The future of a long-vacant school sitting on prime downtown real estate is now incoming Mayor Vincent Gray’s problem after the D.C. Council decided not to deal with the controversial building on the outgoing mayor’s watch. A bill submitted by Mayor Adrian Fenty earlier this month proposing to surplus the historic Franklin School at 13th and K streets will expire at the end of this week, according to a staff member in Councilwoman Mary Cheh’s office. Cheh is chairwoman of the committee to which Fenty’s bill was submitted. Declaring a city-owned property “surplus” allows the District to sell it to a private entity.
All pending legislation not addressed in committee automatically expires at the end of the session and requires resubmission the following year, said Drew Newman, legislative counsel for Cheh.
Fenty shuttered the building in 2008, when it was operating as a homeless shelter, and since then advocates and city officials have butted heads over how the property should be used. Some want it reopened as a shelter; others want it transformed into an educational or cultural center.
However, the historic building’s imposing renovation cost — an estimated $30 million — has severely limited the options and viability for nonprofit operators.
After its third request for proposals in seven years, the city received one “viable” response this year from a Baltimore-area developer to turn the property into a boutique hotel and culinary school. The second proposal was for a charter school, but the city deemed it an unviable submission.
It is not clear how the new administration will handle the property, said Charles Reed, the area’s Neighborhood Advisory Commission chairman.
“I don’t see the District putting money in to restore the property, which means it either sits and rots or it is surplused,” Reed said. “And the latter is far better — the building should not be allowed to be destroyed.”
A spokeswoman for Gray was not available for comment Monday.
The school, which opened in 1869, was designed by Adolf Cluss and is a National Historic Landmark. The building in its time was considered an innovation in education for its three-and-a-half-stories, central auditorium and 14 classrooms designed for 900 students.
In the 1920s it became the administrative headquarters of the D.C. school system, then an adult education center. The men’s homeless shelter opened there in 2004.
