Public Policy Matters Take 2
Alexandria power plant revisited: An entering view of the campus.
Mixed media illustration provide by Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center (WAAC)
Continuing a story begun in last week’s blog
Virginia Tech already has a significant impact in Metropolitan Washington with the founding of the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, graduating an impressive number of highly qualified architects in its 40-year existence. But with the new Innovation Campus, that influence will grow. This story focuses on a site just south of there, on an old, unused power plant and the site’s potential re-use for energy research.
The shuttered Alexandria power plant site lies close to the heart of Old Town. The City logically refers to the larger area as Old Town North because it is is adjacent to Old Town, even if the area is yet to establish as distinct an identity–in this writer’s opinion. Just north of the power plant site lies the former Potomac Yards, and the proposed general location of Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus.
The distance from Slater’s Lane (at the north end of the power plant site) to Potomac Yards is 1.3 miles via existing streets. A long dog walk, a short jog or even shorter bike ride.
Illustration provided by Virginia Tech’s Center for Power Electronic Systems (CPES)
The logic of looking at the shuttered power plant for part of Virginia Tech’s expanded presence has the following going for it:
· Reclamation of a long-neglected piece of Alexandria’s urban fabric, as a model for brownfield site development
· Opportunities for light rail initiatives connected to the Virginia Tech Innovation and Amazon campuses
· Opportunities for expanded pedestrian routes to the Virginia Tech Innovation and Amazon campuses
· Urban anchor for Old Town North
· Prominent location at the northern end of the GW Memorial Parkway
· Adjacency to Old Town Alexandria
· Continuation of Alexandria’s Eco-City goals
So what might Virginia Tech gain from this, beyond the goodwill of the community? Obviously, the Innovation Campus will raise the university’s reputation at the forefront of technological innovation, placing the new campus close to the heart of the nation’s capital. However, jets flying to and from Reagan-National Airport in final approach pass low alongside the power plant site. The site is highly visible; if the former plant were to be repurposed as a physical locus, at the forefront of energy innovations–what a symbol of advancements in knowledge!
As importantly, applying best practices in architecture and urban design to a 19th Century industrial artifact, carrying it into the future is a very attainable goal–surely LEED Platinum. The Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center has done the community a favor—as has the Center for Power Electronics Systems in demonstrating the potential.
This week’s blog intends to set the stage by providing background on the site. In next week’s blog I hope to introduce more specific details on how this project might work.
A Brief Site History
The site’s human history goes back to before the Europeans arrived—some 13,000 years to be more specific. River shorelines along the eastern seaboard abounded with Native American settlements and this was particularly true in the Mid-Atlantic region. However, to date no archeological sites have been discovered in Old Town North.
“Human occupation of Alexandria began thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. Despite the past 250 years of construction and development, scattered but tangible remnants of 13,000 years of Native American settlement still remain buried within the city.
"In 1654, Margaret Brent, a member of the wealthy and powerful Brent family, first patented the land that eventually became the City of Alexandria, including parts of Old Town North. Brent’s 700 acre patent spanned from Hunting Creek on the south to approximately what is now First Street.
"In 1749 the Town of Alexandria was founded, named after John Alexander’s grandchildren who continued to own their grandfather’s legacy. The town began as a rather humble group of tobacco warehouses and a wharf at the foot of what is now Oronoco Street, just south of the boundary of what is now the Old Town North district.
"When the new Federal capital was formed in 1791, it included the Town of Alexandria as well as present day Old Town North.
"Eventually, in 1847 the City of Alexandria and surrounding territory formally became again a part of Virginia. The portion of Old Town North to the south of Montgomery Street became part of the City, while the area to the north became part of Alexandria County (renamed Arlington County in 1921).”
From “Old Town North Historic Interpretation Guide”, 2017, City of Alexandria Office of Historic Alexandria
Thus, early Alexandria was largely developed on land south of today’s Old Town North. But the 19th Century quirk of dividing Old Town North from present day Arlington County bears on the story of the power plant: Amazon’s new 2nd Headquarters lies in Arlington County while the Virginia Tech Innovation campus and the power plant site are in the City of Alexandria–as the crow flies just a few miles south.
The power plant property was part of a larger 400 acre plantation remaining into the 1800s. Because the land’s history evolved from agricultural to industrial uses, the 25 acre site remained largely intact. Railroad lines, a short-lived shipping canal, occupation by Union troops beginning at the outbreak of the Civil War, the “Berg” where freed African Americans fleeing from slavery in Petersburg took shelter, in time all became buried overlays in Old Town North. The most distinctive physical the 19th Century artifact is the vacant diagonal rail line bordering the power plant site to its southwest. And from the 20th Century, the power plant itself.
