Washington Business Journal // Michael Neibauer
Mayor Muriel Bowser started her public service career as a Ward 4 advisory neighborhood commissioner, sitting on the ANC that represents a portion of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She was elected Ward 4 D.C. Council member just as the Walter Reed community planning effort got underway. She lives two miles from the campus.
Needless to say, the groundbreaking on Wednesday of the first project there — a new home for Engine Co. 22 at 6825 Georgia Ave. NW — was worth celebrating.
“When I became the Ward 4 Council member, the Army, they wanted to keep the whole thing and give it to some other federal agency and wall it off and we wouldn’t have access to it,” Bowser said. “Boo to that idea. We decided to fight for it. In any BRAC process, the community gets something. And this community was going to get something too.”
The fire station groundbreaking, and related demolition, follows the introduction of long-awaited legislation setting up the sale of 66 of Walter Reed’s 110 acres to the District. D.C., as we reported Tuesday, will pay the Army $22.5 million, while receiving $25 million from the master development team over eight years. The development team is led by Hines Interests LP, Urban Atlantic and Triden, though numerous other partners are involved, from Toll Brothers toWeingarten Realty Investors and Hyatt Hotels.
The ultimate result: a 3.1-million-square-foot mixed-use development, to be built over two decades, that Bowser said will “transform the upper part of our city.”
The new fire station, designed by Sorg Architects and constructed by Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., will replace Walter Reed Building 18, an infamous former hotel that the Army used to house wounded soldiers. The Washington Post’s reporting on the miserable care those soldiers received, in a special report titled “ The Other Walter Reed,” earned the newspaper a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
The building was turned over to the District government in December 2014. The $12 million station, expected to open in late 2016 or early 2017, will house Engine Co. 22, Truck 11 and Ambulance 22. The companies will relocate from 5760 Georgia, where they have been housed since 1897.
“We will be able to move our firefighters from a crowded, obsolete and falling-down facility to a state-of-the-art facility right here on Georgia Avenue,” Bowser said.
Said Fire Chief Gregory Dean: "I know our firefighters love it, because they’re like little kids. We’ve got something new."