Revisiting stories: the revitalization of 9th Street NW around the DC Convention Center

After the DC Convention Center opened, people were surprised that it didn't result in improvement on 9th Street NW, an old commercial corridor that had long since seen better days.

I responded, making the point that besides the fact that the Convention Center wasn't designed to connect to the community outside of the building, if you wanted the street to improve, you needed to invest money in its improvement in advance of the Convention Center opening, so that there were functioning businesses there to serve the hordes.  That didn't happen.

-- "Speaking of enclave development," 2006
-- "If you don't understand linkage and context then you have learned nothing," 2007
-- "Another example of 'trickle down policy' and service failure," 2008

And this from an entry on how DC's tourism tax revenue stream is used:

In fact, I think it's a travesty that the revitalization of the historic commercial buildings along 9th Street NW between M Street and Rhode Island Avenue wasn't specifically required as part of the development of the Washington Convention Center.

Beleagued Be Bar between two vacant disinvested buildings on the 1300 block of 9th Street NW.

Why would people be enticed to walk outside the Convention Center to explore the neighborhood, when the commercial district looks bombed out?

Rehabilitation of the extant buildings on 9th Street should have been the focus of retail development for the Convention Center first, not the spaces within their own building, which will be focused on keeping people in the Convention Center rather than "letting them out."

A couple years ago, in response to an article about the failure of retail spaces within the Convention Center, I wrote about this topic again, making the same point.

-- "The time to plan for retail in and around the Convention Center was long before it opened in 2003 and certainly before 2015," 2015

But this weekend, I was briefly in Blagden Alley and 9th Street NW was markedly different.


Most of the commercial buildings in the corridor have been rehabilitated, here and there is infill mixed use development of a larger scale, there were interesting businesses in many of the spaces (mostly food and drink related), and there were tons of people on the street and in and around Blagden Alley specifically.

This photo of the same block in 2006 doesn't look so bad.


But that wasn't the case for most of the street back then like this section of the same block, which was pretty typical.


I would assert that the improvement hasn't happened because of the Convention Center, or because they finally opened a Convention Center Hotel on Massachusetts Avenue.

Although the CC is finally fixing some of the problems with the retail spaces, and the 9th Street side of the complex has two heralded restaurants, the Unconventional Diner and Smoked and Stacked, a sandwich shop.  Both continue to be acclaimed and are likely to be successful for the long haul.

There's also a Union Kitchen Grocery, which claims to sell local foods, but it appeared to me that most of the items sold there wouldn't meet the definition.

Blagden Alley.

It's happened mostly because DC has added population, especially in new mixed use buildings in the core.

Also in that area specifically, the O Street Market (between 7th and 9th Streets) was redeveloped into a mixed use space with apartments, condominiums, and a hotel as well as a renewed Giant Supermarket and some other retail, which has helped to stoke both streets.

But if DC hadn't added population in the last ten years, without a focused investment program in the area, I wonder how much change there would be even today?

It would be the Convention Center and the Convention Center Hotel and likely very little else.

The time to plan for retail in and around the Convention Center was long before it opened in 2003 and certainly before 2015

WBJ photo by Joanne Lawton.

The Washington Business Journal reports ("Convention center tries to lease its retail space yet again") that the Convention Center is aiming to fix its retail. Granted the retail spaces within the building are a different issue from 9th and 7th Streets.

“We want to be able to connect Shaw and U Street all the way down to New York Avenue,” Brown said. “Right now it’s just sort of a gray-facade block, but we want to make it an exciting looking place.”  Brown expects the work on the building’s exterior and streetscape to begin in the next 12 months. He hopes Events D.C. will be announcing its first new retail and restaurant tenants before that, perhaps this fall.

It’s not the group’s first attempt to lease its retail space. Many of the storefronts in the convention center have been empty since it opened in 2003. Old Dominion Brewhouse was there for several years, but closed last fall. In March, the convention center announced that Sbarro has leased space there; it is currently the center's only retail tenant.

In the past I wrote some entries (e.g., "If you don't understand linkage and context then you have learned nothing" from 2007) about the failure of the DC Convention Center to spark "improvement" of 7th and 9th Streets NW abutting the center.    From that piece:

The interesting thing about today's Post articles about the Washington Convention Center, "Convention Center Not Living Up to Lofty Goals," subtitled "Declining Attendance Limits Economic Impact," and "Ninth Street Corridor Still Awaits Renaissance," was that before the Center was built, the paper ran little criticism, until the day it opened when the articles on the front page of the business section did offer some critical analysis. (You know the phrase, "a day late and a dollar short...")

The point of criticism is to bring about success. Too often, people focus on being criticized and not the message.

