A tense neighborhood battle is looming over a new AppleTree charter school, plunk in the middle of newly upscale Northeast.

The school is just the kind of thing that gives the newly arrived middle-class urbanites who are coming back to the city a gleam of hope in a dismal public-school situation here.

From the street, there’s little hint of furor. One thirty-eight 12th St. N.E. is a nondescript, two-story gray-brick building, once a Catholic church’s meeting hall. AppleTree paid $1.5 million with plans to house 16 staff members there, open a preschool for 72 kids, add a story to the building and make the roof a play yard.

Residents of the area just north of Lincoln Park jumped on the plan as soon as it was presented at midmonth. They say that the new school is trampling on zoning regulations by barging into a residential neighborhood and will bring unacceptable noise and traffic.

Backers of the school, on the other hand, say that schools have certain rights that eclipse zoning and that charter schools, like other schools, abound in residential areas and always have.

What makes this local fight much more interesting is the opposing characters involved: Backing the school, for instance, is the redoubtable lawyer Ellen Opper-Weiner, long a civic activist whose most recent triumph was the defeat of a mammoth project to implant a Father Flanagan Girls and Boys Town at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Ave. S.E. Aided by Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Will Hill, Opper-Weiner forced the project to fold. The site is to become a large apartment complex by a respected developer.

And one of the leaders of the opposition to the new school is Pat Lally, a quiet-spoken, behind-the-scenes neighborhood activist who worked for years as former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s representative to Congress and is now an historic preservation lobbyist.

Also working to defeat the school is Joe Fengler, chairman of Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 6A, and his colleague on the ANC Cody Rice. Fengler and Rice have proved to be the most effective local politicians in the northern part of the Hill, and they’ve used a reactivated ANC 6A as a powerful tool.

Add irony: Opper-Weiner, who is working as a consultant to AppleTree Institute, a Boston-based education-reform institution, finds herself facing the same anti-development forces she championed so strongly in the Girls and Boys Town case. “It was a tremendous setback for us to learn that Ms. Opper-Weiner will be opposing our community efforts to once again protect itself from nonresidential facilities of this nature,” Fengler noted in a letter to D.C. Zoning Examiner Bill Crews of the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA).

Opper-Weiner proclaimed herself shocked by the opposition the school plan faced and has offered to scale back the number of preschoolers to 54 and to drop the rooftop playground and the extra story. She says compromise can be reached if the two sides will sit down.

But Fengler et al. don’t want to sit down. “All we want is a public hearing,” Fengler told The Hill. He argues that the DCRA must grant a “special exception” to residential zoning and that for the exception to be granted a hearing must be held, at which the anti-school forces will concentrate their efforts.

What’s next? The DCRA is expected to rule whether or not AppleTree can operate “as a matter of right” by next week.

Unlike Hill poster campaigns that use street lamps, trees and buildings as message boards, the mystery bad-mouth slides the message into mail slots. The unwanted, well-printed sheets name names and give addresses but are unsigned.

Postal regulations forbid the use of mail slots for such purposes. Postal authorities have already cracked down on advertisers who attempt to hand-deliver fliers via mail slot, warning them that such fliers must be left on lawns gates, or entry porches, not in the mail slot. But this is the first example of a neighborhood vendetta by mail.

A recent example accused a well-known Hill lobbyist (and Hill resident) of “getting paid to do public relations work for a genocidal regime.” The sheet was inserted in the mail slots of homes in the 8th Street and Independence Ave. S.E., 9th Street S.E. and C Street S.E. neighborhoods.

Another recent filing in this neighborhood’s mail slots accused a neighbor of mistreating his dog.

Residents say they are unsure how to proceed against the mystery mailer, who apparently works at night.

GEORGETOWNING THE HILL
Development doesn’t have to mean displacement
Can development proceed without what critics have dubbed “urban removal?” The answer to that question is the next big milestone in the reshaping of Capitol Hill.

