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Since I unleashed the megaphone to talk about the traffic and pedestrian brouhaha I encountered at New Jersey Avenue and I Street on Saturday, it's my duty to pass along to you The Rest of the Story, at least in regard to pedestrian passage along New Jersey northward toward the freeway.
I went back on Sunday and found it much quieter, and saw at least part of the reason that the pedestrian walkway had been closed - a new curb had been built, and new concrete poured along the gutter, as you see in the photo below. I also saw evidence of the old cobblestone, as you also see in the photo.
But this was apparently just the first part of a process that then resulted in new asphalt being laid down on Monday, as you see in the other photo below.
I had actually noticed last Thursday that the old asphalt was starting to show cracks and appeared to be sinking toward the new 82 I excavation, so this work was probably pretty critical.
And in other good pedestrian news along New Jersey, the stairs up from/down to Garfield Park are being repaired today.
If you are interested in more conversations about the subject, a group calling itself Capitol Riverfront Citizens for Pedestrian Safety (on Twitter at @SaferWalksSEDC) is working to keep a close watch on the state of things.
 

The clear skies were just perfect this weekend, and so I ended up walking a whole lot of miles and taking a whole lot of photos on both Saturday and Sunday--including a new "official" JDLand Nats Park portrait, as you see, where I also inadvertently caught the former centerfield plaza statues in their new home.
* ALL-STAR GAME: The rumors keep flying that Nationals Park will be the site of the 2018 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, but when Tom Boswell says he is "virtually certain" he will be happy with the 2018 announcement when it is made, well, one does take notice. Official word could come on April 6, when new commissioner Rob Manfred comes to Nationals Park to throw out the Opening Day first pitch.
* NLRB MOVE DELAYED: There's been some wondering about when the National Labor Relations Board will arrive at 1015 Half Street, and WBJ has the story of the "costly planning snafu" that delayed the move by six months (it looks like late June may now be the date).
* 11TH STREET BRIDGES VERSION 1.0: DDOT's latest dive into its photo archives includes a shot of the construction of the highway version of the 11th Street Bridges, back in 1964, before there was a highway to connect them to. It also shows the original "local" bridge.
* 503 ERRORS: I know that the site is throwing "503 Service Unavailable" errors with some frequency these days. I'm begging the hosting company to get them fixed, but in the meantime, at least the errors generally never last more than a few seconds. Count to 10 and hit refresh, and your requested page should appear (though then sometimes it takes a little longer for images and formatting to return). UPDATE: And then the site took a breather for an hour early this afternoon, which seemed to finally get the attention of the hosting folks, though I think there are still all manner of configuration issues that they need to fix. Why this has to happen in March and not December, I don't know....
 

A few items to put on your radar, as the calendar turns to April and organizational thoughts turn to event programming:
April 1: The Waterfront Church is holding an Ultimate Nerf Battle for students in grades 5-12, from 6 to 8 pm at the Courtyard by Marriott (2nd floor) at 140 L St., SE. Admission is free.
April 4: As part of the mega Cherry Blossom Festival, there will once again be Lantern Making at Canal Park, with sessions at 10 am and noon. There will be a "variety of Japanese cultural activities," as well as a moon bounce (for the KIDS, not you!). It's co-hosted by Capitol Riverfront BID and DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
(Also on April 4 is the Nats-Yankees exhibition game, but we'll discuss that later, along with Opening Day on April 6.)
April 11: There will be an Anacostia River cleanup event, from 9 am to noon, at Anacostia Park, put on by Anacostia Riverkeeper, Near Southeast Community Partners, the National Park Service, and others.
April 24: Another year of the Truckeroo food truck festival kicks off at the Fairgrounds, from 11 am to 11 pm.
April 24-26: Did you know that, had he lived, William Shakespeare would have been celebrating his 451st birthday this year? It's true! And so the Folger Theater and the BID are marking the occasion with Bard in the Yards, three nights of outdoor films at the Yards Park. The 1993 version of Much Ado About Nothing will kick things off on Friday, April 24, followed by the DiCaprio/Danes version of Romeo + Juliet on Saturday, April 25, and wrapping up on Sunday, April 26 with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in The Taming of the Shrew. All showings are free, and will begin at sundown, somewhere between 7:30 and 8 pm each night. Actors from the upcoming Folger production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead will introduce the flicks. Conversing in iambic pentameter will be optional.
Remember to keep an eye on the JDLand calendar (scroll down the home page) to be reminded of what's on the neighborhood agenda.
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Because I wouldn't want anyone to go without Korean fried chicken for a second longer than necessary, I will pass along for those who haven't been keeping up that DC's first Bonchon restaurant and bar is indeed opening today, March 30, at 11:30 am, on the southwest corner of Half and K streets, SE, two blocks north of the Navy Yard-Ballpark station's west entrance and three blocks north of Nats Park.
It will be open every day at 11:30 am, staying open until 9:30 pm Sunday-Wednesday and 11 pm Thursday-Saturday, except on Nats game days, when 11 pm will be closing time Sundays through Wednesdays. with midnight the post-Nats closing time Thursdays through Saturdays.
The menu is here, and note the $9 lunch special from 11:30 am to 2 pm Monday through Friday, with a choice of wings, drums, strips, or a combo, plus one side.
If you go, feel free to post your review in the comments.
 

