By Philip Kennicott

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 10, 2009


Councilman Marion Barry was late, and Mayor Adrian Fenty even later, but both arrived in time to grab a golden shovel and turn a little earth on the lush green lawn of St. Elizabeths Hospital. And with that, ground was officially broken for the $3.4 billion headquarters of the Department of Homeland Security, a vast new federal complex that will be built on the quiet hilltop with spectacular views where once stood the city's main hospital for the mentally ill.


Barry joked that most of the crowd -- filled with Coast Guard uniforms and suits from the DHS and the General Services Administration -- probably needed a GPS to find it. Which was a sly reference to what many of his Ward 8 constituents, also in the crowd, were thinking: that the federal government was finally investing, in a big way, east of the Anacostia River, in one of the city's poorest neighborhoods.


Barry thanked Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who helped create the grab-bag department of security-related agencies after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. And apropos of nothing, he reminisced about the days of the civil rights struggle, when he and the district's congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, had "to fight those mean, mean white people."


They didn't amen that one, as they did some other remarks of the morning. In general, the mood was celebratory. Norton was ecstatic and noted the critical role of $162 million in stimulus funding in moving the project forward. Lieberman hailed the largest federal project built in the region since the Pentagon. And Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the new campus, which will be home to 14,000 employees when finished in 2016, will help her fledgling agency grow into a more cohesive entity with a unified culture.


But for others around the city, and around the country, the shovels of earth might as well have fallen on a coffin lid. After years of wrangling and public hearings, after complaints and impassioned pleas from historic-preservation groups and skeptical analysis from think tanks (the Brookings Institution has cast doubt on the economic benefits to Ward 8), the fight was over. What had begun in the 1850s as one of the country's most innovative facilities for treating mental illness, and remains one of the city's largest and most sylvan sites for development, is beginning the long, slow process of rebirth as a modern, Level 5 security complex, to be surrounded by double perimeter walls and all but closed forever to the public.


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