Shannon and I attended the special meeting of the Eastern Market Community Advisory Committee last night, and there's quite a bit to report! (As a result, this will be a longer post than normal -- sorry about that.) I'll try to go in the order people presented there, and try to get names right (if anyone has any corrections, feel free to let me know).
The first item discussed was actually the reason we were there -- EMCAC established a Community Outreach Committee which is aimed at guiding the development of an official EMCAC website and at managing other mechanisms of communicating Eastern Market-related issues to the community. Last weekend, I volunteered to help with the website part of things, and as a result, I'm now on this new committee; we'll inevitably have more to say here on Save Eastern Market once the EMCAC website is up and running, and hopefully it'll serve as a much-needed place where Capitol Hill can get information straight from the committee which was established as the community's voice to the District.
Next, as I mentioned last night, Nicky Cymrot spoke on behalf of the Capitol Hill Community Foundation, and among other things, reported that there was now $200,000 in the Eastern Market relief fund.
Most of the action at the meeting came out of the next agenda item, the report from the Capital Improvements Committee. The report started with information by Baird Smith of Quinn Evans (the architecture firm which has been working on the Market renovation plans since well before the fire); he had the unfortunate responsibility of reporting that structural engineers got their first look yesterday at the steel trusses supporting the roof, and that they definitely have now verified fractures in some of the smaller support members holding up the trusses. This means that the roof is more unstable than it was thought to be, that there will have to be some relatively immediate work done to shore it up, and that plans will now have to include remediation of those steel members. He also reported that there are areas of the concrete floor that are in poor condition (both as a result of long-term wear and water damage), and that the fire restoration contractor should have full interior scaffolding in place within the next two weeks so that engineers will be able to do a complete survey of the state of the South Hall.
Next to report in was Nir Buras, who is both an EMCAC member and the president of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Classical America (the group which has contributed its time and effort in creating potential designs for the temporary replacement structures). He presented further information about potential temporary structures, including the first three-dimensional rendering of a possible building (seen at the top of this post), a sketch of how the Hine Junior High site might allow for the creation of an interesting space that would reconnect C Street, and a cost breakdown of the three types of potential buildings. The end calculation is that cost of the building itself, depending on the type chosen, is likely to be between $520,000 and $600,000, and then the cost of everything needed to support the building (the foundation, slab, plumbing, utilities, etc.) will add another $800,000 to $900,000, bringing the entire structure to around $1.5 million. This led to a bit of discussion about the needs of the building -- energy efficiency, building reusability, placement of windows, locations of refrigeration and HVAC compressors, and the like -- and some respectful disagreement on the issue of having an aesthetically-pleasing structure versus one that goes up as quickly as possible and provides no more than what the merchants themselves said will be needed to get them back in business. The report ended with an EMCAC motion generally advising the city to choose a structure which supports the merchants' needs and can be quickly erected, and recommending the Hine Junior High School site for the building.
Finally, there were a few people who spoke about how the Market's operations have gone in the post-fire period. Mike Bowers reported for the Tenants' Council that they were generally pleased with how quickly all the various organizations acted to help ensure that last weekend went smoothly; Brian Cook represented Eastern Market Ventures (the management company responsible for the operations of the South Hall) and reported on what they've been doing to try to solidify merchant and vendor location plans for the coming weekends, something which led a few of the representatives for the merchants and vendors to state that they hadn't yet been notified of these plans. In all of this conversation, a question was raised as to whether there had been any official notice from the District that Seventh Street will be closed to traffic this coming weekend (or any future weekends); while there were many assumptions that that would be the case, nobody knew of an official answer to the question. To wrap the discussion up, the EMCAC Market Operations chair mentioned that the committee was going to try to use this occasion to push for long-term leases for the South Hall merchants, all of whom currently pay rent for their stalls without any future guarantees.
