Divided ANC Supports Dupont Circle Church Plans, With a Caveat

• July 10th 2014

by Lark Turner

A plan to build a new St. Thomas’ Parish church in Dupont Circle — along with residences to help pay for it — was ultimately supported, with caveats, by a divided ANC 2B on Thursday.

The church was mostly burned down in the ’70s, and has allowed Dupont residents to use its open land as a park for decades. The site is in the Dupont Circle Historic District, and the project will go before the Historic Preservation Review Board later this month.

The new plan has stirred up emotions in the community. Hundreds of people have signed a petition, Save Church Street, opposing the development. On Wednesday night, the ANC spent more than an hour debating whether to support the plans for 1772 Church Street NW (map). Commissioner Noah Smith asked the commission to oppose the plan, while the chair of the zoning committee, Leo Dwyer, advocated a resolution supporting it.

Smith ultimately managed to amend Dwyer’s resolution to read that the “ANC does not support the massing of the residential component of the project,” and that amendment narrowly passed 4-3. But though the resolution was successfully amended, it didn’t pass at the end of the night, by a 5-3 vote. Commissioner Stephanie Maltz was the swing vote in the passage of the 4-3 amendment, but after more discussion decided to oppose the resolution as a whole. She worried aloud that a too-strongly worded resolution might scare the church off the project entirely. The church said in a zoning committee meeting earlier this week that some developers had advised it to sell off its land and wash its hands of whatever happened next.

Instead, the ANC decided at the last minute to support a resolution from the Dupont Circle Conservancy led by Tom Bower.

That resolution “supports the concept of the church portion of the project” but asks for higher-quality materials and “a better understanding of how the structure will exist in context with the adjacent fabric on 18th Street.” It also supported the residential component of the project with the following caveat:

“The DCC supports the residential concept but is concerned that the massing presents an incongruous transition on Church Street with the rest of the block.We suggest that the designers revisit the massing with the intent of reducing bulk adjacent to the townhouses on Church Street, with a more gradual increase in height from the east to west.”

Bower told UrbanTurf that the Conservancy passed its resolution by a 7-4 vote. He said some of the members are also supporters of the Save Church Street movement. He suggested that influencing the project positively was ultimately better than allowing the land to sit vacant and be developed later, perhaps with less scrutiny, by someone else.

“The built history of DC is very long,” he said. “None of us is going to be around when that lot changes the next time. By not doing something, you risk having something worse happen.”

He also said the church had been flexible in working with the community thus far. UrbanTurf reported earlier this week that the design had changed significantly since it was first revealed at a heated town hall earlier in 2014.

“The church could simply say it’s our property, we have this zoning right, we’re going to go forward and do what we want,” Bower said. “At this point, they’ve been gracious about being open to tweaking things.”

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/in_controversial_dupont_circle_church_project_divided_anc_supports_plans_wi/8719.