There are five primary reasons for the failure.

1.  The center was not built to be permeable on its west (9th Street) and east (7th Street) elevations. For the most part, entry occurs on the north and/or south sides of the building at K and L Streets primarily.

2.  Lack of a convention hotel for many years limited positive street activation along 9th Street especially, but also 7th Street.  The Washington Marriott Marquis convention center hotel opened in 2014 (pictured at right, photo from Marriott).

While I might normally be against public financial support of such facilities, which often don't work out so well (e.g., ">Hilton Baltimore's woes par for course for city-owned hotels," Batlimore Business Journal), the reality is that to better support large events at the convention center, large hotels are necessary.

I experienced this first hand with the 2004 American Planning Association national conference in DC.  The meeting was spread across two different hotels and the events at the secondary property experienced significantly reduced attendance, even though a shuttle service was provided.

While the convention hotel is focused on capturing restaurant and bar consumption from its guests and not sharing their customers with nearby businesses, not everyone limits their activity to on-site consumption, and some of them end up going to establishments nearby or elsewhere in Greater Downtown.

3.  The retail spaces within the convention center are poorly designed/subpar/badly situated.  And there is a lot of wasted space that could have been used as retail as well.

Most provide entry only from the outside of the building, and for the most part, most people enter the Convention Center from K Street, and secondarily from the Metrorail station/L Street.

1200 block 9th Street NW, west side, 2006.


1200 block 9th Street NW, west side, 2014, Google Street View.

4.  The Convention Center program didn't include a property and business development investment initiative focused on improving the commercial properties on 7th and 9th Streets in its catchment area.

Although it must be acknowledged that in 2003, when the Convention Center, this area was "emerging" at best in terms of the vitality of the commercial properties in those areas.  It would have been a stretch, even if the properties had been fixed up, to see--at least back then--the possibility of a thriving commercial district.  On the other hand, that a complementary investment program for the neighboring properties wasn't created ordained continued failure of the district.

Fortunately, in the past few years 9th Street around the Convention Center has begun to improve as the old Giant Supermarket on O Street has been redeveloped into O Street Market and from development efforts moving west from U Street and retail improvements in response to the addition of apartment and condominium buildings in the area, which has added population.

The more recent improvement of 7th and 9th Streets around U Street has little to do with the Convention Center, but has derived from new construction and rehabilitation projects there, which on 7th Street have centered around the Metro station and the fixing and reopening of the Howard Theater.

5.  The reality is that for conventions in DC, especially those focused on the federal market, many of the attendees are not visiting from out-of-town, but live in the area, and they aren't interested in spending time or money outside of facility.


It's not clear to me that the mistakes are well understood or that the new initiatives will have much positive impact.

As it is now 12 years after the opening of the Convention Center, what's incredible to me is that these problems weren't identified in the design phase of the project, from the 2008 entry "Another example of 'trickle down policy' and service failure":

It's not enough to "merely" build the big project. You've got to take simultaneous steps to ensure that the community outside the lot boundaries of the big project is ready to connect.

A classic example is 7th and 9th Streets NW abutting the Convention Center. There is a major disconnect. 7th Street is mostly housing. And 9th Street is mostly bombed out still. Is it a surprise that the Convention Center, which face it, mostly attracts people who stay inside the Center during their time there, leaving little time to patronize the local shops, hasn't jumped started neighborhood improvements?

In fact, on 9th Street the retail improvements are happening far to the north of the Convention Center, as if the Convention Center has little impact whatsoever. Although it is true that new housing is being developed around the Convention Center proper, plus eventually the Convention Center Hotel.

Crazy s*** in NYC: Convention Center edition

This artist's rendering provided by the Genting Group shows a $4-billion convention center and casino planned for the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens.

While generally, like stadiums and arenas for sports teams, convention centers are usually boondoggles, as outlined in the Brookings report "Space Available: The Realities of Convention Centers as Economic Development Strategy" by Professor Heywood Sanders, it's a different situation in tourist and convention destinations like New York City, where the revenue stream from such activities is considerable.

Gov. Cuomo is pushing hard to relocate NYC's main convention site, the Javits Center, to the Aqueduct Racetrack site in Queens. See "Cuomo's $4 billion convention center backed by Bloomberg, and more importantly, a gambling enterprise" from Capital New York, and these stories from the New York Times, "Cuomo Portrays Queens Convention Center Plan as Risk-Free," "Replace Javits With Center in Queens? Too Far From Sights, Convention Experts Say," and "On Trip to Queens, Road-Testing a Plan for Holding Conventions in Queens," and "Survey finds 57% oppose Aqueduct center" from Newsday.

The site is close to JFK Airport, but far from Manhattan--an hour by subway.

