Author: Olivia Vietor

Around here, developers don’t just build buildings—they build entire neighborhoods.

Tysons – Greg Riegle

Greg Riegle, chairman of the Tysons Partnership, has worked in Tysons as a real-estate lawyer for 25 years—but he lives in Arlington. “My wife and I live a very Metro-centric existence,” he says. “Most weekends, you’ll find us walking places.”

In other words, he’s precisely the type of person the Partnership has in mind as it coordinates the largest redevelopment project in the country. Ask him where he lives in a few years, Riegle says, and maybe—hopefully—he’ll say Tysons.

He and the Partnership’s incoming president, David Diaz, oversee 100-plus developers, landowners, employers, and other Tysons stakeholders, to ensure they’re working harmoniously as they transform four square miles into a dense, mixed-use city. Tysons has long been a place where people like Riegle work. But the idea is that it will become a neighborhood of up to 100,000 residents by 2050. Ten new buildings have opened so far. Another 2 million square feet is under construction. Forty million more is approved and waiting to get built.

Just over five years into its existence, the Tysons Partnership was ready for new leadership. It has left the “garage band” stage of getting the initial buildings out of the ground, says Riegle, who took over as chair in January. Now it’s time to focus on creating a vibrant place to live, and branding it as such.

Diaz, who starts his new job at the end of March, has spent the last decade leading the revitalization of downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, as CEO of the Raleigh Alliance. In Tysons, Diaz says, “the potential seems limitless.”

Downtown Columbia – John DeWolf

When James Rouse designed the city of Columbia in the 1960s, he placed a shopping mall at its core. Today’s smart-growthers would have laughed. But back then, Rouse was among the most progressive planners in the country. His intention was arguably urban-minded—he wanted malls to serve as town centers for otherwise sprawling suburbs.

Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way. Columbia’s downtown now shows its age. “This place went to sleep in the ’90s,” says developer John DeWolf, executive vice president at the Howard Hughes Corporation and a Rouse admirer. “What excites me most is having the chance to pick up where he left off.”

After a career mostly in retail development, DeWolf joined Howard Hughes in 2011 to manage the 391-acre plan for a new downtown Columbia. Merriweather Post Pavilion already attracts a lot of visitors there, but the mission is to create a bustling, walkable city that could turn some into residents. “Everywhere you see a parking lot, there’s going to be a building,” says DeWolf.

The entire project could take three decades. So far, Howard Hughes has erected Columbia’s first mixed-use building, with 380 apartments, a park, restaurants, and shops. Whole Foods arrived in 2014, and One Merriweather, the headquarters of MedStar Health, opened in January.

The mall still stands. Howard Hughes doesn’t own it, but DeWolf hopes that changes: “We need to get at the mall, deconstruct and rebuild it, to realize the full potential.”

Capitol Crossing – Robert Braunohler

Between Capitol Hill and Chinatown, Robert Braunohler is overseeing the construction of seven acres of brand-new city. The $1.35-billion project, called Capitol Crossing, will mend the divide through downtown created by I-395, with three platforms built over the freeway. Offices, retail, and apartments will rise atop them.

Braunohler arrived in Washington in 1973, just a few years after 395 did. He and his wife raised three kids in Colonial Village, in upper Northwest DC, where they still live. Along the way, Braunohler helped develop a number of notable projects. As a partner at JBG, he oversaw construction of two World Bank buildings. At his current company, now called Property Group Partners, he developed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s headquarters.

The gash from 395 was always meant to be healed. “The highway was built about 26 feet below grade for the very purpose of [covering it],” says Braunohler.

When he was mayor, Marion Barry awarded the rights above 395 to a developer friend, who held them until 2000, when the city demanded them back. Unsurprisingly, litigation ensued. Property Group Partners entered the fray in 2005 and ultimately won out, agreeing to settle the lawsuit for both parties and take over the building rights. Construction started in 2015.

The first of five buildings—an office/retail tower at 200 Massachusetts Avenue, Northwest—will finish next year. All of Capitol Crossing is slated to open in 2022. It will be DC’s first “eco-district” thanks to features such as water cisterns to recycle storm runoff and “eco-chimneys” for filtering car exhaust.

For commuters, the most impressive part will likely be something simpler: When Capitol Crossing is done, F Street will flow uninterrupted from Union Station to the Treasury Department.

