Tag Archives: DC

Populating DC

Things going up. CC image from flickr.

Things going up. CC image from flickr.

Some assorted Census/demographic items from recent days:

DC’s population is closing in on 600,000 residents.  One of Ryan Avent’s commenters (rg) notes the historical issues with the accuracy of the Census Bureau’s annual population estimates for cities and urban areas:

Building on what Eric wrote: throughout the late 1990s, the Census Bureau estimated that the District was hemorrhaging population, right up to the 1999 estimate. Lo and behold, when they actually conducted the Census in 2000, it turned out that the 1999 estimate was off by tens of thousands of people: in 1999 the Census Bureau estimated the District’s population was 519,000; the 2000 Census counted 572,000 people in the District!!! They were WAY OFF in 1999. I write this not to trash the Census Bureau but to note that their estimates can be quite suspect. In the case of urban areas, it seems that their methodology, at least in 1990s, was biased against urban areas. So, do not be surprised if the actual 2010 Census count is much higher than this 2009 estimate.

This is indeed true.  The 1990 Census put DC’s population at 606,900.  That same year, the population estimate for the city pegged the population at 603,814 (the decennial census is a snapshot of the nation on Census Day, April 1 of each 10th year – the population estimates are supposed to be a snapshot of July 1 of each year…), and things went downhill from there, at least in terms of the estimates:

Year    Population    Change
1990    603814
1991    593239    -10575
1992    584183    -9056
1993    576358    -7825
1994    564982    -11376
1995    551273    -13709
1996    538273    -13000
1997    528752    -9521
1998    521426    -7326
1999    519000    -2426

This decade hasn’t seen the same massive declines from year to year, yet it remains to be seen if the positive signs from the population estimates will translate into the same kind of bump seen from the 1999 estimate to the 2000 Census.  Compare the previous decade to this one:

Year    Population    Change
2000    571744
2001    578042    6298
2002    579585    1543
2003    577777    -1808
2004    579796    2019
2005    582049    2253
2006    583978    1929
2007    586409    2431
2008    590074    3665
2009    599657    9583

Either way, the 2010 Census effort will be vital for the city.

More is better: Various folks chime in on the new growth  – Loose Lips, taking note of the Post’s article, for example.

D.C. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2), whose district stretches from Georgetown to Shaw, gave credit to former mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) for the city’s apparent population rebound. Williams, who was in office from 1999 to 2007, set a goal in 2003 of adding 100,000 residents in a decade. Williams invested heavily in development, improving city services and reducing crime.

“The whole image of the District of Columbia began to change from a dangerous, dirty, unsafe place to a very different city,” Evans said.

Council member Jim Graham (D-Ward 1) dates the changes to 2005, with the construction of thousands of downtown apartments. The ensuing influx, Graham said, changed the character of his ward, including neighborhoods near the Columbia Heights Metro station, 14th and U streets, and the eastern end of the U Street corridor.

“We’ve always felt that we were having this population growth, but it just wasn’t being reflected in the data,” Graham said.

Indeed – and the best way to get the data to reflect the on-the-ground reality is to have a strong showing for the 2010 Census.

Domestic Migrants: Ryan Avent and Matt Yglesias look at the primary cause in the uptick in DC’s population – domestic migration.  People are moving here, as a net positive, for the first time in a long time.

Data Types: Jarrett Walker notes some changes in the way detailed economic and transportation data will be collected and organized.

Overall, the neighborhood-level American Community Survey is going to be a great thing.  It will present in rolling averages of the last five years, so it will show a bit if a lag, but it’s an important step.  You can’t fix what you can’t quantify.

That last sentence brings to mind one of the City Paper’s quotes of the year, from former City Administrator Dan Tangherlini:

Optimism without data is really just an emotion.

600,000

2010 Census Mug - CC image from flickr

2010 Census Mug - CC image from flickr

Ryan Avent takes note of some joyous holiday news for the District:

I always love looking through new population estimates from the Census Bureau. New numbers, estimated as of July 2009, have just come out, and it appears the District is just a few hundred people short of crossing the 600,000 threshold. From 2008 to 2009, the District was the fifth fastest growing state, in percentage terms.

