Roots of collaboration: Designs underway for tree plaza off Dupont Circle

Through the collaboration of a tree-planting nonprofit and an engineering firm, a stretch of sidewalk near Dupont Circle’s namesake park could be transformed into a community plaza dotted with new trees and other environmentally friendly features.

Restore Mass Ave, a group that works to plant and maintain trees along Embassy Row, is moving forward with plans for improving the now-bare sidewalk where Massachusetts Avenue NW meets the western edge of Dupont Circle. Working with the DC-based firm Designgreen LLC, the group hopes to share concept designs with the community by early spring.

The intersection sees a high volume of traffic, including 25,000 vehicles and 10,000 Metro riders who pass by the Dupont Circle park daily in addition to patrons of the nearby farmers market each Sunday. The site is also home to a PNC Bank and Capital Bikeshare station.

“It is quite a crossing point for newcomers and visitors to DC — but nobody pays attention to it, so we are expecting and hoping that, through this project, the regular users and visitors in the community will discover it can be a real place,” said Deborah Shapley, president of Restore Mass Ave.

Talks of a “tree plaza” project at this site have been underway for several years. The nonprofit partnered with Designgreen in October to consider how to add 11 new street trees while incorporating new stormwater-management features. According to Shapley, the new engineered design should be ready by May 15, wth review by DC agencies this spring.

“Restore Mass Ave has been advocating for trees in that space for a long time,” said Rebecca Stack, the principal of Designgreen. “They’ve had difficulty, historically, on getting traction and to get anyone to listen to them.”

The engineering firm is proposing permeable pavement here as part of a “stormwater retrofit” to help reduce runoff and pollution. (Designgreen’s prior experience in this line of work includes designing and implementing the permeable sidewalk design in place at Duke Ellington Park.)

“You think of stormwater … when it rains, that it goes into the sides of the curb, but what we are trying to do is to prevent that from happening,” Stack said. “We want to connect it to the trees, and we don’t want to turn the site into a bathtub.”

Green infrastructure can soak up stormwater and decrease runoff that would otherwise enter the sewage system. The concept used by Designgreen is also used in DC Water’s Clean Rivers Project.

Reducing “combined sewer overflows” is important for the surrounding environment and water quality in local waterways such as Rock Creek, the Potomac River and the Anacostia River. DC Water’s project aims to reduce 1 million pounds of nitrogen from entering the Chesapeake Bay.

Last May, Restore Mass Ave won a $30,000 grant to create a permit-ready engineered design for the tree plaza. The funding came from the Chesapeake Bay Trust’s G3 program, which focuses on “green streets, green jobs, green towns.”

“The reason the Chesapeake Bay Trust looked favorably on our application … is that they need the runoff into the Chesapeake Bay to be less and to be cleaner,” Shapley said.

The grant also allows more opportunity to bring the local community on board. Shapley said she’s working to involve students from School Without Walls at Francis-Stevens, located nearby at 2425 N St. NW.  

On the project web page, the school’s principal, Richard Trogisch, suggests that the grant “could be considered a junior ‘green jobs’ program, raising our students’ interest in green design careers.”

Students will visit the site as part of a sustainability class and learn from Stack about tree growth and a stormwater reservoir, according to Shapley.

“Nobody wants these projects that are dropped down from up high, and just stuck in a neighborhood or community,” Shapley said. “They are not going to be lasting and be maintained if the local community and the next generation is not involved or committed.”

If the project wins city approvals, it would help further the nonprofit’s overall mission to maintain a tree canopy along Massachusetts Avenue from Wisconsin Avenue NW to Dupont Circle. The group has already completed dozens of such projects along the 2-mile stretch that’s generally known as Embassy Row.

“The purpose of our whole project is to let DC residents and workers experience the calm and shade of the elegant old streetscapes,” Shapley said. “There is a very special atmosphere about being under rows of healthy, large trees, when you are in an urban setting.”

This post has been updated to correct the spelling of Designgreen LLC, to clarify the scope of the grant and the timeline for development of the engineered design, and to note that the renderings show an earlier layout that is being revised through development of the engineered design.