The Wharf – Monty Hoffman

Monty Hoffman was born a builder.

The CEO of PN Hoffman grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania coal country, where his general-contractor father taught him how to lay brick, frame a house, and do the plumbing and electric, by the time he graduated from high school.

“We worked hard. We worked long hours,” says Hoffman, who paid his way through engineering school with summer jobs, including in a mine three miles underground.

A relentless work ethic comes in handy these days, as Hoffmann is redeveloping an entire DC neighborhood. The Wharf—his glitzy, $2-billion project of residences, retail, offices, and entertainment on the Southwest waterfront—has been so complicated to construct that it has required three acts of Congress.

Hoffman won the rights to reimagine the mile-long stretch in 2006 and has since brought in a partner on the project, developer Madison Marquette. The first phase is on track to open by October. It includes four residential buildings, three office towers, three hotels, a 6,000-seat concert hall, 22 restaurants, a water-taxi system, and four piers. Planning is under way for the second phase, to include an additional 1.2 million square feet, designed by 11 architecture firms. It’s expected to finish by 2021.

Perhaps surprisingly for someone who has spent his career building up DC neighborhoods, Hoffman has been a longtime resident of Potomac. But not for long—he bought a penthouse at the Vio, one of the Wharf’s luxe condo buildings.

All cities bear scars, evidence of past planning decisions, made with the best of intentions, that affect urban space in negative ways over the following decades. For more than 40 years, Washington, D.C.’s northwest quadrant has suffered a particularly prominent one where the District’s downtown meets the Capitol Hill neighborhood to the east: A three-block-long, 200-foot-wide opening above the depressed Center Leg Freeway (I-395), which runs beneath the nation’s capital from New York Avenue down to the Southeast Freeway (I-695).

The opening—bounded by Massachusetts Avenue to the north, E Street to the south, 2nd Street on the east, and a handful of buildings along 3rd Street—is a remnant of the nationwide mid-20th-century effort to revitalize cities by bringing high-speed, multilane highways around and through urban cores. Extensive plans for the District included an interstate loop within the city that would stretch from the west end of the National Mall to the Anacostia River on the east. The eight-lane Center Leg Freeway, which skirts along the U.S. Capitol’s west side, was the second segment built.

North of Constitution Avenue, the section of D.C. the freeway would pass through was a largely black and mixed-European working-class neighborhood that had been in long decline as the city suffered from white flight and economic woes. (Partly in response to the District’s difficulties, a complete reorganization of local government in 1967 gave D.C. semiautonomous rule with its first mayor and City Council.) The area was considered blighted, and there was little effort to resist the project. But seven years after construction on the Center Leg Freeway began, dwindling federal budgets and shifting transportation priorities—as well as sustained protests from wealthier communities within the District about other proposed highway segments—took their toll. The D.C. plan was abandoned, and I-395’s abrupt termination at Massachusetts Avenue, in 1973, was its final gasp. (A congestion-easing, subterranean extension to New York Avenue, a few blocks to the north, opened in 1982.)

Four-plus decades later, the scar is finally vanishing, thanks to the 7.5-acre, $1.3 billion Capitol Crossing development from Property Group Partners (PGP). The project will completely cover the opening with five new 130-foot-high mixed-use buildings (including residences) and public space (20 percent of the site, says PGP), reconnect the gaps in F and G Streets, and offer 2.2 million leasable square feet. Currently under way, with the decking to be completed this year and the first building available in 2018, Capitol Crossing is expected to finish build-out around 2022.

Why did it take so long? In short: the city’s decline, which began (as it did in other urban cores) in the 1960s and didn’t end until almost the turn of the century. Since then, the District has flourished by leaps and bounds, and only in the past decade, notes PGP Regional Vice President Bob Braunohler, has the value of real estate risen to the point that a massive, precedent-setting project like Capitol Crossing makes economic sense. “We and New York are about it,” he says. “We’re building land, and the cost of building the land is less than it would be to buy land” of a comparable scale.

