The bridge will be built in DC.
On Tuesday, the 11th Street Bridge Park project announced they are the winners of a $15 million grant from the Department of the Interior Land and Water Conservation Fund’s Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership program (ORLP).
The grant means the bridge project has secured the full $92 million needed for the construction of the 11th Street Bridge Park.
The ORLP grant – the largest DPR has received to date – enables urban communities to create new outdoor recreation spaces, reinvigorate existing parks, and form connections between people and the outdoors in communities with a population of 30,000 or more.
“After 12 years of working with the East of the River community, we’re thrilled to have secured the funds needed to fully realize residents’ vision for the 11th Street Bridge Park,” said Scott Kratz, Senior Vice President, Building Bridges Across the River (BBAR) & Founding Director of the 11th Street Bridge Park Project. “We’ve been committed to ensuring this project is responsive to the needs of this community from day one and this grant represents a promise kept and propels us toward putting shovels in the ground.”
Now, the project expects to begin to solicit a contractor in January 2025, with construction planned to begin in May 2025. The goal is to complete construction sometime in the fall of 2027.
Since former Director of the District’s Office of Planning (OP) Harriet Tregoning convinced the city to keep the obsolete 11th Street Bridge around for pedestrian use in 2011, BBAR has gone the community to ask for their opinion and ideas, holding 200 community meetings; they’ve held more than 800 more since then. Gauging that there was some enthusiasm, they asked the community to shape the project elements, including environmental education, boating launched, urban agriculture, public art, performance space, playground and a café. There was an 8-month design competition, voted on by the community.
BBAR has also learned from the impact of the High Line park in the Chelsea neighborhood, a project that drove up real estate prices and accelerated gentrification. To avoid unintended consequences, BBAR has worked early with local residents at the center to build intentionally. They spent a year creating an equitable development plan. The first iteration came out in 2015; a third version will be released in December, containing 34 different strategies, Kratz told commissioners.
BBAR established a Ward 8 Homebuyers club, helping over 150 buyers establish generational wealth. When community called for equitable development together with the park, BBAR created the Douglass Community Land Trust, which has 230 units of community owned affordable housing and a goal of 1,000 in the next five years. More than 150 people have already completed construction training through the Skyland Workforce Center. Through the bridge, $86 million has been invested in equitable development strategies even before the park has opened.
A central plaza and a hammock grove are part of the bridge design, as are a cafe and community meeting space. There are multiple programming spaces. Kratz said perhaps his favorite space on the park is the mussel beach play space —an 11,000 inter-generational play space by Studio Ludo.
On the east side, the Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS) will program an Environmental Education Center and a kayaking canoe launch targeting school kids in the day and low cost access evenings and weekends. There will also be an urban farm on the Anacostia park side.
All told, the Bridge Park spans about three football fields. That’s a bit more than 7 acres or 1100 feet. A run across across takes between 5 and 10 minutes, Kratz said.
The city will own and be responsible for bridge itself from pier, piling, piling to deck; everything from deck up is owned, programmed and maintained by BBAR. Kratz said the arrangement, being finalized as he presented, will likely be facilitated through a public space permit issued in perpetuity to BBAR for the space. That means that DC and BBAR will not be in a contract requiring monetary exchange.
With the completion of the park’s construction goal, Building Bridges is turning its lens to the future. Fundraising goals will now focus on a $10 million operations reserve budget to ensure sound financial stewardship of the new civic space.
It truly has become much more than a park, Kratz said at a community meeting in 2023. It has become a bridge, both literal and metaphorical, transcending the limitations of either shore.
“There is a deep investment on both sides of the river,” Kratz said, “to ensure that the tens of thousands of reisdents who helped shape this proejct from the beginning can be the ones that benefit from it.”
Learn more at bridgepark.org
