A New Chinatown Facade
DCist was in Gallery Place/Chinatown/East End/Penn Quarter (take your pick) last week to take a look at the massive soon-to-be-completed building at the southeast corner of Seventh and H streets. Already, Urban Outfitters and Benetton have opened their doors. A movie megaplex will open soon, along with some more retail, infusing the Seventh Street corridor with more pedestrian traffic.
Unlike some new construction in the Seventh Street area downtown, DCist is most pleased with how this building turned out architecturally. First, compare its metrorail entrance to that of the escalator entry at 13th and U streets on the Green Line. At U Street, the new building at the metrorail station is short, squatty, quite unimaginative and architecturally, it is very dull and doesn't even blend in with the neighborhood. (The Post's Benjamin Forgey wrote a most fitting obituary for the corner a year ago.) At Gallery Place, the new building's metro entry takes elements from Chinatown's Friendship Gate making the underground portal very dignified for what would otherwise be a bland WMATA entry. While DCist is normally skeptical when architects try to recreate elements from the past in a contemporary setting, it seems to be done well here -- not quite imperial Nanking, not quite Epcot.
And this design philosophy carries over to the next section of the building.
Down Seventh Street, on the way to the MCI Center, you may notice elements of 19th century Lower Manhattan here. Seriously. While DCist hasn't come by with a magnet yet, it looks from afar that the exterior around the Urban Outfitters could be cast iron, as if parts of Broadway and Mercer, Crosby and Greene streets were recreated on Seventh Street. Again, its not effect is not quite SoHo, but not quite New York, New York in Las Vegas.
The New York Times wrote about this architectural fusion on Sept. 1, but it's in their fee-based archives, so pay the $2.95 if you want to read more. (We're surprised that Benjamin Forgey hasn't given his two cents yet in Cityscapes.)
In short, the architects did a good job of not only tying in elements of Chinatown (or Chinablock as it may be now) into the building, but also did a nice interpretation of the revitalized 19th century commercial building stock across the street.
Despite how well the new development blends the different elements of the neighborhood, it competes with other elements that don't. As the City Paper noted two years back (we think), having Hooters and Chipotle carry Chinese lettering for authenticity’s sake seems more than a bit fake. DCist is excited about the future of the Seventh and H street corridors, but fear stores like Urban Outfitters and the like could bring in massive amounts of school groups that will flood the sidewalks. And that could deter the non-MCI Arena/non-tourist crowd from considering it a District retail corridor and leave it soley as a Disney-like nexus of transplanted suburban shopping and destination entertainment. More affordable housing could help fix that, but it's difficult to see that coming anytime soon in the Chinatown/Gallery Place/East End/Penn Quarter area.