How D.C.'s 11th Street Bridge Will Transform Infrastructure into Civic Space

The 11th Street Bridge Park Project, one of the most prominent of these efforts, seeks to turn an aged-out freeway bridge into a three-acre civic space crossing the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C. It has garnered national attention with a recent design competition that yielded four finalists.

Scott Kratz, the project's director, discussed the initial idea and its ongoing implementation with The Planning Report. Beyond the structural concept, he detailed the intensive community outreach process and the goals this recreational area seeks to meet—including tying together two long-divided neighborhoods: "If we can create both a physical and metaphorical bridge to connect two sides of the community that rarely venture to each others’ banks, that will be a great success.”

He goes on to detail the conditions and assets east of the river, in Wards 7 and 8: "They have some of the most challenging issues, on pretty much any scale: unemployment, the health issues that we spoke about, housing insecurity, poverty, and so forth... The area has tremendous bones with extraordinarily longstanding and proud residents who perhaps haven’t had the same opportunities as those in the rest of the city... As we work with the community to help shape the vision for the park, this can be an opportunity to build economic benefits on both sides of the river."