With the arrival of spring comes the expansion of the hours of operation for the Union Station - Navy Yard Circulator route. Beginning today (March 30), the hours of operation will be from 6 am to 9 pm on weekdays, and 7 am to 9 pm on Saturdays. These new summer hours also apply to buses on the Skyland route.
There's also the expanded service for Nationals games, with buses running when there are Sunday home games from 10 am to 10 pm and until midnight when any home game starts at 4 pm or later.
And, as mentioned previously, today also marks a change in the route's stops near Union Station, with buses headed toward Navy Yard only serving the stop at Massachusetts Avenue and Columbus Circle. This means buses will no longer stop at 1st and Mass and 2nd and Mass.
And perhaps later this year the route will be extended to the Southwest Waterfront, though there's been no recent new news on that.
 

It's been a while since I've been down to the shores of the Anacostia at 1st Street (I'm old/it's been cold/I'm tired/I'm lazy), but on Saturday I finally made the trek to Florida Rock, and saw what I expected to see--a concrete slab at the bottom of the two-story excavation for the 305ish-unit residential building "The Riverfront," along with the base of the project's crane being put together.
I snagged a peek-through-the-fence shot of the hole, though before long I'll get to start taking photos of it from up above, on the viewing platform at Nats Park. (While I, uh, watch baseball, too. Yeah, yeah, that's it.)
Here's the riverfront view of the Riverfront footprint (below left), matched to the rendering of the same spot (center). Plus, at right, a shot looking from Diamond Teague's pier to the staircase at Nats Park, giving a sense of the plaza that will be there (and that one sightline from the staircase to the river will still exist after the apartment building is completed).

/This building, the first phase of the overall 1.1-million-sq-ft mixed-use redevelopment, is expected to be finished in late 2016. It will have a little more than 18,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and two levels of underground parking (as you see!). There will also be an extension of the Anacostia Riverwalk Trail.
The Phase 2 land immediately to the west of the new building is expected to be temporarily remade as a "beach" area, including volleyball courts, with additional space for parking and other temporary uses. Which is all separate from Bardo's potential "brew garden" plans for the two acres to the west of THAT site, on the portion of the Florida Rock footprint that edges up to the current Douglass Bridge.
See my Florida Rock page for lots more photos and renderings.
UPDATE: I finally made it up onto the Douglass Bridge on Sunday for the first time in forever to take some photos, and got an even better view of the excavation and its position in relationship to the ballpark. So, let's all look at this and start to mentally prepare for the change in the view not only of the ballpark, but from the ballpark.

 