The full dataset is available here.  DC’s estimate from July 2009 puts the population at 599,657.  This obviously puts the 600,000 number within reach for the 2010 Census.  However, crossing that threshold isn’t a given, as the methodology from the Census’s population estimates in the intervening years between each decennial census vary quite a bit from the forms everyone will be filling out in March of 2010.

With that in mind, it’s vital that DC achieve a complete and accurate count in 2010.  600,000 isn’t just a nice round number to pass, as it shows a real growth and reinvestment in both DC specifically and urban areas in general that’s taken place over the past few years.

Snow day

We got the illest weatherman in the biz on storm watch… – dilated peoples

What remains to be seen is if DC can have as much fun as Madison, WI did in their recent snowstorm:

The giant snowball

Snowball fight, Braveheart style: (you’ll have to excuse the foul mouths of the Badgers…)

More videos from Madison from their alt weekly, the Isthmus.

Streetcars have arrived

Our first streetcars are here. DDOT’s facebook page has the pics.

Ruth Samuelson fears burnout!

Since late summer, the city has been buzzing about streetcar lines coming to Anacostia, H Street NE and possibly numerous other corridors across the city. Some people are thrilled. Others cry waste. But until Saturday, no D.C. streetcars were actually in America—they were in the Czech Republic, of all places.

I don’t know if Ruth has noticed, but the Europeans tend to build these things better than we do (at least right now).  Of course, it won’t always be that way – see United Streetcar.

Then today, news broke that the cars were here! Why this was news is kind of peculiar. Do people care when a new, updated version of the METRO car arrives?  A press release from the District Department of Transportation noted the length of the streetcars journey–4,200 miles. It detailed what kind of measures were taken—a “wax coating” was applied “over the external surface of the street car”—to prepare the streetcars for their voyage. It featured an enthusiastic quote from DDOT director Gabe Klein, suggesting that D.C. residents were just dying to see the vehicles up close and personal– as if they were the newest presidential pets.

I’ll fully admit that I’m far nerdier about this than most, but I am just dying to see these vehicles up close and personal.  And I do like riding in new Metro cars.  I’ll even throw in my two cents about their design.  I know I’m not the only one, either.

So, is this really newsworthy?  I don’t know.  But the beauty of this is how DDOT’s managed to use some social media to get the news out to a community that really wants to hear it and see the pictures.  Little things like this make a big difference.  Metro, for example, could use a little good publicity right now.  Positive waves!

Plenty of Parking

DCist takes note of a great photo of the Mt. Vernon Square area from 1992, looking south towards the Portrait Gallery and what’s now the Verizon Center:

It’s amazing to realize how much the area has changed over the past 15-20 years.  Looking back at the historical images available from Google Earth, you can piece together the evolution of the area over the years.  Google Earth’s imagery isn’t universally available over time, so there are some rather big gaps between some aerial sets.

North is to the left in all the images.

1949:

MVS-1949

Note the fine grain of the urban fabric, almost all of the buildings occupy narrow lots with zero setback from the property line – and there are virtually no vacant lots.  You can see the beginnings of site clearance at the top if the image for the enormous Government Accountability Office building.  That structure would be dedicated in 1951.

1988:

MVS-1988

In 1988, things have changed a great deal.  Obviously, lots of surface parking lots here.  Though the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station opened in 1976 with the first operable segment of the Red line, the North-South connection along the Green-Yellow lines wasn’t yet open when this picture was taken.  The Mount Vernon Sq, Shaw-Howard, and U St stations all opened in 1991, just prior to the taking of the opening photograph in this post.

1999:

MVS-1999

In 1999, the (now) Verizon Center has been open for business for about a year and a half.  Site preparation is well underway for the new convention center, but there are still some significant parcels in key downtown locations occupied with vacant lots or surface parking.

2004:

MVS-2004

Gallery Place is taking shape, the new convention center is done, and other vacant lots fill in.  Still some significant vacant lots to the North of Mass Ave.

2009:

MVS-2009

The old convention center has been removed, just about all of the once vacant lots in old downtown (i.e. the right side of this image) are filled in, and stuff to the north of Mass Ave is beginning to see some real development. There’s a little error in image stitching between L and M streets, with the aerials to the right taking a slightly more oblique angle, showing the heights of the buildings in Old Downtown.

