The 11th Street Bridge Park, District of Columbia

closed

The 11th Street Bridge Park will be Washington, D.C.’s first elevated public park and a new venue for healthy recreation, environmental education, and the arts. The park is located on the piers of the old 11th Street Bridge spanning the Anacostia River with overarching goals for the park being: Create a healthy community by establishing a safe place for residents to exercise and play Connect the community with the Anacostia River Reconnect the neighborhoods of Anacostia / Fairlawn and Capitol Hill / Navy Yard Generate new jobs and economic activities for the local communities. The 11th Street Bridge Park will span the capital’s cityscape and include community generated programming including outdoor performance spaces, playgrounds, urban agriculture, an Environmental Education Center with classrooms to teach students about river systems, public art that tells the rich history of the region, and kayak and canoe launches. Bound by the Washington Navy Yard on one side and the National Park Service’s Anacostia Park on the other, the Bridge Park will be a destination for some, a pedestrian or bicycle route for others, and an iconic architectural symbol across the Anacostia River for the city. Background: The 11th street bridge built in the 1960s reached the end of its lifespan a decade ago. Then Mayor Vince Gray and others saw an opportunity to “save part of the bridge, its precious pilings,” to create a new bridge park that would bring both sides of Washington, D.C. together. The idea behind the 11th Street Bridge Park was to utilize abandoned infrastructure—a set of piers from a now-defunct vehicular bridge—to create a pedestrian link between east and west. As its name implies, the park would be at once a thoroughfare across the river and a gathering place over it. The 11th Street Bridge Park would connect the majority-Black and historically disenfranchised neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River to the rest of the district, potentially drawing as many as 1.2 million visitors a year. The park will be owned by the D.C. city government and managed by Building Bridges Across the River. The Environmental Education Center and kayak / canoe launches will be run by the nonprofit organization Anacostia Watershed Society. After two years of extensive community outreach (over 200 meetings) and a seven-month design competition, the winning team of OMA+OLIN was selected to design the 11th Street Bridge Park in October 2014.

High