Remington residents who hope to see high-density development in place of the Sisson Street ‘Dump’ are likely to be disappointed, warns a developer who wants to buy the land from the city.
Thibault Manekin, a partner of the company that’s seeking to buy the 5.6-acre parcel at 2840 and 2842 Sisson Street for redevelopment, told a community group earlier this year that the land is limited in terms of any new construction it can support.
During a land use committee meeting of the Greater Remington Improvement Association (GRIA) last spring, Manekin said the municipal Dump was created on part of a filled-in quarry that once spanned both sides of Sisson Street.
As a result, he said, it would be unrealistic to expect that it could be a prime location for any sort of high-density development that would require substantial foundation work.
Manekin is a partner and co-founder of Seawall Development, which has submitted a proposal to buy and redevelop the city-owned Sisson Street Sanitation Yard and Citizen Drop-Off Center site, also known as ‘The Dump.’ On Monday, City Council legislation was introduced that would authorize Mayor Brandon Scott and the council to sell that city-owned property to a developer.
The GRIA will hold its next monthly meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 20, starting at 7 p.m. at Kromer Hall, 335 W. 27th St. The drop-off center relocation project is on its agenda for discussion.
The sales ordinance that was introduced on Monday didn’t identify the buyer or say how much the land would be sold for, but Seawall is the likely purchaser. As part of his efforts to gain support from the community, Manekin has shared his vision for the project he hopes to build there, if awarded the development rights.
“The real priority on that site is to put a grocery store” in, he told the land use committee in 2024.
He said in May of 2025 that he hoped to be able to announce an operator in the near future.
“There’s…an awesome grocery store that is super interested,” he said. “We’re kind of at letter of intent right now. Hopefully we can get that across the finish line.”
Maximizing density
Manekin hasn’t shown any renderings of the project he wants to build in place of the drop-off center. During the land use committee meeting in May, members said they would welcome even more than a grocery store.
Jed Weeks, chair of GRIA’s land use committee, noted that the community’s comprehensive plan for Remington envisions high-density development on both sides of the 2800 blocks of Sisson Street.
Seawall has unveiled preliminary plans for a mixed-use development called Sisson East for the east side of the street, with shops, restaurants, apartments and a garage. The company initially planned to have a mid-rise office building as well but the prospective tenant backed out and Sisson East is being redesigned without an office component. Seawall refers to its proposal for the drop-off center parcel as Sisson West.
“In the community plan, we really were focusing on those sites as some of the highest density potential in the entire neighborhood because of the geography and them being on the edge of the neighborhood,” Weeks told Manekin at the land use committee meeting.
“I think ultimately what you’re building now on the Sisson East site is going to be lower density than what the community plan called for,” he said. “I still…am in support of the project and like the idea. But if we are going to have a large parking component over there [at Sisson East], can we really ensure that the west side is meeting that community vision of really maximizing the density of the site? If we’re going to have to do structured parking on that side of the street for a grocery store, can we build way above the grocery store too? Can we really ensure that that site is as dense as possible?”
Weeks said he hopes the grocery store in Remington won’t follow the example of the Charles Village branch of Safeway, where the store sits behind a large parking lot that fronts on 25th Street.
“We all want grocery stores in the neighborhood, and walkable grocery stores,” he said. “But the Safeway is the worst land use in central Charles Village. The Lidl development at Northwood Commons basically got downscaled to, like, a car sewer that is not at all like the dense, mixed-use development that it was supposed to be. I think there are a lot of concerns in the Madison Park North neighborhood and the Bolton Hill neighborhood around the Streets Market coming over there and the overbuilt parking that’s going to come with it.”
The redevelopment of Remington’s drop-off center site should be different, he said.
“I would really love to see, especially since we are not at the density level we were looking for on the Sisson East site, that we can really try to maximize it on the other side,” he said.
Obstacles to high density
Manekin said he thinks the community will like the density of the redesigned Sisson East development, even with the office component gone. “I think you’re going to be fine with that.”
But he said there are obstacles that limit what can be built on the west side.
“The challenge on Sisson East and the challenge on Sisson West now is that on Sisson East there’s a hundred-foot quarry that used to be there,” he said. “They filled it in. We didn’t find out until we were into our design and geo-tech work and it’s cost prohibitive to go up, right? On Sisson East, we’re in too deep. That site is really important to get the density. The same quarry exists at Sisson West also, which is going to be one of the main limiting factors to being able to do anything super vertical there. That is a hard fact. These quarries are super deep. We have to send micro piles 100 feet down at Sisson East before we get to rock to be able to support any building. And the added price tag doesn’t make economic sense.”
At the same time, Manekin said, grocery store operators look for sites that provide convenient parking for their customers.
“It is going to be I think impossible to attract a national grocery store if we don’t have ample surface parking there,” he said.
Manekin said it may be premature to go into too much detail about this now.
“I would love to punt this conversation until we get a little bit further, until it becomes a little bit more real, because I know it’s one that we’re going to have to look at and have,” he told the committee. At this point, “I just know that that Sisson West site, for those two reasons, is going to be challenging to put a lot of density on.”
‘Car hell’
Former GRIA president Corey Jennings said he’s troubled by the idea of a large parking lot on the drop-off center site.
“As a person who lives extremely close to both of these projects,” he said, referring to Sisson East and Sisson West, “I am very concerned about any kind of large surface parking lot, especially given that there is a gas station right on that corner as well that already kind of creates the feeling that this area of the neighborhood is kind of just like car hell, if you want to say it.”
He encouraged Manekin to take another look at what can replace the Dump.
“I don’t know if there’s an opportunity to start to think about increasing density to a level where it actually would be not prohibitive anymore,” he said. “Maybe it’s building an extremely tall tower. Maybe it’s creating…residences above or putting the parking above or moving all the parking from Sisson East to Sisson West.”
Jennings agreed with Weeks about not wanting a repeat of the Charles Village Safeway parking scenario.
“I do have extremely strong concerns around creating some sort of Giant or Safeway parking lot in the middle of Remington,” he said. “It would be taking one problem of a Dump with a bunch of cars going into it and just moving that to a grocery store.”
To be sure, “a grocery store would be…a great, amazing thing for this community,” he said. But a large parking lot would “kind of go against a lot of the things that a lot of us have worked towards, for years at this point.”
‘Prioritize the community‘
At a bare minimum, “I would hope that the grocery store would be oriented [on the site] in a way that it prioritizes the community and not prioritizes the cars,” Jennings said. “That means not putting a grocery store at the back of a parking lot but putting it at the front and maybe the parking behind it or something like that.”
He urged Manekin to think outside the box.
“I do implore you to come to us and ask for crazy variances,” he said. “Ask for wildly tall buildings. Ask for things that you think we might say no to, but ask us for them. Because maybe the community would be more supportive of that than a flat parking lot that just has cars standing on it. I think we all would rather have more people and more opportunity to support all of our wonderful small and local businesses that you all are bringing into the community than just have a surface asphalt parking lot.”
