August 30, 2011 from WAMU

The Walter Reed Army Medical Center has a storied past. It has been the country’s leading Army hospital for more than 100 years, sitting on a complex that includes a Civil War battlefield. There was a time when 16,000 patients a year sought treatment for wounds of war or illness.

By the end of August, all of the patients and doctors will have left, moved to Bethesda and Fort Belvoir as the Army consolidates its bases. But as one era closes, another opens: Washington, D.C., may be left with nearly 70 acres of prime real estate.

Neighborhood Businesses Face Change
Just after the midday rush at Ledo’s Pizza on Georgia Avenue in Northwest D.C., Tim and Kelly Shuy sit down at a table.

“We get a lot of military families, people who are visiting, folks who are in the hospital. We get a lot of contractors,” Kelly says.

Their pizzeria is across the street from the sprawling Walter Reed campus. Lush with trees and a hilly landscape, the campus includes several iconic 100-year-old buildings with red tile roofs where patients, their families and staff were able to wander and just look out on the rest of the neighborhood from a distance.

Many in the neighborhood call the medical center a fortress. But for the Shuys, it was a mainstay. Doctors and patients alike have supported their business for years.

“Some of them come in uniforms. We have patients who come in who haven’t been out of Walter Reed,” Kelly says. “I’ve had dozens of people tell me this is their first meal out of the hospital.”

But those days are just about over.

“We’ve been saying goodbye to people for a long time. We say goodbye to people every day,” Kelly Shuy said. “But it’s horrible — we’ve had tears over saying goodbye to people who are regulars.”

Of course the Shuys are losing more than just familiar faces.

“As far as the business goes, obviously it’s a huge hit for us,” Kelly says. As Walter Reed closes down, it leaves behind questions. What is going to take its place? There is no shortage of opinion among interested residents:

“We are looking for quality space for our students,” says Christine Encinas.

“We’d like to use part of it to develop affordable family housing,” says Troy Swanda.

“We’d like to see a bit of parkland right along here,” says Ellen McBarnett. “Many of the neighbors have been talking about dog-walk parks or places for children to play.”

City Eyes Retail Development
And that’s just the beginning. The State Department will take a chunk of Walter Reed’s 113 acres, possibly for embassies. But that leaves almost 70 acres for D.C. In a city where a quarter of the land is owned by the federal government, demand for land is high.

“This is a uniquely vocal community, let me just put it that way,” says Victor Hoskins, deputy mayor of Planning and Economic Development. He co-chairs the committee that is going to figure out just what the District of Columbia is going to do with all of this land.

“Actually, the interest we’ve gotten from a number of retailers already has been, really, quite astounding. What’s going to happen is when that fence comes down [and] we develop the retail along there, it will become a place to go,” Hoskins says. “And there’s a chance now to revive a Main Street, which is Georgia Avenue, which has for years been suffering from decay.”

D.C.’s government has a major interest, as well. For 100 years, this property has been federal and untaxable. The city estimates it could get $20 million a year in tax revenue. And the people who worked at Walter Reed mostly drove in and drove out, not spending as much in the neighborhood as destination consumers might. Plus, if retail takes off, it might supply local jobs. Of course, that’s assuming the city gets it right.



This satellite image shows how the Walter Reed Campus will be divided between the District of Columbia (purple) and the State Department (yellow). The District’s 67-acre portion includes both the old and new hospital buildings.

Coming Up With A Plan
Faith Wheeler is a neighborhood representative who lives near Walter Reed. Standing about a mile away from the hospital, she points to a block where new development didn’t work out so well.

“Well, I don’t want to see all those for-lease signs; look at that,” she says. “If that happened on Georgia Avenue’s Walter Reed campus, it would be awful, horrible. According to textbook ideas, this is the place where retail ought to be booming. It’s not.”
This is what Wheeler does not want to see: a street that’s a commuter corridor, lined by sterile and vacant office buildings. One thing she does want is some sort of tribute to the place’s history. And that is likely; many of the historic building facades will be kept. But Wheeler’s voice is one of many.

Public Meetings, And Many Rules
“It’s kind of the new realities of urban planning in the 21st century,” says Lisa Benton-Short, a professor of geography at George Washington University who has written about previous base closings. She says the Walter Reed campus will take awhile to sort out.

“I think for much of the 20th century, planners were quite top-down in their planning,” she says. “They told us what we needed in our spaces. Sometimes they were right, and sometimes they weren’t. In the last 25 years or so, the planning profession has really changed. And one of the most important ways it’s changed is to bring in public participation and planning.”

That means public workshops, public forums and many public meetings. Benton-Short says it will be messy. And the military has its rules, as well.

There will have to be services for the homeless, there will have to be organizations that serve the community, such as schools. And there’s an entire bureaucratic process that will probably take two years before a deal is finalized, let alone anything getting built. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will have to approve the plan, and there will have to be an environmental impact assessment, as well.

“We’re talking 10 years, 15 years before these visions are actually transformed into reality,” Benton-Short says.

That only heightens the fear of area businesses who will have to wait that long. There’s also radioactive waste from X-ray machines and cancer treatments that needs cleaning up. And there’s asbestos to be removed. That’s all possible — but it will take time. It’s also one reason that the amount D.C. will have to pay the Army for the land hasn’t been nailed down yet. But when all is said and done, one thing everyone agrees on is that the site holds real potential.

