Neigh­bors, Coun­cil Pan Fenty Plan for Apart­ments at His­toric School

By Bill Myers | Octo­ber 8, 2009

Mayor Adrian Fenty’s plan to con­vert a his­toric D.C. school for freed slaves into a lux­ury apart­ment build­ing has run into fierce oppo­si­tion from neigh­bors in Foggy Bot­tom and D.C. Coun­cil members.

In late Sep­tem­ber, Fenty awarded a con­tract to Equity Res­i­den­tial so that the Chicago-based firm could con­vert the Thad­deus Stevens Ele­men­tary School into an apart­ment build­ing. Many neigh­bors in Foggy Bot­tom — many of them already angry that Fenty closed Stevens — have erupted.

“We have high expec­ta­tions and we want to see a sig­na­ture project there,” Advi­sory Neigh­bor­hood Com­mis­sioner Rebecca Coder said.
“Rental units don’t cut it.”

Coder and her friends have elicited promises to kill the Equity con­tract from three D.C. coun­cil­men on the five-member eco­nomic devel­op­ment committee.

“It doesn’t work here,” Coun­cil­man Jack Evans, D-Ward 2, said of the devel­op­ment.
Evans’ is a cru­cial defec­tion because he has long been one of Fenty’s most loyal allies.

The city is sit­ting on tens of mil­lions of dol­lars worth of prop­erty in the form of aban­doned or shut­tered schools like Stevens. City law requires that char­ter schools get first choice of old pub­lic schools build­ings, but crit­ics say that Fenty and his team have rou­tinely short-circuited those require­ments to hand over schools to pri­vate developers.

Fenty spokesman Sean Madi­gan didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Stevens School, near the inter­sec­tion of 21st and K streets NW, was founded in 1873 for freed slaves. It has a long list of cel­e­brated alumni and has been des­ig­nated a his­toric site by the National Park Service.

Much of the resis­tance to Equity’s con­tract has been orga­nized by Asher Cor­son, another Foggy Bot­tom neigh­bor­hood com­mis­sioner and a press aide to Coun­cil­woman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3. He sent a let­ter to Equity exec­u­tive Greg White Mon­day night urg­ing him to bow out gracefully.

“The deal is dead,” Cor­son told The Exam­iner. “At this point, there’s noth­ing left to talk about. Hope­fully, this will give the city and Equity an out.”

White said his com­pany won’t walk away from the deal.

“We haven’t con­sid­ered it,” he said. “We con­tinue to look for­ward to meet­ing with the community.”

Cor­son said that most neigh­bors favored a hotel devel­op­ment pitched by native Wash­ing­ton­ian Don Pee­bles, who has built a $4 bil­lion empire of lux­ury hotels — mostly in New York and Miami. Equity, which mar­kets its apart­ments to young sin­gles, can­vassed no sup­port because many neigh­bors saw the project as a “lux­ury dorm,” Cor­son said.