O Street Market, DC: Great Expectations

Conspicuously dilapidated, clearly historic, and located near a number of housing projects, O Street Market at 7th and O Street in Washington, DC is the kind of project an overly enthusiastic historic preservation graduate student would write their thesis about. O Street Market could easily illustrate the history of DC's Shaw neighborhood, DC's race relations and housing issues, and its urban renewal goals.

But I'm supposed to be blogging about food politics. And my attorney (also my fiance) advises me to be brief, like bloggers do, not long and lecturey, like someone who was once an overly enthusiastic historic preservation graduate student.

The New Old Market

The 1881 market's heyday was in the 1930s and 40s, according to reports from the 1970s. It fronts a major historic route to Maryland farms. According to one account in the late 1970s, produce stalls once lined 7th Street on market days from O Street Market all the way to Florida Avenue (north by several blocks). Today, that's a pretty bleak stretch.

O Street Market has been on the verge of rehabilitation for a while now. It's part of a bigger plan for the site.

http://www.roadsidedevelopment.com/admin/Editor/f1l3s/rd_oSt_marketing.pdf

This plan involves tearing down a Giant supermarket on the other side of the two-block lot, and adding a hotel, rental and senior housing, and condominiums. In the plan, the historic market is a landmark cornerstone, and the market function on the site (in the Giant, to be demolished) is incorporated into the older building.

In general, most everyone is excited about the project. Concerns include the scale of the new development relative to the context, restoring 8th Street (a part of the L'Enfant plan) which was erased in the late 1970s site plan and gentrification issues. The project's architect, Shalom Baranes Associates, has incorporated preservation officials' feedback into the design.

Community Feedback

Can O Street be compared to Capitol Hill's Eastern Market? O Street's rehab has been delayed for some time while Eastern Market was quickly rehabbed after an April 2007 fire. Given Shaw's challenges, and the history of the site, a fairer comparison -- at least when thinking about the ultimate impact of the project -- might be the larger-scale CityVista, a multiuse development in the nearby Mount Vernon Triangle neighborhood.

Though that site doesn't include a landmark building, the overall idea and neighborhood concerns and needs are much more similar to Shaw's than Capitol Hill's. Capitol Hill's public Eastern Market has been in continuous operation since 1873. O Street Market's history has been up and down, and tied into urban renewal plans for Shaw (more on this below).

CityVista's program, including a large grocery store function, (http://www.cityvistadc.com/f_index.php) shows how this scale of development might work in the Shaw neighborhood. CityVista is still very new -- it opened last year -- but a review of blogs focused on living in downtown DC suggests CityVista's Safeway is now the supermarket downtown.

Historic Politics

Forty years ago, development ideas about O Street Market attempted to balance the needs and desires of new (more affluent, white) residents with the needs of existing residents. (Note: Shaw is historically multiracial and middle class with some pockets of poor residents). The building's developer in the late 1970s, James Adkins, proposed flood lights to make new white residents feel comfortable shopping on O Street. This was no simple ribbon cutting.

O Street Market stood closed for over a decade after the April 1968 riots following Martin Luther King's assassination. The Giant was the District's first new supermarket after the riots. ("Old-Style Markets Return," Washington Post, November 29, 1970).

The historic market's reopening, along with the Giant, made many very optimistic. Reporting about the two markets in the late 1970s and 1980 was a mix of nostalgia and ideas about what Shaw needed to do well.

Unfortunately, the good late-1970s ideas for O Street's rehab (including a proposal for a neighborhood kitchen and culinary training) didn't come together exactly as planned. Sales were less than brisk. A 1994 shooting inside the market, resulting in the death of a 15 year old, and 8 wounded, left sales even scanter, and vendors packed up for other markets. The shooting dominated reporting about the historic building after that, even in more recent reports about Roadside Development's plan. The building's roof fell in after a snowstorm in 2003. It's now gutted and fenced off.

As a Shaw resident, I'm maintaining optimism about O Street Market. It's a complicated project, but certainly well worth the wait.