Bringing a modern aesthetic to a traditional D.C. neighborhood
By Kathy Orton
May 14, 2021
“Prior to my getting involved as a developer, I had heard there were several other developers over the last 10 to 15 years who were trying to figure out ways to access the land,” he said. “They couldn’t do it because there was no way that D.C. was going to allow 49th Street to come up, and there was no way to access Cathedral Avenue from the lower six lots that we ended up buying.”
Arrowood’s solution was to buy the house at the end of Cathedral Avenue, which bordered the six undeveloped lots. That allowed him to construct a private road that would connect the newly built houses to the main road.
“It took a year and a half, two years of finessing two different [sellers],” he said.
But that was just one hurdle he had to overcome. Another was gaining approval from the various entities involved — the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, the National Park Service, the D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation and the D.C. Department of Transportation, to name a few.
“When I talked to my civil engineer about this at the very beginning, he said it’s going to be very hard to get all of the approvals to do this because you’re next to a national park,” Arrowood said. “There are storm-water management issues. There are all kinds of DDOT issues. There are environmental concerns. We’ve got to be really careful about how we do this.”