This morning broke clear and sunny, and with a full slate of photos on my agenda, I headed south down New Jersey Avenue from north of the freeway, snapping merrily along, until I came to the 82 I construction site on the northwest corner of New Jersey and I.
With new sidewalks not yet in place in front of the Park Chelsea/800 New Jersey developments on the east side of the street, and with 82 I apparently not being covered under the regulations that resulted in the wide wide sidewalks you see all along the rest of the avenue, excavation and site work has been taking place right up to the (former) curb line on the only side of the street where pedestrians can walk. This has been going on for a few weeks, and while the temporary in-the-road-but-separated-by-plastic-barriers pedestrian path isn't optimal, it's also not unusual in these situations.
But this morning a large truck was parked in the former pedestrian path, with flagmen directing traffic in what had become just two very narrow north-south traffic lanes--and now there was absolutely nowhere for pedestrians to walk, in a location where it's very hard to take an alternate route on foot, unless you want to walk allllllll the way over to South Capitol and alllllll the way back to New Jersey once you get north of the freeway and train tracks, or backtrack southward to K so you can then walk north on 2nd or 3rd.
I've sidestepped a lot (A LOT) of construction during my 12 years of JDLand-ing, and I am generally pretty laid back about it--I'm not walking a dog, or pushing a stroller, so I just kind of grumble and pick my way through.
But the situation this morning--when two flagmen on either end were each telling me a different lane in the street in which to walk, and later exacerbated by seeing the line of seven or more dump trucks that were idling back to and around onto K Street while waiting to haul off excavated dirt--well, it escalated past even my high bar of tolerance, especially since I know how many people now walk along New Jersey to go to Capitol South, or the Capitol complex, or wherever.
And with the Nats returning to the neighborhood one week from today, and with thoughts of the number of stadium-goers who also do that New Jersey Avenue walk before and after games, I did the normal thing in 2015--I mentioned the situation on Twitter.
Which led to a lot of other people speaking up on Twitter, many of whom have been complaining about the issues surrounding this construction since it began back in February. Before long, Ward 6 council member Charles Allen tweeted that he had contacted the director of DDOT, and that "he's looking into it."
And while it shouldn't be the case that residents' complaints are ignored until either a) a loudmouth blogger fires off a tweet or b) baseball arrives, the truth is that the Nats' 2015 season is going to present a lot of challenges for anyone arriving in any way other than coming out of the Metro at Half and M.
There will be less parking available this year (which I'll detail in an upcoming post), and with 13 active construction sites east of South Capitol between the freeway and Nats Park, cars and pedestrians and bikes and fans and residents and commuters will be fighting a lot of battles, even though for the most part there won't be at gametime the sort of active work that snarled New Jersey and I this morning.
In addition to this New Jersey Avenue construction possibly bedeviling fans using Capitol South, the blocking of the sidewalk on the west side of 1st Street south of M for Ballpark Square construction in the block just north of the stadium--and the apparent temporary loss of the bike lane there as well--will end up making lots of fans just walk in the street instead of crossing back to the east side of the street, away from the ballpark.
And there are other spots where sidewalks are now blocked off or narrowed, or where street parking is temporarily banned, which are the sorts of issues that lead to grumpy drivers and grumpy pedestrians, which can lead to bad things.
One hopes that there will be attention paid to ways to ensure a safer passage to the ballpark, but one also hopes that any real effort to mitigate these construction/sidewalk/traffic/pedestrian issues doesn't happen only during the hours that red-and-white-bedecked masses are around.
In the meantime, be careful out there, and not just right where you see construction. (I watched a dump truck blow through a red light at 1st and Potomac, taking me back to the last era of crazy amounts of construction, but that was in 2007 when the resident population was about 1/10th of what it is now.)
UPDATE: One thing I should have emphasized more clearly is that this was obviously a Saturday-type operation, where the assumption is that such a setup will be less disruptive than on a weekday, and so the contractor can then get more done (in this case, hauling of dirt) in a shorter timespan. This intersection is just a tough one, since, as I said above, it doesn't easily allow for alternate north/south passage if something is going on.
UPDATE II: I went back on Sunday, where, as I expected, things were much quieter. And I also saw that part of the reason for the closure of the pedestrian walkway on Saturday was to build a new curb, and also pour some new concrete. I had noticed actually on Thursday that the old asphalt had a big crack in it and seemed to be dropping off toward the new excavation hole, so obviously this was a fix for that, and probably a pretty critical one.
Note also at the bottom of the photo evidence of old cobblestone.
 