In 1988, a local developer, Conrad Monts, acquired the freeway’s air rights from the city and proposed a several-building project. But things fell apart as the relationship soured, for a variety of reasons, over the years. By 2005, the site remained vacant, and Monts and the city were mired in lawsuits. Sensing an opportunity, PGP—then known as the Louis Dreyfus Property Group, which had been active in D.C. for a number of years—approached both parties, brokered a peace, and began negotiating with the city for the site. The process took years, as the two sides had difficulty agreeing on the value of empty space (which happens to have a massive highway running beneath it). The deal finally closed in 2012 with a novel approach from “clever” lawyers at Arnold & Porter, says Braunohler: PGP would purchase the land below the opening directly from the city for $63 million, as opposed to Monts’s air-rights-only lease, but the number would be subject to a formula that takes into account the cost of building the freeway-hiding deck, meaning the final purchase price has yet to be determined.

Neil Albert, who was the city’s deputy mayor for planning and economic development from 2006 to 2010, under then-D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, and now heads the DowntownDC Business Improvement District, where Capitol Crossing is located, says, “On the surface, a project like this shouldn’t get done” given the multiple development jurisdictions in the District, “but there was a spirit of collaboration that set in at an early stage. The stars really aligned.” Everyone, that is to say, bought into PGP’s grand vision.

And that vision has entailed a complexity of design, engineering, and coordination between PGP (and its development team) and the local and federal government (which manages the highway, in addition to other D.C. development-related jurisdictional oversight) unlike almost anything else the city has seen. Even before Capitol Crossing’s official May 12, 2015, groundbreaking, PGP spent more than a year preparing the surrounding area by improving and expanding area infrastructure and utilities. These days, the site is an incredible hive of activity as new freeway access and egress points are engineered and the deck gets built atop a never-ending stream of traffic—although certain aspects, such as setting the massive beams that will support the deck, happen only at night.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)—which developed the master plan for Capitol Crossing, is managing the deck construction, and will provide construction administration services until the project is complete—has been at the center of it all. (The D.C. firm of Lee and Associates is the landscape architect.) “There was both an art and a science to calibrating the plan,” says Kristopher Takács, director of SOM’s D.C. office. “On the one hand it’s very much about extending the street grid, restoring the rights-of-way, restoring a pedestrian network of corridors that creates a seamless public realm, and in that way a horizontal urban design exercise. But with the highway it was at the same time an extremely challenging vertical exercise, designing within constraints around the dynamic needs of the highway, influenced by design decisions [above the deck] that hadn’t been made.”

But the ambition that Capitol Crossing embodies isn’t just about good urban planning, impressive engineering, and significant revenue generation for D.C. ($40 million annually in real estate taxes alone, PGP projects); it’s also about pushing the sustainability envelope. And PGP knows green, having built the District’s first LEED Gold and Platinum commercial buildings. “It’s part of our reputation,” Braunohler says, noting that “with this development, because of its scale, we had the opportunity to try different things.” Big things.

It starts with infrastructure: power and water. A freeway-level cogeneration plant on the 2nd Street side will provide the entire site (and possibly surrounding buildings) with electricity and usable heat, saving tenants about 20 percent on their power bill, Braunohler says. Extensive water harvesting at roof and street levels will retain more than 90 percent of stormwater, reducing potable water usage by 45 percent and landscape water usage by 50 percent; what isn’t used will be cleaned before its release into the city’s combined sewer system. And by tapping into D.C’s high water table, Capitol Crossing will capture more than enough groundwater to service all of the site’s cooling towers—no city-provided water needed.

Sean Cahill, PGP’s senior vice president of development and a friend of U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) founder Rick Fedrizzi, Honorary ASLA, says, “We approached USGBC starting 10 years ago because Capitol Crossing was going to be innovative” in ways the council wasn’t considering, such as an early adoption of “ecochimneys” that will filter parking garage air through ground-level plantings before returning it to the sky, cleaner than the surrounding atmosphere. Cahill credits Bill Browning of Terrapin Bright Green, a noted sustainability strategist who was involved in early working sessions, with bringing “large, out-of-the-box” thinking to the development.

PGP describes its vision as “beyond LEED Platinum certified.” And the USGBC is trying to keep up—happily so. “What they’re doing is taking a much more integrated approach than the current [rating] systems are capable of dealing with,” says Brendan Owens, the organization’s chief of engineering, who uses the word “singular” when describing Capitol Crossing. “They are mirroring a vanguard thinking that blurs the lines between infrastructure and building projects,” he continues. “As the project has evolved, we’ve been evolving our own systems. They’ve challenged some of our thinking, in a positive way.”

