RSS FeedA Clara Barton Museum? At Last?
Readers may have overlooked the November 3 article in the Washington Post about Clara Barton’s Office of Missing Soldiers so we’re highlighting it here. The Penn Quarter Project which includes the Lafayette and Clara Barton Condominiums, a commercial parking garage, the Woolly Mammoth Theatre, a number of restaurants, a beauty salon, and a tanning business is in the same edifice as Clara Barton’s office where she located soldiers missing after the Civil War for families. Although a museum going into this space has been mentioned here on PQ Living before, it now looks like there are some more serious overtures towards its becoming an operating museum hosted by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. This is welcome news and would add to the cadre of museums that makes downtown DC such a great place to be.
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I hope the following partial history helps people to understand why the name of the development that JPI built in Square 457 on the east side of 7th Street is a bit confusing.
JPI’s originally named the entire complex The Jefferson at Penn Quarter with rental apartments, the theater for Woolly Mammoth, parking and loading, and ground floor retail, including a GSA-required-for-five-years grocery store.
When the financial markets favored condominiums over rental apartments, JPI changed their game plan and divided the development into The Lafayette at Penn Quarter and the Clara Barton at Penn Quarter, marketing one before the other for condominium sale.
I do not know if they had originally created a single condominium regime or began with the two. (As as aside, after DC rent control laws went into effect, developers of new residential projects created condominium regimes regardless of whether their intention was to lease apartments or sell condominium units; a pre-existing condo regime made it far easier later on to sell the units as condos should the building owner wish to do so.)
For a number of reasons actual construction took lots longer than planned so the development had its original name for quite some time. This may contribute to the confusion in the development’s various names plus the fact that “at Penn Quarter” was tagged on to each of the various names JPI gave the development.
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Finally!! That would be a welcome development. I have been trying for a few years now to get anyone at the GSA or anywhere else to give me info on the status of this project. I can’t wait!