Last Friday, the whole family went on a walking tour of the McMillan Sand Filtration Plant. The wha? It's an engineering marvel dating from 1904 - a slow sand filtration plant that filtered 75 million gallons of water a day for DC. To most folks though, it is the strange looking hobbit missile silos things along North Capital Street.
Arial photo - note the pattern of holes.
The tour was sponsored by the NCRC and one thing struck me: It is a PROFOUNDLY unsafe space.
This isn't what I expected to be my 'take-away' from this trip. The site is hotly contested as one of few remaining open spaces in DC. It has a history as parkland (at least over closer to the reservoir) and is even named for a fellow who created a plan for city parks. So, any redevelopment should have open space protected, yes?
Generally, you know I would agree.
Let's talk history. I don't know all the details, but here is the gist. The Army Corp built this in 1904, together with a slew of high-brow names, including Olmstead Jr. (NOT Olmstead Sr., the more famous Olmstead, who died in 1903 at 81.) The site includes 26 acres of underground filtration 'cells', each an acre in size, filled with sand. The water would slowly seep through the sand leaving behind the worst contaminants before being pumped to the city.The sand is of an unknown depth, with yet more infrastructure underneath. How many tons of sand does it take to fill an acre of space 10 feet deep? The site has a number of sand silos and sand washers, for storage and reuse. It's an elegant system and it revolutionized the cleaning of water in the city. In order to provide light for the workers inside the cells, they installed 2,000 manholes which could be opened to flood the acres of underground catacombs with light.
In addition, the site was part of the City Beautiful movement
of the turn of the century. With the belief that there is no industrial
site that can't be beautified, the design apparently included a
promenade, shrubbery, and sand silos covered in Boston Ivy. Sounds great on paper.
Look again. The 'Promenade' was a narrow, unsafe space between 2,000 manholes topped with paper-thin
covers. I can't imagine the grassy area on top of the filter cells was
ever open to the public, although park historian claim it was a vibrant
public space. Even at the turn of the century, I would imagine a 15 foot drop every 3
steps would have seemed dangerous. Underneath are acres of unreinforced
concrete, being further torn apart by the very shrubs Olmstead wanted
planted and a spring that was already there but refuses to stay out of
the way.
This looks like a redevelopment nightmare to me. There is no way this can be 'preserved' and made a park again. Simply put, this was never a functional park, no matter what folks might want to believe. If sheep were left here to graze (it's been suggested), they'd fall in the holes and break their necks. Seriously. If they want to build a mixed use area here, I'm equally stumped.
Most endangered place. Or most dangerous?
Don't worry - NCRC won't do much there for a while. They may still realize it's too expensive and just give it back to the city. It will never be safe for your average tourists and I'm not sure it can be made safe for development without wholesale removal. I don't have enough faith in trendy international designers to come up with ideas that would work, engineering wise - I'd wager even the Army Corps doesn't want to be called back to sort this out.
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