The National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), which in 2009 developed D.C.’s first ecodistrict initiative (a comprehensive initiative to turn a 15-block area in the city’s southwest quadrant into a highly sustainable neighborhood), views Capitol Crossing’s approach with high regard. “This is the first time we’re going to see an actual group of buildings thinking at a district scale,” says Diane Sullivan, director of the agency’s Urban Design and Plan Review Division. “This project is going to pave the way for a lot of district-scale sustainability.”

For many reasons, Capitol Crossing is certain to reverberate throughout the real estate industry even before the project is fully built out, inspiring other cities to reconsider what’s possible with below-grade urban highways. But one of its most profound local impacts will be on future development in D.C., especially the stretch over I-395 immediately to the south. The NCPC, for one, is already starting to think about what comes next. Capitol Crossing, Sullivan says, could be a “starting point for the whole [Center Leg Freeway] corridor to change.” Although the evolution would be many years in the making, it’s not too early for mild speculation.

A block south of Capitol Crossing, at D Street, sits the U.S. Department of Labor’s 1.8-million-square-foot headquarters, almost half of which covers the Center Leg Freeway to Constitution Avenue. Completed in 1975, it was among the first federal buildings to acquire air rights for its development. In late 2015, the General Services Administration announced its readiness to find a new Labor headquarters and release the 10.5-acre site (a large portion of which is not over the freeway) to the private sector. Given the development forces at play in D.C. and the parcel’s proximity to the Capitol and the National Mall, it’s easy to envision mixed-use commercial and residential buildings, parks, and more atop a new state-of-the-art platform 10 to 20 years from now.

Between the Labor building and Capitol Crossing, however, I-395 is only partially covered by a plaza bridge that belongs to the U.S. Tax Court, to the west, and was designed by the court’s architect, Victor Lundy, as part of the 1974 federal project. A celebrated example of federal modernism, the Tax Court was given historic designation in 2008 and so will be around for many decades. Which means the plaza will remain as well, along with the large openings on either side that provide a view to the freeway beneath—constant reminders, in the heart of the nation’s capital, of America’s landscape-altering obsession with automobiles. Not every scar can be completely erased.

Project Credits

Developer Property Group Partners, Washington, D.C. Master Plan Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Washington, D.C. Landscape Architecture Lee and Associates, Washington, D.C. Architecture Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, Hamden, Connecticut; Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, New York; and Beyer Blinder Belle, Washington, D.C. Traffic Engineer STV, Washington, D.C. General Contractor Balfour Beatty Construction, Fairfax, Virginia. Structural Engineer Leslie E. Robertson Associates, New York.

Capitol Crossing is a 2.2 million square foot mixed use development occupying the air rights to the 6.8 acres above Interstate 395 in Washington, D.C. It is the largest air rights project that has ever been undertaken in Washington. Planned as the first “eco-district” in the nation’s capital, it includes five buildings built over three blocks, with office, retail, and residential space. The project aims to fulfill Pierre-Charles L’ Enfant’s original vision of the city by reconnecting the otherwise empty space to the street grid and urban fabric.

The North block is comprised of two buildings supporting three towers, which provide multiple amenities for the primarily commercial tenants, residents, and visitors to the space. Enveloped in glass curtain wall, the towers are connected on the second level by the Pedestrian Way, a 55 feet wide gallery which offers a lively retail environment. Suspended glass screen walls spanning 50 feet create prominent entrances to the west and east lobbies along Pedestrian Way and to the main entry on 3rd street into the concourse, and lobbies on the ground and second floor. A green roof with terraces on both towers offers panoramic views to the Capitol and Washington Monument. The west building has an additional green roof with a terrace on the fifth floor. The project also includes a below grade parking garage for 1,146 cars and 440 bicycles is below the three blocks.

The exterior of the complex is composed of two curtain wall types. Between the third and twelfth floors, the curtain wall has a grid of floor to ceiling 2″ wide polished stainless steel frames on a 5′ module set beyond a plane of satin finish stainless steel. At towers’ corners and recesses, the curtain wall is flush structural glazing. The subtle contrast of curtainwall types gracefully accentuates the building’s geometry. At every floor level, fritted glass fades into clear glass at the height of 3′-6″. Along the exterior of levels one and two, a granite cornice and series of pilasters form the base of the buildings.

