They’re finally putting the final piece of Capitol Hill Townhomes together.

The pace is pure D.C.: That final fillip of the nationally famous “new wave” public housing project, a “community center,” was due to open in 2001.

Now that it’s actually being built at 6th Street and Virginia Avenue S.E., controversy is past. Ellen Wilson/Capitol Hill Townhomes is a tourist destination, a poster boy for urban success.

It was once thought that public housing — even public housing in designer row houses, mixed incomes and scientifically calculated subsidy-free — was doomed to fail. You can take the poor out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the poor, cynics here on the Hill said.

Some of the oldest of the naysayers can even remember when the 1941 Ellen Wilson Dwellings, the 5-acre, 134-unit, totally up-to-date brick village, was touted as a civic triumph, replacing “one of the most notorious slums in the city.” Ironically, it was restricted: whites only need apply.

But glory days were brief. The Southeast/Southwest Freeway took away 15 buildings, and, by the ’60s, the project had become a black slum that featured the worst design faults: It resembled a military barracks, which contrasted sharply with the warm variety of Hill row houses. It almost screamed poverty, separation, ugliness and rejection.

By 1988, the D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA), one of the city’s most inefficient and corrupt agencies, moved the people out, turning it from a squalid slum to a hell of squatters and drug users for eight long years, until it was finally demolished in 1996. Then Townhomes rose on two large grants from the federal government in 1993 and 1995.

The project was blessed from the first: the architect, Amy Weinstein, was already famous for her interpretations of 19th century Hill row houses. She was a stickler for detail, who demanded that contractors show the exact shade of mortar they’d use between the bricks. The developer, Marilyn Melkonian of Telesis, had already scored with attractive and successful public housing projects in Boston. Thanks to DCHA ineptitude, D.C. courts brought in receiver James Gilmore, a star among bureaucrats. A strong management was set up under Ed Batal, a local resident and former Marine.

Locals, who had thought that no one who could afford to live elsewhere would want to live in a subsidized housing project, were surprised when the most expensive units in the mix were the first to sell. The little community never looked back, and now it’s an urban showplace, included on the newly popular heritage tours of famous Washington neighborhoods.

Last week, carpenters were cladding the peaky tower on the two-story, 4,000-square-foot community center. It will contain office space for the property manager, a meeting room, an exercise area, perhaps a computer learning center. It’s four years late, but completely noncontroversial. Locals hardly remember that their tax dollars are paying for it.

RFK’s open air market squashed by fiat

There was really nothing quite like it: The farmers and flea market at Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, which ran there with increasing frequency but usually Thursdays and Saturdays at Stadium Parking Lot 6.

It was a place you could find a set of tires or a used chain saw, a bicycle or a mattress, a bunch of greens or a pile of grapefruit, a jerk sandwich or a croaker cooked in hot oil, a bureau or a package of socks. Prices were between you and the seller.

But the famous flea market, which ran there since 1989 (the farmers have been there since 1977), was eviscerated without a hearing or any due process in January by the D.C. Sports Commission. Now only a reduced number of farmers remain; the enormous traffic generated by the flea market is missed.

A death knell sounded two years ago when the Sports Commission wasted millions with the ill-conceived Cadillac Grand Prix. As part of that deal, authority over the market, once in the hands of private interests, was turned over to the commission, which had little interest in it.

One result was the disruption of both flea and farm markets and the beginning of bad feelings over space and the rental the market pays to the commission. The commission claims that complaints from local residents over such matters as parking, trash and irregularities led to the end of the flea market’s lease, but RFK market managers deny the charges.

There were minor illegalities — there always are at such an open place, where for a few dollars of rent you can mark out your piece of asphalt and sell whatever you want (within reason) to the large crowds drawn there. Just before Christmas 2003, for instance, police raided the place, proudly coming away with five suspects and “21,500 unauthorized recordings, 2,000 unauthorized DVDs,” according to D.C. police.

Al Smith, who ran the farmers market before he was ousted, is still bitter, and New Horizons, which managed the amorphous flea market, has contemplated suing the Sports Commission. Smith said that Sports Commission accountants told him the commission wasn’t making enough money to make it worthwhile.