But maybe Governor Andrew Cuomo is the new Robert Moses. Moses refused to help build a new stadium in Brooklyn for the Dodgers, instead he wanted a stadium in Queens, as part of the redevelopment of the World's Fair site. So the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, and eventually Moses built his stadium in Queens and got an expansion team, the New York Mets, for the stadium.

Obviously, what is driving this proposal are casino interests, although probably moving the convention center out of Manhattan may be seen as an opportunity to change the labor arrangements, which are onerous.

Doing exhibiting sucks from the standpoint of exhibitors because most convention centers and hotels in big cities are union shops, and everything has to be moved in, and depending on the size of the booth, be set up and taken down by union workers, at union wage rates and minimums. It's particularly expensive in NYC.

The other problem with moving a convention center so centrally located is that it induces trips and reduces the value of existing hotel properties proximate to the current site.

Because of the impact on existing hotels--not the increase in the number of trips--it's unlikely at the end of the day that the convention center will move out of Manhattan, despite Gov. Cuomo's best Robert Moses imitation.

For similar reasons, the new convention center in DC was located in midtown DC, not far from the previous location and close to all the major hotel properties in the core of the city, rather than being moved to an alternative location near New York and Florida Avenues one mile away from the current site, but 3.5 miles away from the Omni Shoreham and Marriott-owned Wardman Park Hotels in Woodley Park and not quite 3.0 miles away from the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue.

The hotel and restaurant interests centered in Downtown and north and west of the central business district refused to allow a relocation that would lead to a significant devaluation of their present location value.

What malls and convention centers have in common

They are enclosed spaces cut off from the world. They are single use places. And the people who go to them, convention goers especially, aren't interested in venturing elsewhere.

So generally, statements that X convention center or Y shopping mall will do all kinds of miraculous things for the adjacent areas and commercial districts are fatuous. Although, by working very diligently to make connections beyond the building, more positive impact can be garnered. But it's not easy.

The reality of shopping malls starting to change and add other functions isn't very interesting to me, even though it's interesting to a lot of other people, has engendered books such as Big Box Reuse, and many articles in the press.

All it is is a recognition that single use places lose their oomph and must be constantly refreshed in order to remain interesting and relevant. There's nothing new to that recognition, except to the people who didn't know any better.

As people get bored with shopping, and as the prevalence of "retail therapy" diminishes as the ability to spend money frivolously declines, places devoted exclusively to shopping lose their allure as well.

The Boston Globe has a number of recent articles that illustrate this point. "Legacy Place in Dedham puts a new spin on retail" discusses the triumph of lifestyles because they are mixed use destinations with more than retail stores. (And yes, lifestyle centers are modeled after traditional commercial districts, unlike traditional shopping centers, which focus exclusively on retail stores.) From the article:

Hours later, shoppers packed the open-air plaza off Route 1, streaming into Showcase Cinema de Lux to catch new releases such as “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,’’ tearing up the alleys at Kings bowling, gorging on sweets at Sugar Heaven, and hitting the sales at various merchants. While traffic dropped off at other retail outlets after Black Friday, Legacy Place was bustling for the rest of the post-Thanksgiving weekend.

This holiday, Legacy Place is changing the shopping landscape in Massachusetts by spurning such traditional gimmicks as door-buster deals at the break of dawn and photos with Santa. Instead, the Dedham complex is vying to attract customers with its unique combination of entertainment, upscale restaurants such as Met Bar & Grill, New England’s largest Whole Foods Market, and a range of retail options, including the first shopping venue in the state with all three Urban brands: Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters.

Open-air shopping meccas such as Legacy Place have gained huge popularity across the country as consumers demand more from their shopping excursions. The number of lifestyle centers, which typically offer specialty merchants along with restaurants and entertainment with easy pedestrian access, has doubled to 434 since 2003. Meanwhile, no new enclosed mall has opened in the United States since 2006. In Massachusetts, about a half-dozen open-air shopping centers similar to Legacy Place have opened since 2003, including Derby Street Shoppes in Hingham and Patriot Place in Foxborough, according to Robert F. Sheehan, vice president of research for KeyPoint Partners LLC, a Burlington firm.

This comes at a cost when traditional commercial districts are unable, for many reasons, to be competitive. See "Dedham Square struggles to coexist with new Legacy Place mall." From the article:

In light of an ongoing metamorphosis in historic Dedham Square, hopes were high this fall that the downtown shopping area would hold its own once the massive Legacy Place lifestyle center sprang up on Route 1.

Town officials anticipated a spillover effect, figuring patrons of the 80 new stores and restaurants, and the 15-screen movie complex a mile down the road would also make a trip to the square to see, taste, and buy what the local shops had to offer.