Watching this section of DC devolve and then redevelop shows some clear trends.  The newer buildings are all much bigger than their predecessors – both in terms of heights and footprint.  The fine-grained urban fabric of the 1949 image is largely gone from the downtown portions of the images, aside from a few stretches where the original facades have been retained behind newer developments or a few blocks in Chinatown, where the finer grained structures remain.

The interesting thing to note is how much of Downtown DC turned first to surface parking before redeveloping back into urban forms.  This intermediate, destructive step prevents preserving that kind of fine grained urbanism.  Nevertheless, the redevelopment of the area is a rousing success, showing the versatility of the traditional city grid – particularly when reinforced with urban rail transit.

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

Links – All the pieces matter

Brands matter

  • JD Hammond looks at the importance of rail liveries in the transit brand.
  • GGW looks at Metro’s proposed redesign and unification of bus stop signage.
  • Multiple sources (GGW, BDC, DCist, PoP) noted the shipping of DC’s first streetcars from the Czech Republic to DC.

A common theme amongst the streetcar commentariat – Hey!  That thing looks like the Circulator!

No doubt.  Obviously, this spurred JD Hammond’s post.  One commenter on one of those sites (I can’t keep track) noted that the stripped down base paint job for the livery, missing the graphics and text, looks awfully similar to a Jesus fish.

Commute flows matter

Matt Johnson (at GGW and Track Twenty-Nine) has a fascinating graphic looking at Metro’s commute flows, also determing which segments of the system are the busiest during the AM rush hour.

Very interesting to look at.  Well done.  Also, an excellent case for more investment in the core.  Discussions in GGW’s comments thread hints at the impacts of the Silver Line on current Orange Line crowds – and the inescapable conclusion is that more core capacity will be needed – sooner rather than later.

All in the game, yo.

Apropos of nothing in particular, this video of The Wire‘s 100 greatest quotes is fantastic.  Those with virgin eyes/ears or those that haven’t seen all 5 seasons (there are spoilers) might not want to watch.

Lester Freamon’s last quote is the one that hits home for me when thinking about cities and the series – “all the pieces matter.”

A Parisian Anacostia

Yesterday, Kojo Nnamdi hosted classical architect Nir Buras on his show, talking about (among other things) narrowing and urbanizing the Anacostia River so it more resembles the Seine‘s course through Paris.  Such a massive public works undertaking would be under the guise of a new iteration of the L’Enfant and MacMillan plans for the city.

Buras hit on a wide variety of topics – some of which I agree with, some I do not, and some that raise serious concerns about his ideas.   They include the interface between city and water, hydrology and flooding, the supposed superiority of classical design, and a desire to make everything revolve around Paris.

Thoughts on the various topics:

Urban Waterfronts

Buras is certainly correct in noting that DC’s waterfronts are woefully underutilized.  I know I’ve had those thoughts myself, and think there are many opportunities on the shores of the Anacostia to help the city engage the water that flows through it.  We see some good examples of this here and there within the region – Georgetown’s waterfront, Alexandria’s waterfront, and even the SW DC waterfront (something’s just fun about grabbing a beer at Cantina Marina).  Still, there’s a far greater opportunity that we’ve missed.  Given the pending redevelopment of Poplar Point, this condition is poised to change in the relatively near future.

The problem with Mr. Buras’ idea is that he’s promoting Paris as the ideal, when he admittedly notes the dimensions of the Anacostia are more similar to the Thames in London.  He specifically calls to narrow the river from ~1000 feet wide to ~500 feet wide.  Instead of making the urban design meet the natural conditions of the land (as L’Enfant did so well, siting the Capitol atop Jenkins Hill, keeping his grid within the relatively flat plain below the fall line, etc).  Similarly, he dismisses Amsterdam and Venice as problematic for engineering reasons.

Having the city meet the water is a great idea.  Re-creating Paris is a solution looking for a problem.

Transportation

Buras mentions the Anacostia serving as a barrier – and rightfully notes the barriers also imposed by both the SE/SW freeway and 295 – yet this major infrastructural idea gets little treatment from Buras compared to the idea of narrowing the river channel.  In my mind, removal of the freeway is a far more important decision, yet it’s not nearly the sexy idea.

