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County Board to Consider Nixing Path as Part of Crystal City Development

The Arlington County Board is set to consider a developer request to get rid of a little pathway in Crystal City to make room for a new construction site.

Developer LCOR Inc. is offering the county $125,436 to nix a small pedestrian pathway near S. Eads Street near the Crystal City-Pentagon City border. The county’s vacation of the pathway will allow LCOR’s Verizon site project on 1400 11th Street S. to move forward.

County Board members are scheduled to vote on the request during their meeting this Saturday, October 19.

The land itself is a 469 square-foot, skinny strip next to S. Eads Street on the north side of the property, where LCOR is planning to build the service and loading entrances to the apartment building, per a site map the developer shared earlier this year.

Google Maps images from 2018 show pedestrians walking the paved strip, which bisects a grassy curb between S. Eads Street and the parking lot by a Verizon telecommunications facility.

“As of the date of this Board Report, staff has not received any negative feedback related to the Street Vacation from the surrounding property owners,” a county staff report to the Board notes.

Verizon is slated to keep its facility onsite as LCOR constructs a 19-story, 306-unit apartment building with 10,908 square feet of ground floor retail on the property.

The developer increased the number of planned apartments this spring from 280 to 306 after Amazon announced that its second headquarters will be built nearby.

If the county agrees to sell the strip of land to LCOR, the developer would need to develop a plan for any utilities that cross the parcel. The firm bought the land from Verizon for $9.5 million last summer, and said it hoped to begin construction by 2020.

Images via Arlington County and Google Maps

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