The project incorporates numerous assets to enhance the buildings’ sustainability. The 45,108 sq. ft. of green roof mitigates heat island effect and addresses storm water runoff. Advanced energy recovery devices, indoor air quality controls, water conserving plumbing fixtures, and the elimination of supplemental irrigation help minimize consumption of energy and resources. The insulated glass on the exterior improves thermal efficiency. The Pedestrian Way features two eco-chimneys, which will address the below-grade vehicle exhaust. The project anticipates LEED Platinum certification.

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Deck over active highway supports $1.3-billion development

Constructing a podium for the largest air rights project to date in Washington, D.C., is one thing. Doing it in a confined work area over an active highway is something else entirely. Topping that, the project includes moving Washington’s oldest synagogue—twice.

The nearly 1,100-ft-long and 120-ft-wide concrete deck is just off Massachusetts Avenue and covers open-cut portions of Interstate 395. Completed in October, the deck spans a six-lane trench dividing Capitol Hill from the city’s East End that was built in the 1960s for a full inner loop highway system, halted because it would have bisected residential neighborhoods. The project also extends an existing on-ramp tunnel by 1,000 ft so it can more efficiently filter traffic to the freeways underneath the platform and improve pedestrian safety above it.

The seven-acre Capitol Crossing project is finally mending Washington, D.C.’s original street grid by creating three square blocks of real estate. The $1.3-billion multiuse development—including $270 million for utility upgrades and replacements and foundation work—will ultimately include five buildings containing 2.2 million sq ft of office space, apartments, green space, shops and restaurants.

Washington’s oldest synagogue was moved about 40 ft off the footprint of the development’s 750,000-sq-ft underground parking garage. Once the garage is complete, crews will move the synagogue back, atop the garage’s at-grade deck. Once that is done, work will begin on a Washington Jewish history museum, adjacent to the synagogue.

With an 11-year entitlement and permitting process and more than three decades of starts, stops and financial woes, Capitol Crossing is a complicated development, says Robert Braunohler, Property Group Partners (PGP) regional vice president. “The real challenge with a project like this is to have sufficient land value to justify the cost of building the platform, and there are only two cities where land value is high enough and that’s New York and Washington,” Braunohler adds. “There aren’t just empty sites just sitting around.”

Designing the foundation

Capitol Crossing’s $200-million deck is designed to withstand a 100-MW fire in the tunnel beneath it to meet federal highway requirements for fires and blast resistance put in place after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The concrete deck was designed by the project’s structural engineer, LERA Consulting Engineers, based on recommendations from geotechnical engineer ECS.

LERA designed the deck with extra reinforcing steel in all the slabs to prevent disproportionate failure; if any one column fails, the deck and the buildings’ floor slabs are designed to survive.

The design team held at least three full-day charrettes with federal officials, blast experts and modeling experts to determine the design criteria for the deck and tunnel extension.

Foundation work was further complicated by poor subsurface conditions, says William Faschan, a partner with LERA.

Crews from Case Foundations installed drilled polymer slurry caissons, 8 ft to 10 ft in diameter with a 30-ft steel casing at the top. The caissons were cast up to 130 ft into the ground. An onsite slurry plant produced concrete mix for the caissons and the 867-ft- long and 3-ft-thick slurry wall. The wall is as tall as 76 ft.

The deck contains steel girders as long as 60 ft and as deep as 6 ft and concrete planks as long as 32 ft and as thick as 10 ft. The deck’s depth varied across the three city blocks and was limited to fit between the top of the highway right-of-way and the street grade.

To solve the challenge of long steel spans and limited deck depths, LERA considered various systems in concrete and steel. Ultimately, the engineer chose a system of composite structural steel and concrete box beams supporting 10-ft precast planks with 4-ft-deep composite cast-in-place concrete slabs. “Even in the temporary condition, the deck has to support heavy loads since the formwork and weight of the wet concrete of the superstructure needs to be supported during construction,” Faschan says.

The project’s complexity stemmed from balancing “the practical needs of construction and preserving design flexibility for future vertical development,” says Kristopher Takács, the Washington, D.C., practice leader in the office of architect-engineer Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. SOM provided master-planning, entitlements, infrastructure planning and urban design for the project. It is also providing architectural services for some of the buildings.