A Positive Legacy
“This is something that I hope will be a positive,” says Ethelbert Dawson, 77, who attended Walter Reed’s official closing ceremony last month. He lives around the corner, and for 25 years, he worked at Walter Reed as a research chemist.

“When I was here, I never thought that this day would ever come. We used to call it Walter Wonderful, because that’s what it was.”

He says he can’t really predict what this new space will mean for Washington, D.C.

“But for Walter Reed and all of the positiveness that hospital has given this community,” Dawson says, “I don’t know if they can ever reduplicate that.”

All eyes are on this space, to see whether the disappearance of a 100-year-old place of healing will usher in an urban rebirth — or leave a scar.

IN LATE 1976, Pink Floyd arranged to have a pig-shaped helium balloon the size of a double-decker bus raised above the hulking Battersea Power Station on the Thames in London for a photo shoot. The balloon escaped its tether and the pig floated away, eventually landing in a distant pasture and badly frightening some cows. But the image of pig and brooding power plant was committed to film, and later graced the cover of the group’s album Animals.

So when talk of demolishing the station arose in 2005 (it hadn’t been running since 1983), Pink Floyd fans rushed to the barricades. “You don’t dare to touch my chimneys,” one declared on a fan site. Demolition would be “an act of vandalism,” wrote another. “Every effort should be made to save Battersea.”

The monumental structure, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and built in stages beginning in 1929, is now safe from the wrecking ball. After more than a quarter-century of debate, London’s mayor signed off on a plan late last year that puts the iconic brick structure and its smokestacks at the center of a development of mid-rise apartments, offices, and entertainment venues. The project encompasses almost 40 acres and will cost nearly $9 billion.

Across the Atlantic, in Brooklyn, another monumental project on a former industrial site is also finally moving ahead. The Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg sits on nearly a dozen prime acres facing the East River. It’s long been a sentimental favorite—the 40-foot-high DOMINO SUGAR sign, with its jaunty script, sits like a comic-book dialog balloon over a grim Ashcan School tableau. The sugar factory closed in 2004; shortly afterward, it was acquired by the for-profit arm of a nonprofit seeking to build affordable housing. In 2007, the city landmarked the 1880s-era Romanesque Revival sugar refinery at the heart of the complex, and plans for its redevelopment called for residential towers to flank the old factory, much of which would itself be converted to apartments. Missing from the initial designs? The Domino sign. “It just looks empty, like there is a void,” Dewey Thompson, a member of Brooklyn’s Community Board 1, told a New York newspaper after seeing the designs at a meeting. Back to the drafting table: under revamped plans, a refurbished sign will glow again from atop the remodeled refinery.

The London and New York projects have several things in common. Chief among them: Rafael Viñoly, the Uruguayan-born, Argentinean-raised, New York–based architect famed for soaring steel structures such as the Tokyo International Forum and Seoul’s Samsung Jong-ro Tower. In charge of the master plan in both cases, he is designing new edifices for each site. But something else is worth noting: in both projects, Viñoly and his co-developers are trying to map a route through the hazy and treacherous borderlands that lie between architectural history and public nostalgia.

Viñoly’s studio is located on Vandam Street, in Manhattan, which by pleasing coincidence is the same street where William and Frederick Havemeyer established, circa 1807, the sugar factory that would eventually become Domino. When I spoke with him about the two projects, he radiated a wry detachment, sometimes sounding less like an architect than like an anthropologist trying to plumb complex and obscure rituals—in this case, how large-scale development navigates civic-preservation agendas on both sides of the Atlantic. And I thought I detected some irked undertones, as if he felt that he was working with a committee to design a setting for a jewel, rather than the jewel itself.

Viñoly made clear that he doesn’t think too highly of either gem he’s been handed. He panned the 1880s Domino factory as a pattern-book building, whose design was imported from Germany and is not native to the American industrial tradition. (What’s more, conditions in the factory may not have been worth celebrating. An 1894 story in the New York Tribune noted that the sugar-factory workers “are nearly all thin and stooped and rarely above middle age, it being a well-known fact that men employed in the refineries rarely live to old age.”) Viñoly designed the project to accommodate the factory; had it been torn down, he said, he likely would have arranged the buildings differently, playing off the nearby Williamsburg Bridge.

Although he acknowledged the heroic monumentality of Battersea, he’s slightly mystified by the public affection for the plant—people seem to forget that it is, after all, “a culprit in the history of pollution of the Thames,” and something that has helped destroy the climate. “It’s like preserving Dracula, somehow,” he said.

Cities are living projects, and must be constantly edited, often by an invisible hand—one structure needs to be deleted to make room for another, an early draft of this neighborhood is recast in a newer, tighter form. If nostalgia rules the day, nothing changes, nothing moves forward.

Still, it seems Viñoly may be more ambivalent than he need be about the historic structures on these sites—good arguments can be, and have been, marshaled that these buildings should be preserved for historic rather than sentimental reasons. But he’s right that, in general, nostalgia is gaining too much influence in these debates. “Train stations were done in the 19th century with some glamour,” he said. Now the preservation movement considers factories to be “as important as the Penn Station building, which they are not. But the narrative is the same.” Whether in New York or London, Viñoly lamented, the civic debate about setting preservation standards offers mostly shifting sands on which to try to construct something, before popular sentiment shifts yet again.

By WAYNE CURTIS, The Atlantic