In Del Ray, Visions of an Arts Colony

Private, Public Plans Merge As Neighborhood Revives

By Jerry Markon

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 24, 2005; Page VA12

Alexandria artist Eric Nelson was on the verge of losing his studio when he had an unexpected revelation while driving down Mount Vernon Avenue a few months ago.

Passing an out-of-business dry cleaner at the corner of Bellefonte Avenue, Nelson looked past the old laundering equipment still visible in the window. He envisioned instead a center for the arts, a building with studio space for 10 artists and an art gallery and wine bar.

Over the next few months, Nelson became even more convinced that Mount Vernon Avenue and the surrounding Del Ray neighborhood was the perfect place for his aspiring business.

"I'd call it a very upscale bohemian neighborhood, very much in support of the arts," said Nelson, who is close to signing a lease for the building and hopes to have his arts center open within a year. "It's incredible how well my idea fits right into what the neighborhood is trying to accomplish.

Neighborhood leaders and city officials could not agree more. Nelson's artistic vision is precisely the type of business they hope to lure to the area under a new development plan recently approved by the Alexandria City Council.

The 129-page Mount Vernon Avenue Business Area Plan envisions the street as a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly place that would attract new retail businesses while retaining what residents call its small-town character.

It seeks to build on demographic and other changes that have occurred in the area since the mid-1990s, transforming a street once described as somewhat desolate into a commercial center beginning to thrive -- and a mainly blue-collar neighborhood into one that is increasingly white-collar.

"People want it to be this vibrant, funky, kind of down-home unique place where they can get together with their friends and raise their kids, where there are opportunities to work, to play, to shop, and where they can walk," said Kimberley Fogle, the city's chief of neighborhood planning and community development. She helped spearhead the working group of residents, business leaders and others that prepared the report.

A major part of the strategy for accomplishing these goals is to position Mount Vernon Avenue and Del Ray as a center for the arts, a place where emerging artists feel comfortable setting up shop, displaying their works and making a home.

"I think one of the many reasons people would be attracted to an area is if you have public art," said Susan Slattery, president of the Del Ray Artisans, a local nonprofit that has been promoting the arts since 1992. "Art is eye-pleasing and it shows vitality," Slattery said. "If a neighborhood has art galleries, I think surely they must have good restaurants, surely they must have good shopping."

The development plan, approved by the City Council on March 12 following a recommendation by the city Planning Commission, faces some obstacles. City officials could not provide a price tag for the physical improvements the report recommends, which range from new pedestrian-oriented lighting to traffic lane changes and benches on the sidewalks. The report acknowledges that "limited public funding is available."

It also analyzes the potential difficulties of the focus on the arts. One possible approach, which the report calls an "anchor strategy," would be to develop one key arts facility, much like the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Old Town. But the report says few suitable buildings exist on Mount Vernon Avenue and that new construction likely would be too expensive.

The arts center that Nelson plans to build for himself and other artists would be far smaller than the Torpedo Factory, which leases 65 studios to 185 working artists. Nelson, who lived in Del Ray 20 years ago, had been working out of a commercial mosaic studio in Arlington, but it closed in January.

Torpedo Factory director Trudi Van Dyke said she supports the Mount Vernon Avenue arts concept, adding that "making people aware of art and art in their daily lives can only benefit all of us."

But Van Dyke said making a community an art center is "a slow building process."

"I don't think it will be successful overnight," she said. "Art and galleries need to build a following and a reputation and do a lot of outreach. It's not quite the same as a grocery store, where you can go in and put a coupon in the paper for a free pound of butter and people will come visit you."

City officials said the report is a vision for how they want the street to look over the next decade or two and that a budget is not yet necessary. "People have expectations that all these things will happen tomorrow," Fogle said. "The idea is it's going to happen over time. And we do have limited resources."

Neighborhood leaders in Del Ray pointed out that the arts promotion strategy is already well established. More artists have moved into the area in recent years and the community's annual Art on the Avenue festival has been a huge success. When the festival began in 1995, about 2,500 people attended, said Pat Miller, the festival's chairwoman. Last year, she said, 40,000 to 45,000 people attended the one-day event, held on the first Saturday in October.

The festival's success is a key part of the revitalization that has been underway for the past decade on one of Alexandria's most historic streets.

As the development report describes, Mount Vernon Avenue has a "rich history." It began as a main thoroughfare connecting what were then the Del Ray and St. Elmo subdivisions in the late 19th century.

Fogle said the subdivisions were established to house workers from the nearby Potomac Yard, which until the 1980s was one of the major railroad switching stations on the East Coast. The area was incorporated as a separate town, called Potomac, and by 1925 had its own town hall and firehouse.

Alexandria annexed Potomac, which had included Mount Vernon Avenue, in 1930. The primarily residential avenue evolved into a major commercial street and an important regional route paralleling Route 1.

By the 1980s and early '90s, however, the area had become what Justin Wilson, president of the Del Ray Citizens Association, calls "a scary place." Residents say there was much more crime than there is today, and retail business was scattered.

Slattery, the head of the Del Ray Artisans, said she grew up in an adjacent neighborhood and "wasn't allowed in Del Ray when I was a kid."

When she moved into the area in the late 1980s, she recalled, "one of the first things I did was get a big dog."

Among the triggers for the current revitalization, residents say, were the art festival, the introduction of a farmers market in the mid-1990s and the opening in 1996 of St. Elmo's Coffee Pub -- on Mount Vernon Avenue.

"I was the first one who took the gamble," said St. Elmo's owner Nora Partlow, who displays artwork from local artists on the walls of the coffee shop. "Other people said, 'If she can do it, we can do it too.' The whole concept was to keep business on the avenue. We didn't want people to go to Arlington, or anyplace else."

More businesses, ranging from car dealerships to a cheese shop, opened. Property values rose rapidly.

The neighborhood plan, which is now incorporated into the city's master plan, seeks to build on these trends and encourage more development, but also limit it to small businesses.

To keep the area's residential character, city officials hope to make Mount Vernon Avenue more pedestrian-friendly by better lighting the sidewalks, adding more on-street parking and bike lanes, and cutting traffic flow from four lanes to two north of Commonwealth Avenue.

The report also calls for improving public transportation by adding DASH bus service in 2008 and trying to better connect the avenue to the Braddock Road Metro station.

Local business leaders and residents say they are happy with the plan. They say that the working group that prepared it encountered few major problems or controversies after coming together in the spring of 2003.

"It was a very amicable process all the way through," said Kevin Reilly, president of the Potomac West Business Association, a group of local businesses. "Everybody is looking to continue this momentum but at the same time retain the character of the avenue."

Wilson, the citizens association president, said the neighborhood has "come a long way."

"This is the next step," he said.