Power Plant Site in Present Day
The shuttered power plant site is bordered on the east by the Mount Vernon Trail on a precious sliver of land beside the Potomac River, to the southwest, the abandoned rail line, the GW Memorial Parkway (North Washington Street) to the west, and Slater’s Lane to the north.
Power Plant panorama
From here along the Mt. Vernon Trail, the US Capitol can be seen across the water.
Virginia Tech Center for Power Electronics Systems
Who are these people, anyway?
Best description is a university research center allied with a wide ranging consortium of industries, from energy to transportation and aerospace. Eighty-plus corporations in a broad spectrum of industries are currently supporting CPES research. CPES has also developed a reputation for collaborating with architects—of all people. (emoji here)
VA Tech’s CPES was begun in 1977 and has been growing since.
In 1987, CPES was briefly associated with Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology (CIT). The CIT building was designed by Arquitectonica, a band of architects who also designed the “Hole in the Middle” residential tower featured in Miami Vice.
If you’re ever flying via Dulles Airport, look down and you might have noticed the CIT building–a tilted tabletop with multi-hued glass sides, wrapped by a forest of trees.
In 1998, the Center for Power Electron Systems became a National Science Foundation engineering research center with a consortium of universities including: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina A&T State University and University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez.
“The research vision is to enable dramatic improvements in the performance, reliability, and cost… of electric energy processing systems by developing an integrated system approach via integrated power electronics modules… based on the integration of new generation of devices, innovative circuits and functions in the form of building blocks with standard functionalities and interfaces to facilitate the integration of these building blocks into application-specific system solutions… Various versions have been successfully commercialized, such as, in motor drives and power management solutions for microprocessors.”
from the Virginia Tech CPES website
Collaboration with Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture has continued for some time, last year winning first place in the Solar Decathlon Middle East-Dubai with their FutureHAUS.
FutureHAUS image provided by Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech’s CPES first became present in Northern Virginia in 2017, locating in facilities in Arlington. Looking forward, it is expected to join the burgeoning Va. Tech. Innovation Campus.
CPES current Arlington Lab
Former Power Plant
The power plant was built in 1949–hard by the Potomac River. The river now laps against the concrete foundation walls of the secondary buildings. It’s possible the plant was originally set back further from the water, and the river just changed course. It’s also very possible the site was filled by tons of backfill pushed into the river; they used to do things like that.
The bike trail’s boardwalk runs beside the power plant—and beside the Potomac River.
Either way, it’s curious to find a power plant’s foundations being washed by the Potomac River, which isn’t the largest or longest, though it has a history of violent floods down its entire length.
A historic curiosity is that the Potomac separating the two former colonies is ‘owned’ by the District of Columbia, then beyond DC’s borders the State of Maryland. In some countries that could mean border crossings with snarling dogs, guards and visas. Ireland’s Brexit problems come to mind. But not to pretend these things don’t matter in the US, you might have read about a recent Supreme Court decision: National Sea Grant Law Center settling a water rights dispute between Virginia and Maryland—you can’t make this stuff up.
To go further into the mud, the reports of the power plant’s site cleanup–because the contamination went into DC’s section of the Potomac, the cleanup reports were submitted to the District of Columbia’s Department of Energy and Environment.
So let’s review: a coal-fired plant built seventy years ago to sell power to the District of Columbia, not able to keep up with environmental standards and shut down was later to be found contaminating the land (and river) Washington surveyed as a young lad and another Virginian named Jefferson used to view from Mount Vernon…
Quirks of History
In considering the power plant site, a first question comes: where does the 100-year flood plain for the Potomac lie? FEMA maintains the maps, so I took a trip (euphemistically) to their website. Then dug around the Virginia DEQ website for the local site’s history.
The power plant site lies at the edge of the 100-year flood plain FEMA identifies for the Potomac River. The site is immediately south of Daingerfield Island, a FEMA-designated ‘floodway.’ Just south of the power plant site, Old Town, by comparison, is regularly flooded for the streets nearest the river. So how many times might this site alongside the Potomac be flooded? Best guess is the majority of the physical plant site is some twenty feet above the 100-year flood plain and the southern end slopes closer to ten feet.
Ironically, the power plant site sits at a higher elevation than historic Alexandria’s riverfront.
