In 2025, as you drive south near the intersection of Barret and Breckinridge Streets, you should see a park-like landscape, called the Town Green, which preserved an Olmsted-designed landscape. You should also view a nice hotel and smaller retail buildings lining the Barret streetscape. As you turn right onto Breckinridge, there are contextually-designed townhouses that aesthetically strengthen the surrounding neighborhoods of Germantown and Paristown. Next, turning right onto Vine Street, there you would notice a wonderfully repurposed original landmark structure that was once a hospital, now housing affordable residential units. Further north on Vine, there is a new modern office building.
This year, in 2025, that is what you should be seeing in this block bounded by Barret, Breckinridge and Vine. A marvelous development that blends old with the new, creating a vibrant sustainable economic engine for this inner-city district.
If though, you drive by this block now in 2025, you won’t see this transformative project that was proposed in 2020. Instead, you see utter destruction and decay. Large demolition machines are at work destroying what is left of the former hospital. They had already razed the other structures on the site and laid waste to the tree-filled Olmsted landscape…