But that has not happened. Foot traffic in the square is down, with some merchants reporting losses of 40 to 50 percent of their receipts, since the retail complex opened late this summer.

People are lazy, I mean, efficient. They prefer to go to one place and stay there. So unless the new and the old are well integrated, usually the new trumps the old, at least for a long while, and forever if the new continues to be able to be "refreshed" from time to time, while the old stays uncompetitive.

As for convention centers, as Robert Campbell writes in "Expanded convention center must do more than get bigger":

There are economic arguments for and against such an expansion. I’ll leave those up to the financial experts. I’m interested in the quality of city life for the people who live there and those who visit. Looked at that way, a convention center can be - and usually is - an unmitigated disaster. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there are ways to make these Goliaths into better neighbors. That’s rarely achieved, but it’s possible.

First the bad news. Typical American convention centers are hideous, huge, blank-walled boxes. They’re surrounded by streets that are too wide, in order to accommodate all those trucks, buses, cabs and cars. Approaching such a center on foot, as a pedestrian, you feel alienated and unwelcome. The building divorces itself from its surroundings. It creates a dead zone all around itself, as if it were some kind of toxic infection in the city. There’s seldom much urban life in the vicinity of any convention center.

Often, these places are built far from the center of town, in locations where if you walk out the door there’s no place to go. In Chicago, for example, you feel like you must be in some other state. That’s true in Boston, too. The famous charm of our city is invisible and far away.

So what’s the solution? What makes these places work better? The answer is pretty simple, although hard to achieve. Everything depends on the edges, the periphery, the line of demarcation where the convention center meets the city around it. The center must reach out to shake hands with the city, not isolate itself behind a concrete wall or a moat of traffic.

He goes on to discuss two examples of better connected convention centers that illustrate his thesis, in Philadelphia and San Francisco.

In the meantime, economic development types sell us citizens a bill of goods.

Arts and culture and commercial district revitalization

The Boise Idaho Statesman has an article, "New Boise program gives temporary homes to artistic process," about an artist in residence program there, set up to use vacant commercial spaces. I am a big fan of such programs. The Storefront Artist Project in Pittsfield, Massachusetts is one of the earliest major examples of this kind of effort.

Paducah, Kentucky has extended this idea by providing relocation assistance to artists willing/interested in moving there (Paducah Artist Relocation Program). By directing people to a disinvested neighborhood adjacent to downtown they increase the number of occupied residences and entrepreneurs, and help strengthen the adjacent downtown as well. The key is targeting your investment and the resulting impact.

The Washington Business Journal has a good article, "Stage theaters breathe life into neighborhoods," about the economic impact of neighborhood theaters (not cinemas), based on data from the economic impact project of Americans for the Arts. According to the article:

A 2007 study by Americans For the Arts found that Washington-area residents who attend an arts performance contribute $22.91 to the economy beyond the ticket price. For nonresidents, the number soars to $82.08.

(Webpage for Arts & Economic Prosperity III: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts and Culture Organizations and Their Audiences.)

As the experience of the Atlas Performing Arts Center and H Street Playhouse on H Street NE demonstrate, money won't be spent in the immediate neighborhood where a theater is located if there aren't quality retail and restaurant establishments able to meet the needs and demands of potential customers. It's different on H Street today, with the number of establishments seeded in large part by Joe Englert. (See "Plans to Set The Bar High On H Street NE" from the Washington Post.) When the H Street Playhouse first opened, there weren't quality restaurants on H Street--and Phish Tea was a massive disappointment, a decent idea and concept that was never satisfactorily executed.

The problem of course is that anchor institutions can't do it alone, and too frequently, there isn't simultaneous complementary planning and programs and incentives developed to ensure that the supporting businesses build up around the anchors in a timely fashion.

The Washington Convention Center is a perfect example of this. While more than $400 million was invested in the center, little money was invested in improving the built environment, streetscape, and business environment on 9th Street NE especially but also on 7th Street and nearby New York Avenue, where logically, associated supporting retail businesses could have located, recreating a business district around the Convention Center where convention-meeting goers could have then spent additional time and money on local activities.

Years later, 9th Street still looks bombed out, many of the retail businesses located in the Convention Center have had a difficult time, and the kind of impact that the Convention Center could have brought to the immediate area has been minimal, even as the Convention Center has meetings which generate some (but not enough) rooming nights at hotels Downtown, in Georgetown, and Dupont Circle.

In general, this is a major problem with revitalization efforts, that people expect anchors to do all the revitalization without the existence of allied businesses and services. A commercial district is an ecosystem, and a system requires many actors and components in order to function as a whole.