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A D.C. college building faces demolition — to the surprise of students

2023-09-21 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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It would have been easier for Dnisa Oocumma to remain quiet. Friends warned her that speaking against plans held by the university she attends would not help her future and could hurt it.

But after she learned that a proposal called for demolishing a key building on the campus of the University of the District of Columbia, Oocumma did more than speak up. She asked her classmates and professors if they knew anything about those plans, and after many told her they didn’t, she and others put together an online presentation, complete with a slide show, to let people on campus know what they had learned.

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“What is Building 41?” read one slide.

“How we got to this point: What lies ahead,” read another.

“If the university is not going to let people know what’s going on, I felt like I needed to let them know,” Oocumma, who is a senior and urban sustainability major, told me on a recent afternoon.

Building 41, she and other students will tell you, is not just any building. The six-story structure is one of the largest buildings on the small campus, and it sits in a spot that is central to student life at the HBCU. The building is next to a plaza where campus gatherings take place, and it is surrounded by organic gardens that have been diligently tended to by students and community members. This year so far, more than 350 pounds of produce from those gardens has been donated to a neighborhood food pantry and the UDC food pantry, which Oocumma manages.

D.C. could offer free meals to all students. Every city should.

Oocumma and others now fear those gardens — and much more — will be lost if D.C. and the university are allowed to move forward with a proposal that calls for demolishing Building 41 and constructing a facility to house the D.C. Archives.

They worry that environmental and noise pollution will disturb students and keep them from wanting to spend any extra time on campus. They worry that losing the building to the city will mean losing an opportunity to provide child care on campus and create much-needed student housing. They worry that they are just now finding out about these plans and that there is truth in the message they’ve been hearing: “This is a done deal.”

“I think they are going to do what they want to do,” student Autry Smalls told me. Smalls is the president of the public health club at the school, and he is concerned that having a construction site on campus for years will affect air quality, create noise that will distract from learning, and represent an eyesore. “It’s not good for mental health, physical health. It’s just not good health-wise at all.”

If you haven’t previously heard about the plans for Building 41, you’re not alone. I spent time this week speaking to six people who have been active on the campus for years, and they all said they only learned about the plans in recent weeks and months. All six plan to testify Thursday at a D.C. Zoning Commission hearing. Each shared with me different concerns, but they all expressed the same hope: that city officials will give the public more time to learn about the project and offer input before deciding whether the plans should move forward.

A page on the D.C. Department of General Services website describes the purpose of the project. “The new facility will provide better security for the collections and enhanced access for the public, while allowing for future expansion,” reads one line.

A 258-page report on the project tells of a long-recognized need for a place to house city records (it describes them as stored in at least 13 facilities across the region) and details a site selection process that took place in 2015. The Department of General Services, the report says, awarded Hartman-Cox Architects in association with EYP Architecture a contract in 2022 to design a new home for the archives where Building 41 stands.

A girl’s gravestone mystified strangers. We may now know her identity.

A new facility is no doubt needed. Preserving the past is important. But preserving the past should not be prioritized over building the future, and those UDC students are our future. What they are asking for is not much. They are asking to be heard on an issue that will directly affect their lives.

When Doneka Brooks testifies Thursday, she will tell the commission that she is a single mother who works, studies and volunteers on campus. She will explain how a day-care center that is run out of the otherwise empty Building 41 will close and how that space could be used to expand child-care education and services for students and employees.

“We have an early-childhood education program at UDC, but no day-care center on campus for students who need day care for their children,” Brooks, who has a 3-year-old daughter, will tell them. She will tell them that the building could be used to offer after-school care to young people in the community, which would help prevent gun violence, or provide much-needed housing for students like her. “It would really help me and my child if I could have housing on campus with a nearby day-care center.”

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When Mary Beth Tinker testifies, she will tell the commission that she lives near the university, volunteers on campus with the garden club, and is a student. She will also tell them: “A great deception is taking place that the UDC community — especially students and neighbors — are being asked to bear the burden of. I know because I have been there for every step of it.”

She testified in 2021 about the UDC Campus Master Plan, and at the time, there was no mention of demolishing Building 41, even though city and university officials already knew that would occur, she said. When she and others started looking into the issue, they discovered that in 2019 the D.C. Council approved a budget item that called for allocating $73 million for the archives to relocate to a “stand-alone, purpose-built new facility.” The address listed was for UDC.

Tinker will tell the commission that the question they are really deciding is this: “Should UDC students have a fair chance at weighing in on how the building would best serve THEIR needs?”

One of the slides Oocumma shared during that presentation lists questions that remain for students and other community members.

“How did this project get so far without the community knowing about it?” reads one.

“Can we have a real debate about how best to use Building 41?” reads another.

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