Designing the foundation with utility relocation and avoidance in mind, engineers had to accommodate a “spaghetti” of existing city utilities, some of which crews discovered during excavation, says Bob Robidoux, the purchasing director for the project’s general contractor, Balfour Beatty Construction D.C.

The utility design and planning also required onsite surveying and offsetting caissons from below their columns. The columns for the building superstructures are supported on transfer girders at the platform level, including a 63-ft-long and 4.5-ft-wide double-plate transfer girder that runs across the Massachusetts Avenue bridge that abuts the deck. The transfer girders are supported by columns, says Faschan, “which are, in turn, supported directly on caissons, one for one.” Faschan added that there are no caisson caps and each column is constructed directly above a single caisson.

“Caisson dowels have tension couplers so the caissons could be paved over after installation,” says Faschan. “Each caisson had to be designed to independently resist all applied loads, including horizontal forces from accidental loading since it was impractical to install grade beams across multiple lanes of traffic to interconnect groups of caissons.”

The design team also coordinated its plan with the traffic maintenance plan as one side of the highway, either northbound or southbound, was always required to remain open.

In late 2014, workers from Balfour Beatty began relocating utilities and installing new ones needed for a new highway portal and the surface street grid redesign. This included storm and sewer lines, water lines, electrical and telecommunications duct banks.

Massachusetts Avenue could only be closed on Saturdays or Sundays during the nearly completed utility phase. If it rained on those days, “you were in trouble,” says Robidoux.

Long Nights

Around the same time utility work was getting underway, city officials rebuffed PGP’s proposal to close a portion of I-395 for more than a year during construction. The developer said closing the highway would allow completion of the project in about 20 months instead of the 60-month mandated deadline, which was part of the purchase agreement with the District Dept. of Transportation and Federal Highways Administration.

Balfour Beatty created a 3D digital sequencing model that ultimately convinced officials to allow the closure of one side of the highway from 9 p.m. for eight hours. “We had to be cleaned up and gone by 5 o’clock to open up for rush hour every single morning,” says Robidoux.

The nearly eight-month deck operation began with workers from Case Foundations Co. drilling caissons on the east shoulder and the median of the highway. They installed a slurry wall on the west shoulder of the highway, too. Then, Facchina Construction Co. formed and placed 48-in.-dia concrete columns on top of the caissons and slurry wall. L.R. Willson & Sons erected the steel girders and the precast wall panels at the highway median before Facchina set the precast planks on top of the girders.

Finally, crews cast the self-consolidating concrete in the steel box girders along with the concrete topping over the precast planks before Davenport sprayed on fire-resistant material to protect the steel.

The team installed the foundation and deck from north to south for ease of construction and to be able to deliver the deck’s northeast portion in time to build the first building.

“You are trying to move equipment in and out, move material in and out, get concrete trucks in and out,” Robidoux says. “We were trying to pour concrete at 4 o’clock in the morning. Once you start pouring a caisson you have to finish it, and getting concrete here at 4 o’clock in the morning [presented] some challenges.”

Used to lift girders, the project’s 300-ton lattice-boom truck crane was driven by the operator onto the highway worksite every night. The 26-ft-wide crane was parked all day just off the highway before it traveled a half mile per hour to its working position through an opening in the deck columns with a 3-in. clearance. “Every night for eight months they moved it in and out, in and out,” says PGP’s Braunohler.

Eco-district

The developer says Capitol Crossing is planned as the first “eco-district” in the nation’s capital. All five buildings are designed to qualify for a LEED Platinum rating. The buildings will have green roof areas and a water capture and containment system. Eight tanks—one 23 ft deep—will store groundwater from a riverbed beneath the project. The captured water will be minimally treated and used for cooling. The system is expected to save about $40% of the complex’s potable water intake.

A 2-MW cogeneration plant will generate electricity and heat. Two of the three generators in the plant will be fired by natural gas. The third will be powered by the heat generated from the other two generators. The system will reduce the tenants’ electric bills, Braunohler says.

Eco chimneys, made of large plants, will filter garage exhaust. An axial ventilation system was installed in the expanded highway tunnel with Saccardo nozzles that move air through the tunnel in the direction of traffic. The original portion of the tunnel previously used a traditional lateral ventilation system that blows air in the middle of the tunnel and sucks it out of vents.

