Can D.C. Lead the Way to a 21st Century Waterfront?

The Southwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., has always been something of a social experiment in progress. In the years after the Civil War, the neighborhood was a highly segregated dumping ground for the city’s poorest residents, divided fairly evenly between a mix of Scottish, Irish, German, and Eastern European immigrants and freed black slaves. Though conditions had improved by the early 1900s, especially along the Southwest waterfront, they slid for the next four decades, until federal authorities eager to expand the physical boundaries of federal Washington evicted tens of thousands of residents in order to raze a mostly 19th-century neighborhood and erect a gleaming new utopia in its place. They had the future in mind.

So when developers Hoffman-Madison Marquette break ground on a roughly 52-acre development early next year, they’ll be working in a proud neighborhood tradition. EE&K, a Perkins Eastman Company, the firm behind the master plan for The Wharf, says it is designing a waterfront for the 21st century. And in the case of waterfronts, that means looking backward as well as forward.