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The new apartment building at 880 P Street,
NW. The existing Cambria Hotel is visible
in the right background.

Market Rates
Market Rates All photos © Maxwell MacKenzie Architectural Photographer

The Last Piece of City Market

at O Falls into Place by Deane Madsen, Assoc. AIA

Fifty years ago this spring, as the nation recoiled from the NW, to the south, P Street to the north, and 7th and 9th streets to
assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., its capital descended the east and west, respectively. Now, thanks to a forward-thinking
into four days of uprisings that left whole swaths of Washington re-investment initiated by Roadside Development in 2001, the O
in smoking rubble. A quarter century later, the Victorian-styled Street Market is restored, and the two blocks are filled with a hotel,
O Street Market—which had served continuously as the Shaw various restaurants, and new mid-rise residential buildings that
neighborhood’s public marketplace since its 1881 completion but bring density and housing into a historic district. The last piece of
was slow to re-emerge from that post-uprising rubble—was again the puzzle, designed by Shalom Baranes Associates (SBA), is
the site of turmoil as gun violence erupted, injuring eight people 880 P Street. (See the Winter 2015 issue of ARCHITECTUREDC for
and killing one, 15-year-old Duwan A’Vant. coverage of the first phase of the project.)
In the two decades that followed the 1994 shooting, the O “I think the building is an example of how you can do
Street Market fell into disrepair. A grocery chain, Giant, opened contemporary design in historic neighborhoods, and it’s going to
and paved over the rest of the two blocks bounded by O Street, be OK,” said Robert Sponseller, AIA, the design principal at SBA

68 MARKET RATES