Posts about Navy Yard

Yards Park unnecessarily bans bicycles

Rules and regulations for the Yards Park are unequivocal. They list "bike riding," along with drug and alcohol use, smoking and "using more than one seat on a bench designed for sharing" among those activities prohibited by park guidelines.

The rules list no reason, but this most likely derives from a presumed conflict between cyclists and other users of the park, as is common on mixed-use paths. However, inside the park itself, that conflict doesn't arise.

The path through the park, including the bridges from Diamond Teague Park and the boardwalk that runs to the entrance of the Washington Navy Yard, is quite wide (upwards of 30 feet in parts) and has plenty of space for many different kinds of users to mix.

Rather than contribute to conflicts, this vast amount of space gives ample room for cyclists to pass safely while still letting people on foot casually stroll or enjoy the view. Though the path does narrow at certain points, it still remains wide enough for mixed bicycle and pedestrian traffic.

This award-winning park is quite a lovely one. It could become an activity center in the Near Southeast neighborhood, as the home of restaurants and shops that will be genuine amenities for the nearby community. Yards Park has also hosted many community events, including last year's celebration of bicycling, the Tour de Fat, hosted by New Belgium Brewery, which sought to "spread... the good word about the positive societal offerings of the bicycle." The event raised over $20,000 for the Washington Area Bicyclist Association.

Banning bicycles seems contradictory to the goal of becoming a welcoming gathering place for an increasingly multi-modal neighborhood.

Navy Yard Riverwalk unnecessarily bans bicycles

The Washington Navy Yard Riverwalk has, in the past few years, gone from completely prohibiting public access to limited public access on workdays, to expanded daytime access on weekdays, to daytime access seven days a week, to unlimited 24/7 public access, with the exception of closures for official events. Each successive increase in accessibility has been a step in the correct direction.

However, this increase is access does not extend to bicyclists. The Navy Yard Riverwalk rules prohibit bicycling, along with rollerblading and skateboarding. Child strollers and wheelchairs are still permitted. Much like the path through Yards Park, this section of the trail does not lack for space to accommodate of cyclists and pedestrians.

The Navy justifies the ban among the Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Can I ride my bike or roller blade on the Riverwalk?

A: No. Bike riding, rollerblading, skateboarding, or scooter use is not permitted. The pedestrian bridge that makes up part of the Navy Yard's Riverwalk is narrow, and cannot support intermingled pedestrian and any type of vehicular traffic. Child strollers and wheelchairs are allowed.

Employees exiting through turnstiles onto the Riverwalk will not have immediate situational awareness of their surroundings, and may not see oncoming vehicular traffic in time to avoid a collision. The reverse would be true for someone who is on a bicycle, skateboard, rollerblades or scooter who would suddenly be confronted with a pedestrian that emerged from a turnstile. This is an obvious safety concern as collisions would be unavoidable.

The pedestrian bridge mentioned above is about 60 feet long and approximately 5 feet across. It seems sensible to think that this is too narrow to be effectively and safely shared by pedestrians and cyclists.

However, given that the bridge is only a very small section of the trail, it does not seem to justify banning bicycling throughout. The Navy could place a "Dismount Bikes When Pedestrians Present" sign here and permit bicycling in the other, wider sections that make up the overwhelming majority of the Navy Yard Riverwalk.

Perhaps more curious is the reference to the security-controlled turnstiles that sporadically provide access from the trail to the facilty and vice versa.

On the other side of the 3 of 4 turnstiles are parking lots. Presumably, the lack of situational awareness that accompanies the use of a turnstile proves to be no problem when heading the other direction, and while collisions with bicyclists, rollerbladers, skateboarders and scooter users are unavoidable, collisions with automobiles are not.

Unless a cyclist were riding within a few feet nearest to the turnstile and fence that separate the facility from the Riverwalk (and given the width of the trail, this seems unlikely), there is no good reason to believe that a collision would obviously occur.

There are far less burdensome ways to keep pedestrians safe

In both the case of the Navy Yard and Yards Park, the outright bans are clumsy approaches to the commendable goal of pedestrian safety. As the pictures above show, both facilities have more than enough room for users on foot and on bicycles to share them effectively. Each is even vastly wider than the region's shared mixed-use paths, like the Capital Crescent Trail and the Mount Vernon Trail.

To better help different users share the trail, there could be elements as simple as signs asking pedestrians and bicyclists to be mindful or each other, or painted sharrows, pointing out the preferred path for bicyclists through the area. Efforts to keep pedestrians safe need not come at the cost of removing Yards Park and the Navy Yard Riverwalk as destinations for people arriving by bicycle.

