The other day I was up at Qualia Coffee on Georgia and wandering around, and I stumbled on this, a pretty cool abandoned building covered in graffiti at 4111 Kansas Avenue NW.
Normally I’m pretty anti-abandoned buildings, as they mean no one is living there, no businesses are there, and nobody is paying taxes, but in this case, if it’s going to be abandoned, at least it’s interesting looking.
The building is a warehouse owned by one William J. Deoudes, who lives in Maryland (thanks to the city’s DC Atlas for letting me find that out.) He seems to be a real estate investor based on some basic googling. The building isn’t categorized as abandoned or blighted, oddly, since it seems to be one or the other — vacant means it’s empty while blighted means it’s empty and in bad shape. The idea is that owners of vacant or blighted buildings have to pay higher taxes on them so that they’ll fix them up.
I hope it gets fixed up into something productive.
The art seems to be from various artists and there is both graffiti and paste-ups. I’m not sure who exactly they are, but pretty cool.
