Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Arts Plan, We’re Glad We Knew Ye
“We're very happy where we are,” said USPS District Manager Michael Furey in a phone call yesterday, the last of the phone calls planned for this topic. "We plan on staying there a long time."
And they can stay another 22 years if they wish, according to their lease.
He said he saw movies there when he was a boy, but that was not enough to push him to think about moving the Buckingham Station into a building that is being planned for the southwest corner of the N. Glebe Road at N. Pershing Drive intersection (the current CVS location).
[If the post office could have been convinced to move, then the neighborhood might have been able to convince the powers-that-be to convert the post office back into some sort of arts venue, like a home for the Arlington Philharmonic Orchestra. It was an idea I brought up a few weeks ago, and it looked pretty good then. Just about everyone I spoke with thought it was a great idea, but not great enough for the effort involved. –ST.]
Plans for the building on the southwest corner still do not include a clear occupant for the ground floor, said Bob Moore, of Georgetown Strategic Capital, which is redeveloping the corner. Like Mr. Furey, Mr. Moore saw movies at what is now the post office.
Officials of Georgetown Strategic Capital have been bringing plans and ideas to the county’s Design Review Committee and the Historical Affairs and Landmark Review Board since the summer. The next HALRB meeting where this will be discussed is next Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2007, the DRC will pick the topic up in their Jan. 2 meeting.
On another note, the house at 374 N. Glebe Road, will be turned into a fitness center, reported Catherine Bucknam, a spokesperson for AHC, Inc., which owns the building. It is considered historic and cannot be torn town, nor can its exterior be significantly changed. AHC had been unsure how they were going to use that building, they said earlier in the year.
A fitness center planned for the new community center, under construction just behind 374 N. Glebe, has now been moved to that house. That house had been the caretaker’s home when all of the Buckingham apartments (The Chatham, Arlington Oaks, all three Buckingham Villages and The Gates) were owned by the Freed family.
[When Vic Socotra, another Buckingham blogger, and I met back in November we got talking about that building which we both thought was still without a plan. We got thinking of a museum, or a space for a writer’s group, arts of all sorts. Our imaginations ran wild. –ST.]
More on this soon. AHC is settling in to new office space, but Ms. Bucknam promised to answer more questions soon about the use of the building.
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Labels: art, redevelopment
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