LIPSTICK ON A PIG: HOW D.C. AND THE DOWNTOWN BID TRIED TO MASK A DREARY CORNER
Washington Business Journal, DC
Nov 12 2014
Nov 12, 2014, 2:54pm EST\
Michael NeibauerStaff Reporter- Washington Business JournalEmail
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At the corner of 14th and G streets NW, in the heart of downtown D.C.,
a historic bank building sits vacant, and there’s little the District
can do except try to mask it — and tax the heck out of it.
The Downtown D.C. Business Improvement District, in coordination with
the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, has installed a
fence outside the Federal-American National Bank (also known as the
National Bank of Washington) and wrapped that fence in a colorful
banner advertising downtown commerce.
“It just looks so blah, for lack of a better really good PR term,”
Karyn Le Blanc, Downtown D.C. spokeswoman, said of the bank, which
was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.
DCRA put up the fence, Le Blanc said, and the BID installed the banner
“just to liven up that corner with a little bit of color.”
The banner doesn’t hide the bank building, but it does at least draw
the public’s attention away from what has become a blighted corner.
This is what the District can do, given the stalled effort by the bank
building’s owner, the Minneapolis-based Cafesjian Family Foundation, to
redevelop the property into the Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial.
The building was sold to the Armenian Assembly of America in 2000
for $7.25 million, using funds provided by multiple donors, including
$4 million from the Cafesjian Family Foundation. The museum project
faltered, and under a complex real estate arrangement, the building’s
ownership reverted to the foundation as of Dec. 31, 2010. Years of
litigation between wealthy publisher and philanthropist Gerard L.
Cafesjian (who has since died) and the Armenian Assembly was finally
settled in July by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
“This legal saga has been long-lived,” Judge Robert Wilkins wrote in
the July 15 decision, on behalf of a three-judge panel. “What began
as a single lawsuit to collect on an unpaid promissory note quickly
escalated into a morass of litigation. More than seven years and
millions of dollars in legal fees later, much of the parties’ work
to achieve their dream of a museum appears to have been for naught,
which is regrettable. Whatever happens next, hopefully our decision
today can at least serve as the last word on this dispute’s protracted
journey through the courts.”
What happens next may be a massive tax hike. The Cafesjian foundation
paid $393,363 in real estate taxes this year for the bank building
and four adjacent G Street properties (1336, 1338, 1340 and 1342),
three of which were recently razed.
The bank building is currently taxed by the District at the Class 2,
standard commercial rate. But now that the litigation is complete,
the District is free to raise the rate to either the vacant tax level
($5 per $100 of assessed value) or the blighted level ($10 per $100
of assessed value), so long as the building isn’t for sale or under
renovation. D.C. Councilman Jack Evans, D-Ward 2, said Wednesday he
will ask the tax office to “investigate the status of that property
and implement the tax laws accordingly.”
“We want to force whoever owns that now to fix it up,” said Evans, who
represents downtown and chairs the Committee on Finance and Revenue.
“It is unacceptable any longer to have a prime real estate corner
like that in the condition it is and has been so long in downtown
Washington given the progress we’ve made.”
At $5, the bank building tax bill would soar from $123,240 in 2014
to $359,777 in 2015. At $10, the foundation would be hit with a
$719,555 levy. The Cafesjian Family Foundation has not returned calls
for comment.
All of this effort to jump-start the revitalization of a building
that is certainly worth saving. From the 1994 application for historic
designation:
It is an excellent example of early-twentieth-century Classical Revival
bank architecture, designed by the nationally prominent bank and
skyscraper architect Alfred C. Bossom, in association with J.H. de
Sibour, the distinguished Washington architect who was among the
city’s leading proponents of Beaux-Arts principles. It is the only
building designed by Bossom in Washington, and exemplifies many of
the best characteristics of the forty banks he designed around the
country between 1912 and 1926.
The building epitomizes the striving of a 1920s financial institution
to express its financial prowess through a distinctive building. It
also illustrates the dangerous tendency, typical of the period,
for some banks to over-invest in lavish building campaigns, to the
detriment of their financial stability. The building’s subsequent
history as the main office of a newly constituted Depression-era bank,
the Hamilton National Bank, and a much larger financial institution,
the National Bank of Washington, demonstrates its sustained appeal
as a banking headquarters.
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