100-year flood plain is defined by FEMA as a 1% annual chance of flooding, i.e. statistically occurring once every 100 years. From FEMA Flood Insurance Map, 2011
After Hurricane Katrina, locating major utility plants next to large bodies of water has taken on a different cast. And after decades of work restoring the Chesapeake Bay, a similar thought applies: it was a great idea to shut down this coal-fired beast.
Next up: what to do with 25 acres of riverfront?
Current Virginia environmental regulations related to the Chesapeake Bay (which the Potomac joins south of DC) requires a minimum 100 foot setback for construction of any kind–the so-called Resource Protection Area (RPA) intended to minimize contaminants reaching the water. Whether the shuttered power plant can be grandfathered is a first question.
The Bay Act delegates land development to local jurisdictions, in this case the City of Alexandria.
“The Bay Act recognizes that local governments have the primary responsibility for land use decisions, expanding local government authority to manage water quality, and establishing a more specific relationship between water quality protection and local land use decision-making.
"The lands that make up Chesapeake Bay Preservation Areas are those that have the potential to impact water quality most directly. Generally, there are two types of environmentally sensitive lands: Resource Protection Areas (RPAs), and Resource Management Areas (RMAs). RPAs protect and benefit water quality, while RMAs have the potential to damage water quality without proper management. By carefully managing land uses within these areas, local governments help reduce the water quality impacts of nonpoint source pollution and improve the health of the Chesapeake Bay.”
From Virginia DEQ website
The Chesapeake Bay’s watershed extends through Pennsylvania and into lower New York State via the Susquehanna River. Map by USGS
Mount Vernon Bike Trail
This bike trail is one of the oldest in metropolitan Washington. Come spring it is a mecca for all sorts and sizes of bikes, pedestrians, dogs and the occasional cat. Further south it crosses wetlands on a long series of wood bridges that give you the feeling of riding through a tidal wilderness. Riding alongside the shuttered power plant doesn’t give quite the same impression.
An engineering traffic study of the bike and pedestrian traffic ca. 2015 counted over an average 520 cyclists and 130 pedestrians in a two-hour period immediately north of the shuttered power plant. Redevelopment of the power plant site would require careful moves incorporating the Mount Vernon Trail – and the cooperation of the U.S Park Service.
The northwestern end of the site lies within the viewshed of the George Washington Memorial Parkway (North Washington Street). Meaning whatever might be proposed at this end of the site would receive scrutiny from both the City and the U.S. Park Service.
Site Issues for the Power Plant
Two key tasks facing architects on planning any project begin with an understanding the site constraints and understanding the owner’s building program. At two ends of a spectrum, macro to micro, and both are critical to the project’s success. This week, I’ll cover what’s known about the power plant’s site.
Has all the site’s coal and petroleum contamination been remediated? As mentioned earlier, a former power plant can be one granddaddy of a brownfield site. As important would be understanding what constraints the Bay Act would impose beyond its remediation. Water quality strategies for this site would play an important part in the visual aspects of the site, with rain gardens and basins being prime methods of returning runoff to the river.
Politically, convincing the Alexandria community that the site can be responsibly developed has a lot to do with how closely the design team works with the City’s Planning Commission, local civic groups, and the community at large. The most successful process I’ve witnessed, termed a ‘charrette’ (public brain-storming sessions) gives the best chance of receiving community input into the process. In this process, the focus is mainly on height, density and traffic, not necessarily in that order.
Being within the GW Parkway viewshed implies a high order of scrutiny from a number of state local and Federal agencies. Likewise the Mount Vernon Trail.
Finally, what possibilities exist for reuse of the abandoned rail running south of the site? Is there a possible linkage by light rail to the Innovation Campus due north? To the Amazon Campus?
I first came to Washington as a designer of Metro stations and sites, and I’ve made that passion for incorporating public transportation options into a career. With an inactive rail line at the foot of this site, how it is reclaimed and brought into the weave of the urban fabric is key to the future of the power plant’s 25 acres.
In fact, the site is bounded by huge urban design opportunities: a riverfront, important gateway street, popular bike trail and a future transit way. All that’s needed is to get started with it.
Addendum to Last Week’s Blog
Regarding the power plant, last week I mentioned GenOn declared Chapter 11. Digging a little further, I found the following:
“Houston-based power producer GenOn Holdings Inc. emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this month as the successor to GenOn Energy Inc. with a new management team and board of directors.
"GenOn Energy was acquired by NRG Energy Inc. (NYSE: NRG) in December 2012, but NRG let go of its interest in GenOn as part of the Chapter 11 restructuring, which began in June 2017.”
By Olivia Pulsinelli, Houston Business Journal, Dec 24, 2018