I wrote a few weeks ago about the latest plans to use two acres on the western part of the Florida Rock site along the Anacostia River as a "brew garden" and neighborhood park while waiting for the project's later phases to get underway--and I also wrote about the muted reception the idea got from ANC 6D after a somewhat nebulous presentation by developer MRP Realty and representatives of Bardo.
Now the Bardo folks, who already operate a similar brew garden in Northeast, are trying to raise $200,000 to "do this thing deluxe," to create what it calls Bardo Riverfront, described as "100,000 square feet of BeerDisneyLand." This would include flush toilets instead of porta-potties, a bike shop, a kiddie playground, and "the largest dog park in DC," as well as parking for 500 bicycles, cornhole, food trucks, outdoor movies "projected onto a floating screen in the river," and other ideas.
Donations of $20 now will get you four pints of beer when it opens, or four pitchers for a $50 donation, or numerous other options up to a $5,000 donation allowing you to take over the entire place on any Monday-Thursday when the Nats aren't playing. If you don't have money to contribute, you could donate wood trips, or "big tree logs to make into totem poles."
More details as they become available....
 

When we last checked in on the Banfield Pet Hospital on Tingey in the Twelve12 apartment building, we had heard "early 2015" for its opening. And then we blinked and it was late March, and still no Banfield.
I checked in with Forest City, and they've passed along that there were some last-minute changes requested by the DC Board of Veterinary that needed to be made to the facilities, and it took a little time to then get approvals.
Things once again appear to be on track for an opening, in April--when I hear a date, I will alert the masses.
The Banfield web site has the page for this location up and ready to go, and it shows operating hours as 9-7 Monday through Saturday and 10 to 5 on Sunday.
 

* MOVIES: You voted a few weeks back, and now the lineup has been announced for this year's Capitol Riverfront's Outdoor Movie Series at Canal Park:
June 4: Back to the Future
June 11: Selma
June 18: The Princess Bride
June 25: Rush Hour
July 2: Independence Day
July 9: Bring It On
July 16: LEGO Movie
July 23: Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
July 30: Big Hero 6
August 6: Pitch Perfect
August 13: The Goonies
August 20: Guardians of the Galaxy
August 27: To Kill A Mockingbird
September 3: The Sound of Music
The official start time each week is "sundown," but the BID invites you to come around 7 pm with picnic in hand. All movies are free and open to the public.
* MUSIC: The Friday Night Concert Series at the Yards Park is coming back for its fifth (!) year, starting at 6:30 pm each week. The schedule of musical acts:
May 15: Jimi Smooth
May 22: Still Surfin'
May 29: Sponsored by Tour de Fat: Lineup TBA
June 5: Scott's New Band
June 12: DC JazzFest at The Yards: Soul Rebels & SharĂ³n Clark
June 19: Texas Chainsaw Horns
June 26: Jah Works
July 3: Almost Journey
July 10: Hand Painted Swinger
July 17: Wesley Spangler
July 24: Justin Trawick
July 31: White Ford Bronco
August 7: Morrison Brothers
August 14: Jeff From Accounting
August 21: Lloyd Dobler Effect
August 28: Special Guest TBA in August!
September 4: Crowded Streets
September 11: Sara Gray
 

* BONCHON GETTING CLOSER (MARCH 30!): There's been a whole lot of non-construction people inside Bonchon (as I saw during my most recent nose-pressing), and HillNow quotes the owner as saying the restaurant "is aiming to open near the start of Major League Baseball season," with job postings saying that the restaurant will open next week. Also: "The kitchen of the 140-seat restaurant will stay open late on game days, until 11 p.m. Monday through Thursday and later on weekends. A happy hour 4 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday is in the works."
UPDATE: Washingtonian has a sneak peek, with pictures, and says March 30 is the opening date. And Eater has its post up now too, and there's confirmation of that date on the Bonchon Navy Yard Facebook page. So, prep your taste buds!
* OPENING DAY GETTING CLOSER: The Capitol Riverfront BID has put together an initial list of Opening Day Specials and Events, which I imagine I will mention again with more fanfare when April 6 is upon us. If you liked 106.7 The Fan hanging out in Canal Park for the Winter Classic, they are doing it again for Opening Day. And Bluejacket is having a big Opening Day Fest.
* PARK CHELSEA GETTING CLOSER: With a July 1 target date to start leasing, the huge residential building at New Jersey and I is rolling along, and they've posted some interior construction photos on their web site. (But what I really want is their update on getting I Street opened....!)
And now I can't get Paul McCartney out of my mind.