With the new method, air moves southbound on one side and northbound on the other side. “This is a much safer ventilation system because if there’s an accident or a fire you are blowing the smoke away from the traffic that’s trapped” and out the far end of the tunnel, Braunohler says.

The new system required Balfour Beatty to modify and taper the tunnel walls to create concrete ductwork that channels exhaust out of the tunnel.

Years in the making

Local developer T. Conrad Monts acquired the air rights over the highway in 1989 but was embroiled in litigation with the city over land ownership. In 2005, PGP began negotiating to pay Monts the cost of a settlement so PGP could buy the property from the city at fair market value. After Monts died in 2009, PGP acquired the air rights for the project after paying an undisclosed amount to Monts’ widow to settle the lawsuit. PGP also worked out a deal with D.C. officials that uses a formula to determine how much it will ultimately pay the city for the property based on how much it cost to build the deck. The amount will be determined within 17 months, says Braunohler. PGP has already paid the city $9 million.

PGP also is paying up to $500,000 to move the 140-year-old Adas Israel synagogue and $9 million to the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington for its new adjoining museum, according to Braunohler.

The synagogue was originally moved three blocks in 1969 to Third and G streets to make way for the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority headquarters. In November, Wolf House & Building Movers transported the 273-ton brick structure about 40 ft to a temporary position.

Wolf House spent weeks setting up the move. First, crews detached the building from its foundation and used hydraulic lifts to install a framework of steel beams under the 24-ft by 60-ft structure. Then, on moving day, remote-controlled dollies slowly drove the synagogue about 1 foot per minute to a temporary location in a little less than an hour.

The synagogue will remain there for about two years while the Capitol Crossing garage is built. Then, crews will move it another 1,000 ft to its final location.

Balfour Beatty weatherized the synagogue and braced the windows. Two air-handling units will cool the interior during the summer, and weekly maintenance will be conducted.

The 103-year-old Holy Rosary Catholic Church also adjoins the deck at Third Street NW. Crews will demolish the church’s rectory before building a $10-million annex behind the church, on the deck. PGP says it will expand the church’s cultural center as well.

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the deck, construction of the project’s first office building is more than half complete. The 12-story, 430,000-sq-ft structure is slated to open in 2018. The other four buildings should all be completed by 2022, Braunohler says.

“It’s an urban planning victory to be able to reconnect the city street grid and make a highway disappear,” Braunohler says, “and that’s really a great feeling to be part of that.”

WASHINGTON (ABC7) — For the second time in its 140-year history, Washington’s oldest synagogue was relocated Thursday, making way for the massive Capitol Crossing project in downtown D.C.

Like a biblical event, Adas Israel Synagogue floated away from its foundation. The synagogue at 3rd and G Streets NW was only shifted slightly, about a dozen yards. But this move took months of preparation and a lot of faith.

Capitol Crossing developer Bob Braunohler said, “It’s just a masonry structure so it can crack easily.”

This summer, crews punctured steel beams through the building’s base, reinforced the corners, dug out the foundation and gently lifted the 273 ton structure over a large platform with wheels.

Just before the move Thursday morning, a rabbi offered up prayers while crews smoothed out the soil to ensure no sudden bumps or friction.

“We have plenty of insurance. That helps me sleep better,” Braunohler said with laughter.

In all, it took about 30 minutes to move the structure about 40 feet. All of this played out in slow motion, with the wheels barely moving, less than 1 mile per hour.

In the end, the building was parked Thursday in a temporary space just off 3rd Street NW.

In 24 to 30 months, the building will move to a new, permanent location a block south at 3rd and F Streets NW.

The Jewish Historical Society plans to build a new museum there exploring Washington’s Jewish history with the synagogue as its centerpiece.

The synagogue was dedicated in 1876, with President Ulysses S. Grant in attendance.

“It’s the first time a U.S. president had attended a synagogue service,” said Wendy Turman, deputy director of the Jewish Historical Society.

Over time, the building transformed from a Greek orthodox church to a grocery store to a BBQ pork carry-out restaurant.

“So there was a neon pig on the corner of this former Jewish house of worship,” Turman said.

In 1969, when Metro was building its new downtown D.C. headquarters at the synagogue’s prior location, the building was saved from demolition and relocated a few blocks east.