Ouch.

For anyone who recently moved into one of the many apartment buildings rising along Massachusetts Avenue between Mt. Vernon Square and Chinatown and read the Post yesterday, it may have been a bit of a shock to find the city’s newspaper of record heaping criticism on the developments. In an article gracing the front page of the Style section and titled “The Mediocre Mile,” Post writer Philip Kennicott left little debate over what he thought of the many new residential buildings:

So what do these new buildings look like? They’re big, and more often than not they’re brick, or, rather, clad with a brick facing that gives them a shallow skin of pink or red or dun-colored hues. Many of them take advantage of a D.C. zoning quirk that allows residential buildings to extend bays or other protrusions beyond the property line, and so they mimic, in a tall, distended way, the street-scape of the city’s historic neighborhoods. They also push up to the maximum heights allowed by the city, and out to the farthest reach of their allowable space. They’re block-fillers and often very drab. And many of them feel as if they could just as well be in Ballston — or South Florida.

He continues, critiquing not only the structures, but indirectly offering an opinion on the people living within them:

Politically and economically this is an urban success story. But look at the details of these buildings and they don’t seem very urban at all. Yes, many of them have street-level retail — and the chain stores are moving in. And yes, these buildings will bring thousands of new residents to a once-empty area. But they also have an inexorable thrust upward, to rooftop pools and running tracks and common areas that give their denizens a view of the city from a 100 feet up, rather than an immersion in it.

We can’t lie and say we don’t somewhat agree. The area is no doubt better than what it was a few years ago, when not much lined the sides of Massachusetts Avenue from Union Station to beyond the new Convention Center. But much like the newly revitalized area of Chinatown, there isn’t much life to the buildings that have popped up. They’re uniform, sterile, and removed from the pulse of city life. Then again, we see the obvious benefit. They attract well-to-do workers who no doubt contribute to the city’s tax base and likely take little by way of city services.

Since the Post didn’t offer readers the chance to critique or compliment Kennicott’s piece, we will. So we ask — Massachusetts Avenue, mediocre or marvelous?