 

* SOUTH CAPITOL SPEED CAMERAS: MPD has announced the latest batch of speed camera deployments, and it includes South Capitol Street between O Street and Potomac Avenue--alongside Nationals Park and just north of the Douglass Bridge--in both directions. "The 30 day educational phase, or 'warning period', will commence on or about March 23, 2015. During this period, violators will receive warning citations. After the 30 day warning period, MPD will begin issuing live moving citations to violators."
* NATS PARK MAGNETOMETERS: There was a media event on Monday to unveil the new magnetometers at all entrances to Nats Park. (I'll note that this sign about the procedures will probably not be met with glee.) I wasn't at the event, but I did get my own shot on Sunday of the new installations at the Center Field Gate, as you see at right. The new security screening procedures will be in place starting with the April 4 exhibition game against the Yankees. Arrive early! (WaPo)
* US-NY CIRCULATOR CHANGE: "From 3/29, catch the Union Station bus to Navy Yard only at Mass Ave and Columbus Cir 1st & 2nd St stops discontinued." (@DCCirculator; more here)
* YARDS PARK WORK: "We're almost ready for Splash Season! Please 'pardon our dust' as we prepare the water features and basin. We'll update here when finished!" (@YardsPark)
* PEEKING AT CSX: At right is a shot of the now-cleared area just south of the freeway and behind the 70 and 100 Capitol Yards apartment buildings. This work has had hearts aflutter that there could be some new development coming there, but it is actually just CSX clearing its considerable tract of land as prep work continues for the Virginia Avenue Tunnel.
* PEEKING AT EVERYTHING ELSE: I'm going to have to recalibrate my normal mission to over-document projects in blog posts, given the breadth of work underway in the neighborhood. That said, I can't pass up a quick sharing of the cellphone photos I took Sunday afternoon while peeking through fences at the Homewood Suites, 82 I, Hampton Inn/Ballpark Square, and 909 Half sites. (Click all to enlarge.) It would have been even better if I had included the other holes in the ground, at 1111 New Jersey, 800 New Jersey, and Florida Rock, but I failed.
 

Originally scheduled in February but delayed thanks to snow, the fundraiser at Nando's Peri-Peri for Van Ness Elementary in advance of the school's reopening this fall is now happening on Tuesday, March 24.
Bring the flyer to Nando's between 5 pm and 10 pm, order food, and Nando's will donate 40% of fundraiser sales to help raise money for the school. (Don't fret either the Feb. 17 date on it or about the RSVP stuff.)
This is the third in the series of fundraisers for nearby schools put on by the Near Southeast Community Partners group and Nando's, and there's a mini-competition going on to see which school raises the most money. So, if you're in the mood for chicken and mushed minty peas on Tuesday, print out the flyer and head to Tingey Street....
 

Just some things that didn't make it to the blog during the outage:
* MORE GROUND BROKEN: I had posted a photo last week of the new fence at not-Ballpark Square but wasn't quite ready to say that construction had started. However, the pile driver has arrived, and steel beams are already sticking out of the ground, so I think it's now safe to add the residential/hotel portion of the project to the ludicrous lineup of developments currently underway. (The office component at 99 M is expected to get started before long as well.) It's also the fourth to break ground just within the past month or so, joining residential projects 909 Half and 82 I and the Homewood Suites hotel at 50 M. And I think that's probably it for major projects getting started until the end of this year or early next year.
* BONCHON GETTING CLOSER: The paper is off the windows, so I was able to see where things stand at Bonchon--and it's looking well along. (Not pictured are the five or so boxes containing large flat-panel TVs.)
* DEMO PERMIT APPS: Applications have been submitted to demolish two buildings on the DC Water site--a 50,000-square-foot brick building and a 1,980-square-foot wood shed. Whether these are on the footprint of the planned movie theater/accompanying residential, I cannot tell you.
* SPRING! SPRING! There's now quite the inventory of outdoor tables at Willie's Brew & Que, and work is underway for a patio at the Big Stick (photo by Mr. JDLand):
* MORE ABOUT FOOD: I mentioned it in passing before, but there's been enough tweets sent my way to mention again that work has now started at the Scarlet Oak space at 909 New Jersey. And there's purty window ads now, to both get their name out there and to THWART my PEEKING. And closer to the river, at the Lumber Shed, both Due South and the Navy Yard Oyster Company have gotten their building permits.
With all that cleared out of the hopper, I now may be a bit scarce for the rest of the week. Hopefully the site will behave, though.
 

