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Lowe Wins Bid for Old Wax Museum Site
$133 Million Development to Mix Residential, Retail
By Dana Hedgpeth, Staff Writer
A group led by Lowe Enterprises Mid-Atlantic Inc. has been chosen
to build apartments, condos and a grocery store at the site of
the former National Wax Museum, at Fifth and K streets NW downtown.
The National Capital Revitalization Corp. last night voted 7 to
0 for the Lowe redevelopment proposal. Lowe's $133 million plan
calls for a 55,000-square-foot Safeway grocery store with a Starbucks
coffee shop, dry cleaner and bank inside; 50,000 square feet of
other retail businesses; 623 condos and apartments, 20 percent
of which would be reserved as affordable housing; and 800 parking
spaces. The 3.2 acres, now a parking lot, is considered a crucial
element in the city's effort to create vibrant street life in
the area east of Mount Vernon Square, near the city's new convention
center. The housing component is considered especially important
to D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams's goal of attracting 100,000
new residents to the city in the next decade. The area, known
as the Mount Vernon Triangle, is bordered by New York, Massachusetts
and New Jersey avenues. City planners and developers have focused
on this area, desolate with empty lots and boarded-up buildings,
because of its location between the rapidly gentrifying Shaw neighborhood,
just to its north, and the city's booming East End. "It really
becomes the catalytic investment to trigger all of the Mount Vernon
Triangle development," Richard Bradley, executive director
of the Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District, said of the
Wax Museum site. "There's stuff happening, but now with the
Wax Museum, you all of a sudden get a critical mass in an area
that right now people think is in the middle of nowhere,"
Bradley said. JBG Cos. also has a 246-apartment residential project
and a 200-room hotel under construction at Fifth Street and Massachusetts
Avenue. NCRC President Theodore N. Carter said he hopes construction
will start at the Wax Museum site in spring 2005 and that the
project will be completed in four to five years. Lowe's team includes
CIM Urban Real Estate Fund LP, a California-based pension fund;
and Bundy Development Corp. and Neighborhood Development Co.,
both of the District. Its architect is Torti Gallas & Partners.
The group has until April 15 to negotiate details with the NCRC.
Last March, a deal with developer Horning Brothers fizzled after
the development team backed out, saying a weakened real estate
market made its project economically infeasible. Horning had offered
to build a grocery store, shops and 535 apartments, many of them
reserved for people with low incomes. Under the Horning deal,
the city was going to sell the land to the developer. But under
the deal with Lowe, the NCRC would sell it the land for the condos,
lease it the remaining land for 99 years, and share in the profits.
"This is something the city has put out there for years now,"
said Douglas Jemal, a developer who once bid on the property.
"The market happens to be very strong. It's a good time to
reposition it and get housing there. It's a blighted, empty lot.
It's time to get the show on the road." There were two runners-up
for developing the site. One, Market Commons Associates, was led
by Roadside Development LLC. It planned to put a Harris Teeter
grocery store in the project. The other team, known as the Mount
Vernon Park Partnership, had planned to bring in a Philadelphia-based
grocery store called Freshgrocer. The team was led by developer
John Akridge Cos.
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