An in-depth article in Next City describes the ambitious plans for the 11th Street Bridge Park, which could bring unchecked development to low-income Anacostia, along with great amenities. LISC D.C. has pledged $50 million to support deliberate, equitable development adjacent to the bridge so that existing residents don’t get shut out their neighborhoods and potential opportunities. Oramenta Newsome, LISC D.C. executive director, weighs in on our role and the imperative of supporting the local community.
The excerpt below is from:
Bridging D.C.‘s Starkest Divide
By Amanda Kolson Hurley, Next City
...The 11th Street Bridge Park “is the one project that’s going to ring the dinner bell for the last frontier of gentrification,” says Kymone Freeman, a D.C. activist and artist who co-owns a community radio station in Anacostia. “Anacostia has the potential of becoming Georgetown really easily” — for good or ill.
“WHAT GETS MEASURED GETS DONE”
Kratz’s base of operations is THEARC (Town Hall Education Arts Recreation Campus), a sprawling arts and rec center crossed with a health clinic, a Boys and Girls Club, a youth shelter, a girls’ school, and other service centers. Built and operated by a consortium of local nonprofits, THEARC sits on Mississippi Avenue in Southeast Washington, in a neighborhood of garden apartments and vinyl-sided townhouses just shy of the Maryland line. The Bridge Park team — officially a unit of the nonprofit Building Bridges Across the River at THEARC — works in a small suite of rooms above a theater, accessed via the dressing room. It feels improvisational, befitting a project that grew out of a conversation between friends, and has outstripped anyone’s expectations.
Back in 2011, the now oft-told story goes, Harriet Tregoning, then D.C.’s planning director, got to thinking about the piers left standing in the Anacostia following the dismantling of the old highway bridge, replaced by a new one just to the east. What if these piers could be repurposed somehow?
She talked to Kratz, then the vice president for education at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington, and they hatched the idea of a linear park like the High Line in New York. He agreed to find out if the idea had legs, and sat through a marathon of meetings — about 200 — with community groups on either side of the river. The response was positive, so Kratz kept meeting, planning and pushing. In 2014, he quit his job at the museum to advocate for the park full-time, as an employee of Building Bridges.
“Development for development’s sake, just putting shovels in the ground, that’s not good enough. How does that money, the time and the resources go back to support the local community?” The first sign the project was more than a utopian dream was a commitment in 2014 by the city, under then-Mayor Vincent Gray, to fund a substantial part of the cost. Large donations followed, and Kratz has now raised $15.5 million (including $11.45 million from the District), with another major gift pending, he says.
Since the beginning, the project has stressed collaborating with local residents. For example, the design competition back in 2014 departed from the usual practice of an ivory-tower jury picking a winner in isolation. Instead, Kratz formed an “oversight committee” of local civic-minded types — everyone from the head of a soup kitchen to environmental activists to the director of the Washington Ballet. This group edited the design brief before it went out, met with the finalist designers and advised the jury.
Other Bridge Park efforts show the same degree of conscientiousness. Take the Lantern Walk. With a craft activity and musical performances, it held obvious appeal as a family-friendly event. But the rationale for organizing it was rooted in a piece of Washington history that Kratz and his partners learned: In the late 19th century, African-Americans who worked in Washington would cross the river after dark and build their own houses near Anacostia by candlelight. On the walk, a local pastor gave a prayer to honor these forerunners.
However, it’s the project’s Equitable Development Plan, finalized last winter, that really sets it apart. (The plan was funded by the JPB Foundation, the Kresge Foundation and LISC DC.) Shortly after announcing the winning design for the park in 2014, Kratz convened a task force to discuss equitable development in the areas around the bridge. This task force had a core of nine people, plus special groups of 15 to 20 people each that focused on three areas: housing, workforce development and small business enterprises. What emerged from their discussions was a set of strategies under each of these three rubrics — and crucially, a timeline, coordinated with the expected timeline for rollout of the plan.