For those who missed out on my interim Facebook blogging on Monday....
The designs for two new buildings coming to the current Trapeze School site at the Yards (known in the parlance as Parcel O) are going before the National Capital Planning Commission in April for an early "35% design review."
One is the 140ish-unit condo building being planned by PN Hoffman. It will front Tingey Street between 4th and a newly (re-)built 5th Street. Its design echoes the brick+glass look that Arris will have when it is completed. It will be the first condo project within the Yards.
Immediately to its south will be a two-towered 190ish-unit rental building to be developed by Forest City. There will be 16,700 square feet of ground-floor retail across both buildings, along with 246 below-grade parking spaces, and in addition to the return of 5th Street there will also be a one-block extension of Water Street along the block's southern side.
Both developers are looking to begin construction late this year or early next year.
In honor of now having renderings, I created a Parcel O project page--and while putting it together, I found the photo at right, showing the corner of 5th and Tingey from May, 2004, back when there was a 5th Street (such as it was). This view matches the rendering at far right in the row of three.
As for the Trapeze School, it will be moving later this year to the southeastern portion of Spooky Park, at the corner of New Jersey and Tingey.
 

I think I can start breathing again.
JDLand.com runs on a shared server, and late last week one of the other sites on the server must have made someone veeeery angry, because a Denial of Service attack was launched that ran until Monday evening. On Monday morning, I decided it was time to get off that rickety server and into a new shared environment (with the same company), but it took another 24 hours for them to get me my files from the old server.
I have no doubt there are still bugs to be squashed, and I will be spending my day looking for them.
In the meantime, thanks for everyone's patience. I know it didn't matter anywhere near as much to you readers as it mattered to me, but I hated knowing how annoying it was to come to the site and have it not respond.
Hopefully things will be back to normal now. Though as long as I stay in a shared environment (which is about four times less expensive than getting a virtual private server), these sorts of things can happen.
UPDATE: A few things are not yet back to life--the RSS feed, the little box on the home page showing the most recent comments, and an updated Permits/Crime list. Otherwise, so far, the move itself hasn't been too bad, other than the very sore jaw from five days of clenching my teeth.
UPDATE II: The above lingering items are now fixed. I imagine there's still other stuff somewhere that's not working, but nothing leaping out at the moment.
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If you blinked this week, you missed the lickety-split steel framing of what will be the gymnasium at the Capper Community Center, on the northeast corner of 5th and L:
Just up the block, at 7th and L, the Lofts at Capitol Quarter is starting to look like a real building as well:
Click on any and all to enlarge.
 

* MARATHON: The Rock n Roll Marathon is on Saturday (March 14). Near Southeast gets off easy compared to some neighborhoods, but watch for closures, runners, tie-ups, etc., along South Capitol Street and the Douglass Bridge (plus over into Buzzard Point and also in Anacostia Park) until early afternoon. Full map here. In short: get thee to the Southeast Freeway or the 11th Street Bridges if you wish to escape by vehicle.
* CLOVER FEST: If you're not navigating around distance runners on Saturday morning, you may be dodging wobbly attendees from this year's Clover Fest beer tasting festival at 1st and N SE during the afternoon and evening.
* MONTADITOS BANKRUPTCY: "The Florida operator of the Spanish mini-sandwich chain 100 Montaditos has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Miami." Bankruptcy filings were also submitted for nine of the chain's restaurants in south Florida and the Arlington, Va., location. No word on whether it has any impact on the Tingey Street location. (Miami Herald)
* BLUEJACKET OPENING DAY FEST: Bluejacket is having an Opening Day Fest on Monday, April 6. Free to enter, but there's also a food/drink package option.
* TRUCKEROO: The 2015 Truckeroo schedule is out, starting April 24. (Yes, the Fairgrounds/Bullpen is going to remain open this year.)
* THREE BEDROOMS: I wrote back in October about the Yards West zoning hearing where this all first percolated, but GGW has taken a look at the notion of incentives for three-bedroom apartments. Then City Paper's Housing Complex blog tackled the subject as well.
 