In the past 10 years, the Hill — the city’s largest residential area in the eastern half of the city — has transformed itself from a fringe community beloved of urban pioneers but plagued by crime and drugs to a sought-after neighborhood blessed with convenience, easy transportation, ample parking and widely admired architecture.

The flipside, however, is higher rents and house prices out of reach to all but high earners or the affluent. Some fear the result is a more homogenized, mostly white enclave like Georgetown.

The Hill’s course is either toward exclusion — or addition.

Some developers have found a way through this ethical and social dilemma — it is “zero displacement” development. Examples are many on the Hill, going back to the old Carbery School, at 3rd and G streets N.E. It is now a complex of 23 condominiums created in the 1990s by the late Robert Herrema. No residents were displaced. The same can be said of Herrema’s second project, Faith Baptist Church at 9th Street and South Carolina Ave. S.E.

The most important practitioner of “zero displacement” is Jim Abdo, who began with run-down buildings in Northwest that he turned into condos and continued with the successful reuse of Bryan School at 1315 Independence Ave. S.E. This led to other, larger developments, such as the giant Capitol Children’s Museum at 3rd and H Sts. N.E., where a former nunnery is being transformed into more than 300 units.

Abdo is now working on a much larger plan, developing 15 acres along New York Avenue N.E., a jumble of motels and repair shops that he plans to convert to housing, office and retail. He has pledged to devote part of the New York Avenue project to affordable housing and hired former D.C. Deputy Mayor Eric Price to manage it.

Abdo argues that not a single resident has been displaced by his efforts because he is converting building space from other uses into housing.

These developments, mostly aimed at well-paid professionals, have a direct effect on local rents. This is a fact of real-estate life — and social theorists must decide whether gentrification of formerly sketchy neighborhoods is a better outcome than maintaining slums with low rents and attendant ills. It may well be that slums prove to be a viable place for poor people to live, considering the alternatives — public housing or upscale neighborhoods.

METRO
• Near Northeast’s abandoned Uline Arena is poised to become a grocery store, after six decades of descent from showplace to ice rink to circus venue to trash-transfer station. Downtown developer Doug Jemal is courting Harris Teeter for the huge, whale shaped dome at 3rd and M streets N.E., which he bought for $6 million. ...

• Barry Watch: Political observers are waiting with bated breath for the demonstration of the “gasificiation machine” backed by former Mayor Marion Barry that turns trash into usable energy. It’s now parked near the Blue Plains sewage-treatment plant, and Barry aides say the startup will take place “sometime after Thanksgiving.”...

• E-mails flew and tempers soared in one of the most exclusive enclaves of the Hill when D.C. Department of Transportation took down the welcome green residential parking signs in front of Capitol Hill Day School at 2nd Street and South Carolina Avenue S.E. A school employee asked for the change — for security reasons — but the outcry quickly restored them. ...

• Councilwoman Sharon Ambrose (D-Ward 6) has assured constituents that a House bill that could scotch several important land deals for the District will not get out of conference. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Richard Pombo (R-Calif.), requires the city to buy, at market rates, land that has already been promised to the city by the Bush administration. “It’s not going forward,” Ambrose said. …

• New nickname for D.C., long tagged as the city of the “three A’s” — attorneys, accountants and associations: Fortune magazine, hyping the city’s business and building boom, has dubbed it the city of “three C’s” — conservatives, computers and crises. ...

• Big shoes, belonging to departing city planning chief Andrew Altman, are to be filled by a little-known native of Anacostia, Adrian Washington, a developer of affordable housing. He will head the Anacostia Waterfront Corp., Mayor Anthony Williams’s legacy project, which includes the southwest Waterfront, the new baseball stadium and the entire riverfront. ...

• How the rich get richer: Bernstein Cos. bought the two new Maritime Plaza buildings at 12th and M streets S.E. last year for $90 million; this year it sold the buildings for $115 million. The $25 million difference is attributed to talk of baseball coming to Southeast.