Why Can’t We Have This Kind of a WalMart at Cityplace? Thinking OUTSIDE the Big Box…

You guys, LOOK at this Walmart store going up in Totten Square, Washington, D.C. I had heard or read that Walmart was doing smaller-scale stores for urban infill sites, even connected with public transit. Look at these two D.C. stores that opened late last year. A third is under construction in Fort Totten. If this was going up at our Cityplace, I would be jumping for joy and dying to write about it!

The Fort Totten Square store is designed by Hickok Cole Architects and is a sharp departure from the retailer’s usual big box formula. Get this: Hickok Cole is placing 345 residential units above a Walmart that, at 125,000 square feet, is hardly small, but is a step down from the old “supercenter” format, which averages 180,000 square feet.Then on top of the Walmart, multi-family. Four stories of apartments will wrap around two large courtyards, one with a swimming pool. At the northeast corner of the site, smaller stores and restaurants will occupy another 10,000 square feet. The Fort Totten Metro station, offering access to three subway lines, is a five-minute walk away.

Is this not cool? If later down the road, the big box retailer leaves, they are not leaving an ugly vacant warehouse space that will just become another ugly warehouse BUT can be redeveloped.Please read this article in Architectural Record — and huge thanks to the CD reader, Jeff Bell, who sent it my way:

With its staggered facades of dark composite panels and glass, the design is edgy for D.C. and for a neighborhood of older single-family homes. (On the neighborhood-facing, Third Street side, though, there is “a lot more brick,” notes Michael Hickok, the project’s lead designer.) The developer, JBG Companies, wants to attract some of the young people who have been moving to Washington in droves during recent years. Not all of them can afford to live downtown, and Fort Totten Square—within range of several universities, and not far from nightlife on H Street—could be an appealing option. The apartments will be market-rate but “competitively priced relative to other D.C. submarkets,” according to JBG’s Tony Greenberg.

They asked Hickok Cole, a D.C.-based firm that recently completed National Public Radio’s new headquarters, what it was like to work with Walmart? And the design challenges…

“We went into it with great trepidation,” Hickok admits. The design team worried not just about the retailer’s wanting supersized signage, but also about the more prosaic challenge of putting residential plumbing above a grocery store—the risk of a bathtub’s leaking onto the lettuce and broccoli. But everyone was happy with the plumbing drawings, and branding wasn’t an issue either. “When we did the [main] facade, they were sensitive about our suggestion that we have an appropriate scale for that storefront,” Hickok adds.

Fort Totten Square is expected to open in the first quarter of 2015. Let the letter-writing/email writing campaign commence!

Like I said last week, maybe we can have a Sam’s and even have other big box stores in the same area but the developer has to change his or her way of thinking. (Maybe they are doing that at Walmart?) Imagine a building like the one Hickok is designing in our town at Cityplace with the same needs fulfilled? Call me an optimist, but I think we can do this!