JDLand

I guess it was about two or three years ago that I discovered JDLand, the “Near Southeast” DC Development website and fanatical urban-planning smorgasbord named after and maintained by Capitol Hill resident Jacqueline Dupree. I had been conducting a simple Google search for information on the new Nationals baseball stadium and JD Land was the first and only link I followed. Since then, the site has joined the rarified ranks of The New York Times, The Washington Post and Gothamist in my morning ritual and hardly a day passes that I don’t check in with JD.

So, what’s the deal with this site? Well, Dupree herself says it’s “pretty simple.” She lives north of the Southeast-Southwest Freeway and, she says, “as it became clear that the neighborhood two blocks to my south was going to undergo a huge transformation, I knew I wanted to document the changes, and have a record of what the area looked like before, during, and after.” The way she describes it, this almost sounds like a modest undertaking, but the scope of JDLand as both an urban planning document and a living historical archive is nothing short of breathtaking. Open the site and you are immediately greeted by a barrage of links, excerpted news articles, images, and an interactive map of the area in question, which, as you move your mouse across it, links you to Dupree’s own meticulously detailed pages for each and every development that’s been built, is in the process of being built, or is even just rumored.

In case you’ve missed it, Southeast Washington is in the midst of a massive transformation spurred by the ballpark and spread over more than ten square blocks. The area, which had formerly been home mainly to taxi depots, MetroBus garages, scattered nightclubs, and burnt blocks of industrial rubble, is reforming itself with stunning speed. According to Dupree’s own estimate, in the next 15 years this area should include “approximately 12 million square feet of office space, 9,000 new housing units, and 600,000 square feet of retail.” Additionally, the brand-new, Michael Graves-designed Department of Transportation Building opened last year on M Street, bringing a major federal agency to a once-blighted area.

In other words, the neighborhood is a unique study of urban planning in our current, increasingly bureaucratic age. (For an example of the miles of red-tape that inevitably threatens urban development these days, skim this article from the Washington Business Journal which describes a feud between two developers over a parcel of city-owned land north of the baseball stadium. One of the developers contends it was promised the right to build on the site by the Williams administration; the other more or less contests the administration’s ability to make such promises. The result: a prime piece of real estate right next to the ballpark that may remain a disused bus depot for years to come.) When I was in Washington last December, I visited the neighborhood and its potential was evident. There was simply so much empty space to be built up. The nightclubs had long since pulled up stakes and what remained of the old neighborhood seemed, frankly, pretty expendable: old garages, parking lots and warehouses. The ballpark is walk-able from any point and the streets are pleasantly narrow, if not tree-lined, making the prospect of sidewalk cafes in this former wasteland not entirely ludicrous.

It therefore hardly strikes me as absurd that Ms. Dupree should direct so much of her (unpaid) energies to chronicling late-night oversight hearings and city counsel press conferences on “near southeast.” The neighborhood, and its seemingly daily transformation, fascinates, and Dupree’s ability to consolidate disparate information (that wonderful map!) into a coherent vision of the future creates unexpected suspense. I never thought I would find the possible opening of a Starbucks dramatic, but when Dupree spread the rumor that the new DOT might soon be getting a new retail tenant, I was on the edge of my seat wondering what it would be and what it might mean for the neighborhood.

There is something about watching urbanity spring up before your very eyes that is strangely compelling. It’s the thrill of watching something come from nothing. In Stephen Sondheim’s musical about painting, Sunday in the Park with George, the artist Georges Surat sings as he contemplates his sketch pad, “Look, I made a hat / Where there never was a hat.” The artist himself seems not even to know how this transformation took place. His bewilderment is a point of pride: “I did something I can’t explain but only I could have done it,” he seems to say. City-creation can seem to represent a similarly mysterious progression. In an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, the author Michael Chabon, whose recent novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is set in a city of his own creation, reflects on his hometown, the famously “planned community,” Columbia, Maryland:

“I grew up in a place where the maps were translated into reality before my very eyes, where the houses would be built . . . There would be a street proposed, they would come out with stakes and strings and stake it out and then over the course of the next several months the street would be laid—the pavement, the sidewalks, the houses would grow and it would all sprout before my very eyes. It was this very powerful demonstration of somebody’s idea, somebody’s map that they just make up and they come up with all these names for streets and neighborhoods and so on and then there it is, it’s right before your very eyes.”

Such wonderment can clearly make one obsessive. Tolkien mapped out “Middle Earth” for his Lord of the Rings series, for instance, with a feverish meticulousness. Dupree has referred to JDLand as “my Obsessive-Compulsive Time-Sucking Vortex.” And, indeed, it does numb the mind to consider the sheer amount of material that Dupree collates every date, not to mention its frequently stunning dullness. (After detailing a rather complicated oversight hearing on her “News” page, Dupree recently wrote, “If you understood almost nothing in that last sentence, don’t worry about it.”) Nevertheless, JDLand is something of a masterpiece. Its sheer breadth is stunning and it has certainly set the standard when it comes to documenting urban transformation. Dupree herself, although she alternates between self-awareness and self-effacement, seems to have a sense of how unique she is. Under the "Contact JD" page, she issues the following warning: “Please do not ask if I would consider expanding this site's boundaries to cover Southwest, or Poplar Point, or Anacostia; you're not the first to ask, and I'm already sleep-deprived enough as it is, so the answer is already ‘no,’ unless you wish to pay me lots and lots of money.” Clearly, she’s developed a following.

It’s hard to know who Jacqueline Dupree really is just from studying JDLand. In a profile for the website CapitolHillVoice.com, Dupree’s work on JDLand is described as “conspicuously unopinionated.” One suspects, based on all of her efforts, that she is to some degree at least, pro-development. Still, although the real Jacqueline Dupree remains fairly elusive on JDLand, a visit to her personal website reveals the following statement: “I rarely felt challenged in life until computers came along.” Fortunately for us, she has decided to challenge herself by working on a very public canvas.