Bryan School, Abdo’s recently completed condo development way down 15th Street S.E. off Independence Avenue, is now a sought-after address; only two years ago, it was a neighborhood to be avoided.

But at Abdo’s most ambitious project, the $150 million conversion of the National Children’s Museum at 3rd and H streets N.E., Abdo is facing a new fact of D.C. life — the city’s requirement that such developments should include “affordable housing.”

Abdo has already agreed to build an affordable component at the 500-unit project. He mentioned 26 units last week during a phone interview, but the city has yet to state how many such units it will ask for. The project is still in the design phase, though construction crews are set to demolish some of the nonhistoric structures on the large site.

Last month, Abdo heard a request from Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Anthony Rivera (ANC 6C) for subsidized parking spaces for the affordable units. Abdo responded that he has already pledged one parking space per unit, far more than the city’s usual requirement of one space for four units of new construction.

Abdo estimates that building parking costs $25,000-$30,000 per space and that donating a number of spaces to the affordable units would mean cutting other amenities. “Besides,” he said, “we want to build affordable housing, not affordable parking.” Abdo added that he intended to encourage public transportation — the site is close to the Union Station Metro stop on the Red Line and the H Street bus lines — rather than car ownership.

“We have been absolutely upfront about this,” he said. “This is the largest affordable-housing component in the history of the city under the PUD [planned-unit development] process.” Abdo plans to place $40,000 in escrow to seek solutions to the parking problem or to implement them. “It’s an issue that needs to be examined,” he said.

Meanwhile, Rivera asked for and got permission to set up a community advisory board to monitor amenities at the project, now scheduled for completion by 2008.

Much is being made about Georgetown University’s plan to build a boathouse above Key Bridge. And the biggest howl is coming from an unexpected source — fellow eco-boaters.

Disclaimer up front: I am a longtime rower and member of local rowing clubs. But back to the issue. A small group of self-interested paddlers, based at Washington Canoe Club (which is to be the close neighbor of the new boathouse), claims all sorts of evils will arise from the new structure.

The paddlers say the new facility, with a 50-foot roof peak, and wide and long, will damage parkland and obstruct views. They’ve filed two lawsuits and set up a website, www.savethecanal.org, which complains that the proposed boathouse is too large.

But let’s have a few facts about the matter:

• The National Park Service, the owner of the land, has agreed to the scheme and has made a land-swap possible for the site. D.C. zoning authorities have approved.
• Historically, the site is not natural or ecological at all, consisting of building spoil from two huge constructions, the C&D Canal and the old C&O rail bed, now converted to a nature trail.
• Youth interest in the sport of rowing has increased phenomenally in the past 20 years, with women taking the lead, partially due to the influence of greater female participation in sports due to Title 9.

• Three other large new university boathouses — Yale’s on the Housatonic at Derby, Conn.; Princeton’s on Lake Carnegie, N.J.; and St. John’s on the Schuylkill in Pennsylvania — have not disturbed local ecologies.

• Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row, with close to a dozen large riverbank boathouses, is not only a tourist destination and a “poster boy” for the city but brings thousands of people to enjoy the urban riverfront by hosting numerous regattas from May through November, greatly boosting the city’s economy.

• Rowing, like paddling, not only brings youths to the water at a most impressionable age but also instills habits of lifelong respect for clean water, no-motor watersport and ecology.

• It is notable that two of the most powerful and influential river organizations here, the Anacostia Watershed Society and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, have not joined the clique of naysayers; notable also that the anti-boathouse group is headed by no less than four paddling organizations.

What the angry paddlers want — believe it or not — is a much smaller boathouse, an argument that completely deflates their ecology objection. Could it be that the proud 1904 Washington Canoe Club just wants a boathouse neighbor no bigger than its own?

Eastern Market Manager Stuart Smith takes a lot of flak in his role of balancing the desires of market merchants, vocal local critics and his real boss — the city that owns the venerable grocery hub on the Hill.

Last week, Smith was smarting from implications that his firm’s expenses — which are submitted for payment under the terms of his management contract — have not been detailed enough.

“I don’t want any implication that these are my expenses,” Smith said. “They have been submitted as required, and are the expenses incurred not by me but by my firm, Eastern Market Venture.” Smith added that a fully detailed accounting of sums spent for maintenance, improvements, snow and trash removal, etc., would be available.

Smith also said that the long-awaited (more than three years) lease agreement between market merchants and the city’s Office of Property Management (OPM) was close to completion and that an important meeting between all three parties — merchants, market management and OPM — would occur within the next two weeks. Without an agreement, arbitration is next.

The merchants have rejected several proposed leases. Smith says he has little power to change what the city wants from a lease: basically, to make the market pay for itself and support most expenses except major construction. “In 90 percent of commercial leases, the tenants agree to pay various increases in costs. I am basically an agent for the city,” he said. But merchants feel that agreeing to pay for cost increases will leave them open to large rent increases and liable to legal costs in the case of disagreement.

The issue has stalled the lease for more than a year. Merchants want terms far longer than the current month-to-month rental arrangement so that they can finance improvements to their stalls or purchases of items such as freezers and display cases.

Smith and his partner in Eastern Market Venture, Bruce Cook, took a blistering last week at a meeting of the oversight group, the Eastern Market Community Advisory Committee, over management issues, particularly coordination of coming market improvements.

• Recycled recycling: Coming soon to the Hill neighborhood, little blue trash cans with tiny wheels, taking the place of the brown or green recycling bins in use for years. D.C. is switching to a “single stream” approach, which means paper and bottles, etc., together. The new system resulted in big gains in participation in a trial run. ...

• Marion Barry Watch: Ward 8’s new councilman (D) hugged the spotlight last week, teaching chemistry at Ballou Senior High School and sitting for a Time magazine interview. When reporter Perry Bacon asked him whether or not he still took drugs or was in rehab, the former mayor replied, “My recovery is my recovery. You can ask me again, but that’s what I’m going to say.”...

• I unboldly predict that attempts to recall two-term Ward 6 Councilmember Sharon Ambrose will fail utterly. ANC 6D’s Mary Williams, incensed by Ambrose’s votes for baseball, for the closing of D.C. General Hospital and against the Randall School Homeless Shelter, must get 5,000 voters to sign. Ambrose, slowed by her battle with multiple sclerosis, is still in mind sharp as a tack. ...

• Ever-vigilant Capitol gadfly Rita Warren is upset again: this time it’s the renaming of the Capitol Christmas Tree the “Season Tree” in this year’s holiday iteration. “I’m going straight to the Speaker about this,” Warren, aka “Jesus lady,” said. ...

• Call him Football Jim — Hill East activist Jim Myers got a $1,000 check, along with the Washington Redskins Quarterback Award, for his work defining Hill East as a new neighborhood, and for his battles over nuisance properties and lead contamination of drinking water. …

• New on H Street N.E.: R&B (for rhythm and blues) Coffee: The shop makes its debut at 1359 H, close to the Atlas Theater development. It’s closed Mondays. ...

• Decision time looms for Mayor Anthony Williams (D), who promised TV’s Tom Sherwood that he’d decide whether or not to run again in 2006 by the end of January. It would be his third term.