D.C.'s Future Newark St. Town Center?

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MOST COMPETITIVE GROCERY STORES get makeovers every couple years to meet the changing tastes of customers. For example, Glover Park's Whole Foods is being remodeled right now. But if you go just up the hill, past the National Cathedral, the story is much different. For years and years, the Giant supermarket at Wisconsin Avenue and Newark Street NW has been waiting for renovations — in fact, many neighbors are clamoring for a new store entirely. But other neighbors, fearing those three dreaded words — traffic, parking and development — have successfully prevented past plans to redevelop the site. And so sits the Giant and the long-abandoned G.C. Murphy, pictured here. Aside from the Starbucks just up Wisconsin Avenue, the streetscape in this part of town is pretty dead, walled off by a red brick wall that effectively sucks the life out of this stretch of Upper Northwest's main commercial corridor.

But now there's a new plan for the old early Cold War-era shopping center and its companion low-rise retail and office building across Newark Street. What's envisioned by Giant's development consultants is not just a completely rebuilt store, but a completely rebuilt commercial and residential complex wedged between Wisconsin Avenue and Idaho Avenue, where new townhouses would be built opposite the Metropolitan Police Department's 2nd Division headquarters. Apartments and offices would be built on the second floor of the Giant and other street-level retail. If built to current plans, the proposal would effectively fill in a commercial/retail void between Wisconsin Avenue's two pre-existing Whole Foods locations in Tenleytown and Glover Park. Think less suburban surface asphalt and more walkable town center, complete with green space and vibrant sidewalk life, as promised by architectural renderings.

But as the Current newspaper noted last week, the "entire proposal will undergo extensive public hearings and vetting by city zoning authorities." Translation: Stay tuned for future neighborhood grumbling and revised plans, especially when it comes to the planned five-story building to rise opposite the Giant across Newark Street where the Friendship Building, pictured here, currently stands.

On a tangential historical note, whatever eventually goes in at Newark Street will erase all traces of the old name Friendship. McLean Gardens, just to the northwest of the Giant, was once called Friendship when the McLean family used the property as their famed summer estate (which took its name from the 3,000 acre "Friendship" land tract between Col. Thomas Addison and James Stoddert, granted to the two men in 1695. When Friendship was transformed into apartment houses during World War II, the Newark Street shopping complex took the Friendship name, which has migrated up Wisconsin Avenue as far north as today's Friendship Heights across the Maryland line.

» "Wisconsin Avenue Giant" [Giant of Maryland LLC]
» "Firm Unveils Latest Plants for Giant" [Current, no Web site]
» "McLean Gardens: History" [McLean Gardens]
» "Finding Friendship Along Wisconsin Ave." [Free Ride/Express]

Photos by Michael Grass/Express