Drugstore behemoth Walgreens has won a battle with neighbors in upscale Cleveland Park over a new pharmacy near the Van Ness Metro station.
After months of haggling, a city zoning board turned aside an appeal by residents to keep Walgreens from building a new, two-story pharmacy on the 4200 block of Connecticut Avenue NW. Neighbors say that the store is “too suburban” in design and will crowd an already densely packed intersection with traffic.
“I see it as a real mess waiting to happen,” local Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Jane Solomon told the Washington Examiner.
It’s the second time Walgreens has run into a neighborhood buzz saw in the District. The pharmacy chain, the United States’ largest, was blasted after it bought the site of famed Chinese restaurant Yenching Palace on the 3500 block of Connecticut Avenue NW.
The company has already redesigned its Van Ness site twice. Company spokesman Robert Elfinger refused to say whether Walgreens will go back to its drawing board but he said the company will “continue to work with the city to alleviate those concerns.”
“This is a market we want to get into,” Elfinger said. “We want to expand our presence in the Northeastern United States. We think there are some growth opportunities.”
Despite the collapsing economy, Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreens has more than doubled its stores in the past decade. It has a moderate-size footprint in Maryland and Virginia and only one other store in D.C. Company executives have set a goal of 10,000 stores. Most of them will come in the Northeast and in California.
» 7,507 drugstores in 50 states and D.C.
» $63.3 billion in sales in fiscal 2009 (up 7.3 percent from fiscal 2008)
» 105 stores in Virginia
» 52 stores in Maryland
» 1 in D.C.
The conflict over the Van Ness site is in many ways a microcosm of the argument over the so-called “new urbanism.” For the past decade or more, urban planners have abandoned sprawling, driving-dependent designs for densely packed, walkable plans that build a high-rise mix of shopping, eating and living around mass transit. Critics like Solomon say they can’t see the point of building a single, squat building atop a busy train station in a dense Northwest neighborhood.
“To build a two-story building on top of Metro is a holy waste,” Solomon said.
The 20,000-square-foot Van Ness Walgreens is expected to open in the summer of 2011, Elfinger said.
