on such matters from Council Member Orange and that tactics of this kind do not intimidate me. underlining by InShaw

If you support my position on this issue, please let me know and you can contact Council Member Orange’s office (202) 724-8028 to let him know as well.

Best,

Jim Berry
ANC 5C

Right now I’m too lazy to read between the lines or comment.

I’ve noticed the bright colored pots over on the tiny park on Florida and North Capitol NW and it has helped a bit. I also noticed the pointy additions to the metal work around the trees to keep people from sitting on them. However, I noticed the hanger outs have figured a way around the points. Plastic soda crates. Problem is it requires some balance. I noticed one fellow with equilibrium issues fall down. His buddies just leaned him against the tree box. Of course some just get a few milk crates and make a chair of those.

From today’s comments:

YooHooligan said…
Sadness alert: we discovered a grey Siamese-looking cat with dark grey tail and ear-tips lying dead in a tree box on 4th St. by R. It’s wearing a bright green collar, and looks to have been well-loved by someone. In the interest of safety, we called animal control to come pick it up, but I thought I’d say something just in case any Faithful Readers know who the poor baby belonged to.