If Yards Park and the Navy Yard Riverwalk continue to ban bicycling, the alternative options for cyclists traveling along the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail from areas such as Hill East, Kingman Park, the Southwest Waterfront or East Potomac Park include crossing the Anacostia River on the 11th Street Bridge and then recrossing on the Douglass Bridge, bicycling along the 6-lane M Street SE/SW, or diverting to L Street SE, a quiet neighborhood street that is amenable to biking, but not in any way along the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail.

"The rules against biking in Yards Park and on the Navy Yard Riverwalk are frustrating for a few reasons—first and foremost being that no one would naturally assume that bikes aren't allowed in these attractive, convenient, and spacious waterfront areas," writes David Garber, neighborhood commissioner in ANC 6D.

"If we are 100% about encouraging biking in DC, especially in a neighborhood often touted by District officials as being multi-modal, our rules about biking have to match our talk." Garber plans to introduce resolutions encouraging a closer look at these rules at a future ANC meeting.

The Anacostia Riverwalk Trail provides a genuine alternative to bicycling along city streets. For families, beginner cyclists and those who wish to enjoy a quiet ride in a natural environment, this link will prove vital to Washington's transportation and recreation system. However, bicycle bans jeopardize these seamless, off-street connections.

Mayor Gray, DDOT and local stakeholders must work with Yards Park and the Washington Navy Yard to balance the needs of pedestrian safety with the the need for a continuous bicycling corridor in this part of the District. People on bicycles and on foot can coexist, and our trails and public spaces must demonstrate this fact.

Hutchinson writes that a "desire for country living, fresh water, and relief from the heat" was the leading attraction of life across the riverbed. "Economic conditions beyond the control of the developers plagued the enterprise. In the early 1850s the Navy curtailed ship building at the Washington Navy Yard, and many skilled workers were unemployed." As a result, Hutchinson explains, the lots of old Uniontown gained houses at a rate of only 4 per year.

A Navy lieutenant brings the round-shot and prosperity

But in January 1847, Navy Lieutenant John Dahlgren arrived at the Washington Navy Yard, to lead the manufacturing of rockets recently developed by British inventor William Hale, according to Round-shot to Rockets; A history of the Washington Navy Yard and U.S. Naval Gun Factory. By April Dalhgren was leading the Bureau or Ordnance and had received the Navy's approval for a "new and larger workshop."

Round-Shot says:

Because there was not sufficient level ground available for ranging the guns, [Dahlgren] proposed to use the river. No such experiment for accurate results had been previously tried over the water, and it became necessary to develop a method by which the splash made by the fall of the shot might be precisely located. [Dahlgren] quickly devised by a system of triangulation. The Dahlgren test battery at the Navy Yard came thereby into existence.

In May 1854 the Navy Yard erected a new ordnance building 250 feet long and on October 25, 1854 "the furnace in the new foundry was lighted off for the first time." Soon thereafter cannon balls began landing in the Eastern Branch. With a splash in the old man river, Uniontown got its start.

According to news stories and official reports of the Secretary of the Navy, by 1855 the Washington Navy Yard's workforce was upwards of 1,100. The most preeminent positions were filled by 300 ship-carpenters, 200 machinists, 150 blacksmiths, 50 joiners, 60 plumbers and camboose makers, more than 100 iron and brass foundry workers, 85 civil engineers, and 85 laborers.

In April 1860, before Abraham Lincoln's election, the Baltimore Sun took notice of the city's first suburban development that sprung up to house the new workers that Dahlgren's innovations required.

Some time since The Sun noticed that within the last few years a new and flourishing neighborhood had sprung up on the margin of the Eastern Branch, immediately opposite the Navy Yard. For reasons that place is known and recognised [sic] as "Uniontown."

The story also describes the laying of a corner-stone for a new Methodist Episcopal Church on land described as being on "three of the most eligible lots" donated by developers John Fox and John Van Hook.

A little more than a year later, as troops flooded into the city on the verge of Civil War, the Seventy-first New York gave a matinee concert before a sizable and distinguished crowd, according to Margaret Leech's Pulitzer Prize-winning Reveille in Washington. "One of the great cast-iron Dahlgren guns was fired at targets in the river, and the Seventy-first New York marched in dress parade."

Removing tolls brings east of the river closer

The other dynamic that made Uniontown's development possible was removing tolls from the Navy Yard Bridge.

According to journalist-researcher Steve Ackerman, writing for the Surratt House Museum, "Over time, Maryland's legislature stridently prodded Congress to remove the tolls on the Eastern Branch bridges, to benefit 'persons who frequent the markets of Washington and Georgetown, for the sale of their productions' by removing the 'heavy tax in the form of bridge tolls on their produce'" as an 1844 resolution in the Maryland legislature stated. In 1852 Congress bought the bridge and removed the tolls, freeing up back and forth movement for both merchants and residents.

