It was no easy road. I remember asking him about the Carbery School conversion, which involved lengthy negotiations with the city bureaucracy in the pre-Tony Williams days. “I’ll never do that again,” he said ruefully.
Many of his friends in the house-restoration business, always active on the Hill, thought he was crazy. It was so much easier to gut row houses, put up drywall and a new kitchen, sand the floors, and sell them. But Herrema usually insisted on making a structure perform a completely different task from that for which it was designed, without losing its 19th-century charm.
Herrema inspired others, and as a result his name has been chosen for a new award for “contributions to Capitol Hill’s Urban Landscape,” to be presented Nov. 17. A committee of the Capitol Hill Community Foundation — a 1989 spin-off of the local business organization Capitol Hill Association of Merchants and Professionals — chose four Hill buildings for awards: the H Street Playhouse at 1365 H St. N.E., Results the Gym (the former Giddings School) at 3rd and G streets S.E., the Reed family home at 800 E. Capitol St. N.E. and the Heritage Foundation building at 208 Massachusetts Ave. N.E.
Notably, only one of the buildings (Doug Jefferies’s Giddings School) fits the Herrema image. Another (the H Street Playhouse) is under construction. The Reed house is a painstaking, classic restoration of an old Hill home, and the Heritage building is a modernization of a rather utilitarian office building.
A fifth award goes to the Historic Preservation Office of the D.C. Office of Planning, for its work in preserving the integrity of the Hill’s historic district, the city’s largest.
island dump
Going wild on wildlife island
Heritage Island, the long, skinny, forgotten strip between the Benning Road and East Capitol Street bridges, has become the target for illegal dumpers using new roads into this island wilderness.
Fresh truckloads of illegally dumped trash were visible on a recent visit, as were efforts to move and reuse tons of fill and mulch. Vaunted efforts to turn the place into a wilderness nature trail have foundered, while hobos have set up camp on the unpoliced southern end of the island.
Smaller Kingman Island, closer to the Capitol Hill shore, has fared better. New trails that will become a path for bird watchers and nature lovers are marked, aquatic plants have survived their first summer, and an entryway complete with picnic tables, signage and a gate have been installed.
The Anacostia Watershed Society has been busily planting groups of sycamore, maple and other native trees along the edge of Robert F. Kennedy Stadium parking lots near the Anacostia. Mayor Anthony Williams’s (D) long-planned riverwalk is due to pass close by both islands.
Kingman has also been chosen as the site for a Sept. 11 memorial grove, a plan that will replace part of the wilderness of volunteer trees with orderly nursery hardwoods. But the fate of much larger Heritage is very much in doubt.
The National Park Service leased both Kingman and Heritage islands to the District in 1992. For years, they have been a handy dumping place for District agencies’ excess building materials, excavation fill and mulch.
Then Heritage Island became the target of a private scheme to build a sort of Disneyland under the name of Children’s Island, with amusements and nature themes. But the D.C. City Council defeated that plan, and the island was left again to wasteland status.
Reconstruction of the Benning Road Bridge over the past two years has proved a fragile boon. The area close to the bridge has been landscaped and planted with oak and other saplings, but construction brought the access road to the island to the attention of dumpers, who have quickly taken advantage of a site without patrols or police attention.
green roof first
DoT building gets an eco top
Right now it’s just a huge hole in the ground along M Street S.E., but when the new headquarters building for the Department of Transportation (DoT) is finished, it will sport an important ecological first: the largest “green roof” on the East Coast.
The green-roof phenomenon is far more active in Europe than it is here. Stuttgart, Germany, has even decreed that every new building with a flat roof should be a “green roof.” Adherents of this urban movement hope to create cities that will look like a gridwork of roof meadows from the air, cities that will breathe better, purify their own exhausts, better control drainage and flooding, reduce pollution and add a zany new kind of beauty.
The idea is to pile 4 to 6 inches of soil on flat or slightly sloped urban roofs and plant grasses.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, led on the Hill by Doug Siglin, is the springboard for the DoT green roof. Said Siglin, “The Chesapeake Bay Foundation received money from a lawsuit against D.C. WASA (D.C. Water and Sewer Authority), and the money was used to set up a competition to field proposals for a green-roof project.”
Nationally known builder JBG Co. won the proposal competition and plans to install a 75,000-square-foot roof above the new headquarters now going up on M Street.
Though green-roof technology costs approximately $5 per square foot more than normal roofs, Siglin says there is a payback in savings later, due to better insulation and protection against harmful ultraviolet rays that eventually destroy all roof coatings. Because green roofs retain much of the rainwater that falls, they also produce less storm water, and therefore less pollution.
There is already one small green roof downtown atop an office building at 1425 K St. N.W., a roof installed at the behest of an important tenant, the Casey Tree Endowment. But the DoT roof dwarfs that one in size. “What we are hoping,” Siglin says, “is that we can seed the market.”
METRO
• Halloween fever builds along 7th Street S.E., where Realtor queen Jackie Von Schlegel is planning her regular “Hill O Ween” sidewalk festival with the traditional hairdo, apple bobbing, carousel, moon bounce, balloons, photos and the rest — while exhausted parents refresh themselves at nearby Tunnicliff’s Tavern from 5:30 to 9 p.m. on Oct. 31. ...
• Election Day is not so tense for the 11 members of Advisory Neighborhood Commission 6B; all the incumbents except Keith Smith (6B 09) are running, and only four have opposition. Chairwoman Julie Olson is expected to remain in place. ...
• Exotic grass innovators Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden are planning a completely new look for the corner of 8th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue S.E. where bus lines, the Eastern Market Metro Station and high-density foot traffic come together. One big change in the design is the addition of an iron fence across the median on Penn to stop jaywalking. ...
• Barry Watch: Look out — the anti-Marion Barry groundswell has started. An American University student, Mike Inganamort (a Ward 3 resident), has created a website, StopMarionBarry.com, dedicated to attacking the once and future D.C. councilman from Ward 8. Inganamort, at
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, digs up the usual scandals and malaprop quotes, including my personal favorite, “If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very, very low crime rate.” …
• The Hill’s top broker, Don Denton, predicts that the next real-estate boom on the Hill will be houses and apartments near the waterfront — either in Southeast or Southwest. Denton notes that the price of an average Hill house went from $146,000 in 1995 to $464,000 today, and that 35 percent of Hill house sales topped $500,000 recently. …
• There goes the neighborhood. Patrons of the Hill’s sin strip (nightclubs of every sexual orientation clustered near South Capitol Street below M Street S.E.) are worried that big development — baseball and office buildings, to be exact — will soon put an end to the fun. Lately threatened: the nightclub Nation at 1015 Half St. S.E., where a $20 million, 10-story office building is planned.
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