UPDATE: Well, that was a fun few hours. Sorry about the outage--fingers crossed that we're back. It's the price I pay for keeping JDLand on a shared hosting service. (I actually kind of enjoyed the respite!)
I somehow managed to make it through four hours of Monday night's ANC 6D meeting (yay?). I already gave you the big headline (at least from the JDLand vantage point), but here's some other tidbits:
* DUE SOUTH: After initially applying for a Class CT Tavern license, the southern food restaurant planned for the Lumber Shed agreed to amend the application and change to a CR license as part of the settlement agreement negotiated with 6D. However, the city's liquor license board apparently voted on March 4 to approve a CT license. After much (much!) discussion and consternation about process, 6D voted 4-2-1 to send a letter to ABRA saying that if in fact Due South is being given a CT license, the ANC requests to be reinstated as a protestant to the license application and also moves for reconsideration of the CT order.
* HALF STREET HOLE: A presentation was made on the new plans I posted about for the northeast corner of Half and N, i.e., Monument Valley, i.e., the Half Street Hole, which received a generally positive response from the commission, along with suggestions for a better external differentiation between the condo wing facing N Street and the rest of the building and a request that the new sidewalks be made of softer materials if possible. The commission then voted 4-0-2 to support the project, which is now scheduled for its Capitol Gateway Overlay review on May 28.
* BREW GARDEN AT FLORIDA ROCK: Representatives of MRP Realty and Bardo presented their brew garden/neighborhood park concept. It was very late in the meeting, and so the discussion was hurried, but the commission raised issues based on concerns from when similar aborted attempts were made to use this site in previous years. These ranged from the fact that initial discussions with MPD and DCRA have apparently not yet been had, nor has the BID been talked to (which came up when the MRP/Bardo folks said they were looking to the ANC to "program" the site's offerings beyond the brew garden). One thing emphasized to the commission was that this is not envisioned as a place for baseball fans to come and swill down Bud Light, and that no hard liquor would be served. In the end, with time running out and the somewhat muddled presentation leaving the commissioners a bit quizzical as to exactly what the team is planning to do at the site, no vote was taken.
There was also one item just barely outside the JDLand border region, so you can read SWill on a new residential project planned at 1319 South Capitol, immediately to the north of the Camden South Capitol building and across the street from the ballpark.
 

The second week in March started off pretty notably in Near Southeast:
First, the one that's probably of most interest, the arrival of Bonchon's signage, now hung outside of its space on the southwest corner of Half and K, inside 1015 Half Street.
I peeked in the door, and it appears to still be a few good weeks from opening, which would seem to jibe with the "early April" target date that the restaurant posted on its Facebook page back in February. So everyone will just have to look at these signs and dream for a little while longer.
One block to the south, fences and equipment arrived at the parking lot on the northeast corner of Half and M, and this morning ground was being broken (for real, not ceremonially!) for what will become a 195-room Homewood Suites.
This will be another addition to the neighborhood's burgeoning lineup of hotels, with the long-established Courtyard by Marriott at New Jersey and L about to be joined by the under-construction 168-room Hampton Inn at 1st and N, plus eventually also the as-yet-unnamed brand in the as-yet-unnamed Ballpark Square project.
Speaking of which.... Fences went up Monday afternoon around the sidewalk on the west side of 1st Street south of M, generally along the boundary of the residential and hotel portion of the Grosvenor/McCaffery project currently referred to as Ballpark Square. No heavy equipment has arrived, and as I mentioned recently there's plans for a ceremonial groundbreaking in coming weeks, but fencing off the public sidewalk would seem to be a bit of a "tell."
This project will have a 285-unit apartment building alongside the 180-room hotel, and 45,000 square feet of retail that will stretch across these two buildings, the Skanska 99 M office building at the corner of 1st and M that is also expected to get started Any Minute Now, and a separate two-story retail building at 1st and N.
And, just to emphasize how many new projects have gotten underway in the past few weeks, here's official documentation (finally) of the work underway at residential projects 909 Half (left) and 82 I (right), which together will add another 615ish units to the neighborhood inventory when they open.
Having a hard time keeping all of this straight? Check out my refreshed-for-2015 What's New in the Neighborhood Since Last Season page, with handy maps of the restaurants that have opened or are coming soon, the new lineup of project plans just north of Nats Park, and the 10 (TEN!) residential projects currently under construction or starting momentarily. Be prepared for a lot of blocked sidewalks and a lot of construction vehicles on your way to the ballpark this year....
 
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