As the area awaits residential and commercial revitalization, smart money reportedly has their eyes on Anacostia, invoking the area's history as a key selling point.

This article is adapted from the forthcoming Frederick Douglass' Washington: The Lion of Anacostia, to be published by The History Press on October 9th.

"The first iteration is almost always horrible," said Harriet Tregoning, DC's planning director. Tregoning argued that communities need to be constantly vigilant and to push back through review and input.

An example of a federal building with negative impact is the FBI Building in downtown Washington. When asked if they thought it was "the worst building in DC," a significant portion of the audience raised their hands. Foreboding and removed from the street, this building serves as an example of what not to do.

On the other hand, the sheer number of workers a new federal office brings into an area can activate the neighborhood. This activity can spur more growth and create new urban fabric where there previously was none. They can give birth to entirely new neighborhoods, or revive ones long since written off.

Qualities of many federal facilities pose problems

Federal office buildings are inherently single-use. Office workers do little for neighborhoods after business hours. This can be especially damaging when agencies cluster, creating large single-use neighborhoods. By spreading offices throughout the region, federal projects can invigorate many different neighborhoods instead of negatively affecting just a handful.

Federal buildings farther from transit often use shuttle buses. These could also provide a desirable transit option for neighborhood residents, but security rules often bar them from riding. This has been part of the conversation around the Department of Homeland Security's new offices at the former St. Elizabeth's hospital site between Anacostia and Congress Heights.

Individual buildings can do a lot to help or hurt their neighborhood. The parking garage for the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) in Alexandria is lined with townhouses on two sides, but other sides are just screened and set back from the street with landscaping, creating a dead streetscape. Many projects fall into this same pattern, with a mix of successful and unsuccessful components.

Security drives many design decisions and harms communities

The General Services Administration (GSA) is working to reverse damage to the streetscape from its massive headquarters in Foggy Bottom. The building is currently entirely disconnected from the street, but GSA plans to bring retail back to the building's street frontage.

To do this, they had to get creative with a factor that hampers the design of many federal projects, security. Security drives a lot of design decisions for federal projects.

For example, the US Department of Transportation's building in the District's Navy Yard neighborhood takes up two entire city blocks, but has only one retail space along its entire façade, a Starbucks. It brings many workers to the area, but does little for the street.

In urban conditions, security hurts the streetscape by restricting building access from the street and for­bidding retail from lining the outside of buildings. In more suburban conditions it creates large campuses, cut off from what little grid there is and keeping workers from being able to activate the area around them. These large campuses also restrict the ability for planners to attempt to reconnect neighborhoods.

By adapting, many agencies are tackling these issues. The GSA's headquarters was formerly a Level 5 security building. In its renovation, they created a graduated security system, where not all areas of the buildings require the maximum security. As a result, almost all the security bollards around the building could be removed, a marked improvement to pedestrian conditions.

The lower level of security makes street level retail a possibility, and the GSA is looking into opening the building's cafeteria to the public, allowing the agency to share this amenity with their neighborhood.

Sustainability goes beyond LEED

Federal buildings built today have more environmentally-friendly design features. This demonstrates leadership and forward thinking from GSA and the agencies, but Rollin Stanley, Director of Planning for Montgomery County, was careful to remind the audience that the greenest building is the one that already exists, and urged federal designers not get too caught up in LEED.

A LEED Platinum building with no transit options but hundreds of free parking spaces will do more harm to the environment that a building built to lower environmental standards. There are many different factors to take into account to judge a building's true impact on the environment.

Many federal buildings, like many private buildings, are building more parking spots than they need to. Federal agencies are often surprised by how many workers will choose to commute in ways besides driving. At the Mark Center in Alexandria, offices for the Department of Defense were expected to produce massive gridlock. Instead, 50% of workers utilize transit to get to the site.

Little touches can do a lot

With creative designs, federal buildings can often make the most out of restrictions out of their control. The PTO's work in Alexandria requires constant delivery of packages between offices, so the hallways were placed facing the street. This allowed workers to make deliveries by daylight and activate the streetscape. The building could not have retail, but the PTO activated the street in a unique way.

Small-scale gestures have very positive effects on the areas around government offices. The PTO provides Wi-Fi in a small park adjacent to the offices and installed glass columns that light at night. Despite larger urban design failings, small gestures like these can make a big difference in neighborhoods.

