Washington Business Journal
D.C.’s Franklin School gets little notice from developers
By Jonathan O’Connell
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Community advocates are worried that the District's Franklin School, built in 1869, will be turned into condominiums or a luxury hotel, but developers are showing little interest in the building.
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty received only two development proposals for Franklin, a national historic landmark on Franklin Square that housed experiments by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and became the city's first high school in 1880.
One proposal, by Brooklandville, Md.-based Cana Development, would turn Franklin into a 30-room boutique hotel above a restaurant and culinary training program. The other would turn the site into an elementary and middle school for the Washington Yu Ying Public Charter School, which bid in tandem with D.C.-based Jair Lynch Development Partners.
Michael Morris, a Cana principal, said a 30-room extended stay hotel similar to Palihouse, which opened in West Hollywood, Calif., last year, would fill an empty niche in the local hotel market as a place for days- or weeks-long stays by business travelers or families. Franklin, with its significant history and proximity to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, is a perfect fit, he said. “I think this presents a very unique opportunity,” he said.
Morris, a former development manager at the Cordish Cos. of Baltimore, declined to name hotel operator or restaurant partners, but was recently looking at restaurant locations with Scott Conant of New York City's Scarpetta restaurant. Morris said he is working with the Adams Morgan Youth Leadership Academy, a nonprofit, to craft a work-study program in Franklin’s bottom floor.
Yu Ying, which translates to “Nurturing Excellence,” currently serves about 200 pre-kindergarten to second-grade students in the city’s Brookland neighborhood in Northeast D.C. Executive Director Mary Shaffner said the school plans to grow to almost 700 students by adding grades 3 through 8 in coming years, and finding new space is crucial.
“We really like Franklin partly because of its history and its closeness to Chinatown, and also because it’s accessible to parents all over the city,” she said.
After Fenty’s economic development team, headed by Deputy Mayor Valerie Santos, issued a solicitation for the property in September 2009, community members formed the Coalition for Franklin School, creating a petition and publishing letters in newspapers urging that it be retained by the city and used as a school. The group sent Santos an informal 20-page proposal to turn the building into a “High School for Global Citizenship and Diplomacy.”
Whether Franklin is renovated by the city or the private sector, the work will be expensive. The building suffered from years of neglect and has been used as a homeless shelter until 2008. Those costs, along with the community concerns and the credit shortage, may have collectively tempered developers’ interest. Morris estimated that it would take $15 million to $20 million to bring Franklin up to code, but said it was still “very surprising” there weren’t more responses.
“I would have expected that there would be a lot more interest in the property,” he said. He argued that a hotel and restaurant would bring the city needed tax revenue, create 220 full-time jobs and help turn around that part of downtown. “We would help to gentrify that community and that area,” he said.
While Morris said he isn’t seeking any public funding “at this time,” Yu Ying may be facing longer odds because it is asking the city to finance about half of its plans. The Brookland school was already turned down in its previous attempt to secure one of the city’s more recently vacated schools.
Franklin “was intended as a school, it has historic status as a school and if they decide to protect it as a school, we believe we should get some assistance,” Shaffner said.
When it comes to tax revenue, she said, “we figure they’re going to be doing tax abatements for whoever else would be doing it anyway. So we figure it might come out as a wash.”