Ecology and Hydrology

JD Hammond summed it up succinctly: “I do worry about flooding.”  So do I.  I’m no hydrologist, but some of Buras’ answer to astute questions from callers don’t leave me with a lot of confidence that he’s fully assessed the impacts of such a decision.  One points out the damage done to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, particularly noting how man’s manipulation of the Mississippi River and various wetlands didn’t help that city – it hurt it.  Man’s engineering can’t replicate nature.  JD Hammond emphasizes this point as well, looking to Los Angeles and the concrete gutters that serve as rivers.

The other thing is that I can’t quite tell exactly where Mr. Buras proposes to narrow the river.  Presumably, he’s talking about the region between the confluence with the Potomac and the area around RFK Stadium – any further upstream, and the river is quickly surrounded by both the National Arboretum and the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens – trying to force the river into an urban condition amongst such natural parks is boneheaded.

Classical Architecture

Perhaps the most tedious bit of Buras’ talk was the rambling was his talk on the superiority of classical design.  For one, conflating classical aesthetics and architecture with good urban design is annoying.  I’ve got nothing against classical architecture, but I happen to rather like modern architecture as well.  I’m far more interested in good design, regardless of the style it fits into.   As it relates to the city, I’m more interested in how those buildings fit into and function within an urban environment.

Holistic Understanding

I find it curious that Buras talks of having a holistic understanding of architecture and urbanism, while the hydrology of his proposal shows a profound lack of any sort of holistic understanding of water systems and their intricate feedback mechanisms.

All in All…

Buras raises an intriguing idea.  I certainly support the idea of crafting a new vision for DC, guiding it as the city’s previous plans have done.  I appreciate the fact that Buras is focused on the city, not just the Federal elements (as some other plan proponents have done). I absolutely embrace the desire to have DC interface with her rivers and waterways in a far more productive and beneficial fashion.

However, the focus on classical design (to the point of exclusion, it seems, of all else) troubles me.  Likewise, the details of the plan that were the focus of the Kojo interview (narrowing the river by half) look to be an attempt to force Paris upon DC.  Also, the lack of concern over the hydrologic impacts is both troubling and a step in the wrong direction – as we embrace sustainability in terms of design, we should apply what we’ve learned about rivers and their ecosystems rather than just throw up something that looks good.

There needs to be more to a plan than just good-looking classical design elements.

Smorgasboard

Lots of open windows in my Firefox browser, so here’s a link dump:

Beeee-autiful. Dr. Gridlock reports that lots of Metro stations will be getting a nice cleaning over the next couple of months.  He also links to a Post story about the process of cleaning a station from March of this year.  The following stations will be spruced up:

Major Enhancements: Dunn Loring, East Falls Church, Eisenhower Avenue, Forest Glen, Medical Center, Potomac Avenue, Twinbrook, Wheaton, White Flint, U Street, Vienna, West Falls Church.

Mini Enhancements: Ballston, Bethesda, Brookland, Court House, Foggy Bottom, Franconia-Springfield, Friendship Heights, Rockville, Shady Grove, Smithsonian, Virginia Square, Woodley Park.

The enhancements really make a huge difference.  The stations seem lighter and more welcoming.

Freakonomics had a nice post with some links to a few old studies noting how closing roads sometimes improves traffic flow.   This particular case is from Vancouver, but this is precisely the logic behind the pedestrianization of Times Square in New York.  In certain situations, this kind of action can be a win-win-win – you improve traffic flow by simplifying the turning movements and signals, you increase pedestrian space and safety, and you maintain the urban design that makes Times Square an actual square.

The New York Times paints a portrait of the infamous Randal O’Toole.  It’s somewhat sympathetic, but does a decent job of letting O’Toole’s constant obfuscation collapse under its own weight.

The Wash Cycle notes of upcoming efforts to add murals to retaining walls and underpasses along the Met Branch trail.  The Union Station rail corridor – both connecting to the Metropolitan Branch towards Silver Spring and the Northeast Corridor towards Baltimore – is a vital rail link, but also an undeniable barrier in the area.  Public art along some of those underpasses can be a great way to make those links more attractive to cyclists and pedestrians.

With the Metropolitan Branch trail, it’s vital to ensure as many vertical circulation access points as possible – make it easy to shift levels between the trail and the street grid.

Nevertheless, this kind of mural is a great example of an easy public art project that can be a huge asset to the area.

