Community Three Starts $45M Redevelopment of DC’s Grimke School
By Keith Loria October 21, 2019 12:31 pm
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After roughly ten years of planning, Community Three has finally started work on its planned $45 million mixed-use redevelopment of the historic Grimke School in Washington, D.C. When finished, it will include a new home for the African American Civil War Museum, according to Community Three.
“The redevelopment effort fills a longstanding physical … hole in the neighborhood, though the adaptive reuse of the former Grimke School building, reconfiguration and expansion of the school’s former gymnasium space, and infill of an adjacent parking lot with frontage along U Street,” Grant Epstein, Community Three’s president, told Commercial Observer. “The program leverages the existing neighborhood vitality thought careful physical urban interventions, but also through the addition of its dynamic set of programmatic uses.”
The added office uses will provide daytime patrons for existing businesses and the project’s “maker units” will complement existing and diverse local art talent.
“Rounded out with new, modern, market-rate and affordable residential units, the ensemble [is] truly a strategic effort aimed at mending the urban fabric and celebrating the legacy of this already great locale,” Epstein said.
Next fall, a six-story condominium building called The Fold is scheduled to be built in the previous school parking lot. It will also include ground-floor retail space.
The school was built in 1887 on public property and the District government owned the land that entire time. The city has been disposing of public property, including many school buildings that are no longer in use, in a similar way for many years. The city still owns the land under the main Grimke school building, as it was conveyed to Community Three under a 99-year ground lease.
Toward the end of 2017, the D.C. office of the deputy mayor for planning and economic development gave Community Three the go-ahead to redevelop the Grimke School properties into a mixed-use project with a permanent home for the museum.
In August, the District devised a 99-year ground lease for Community Three on the Grimke School’s land. The District also sold the gym and parking lot properties to the company.
Phase Two of the project, which will transform the Grimke School’s 1920s-era gymnasium into 40 residences, is expected to break ground sometime in 2021 or 2022.
Office leasing is being handled by Stream Realty Partners, while residential sales are being handled by Urban Pace.
Update: This story originally misattributed source material. This has been corrected. We apologize for the error.