The real reason, Smith says, is that, with baseball coming to RFK, the commission didn’t want to deal with scheduling or take any responsibility for running the markets.

Smith, of the D.C. Federation of Farmers and Consumers Markets, manages two other markets and is planning to open a new farm market at Turner School in Anacostia. He said friction with the commission’s director of special projects, Scott A. Burrell, led to Smith’s ouster.

“It was a public service and a public good,” Smith said. “The people loved it. To end it like this, it’s almost criminal.”

Form-based: Zoning by design, not by lawyers

In one of those technical decisions that produce instant yawns — but later make all the difference — the city’s office of planning says it will toss traditional zoning out the window when mapping development in the Hill’s massive new neighborhood, Reservation 13.

Hill techies, urban-planning nerds and some community groupies have been glued to the Reservation 13 saga for months. It’s the 67 acres that’s now D.C. General Hospital, the D.C. Jail and a Park Service wasteland along the Anacostia near Congressional Cemetery.

Already in place is aggressive, politically powerful St. Coletta’s School, which grabbed four choice acres for its fortress-like campus for special-education students. Then perhaps a hospital for the poor? Or a new high-tech hospital financed by a Howard University-city partnership costing $400 million? And what else?

But Ellen McCarthy, the city’s planning chief now that Andrew Altman is heading Potomac and Anacostia riverfront development, says that a new zoning system — form-based zoning — is in order.

Traditional zoning has all to do with land use, lot coverage, separation of functions (residential versus industrial, for instance) — but not one word about the design or look of the buildings. Form-based zoning, on the other hand, makes design and compatibility and the look of the building primary, and the use secondary. The obvious need for a change comes with the large-scale reuse and adaptation of older buildings to new uses all over the country. Industrial buildings turned to lofts, schools turned to condos, stores to homes — all shatter old zoning concepts.

Applied to Reservation 13, old zoning concepts make no sense at all, McCarthy says, because most of the tract is a wilderness, the rest institutional, making it perfect for a tryout of design-based zoning.

Urban planner Peter Katz, a champion of form-based zoning, says today’s urban development is trapped and hampered by old zoning codes, which dictate against many popular innovations.

METRO

• The D.C. Board of Trade wants a D.C. Jazz Festival, and it’s planning to assemble one Sept. 28 for four days of music, site vaguely set for the Mall and the banks of the Anacostia. That the city is a great music center there’s little doubt — the festival will be named after our own Duke Ellington. ...

• That old chestnut — the annual Cherry Blossom Festival — will climax with the traditional parade this Saturday (April 9), and though ever-upbeat D.C. Tourism officials are predicting a huge rush of tourists, they’re also frowning at a survey that shows D.C. to be the second most expensive tourist venue in the country. The leader: Hawaii. ...

• Barry Watch: Marion Barry (D), the former mayor, now councilman for Ward 8, came out swinging with a stinging pen Friday. In a letter to Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, he slammed the pandering to Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos over a television deal for the new D.C. baseball team. Barry expressed “profound amazement” that Major League Baseball continues to offer rewards to Angelos. ...

• Get out the floor wax; the annual Hill House and Garden Tour has been announced for May 7, promising a “beautiful and eclectic” collection of Hill palaces to the envious eyes of the huddled masses in their clammy English basements. Sure to star is one of the Bryan School Lofts at 15th Street and Independence Avenue S.E. developed by Jim Abdo. ...

• Brent Elementary, top public elementary school choice for many Hill parents, has received a 1,000-book gift from Toyota, but the school needs volunteers to catalog the existing library to avoid overlap. Call in at 3rd and D streets S.E. from 9 a.m. to noon. ...

• Belga Cafe, the new spot in the 400 block of 8th Street S.E. featuring chocolate everything, has two nominations for awards from the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington, elbowing out hundreds of downtown eateries. It’s in the running for “gathering spot of the year” and “new restaurant of the year.” ...

• Trouble of the neighborhood-uprising kind is growing over the plans of Dr. Peter Shin, owner of Medlink Hospital at 8th Street and Constitution Avenue N.E., to turn the main building into offices and condos. Residents are organizing to oppose architects Shalom Baranes Associates’ plan to create a glass-wall, modernist look amid the brick town houses. ...