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Move over WaWa… Wegmans is finally coming to the District.
Mayor Muriel Bowser announced on Sunday that the mid-Atlantic grocery chain’s first D.C. store will anchor the redevelopment of the Fannie Mae site at 3900 Wisconsin Avenue NW, The Washington Post reports.
Wegmans is based in Rochester New York and has several stores in Maryland and Virginia. Roadside Development tried to bring the chain to the Walter Reed site, but didn’t win the bid for that contract.
“Wegmans is a decisive win for our city,” Mayor Bowser said in a statement, according to The Post.
The store will be part of a 228,000-square-foot brick building that Fannie Mae moved to in the 1970s. The colonial building was constructed in 1958 to resemble the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg.
The entire Fannie Mae campus includes about 9.71 acres of land, which will be transformed for mixed uses. Roadside Development and North America Sekisui House announced they purchased the site in November for just under $90 million. Since then, they’ve launched a website and reached out to McLean Gardens residents, local ANCs, Sidwell Friends School, and other stakeholders for ideas about what to do with the property.
“It’s a big, important piece of property,” Richard Lake, a founding partner of Roadside Development, told DCist in November. “I don’t want to shortchange the process.”
Fannie Mae is moving to Midtown Center, an office building currently in construction at the site of the former Washington Post headquarters, when it is completed in the summer of 2018.
Lake told The Post that Wegmans is slated to open in McLean Gardens in 2022, occupying about 80,000 square feet of the building.
“People know them and love them, but until now they’ve had to travel to the suburbs,” Lake told The Post. “With this store, we’re bringing Wegmans right to their doorsteps.”