D.C. offers small historic school, huge parking lot for lease and redevelopment

Wednesday, Apr 27, 2016

Washington Business Journal - Michael Neibauer

The District has a school it would like to lease you. And a much larger parking lot.

The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development has released a solicitation for the long-term lease and redevelopment of the historic Alexander Crummell School site in Ivy City, a 108,000-square-foot parcel bounded by Okie, Kendall and Gallaudet streets NE.

Courtey D.C. Preservation League

The site, 1900 Gallaudet St. NE, is one block west of Douglas Development’s Hecht Warehouse District, a block south of New York Avenue NE, and just northeast of the D.C. Department of Public Works campus on West Virginia Avenue — a site slated for redevelopment as the DPW headquarters, plus retail and commercial space for the private sector.

The school building was designated a D.C. landmark and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. While it requires exterior restoration, it should be retained. The parking lot, however, accounts for the vast majority of the site. It is currently leased to the Union Station Redevelopment Corp. for bus parking, but the USRC has never used it for that purpose (litigation put an end to that), and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is now negotiating to end the lease.

Crummell School was the subject of D.C.’s “Our RFP” process, a pilot program through which future development opportunities are put to the community before a solicitation is issued. Through that, DMPED has suggestions for interested developers: Preference will be given to proposals that include “multigeneration recreation,” passive uses of public space, a historical reference to the Crummell School and the Ivy City community, a job training or workforce development component, neighborhood-serving retail, small and local business opportunities, and incubator space.

Any residential proposals should be mixed-income, but maximize affordability.

The Rev. Alexander Crummell, a staunch abolitionist, was a pioneering Episcopalian minister and the first black student to graduate from the University of Cambridge. In D.C., where he settled in 1873, he established St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, organized the Conference of Church Workers Among Colored People, and founded the American Negro Academy.

Responses to the RFP are due by June 24.

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Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development - DMPED

D.C. offers small historic school, huge parking lot for lease and redevelopment

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D.C. offers small historic school, huge parking lot for lease and redevelopment

DMPED Real Estate Project Pipeline