Streetsblog’s DC folks try to document the hierarchy of decision making on the transportation bill. Making a law is always like making sausage, but this particular sausage seems far more complicated than most.  The House folks are fighting a two-front war against both the Administration and the Senate.  That’s a tough road.

Streetcar vs. bus debate hinges on mobility vs. accessibility

Portland Streetcar. Photo by K_Gradinger.

Portland Streetcar. Photo by K_Gradinger.

Advocates and policymakers constantly debate the virtues of different transit modes. Should we build streetcars or BRT? Commuter rail or heavy rail? Each involves technical and cost tradeoffs, but transit advocates often don’t agree. This debate stems from a difference in how people think about transportation. Is the goal to maximize mobility, or accessibility?

Professionals’ precise definitions vary, but in general, mobility refers to the distance or area a person can cover in a period of time. Accessibility is a more qualitative measure about what you can access, not how much ground you can cover. If a given transportation system allows you to easily access your job, a grocery store, and other local retail services within 20-25 minutes of travel time, that site would have good accessibility, even if that 20-25 minute window of time doesn’t allow you to travel very far. Mobility, on the other hand, is transportation for transportation’s sake. It deals only with distances and speeds, and thus, by extension, area covered.

Choosing which concept to focus on affects how land use fits into the debate. Mobility is a pure measure of distance covered, whereas accessibility is more concerned with the ‘what’ than the ‘how far.’ What’s on the land matters a great deal. Increasing mobility usually also increase accessibility: the more area you can cover in a given amount of time, the more uses you can reach. But we can also increase accessibility without actually increasing mobility. In the United States, we have a legacy of designing transportation policy on mobility alone, while ignoring accessibility.

Jarrett Walker observed,

Streetcars that replace bus lines are not a mobility improvement. If you replace a bus with a streetcar on the same route, nobody will be able to get anywhere any faster than they could before. This makes streetcars quite different from most of the other transit investments being discussed today. …

Where a streetcar is faster or more reliable than the bus route it replaced, this is because other improvements were made at the same time — improvements that could just as well have been made for the bus route. These improvements may have been politically packaged as part of the streetcar project, but they were logically independent, so their benefits are not really benefits of the streetcar as compared to the bus.

New streetcars that replace buses do not change mobility. In theory, a streetcar traveling in mixed traffic will have the same mobility as a bus. Jarrett and other bloggers then grapple with mobility versus accessibility and what to measure. Cap’n Transit asks, “Why do we care about mobility?“

Interestingly, Jarrett uses Walk Score to count the places, meaning that his mobility takes density into account. That makes it more valuable than simply measuring how many route-miles you have available to you. There was some back-and-forth in the comments about whether streetcars could increase mobility by increasing density relative to a similar investment in buses, but I don’t think there was a solid conclusion.

Jarrett’s response acknowledges the intrinsic value of accessibility, but also notes the limitations of that concept:

The argument is that the number of places you can get to doesn’t matter so much. What matters is how far you need to go to do the things you need to do. In a denser and better designed city, your need for mobility should decline because more of your life’s needs are closer to you. That’s unquestionably true, and I suspect anyone who has chosen an urban life knows that in their bones. …

One puzzling thing about the access-not-mobility argument is that it suggests that much of what we travel for is generic and interchangeable. Many things are. I insist on living within 300m of a grocery store, dry cleaner, and several other services because I need them all the time and don’t want those trips to generate much movement. But I go to a gym that’s about 1500m away because I really like it, and don’t like the ones that are closer. And every city worth living in is packed with unique businesses and activities and venues that must draw from the whole city. A lot of us want more of that uniqueness, less interchangability, in our cities. How is that possible if citizens aren’t insisting on the freedom to go where they want?

This cuts to the core of the tension between mobility and accessibility. In one sense, increasing mobility naturally increases access simply by opening up easy travel to new areas. However, accessibility captures a more complete picture by asking what the travel is for, not just to accommodate it. Streetcar systems and other rail based transit tend to have higher ridership than similar bus systems. This is known as rail bias, the tendency of passengers to ride trains more often than projected based solely on the mobility improvements of a transit line. Might this rail bias actually represent an accessibility bias?

