There’s some new retail coming to Ward 8, and the entrepreneurs opening there say that they hope the development at St. Elizabeths East will have a big impact on the community — and on their organizations too.

The shops will be part of an interim retail space  the city just broke ground on at St. Elizabeths East near Congress Heights Metro station. The entrepreneurs will open storefronts in the David Adjaye-designed structure next door to the Entertainment and Sports Arena, home to the Washington Mystics. The retail building is expected to open in December, and be a temporary use while the city prepares future phases of development at the 183-acre site, including more residential, parking, and health care facilities.

The temporary retail village that will include eight local businesses, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced July 11, including:

• Black Bella
• Soufside Creative
• Chris Pyrate & Friends 
• LoveMore Brand
• Our Armoire
• Paradyce Clothing Company Inc.
• Salon On The Ave.
• The Museum

Keyonna Jones is taking one of the spaces for a retail location called Soufside Creative. The store will be an “incubator inside an incubator” with a framing shop, gallery space and a store to sell art, says Jones, who is also executive director of the Congress Heights Arts and Cultural Center. She’s been a “one-woman show” for a long time, after founding the arts and cultural center in 2015 as a space for the community to use, and to support Black creatives and other artists of color.

Jones hopes the satellite location will help “jump-start” brands and businesses for artist-entrepreneurs — or “art-repeneurs” as she calls them — from Southeast D.C. 

“It’s really hard and expensive sometimes with framing, so we want to create that equity and that accessibility,” she says. “But then we also want to create a store where creatives can come in, have a brick and mortar, really have a professional space where they can put their stuff on shelves and then also have the opportunity to be a store manager to know what that feels like.”

Another one of the future tenants, Chris Pyrate, is an artist, muralist, and designer from Southeast D.C who plans to open Chris Pyrate & Friends, a combination of streetwear apparel shop and art gallery. He got his start as one of the last designers for Up Against The Wall in Georgetown, but after the apparel retailer’s closure in 2010, Pyrate says he wasn’t finding the opportunities to support himself as an artist in D.C.

So for years, Pyrate bounced between Miami and New York painting murals, all the time yearning to return to D.C. and create the artistic space he’d always wanted to see in his hometown. When he landed a job as a creative director for the D.C. region for Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer in 2019, that provided him with the financial means to not only create more murals across the city, but also support a team of other artists.

That premise of establishing a team and uplifting other artists is something he hopes to bring to the St. Elizabeths retail village.

“You’ll probably see me interacting, collaboration-wise with a lot of the same artists that I hired to PBR,” Pyrate says, pointing to artists like Trap Bob, a multi-disciplinary artist who Pyrate collaborated with. And those collaborations aren’t limited to other artists. Pyrate hopes to do more more work with D.C. businesses in the vein of his Bloom City streetwear collaboration with the Washington Wizards that launched this year. 

By now, Pyrate knows St. Elizabeths well, after the city commissioned him to paint a mural there— a project that was delayed multiple times due to the pandemic. But those delays only deepened Pyrate’s relationship with city officials. And seeing his work on the mural, Kristi C. Whitfield, Director of the D.C. Department of Small and Local Development, asked Pyrate to apply as a vendor for the site.

Pyrate says he is encouraged by the local focus for the first phase of St. Elizabeths retail, and hopes it can stay that way.

“I love the fact that it starts off all local,” he says. “It could be an example of actually like being a destination in Southeast, without being a super like heavily gentrified project … without losing the accessibility [and] the feeling of that Southeast people are welcome.” 

Similarly, Jones hopes that the St. Elizabeths project can be inclusive and serve the existing Ward 7 and 8 communities over the long term. “I think any time that anybody is coming in east of the river in any capacity, there’s always the fear that it will become a situation of displacement or gentrification or things like that the community won’t be able to be a part of,” she says. “But I feel like, especially with this groundbreaking, just how they did it, they were pretty intentional.”

The process to select vendors was rigorous, and community leaders were a big part of the selection, Jones explains. The committee used focus groups and multiple surveys to gain public input, city officials said at the groundbreaking. 

Time will tell if providing the space is enough to support the businesses. But Jones and Pyrate say the selection process gave them some optimism about the potential for long-term support. In terms of what the entrepreneurs could use to be successful, Pyrate says he hopes for more mentorship opportunities for him and his team, since most of their expertise is in the art itself, not necessarily running a business.

While Congress Heights Art and Cultural Center already has its own mentorship initiatives, Jones hopes for more technical support and — of course — for the community to come out and support the store.