Federal projects have their own strengths and weaknesses, but each gains from the collective knowledge of the projects that have come before. Agencies are generally moving towards better designed buildings, closer to transit, that give workers more flexibility. We will surely witness missteps along the way, but the trajectory for these buildings and the positive change they can bring to the areas is promising.

"Active recreation," like a climbing wall, zip line, and many activities for kids could improve health in a part of the city where many kids are not as healthy as they should be. Autumn Saxton-Ross from the Department of Health said that having spaces for play creates "whole children who develop into whole adults."

The bridge could contain community gardens that grow food, a place for food trucks to hold festivals like Truckeroo, or even trees; an avid community gardener who lives in the area emphasized that last one, as it gets quite hot in the summer and a bridge is exposed to the elements.

Then there is the streetcar. Problems between DDOT and the US Department of Transportation scuttled tracks on the new local bridge now under construction, at least for now, but perhaps that would open up a new opportunity to put the tracks on this "recreation bridge."

Making this bridge succeed might not be easy. A bridge is a very big space; this one is over 1000 feet long. It's in the middle of the river, and connects 2 neighborhoods of only moderate density. Even from them, there's a substantial walk to reach to the bridge itself.

Therefore, any use will have to attract people who are deliberately going to the bridge as a destination, rather than people just wandering by or popping over between work and dinner. It will need to have enough different activities to keep the bridge busy most of the day, every day, lest it turn into a dead space or a haven for crime.

Or maybe there is a way to mix active uses with people who are just passing through? If the streetcar traverses this bridge, and stops a few times along the way, it could make the bridge be more of a continuous connector between Capitol Hill and Anacostia. The bridge could get a cafe or two. It would create "eyes on the street" (or bridge), draw the bridge much closer to surrounding neighborhoods, and bring potential users of the bridge's activities passing right by every day.

The bridge would also get closer to surrounding areas if the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail could remain open more of the time. The Navy Yard now allows people to walk and bike past the base during the day every day, which is more than they initially promised. But can it be open all of the time?

A representative from DMPED was optimistic. He said that the Navy Yard now actually finds it somewhat of a burden to open and close the trail every day, and would like to avoid that responsibility. They've also added more security along that edge of the yard, making them more comfortable just allowing public access along that side. He gave no firm details, but it sounds like residents can hope for a 24-hour trail in the future.

As for the bridge, DDOT already gave out a contract to demolish the 2 old bridges. Tregoning said that while DC could try to renegotiate and keep the existing bridge structure, it's in very bad shape. Instead, they will just keep the piers, since those are very expensive to plant in the river, and remove the entire deck.

Another benefit of removing the deck is that a new one needn't be a simple rectangle. Maybe it will take a different shape. It could be thinner, or wider, or some of each in different places. Maybe it can connect in a few places to the new local road, bike, and pedestrian bridge that's being built right next to it.

OP is hoping to start a national design competition this summer, to find the most creative designs from anyone, anywhere.

The bridge project will probably cost around $25-35 million. That's only a tenth of the cost of the highway bridge project, but it's not pocket change, and DC has many other priorities as well. For this reason, they hope to attract private money, either from local organizations or national foundations. For a project which could become an icon for DC, many may be quite interested.

Getting the streetcar onto the bridge would take some creative thinking, too. The new bridges are using some of the space that's now approach ramps to the old bridge. That means there won't necessarily be a smooth and direct approach to the "recreation bridge" on each side. We'll have to wait for a later design phase to find out if there's even a way to get a streetcar on and off the bridge.

The residents in the room were overall either very eager at least open-minded. Some seemed to primarily come to the meeting to ensure that the vehicular bridge was going to open on time and that nothing was changing with that plan. Others were bursting with ideas.

Right now, this project largely seems to be taking advantage of an opportunity. I can imagine Tregoning sitting in a meeting, hearing a status update about the bridge, and suddenly saying, "Wait a minute! We have this bridge over the Anacostia and we're just going to rip it out? When the District is so concerned with figuratively bridging east and west of the river and there are so many needs especially on the east side?"

So far, all the government proposes to do is essentially preserve a bunch of piers to make it far cheaper to build a recreational bridge. Whether something ever gets built is up to residents, leaders, and designers to figure out a way to make it a great public space worthy of the investment.

While the completion of another missing link in greater Washington's growing network of hiking and biking trails is a significant step forward, its closure during the evening rush hour prevents it from being used by most bicycle commuters, and its closure on weekends and holidays discourages recreational cyclists.

The Navy also warns that access to the trail may be blocked for safety or operational reasons at any time, without notice.

The Navy should be applauded for its contribution to DC's quality of life and car-free transportation infrastructure. Let's hope that the new Riverwalk Trail will become popular enough, despite its limited availability, to convince the Navy to increase the hours it is open.