Metro’s history shows us some of the tension between these two concepts. The Orange line includes areas focused on accessibility between Rosslyn and Ballston, while the outer reaches of the line travel longer distances at higher speeds, prioritizing mobility. Of course, a subway presents an inherent increase in mobility over a bus or streetcar anyway, thanks to the grade separation of the subway tunnels. Still, the hybrid nature of Metro’s system shows the different conceptions of mobility and accessibility.

In Zachary Schrag’s The Great Society Subway, he concludes with a quote from a now retired WMATA official involved with the planning of Metro. Before choosing technologies, routes, and levels of transit service, you have to ask “what kind of city do you want?” One of the key arguments in favor of streetcars is their ability to attract transit oriented development in ways that buses cannot. If we accept Jarrett Walker’s assertion that streetcars do not offer a mobility improvement over buses, what about an accessibility improvement? Transportation investments can be powerful forces for attracting and shaping development, and thus improving accessibility by shaping the city.

In determining what kind of city we want, we also have to recognize that different modes of transportation offer different improvements to both mobility and accessibility. Transit system can accomplish both goals, but design choices inherently emphasize mobility over accessibility or vice versa. Every fantasy transit system makes value judgments about mobility versus accessibility. When those systems are the work of one individual, they represent the preferences of that individual’s vision for the city. How should the Washington region balance mobility and accessibility in future transit and transportation planning?

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.

Cities Getting the Shaft

I’ve got a couple of articles I’ve been meaning to write about for a couple of days.

First, the New York Times has a nice piece on how cities are losing out on their fair share of the stimulus money.

“If we’re trying to recover the nation’s economy, we should be focusing where the economy is, which is in these large areas,” said Robert Puentes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, which advocates more targeted spending. “But states take this peanut-butter approach, taking the dollars and spreading them around very thinly, rather than taking the dollars and concentrating them where the most complex transportation problems are.”

The 100 largest metropolitan areas also contribute three-quarters of the nation’s economic activity, and one consequence of that is monumental traffic jams. A study of congestion in urban areas released Wednesday by the Texas Transportation Institute found that traffic jams in 2007 cost urban Americans 2.8 billion gallons of wasted gas and 4.2 billion hours of lost time.

Ryan Avent also chimes in:

It’s absolutely crucial that the new transportation bill do more to focus spending at the metropolitan level. And indeed, this is one of the goals of the Oberstar transportation bill. As that is unlikely to get anywhere in this legislative session, it would be nice if in filling the highway trust fund’s budget gap the Congress tacked on a reform giving states an incentive to use federal money where the people are — for the sake of short and long term economic performance.

I don’t have anything to add other than to emphasize the importance of keeping our cities humming along.  They are the economic engine.  I will again emphasize my thought that we can kill a couple birds with one stone here – given the simultaneous needs to increase transportation funding and reform the way we distribute those funds, as well as the stimulative effects such spending will have.

To Toll or not to Toll, that is the question.

Chris Bradford offers a nice summary of a great back and forth between Yonah Freemark and Ryan Avent on the need and desirability for tolling congested roadways.  Chris summarizes the dispute well, documenting Ryan’s desire to reduce congestion and Yonah’s concern about such charges being regressive.  However, Chris raises several key points:

Second, tolls encourage a number of shifts.  Yes, shifts to transit, which seems to be Yonah’s main concern, at least when the transit system is underdeveloped.  But they encourage other shifts, too.  Shifts to other routes and shifts to other times.   Commuters are the least likely to be nudged to other routes or times.  The most sensitive are those who use congested roads for local trips.  Take the soccer mom who hops in the SUV and enters a congested highway to get to the grocery store a mile down the road.  She imposes enormous costs on others.  Tolls make her internalize those costs and nudge her to use the local streets.

This is a crucial element that’s often overlooked.  Performance pricing, whether for congestion or parking or transit usage, will encourage mode shifts, temporal shifts, and spatial shifts.  It’s vitally important to consider all three potential shifts and plan for them accordingly.

Green Spaces in DC

My friend and colleague Mike Lydon forwarded me a great page from the National Building Museum’s Green Building exhibit.  The site has nice little videos on several DC neighborhoods, emphasizing their green aspects.  The videos include profiles of Dupont Circle, U Street, Columbia Heights, and (soon) Barracks Row.