Last night the Zoning Commission heard the
Capitol Gateway Overlay Review case for
1111 New Jersey, Donohoe's now 220,000-square-foot office building on the northwest corner of New Jersey and M. The
Office of Planning report laid out how the project properly adheres to the requirements of the CG Overlay, and there was actually very little discussion by the commissioners of the building's design or landscape (save for a few questions about the width of the sidewalk on M Street, which is wider than what the CG Overlay calls for, because of various hardware for the Navy Yard Metro station below).
What took up the bulk of the discussion was whether the building's parking garage should be accessed via New Jersey Avenue or via the block's alley that runs north-south between L and M (which is shared with
100 M,
Onyx, and whatever gets built on the St. Matthew's site). The original design had the garage driveway on New Jersey, but DDOT is asking that it be moved to the alley because of both a desire to not have curb cuts on a major state street like New Jersey and because the alley is an existing curb cut where pedestrians expect vehicular flow. But the commissioners were uniformly unhappy with the alley solution, given the narrowness of the alley (14 feet), the heavy amount of traffic there will be, and the very awkward garage entrance/exit that Donohoe has had to come up with in order to make the alley entry work. Donohoe didn't appear to be especially happy with the alley solution, either, but DDOT was pretty firm in their desire to have it there.
The record was left open, and DDOT and Donohoe said they would continue to work on the garage issue. A ruling on the overlay review could come at the March 11 Zoning Commission meeting.
Chairman Anthony Hood also briefly touched on
ANC 6D's opposition to the project because of a lack of a community benefits package--Hood said that this project is not a PUD, and any desires to have amenities packages be part of CG Overlay reviews should have been dealt with when the Overlay was created, so the ANC's opposition was viewed as not germaine.