After years of disuse, Georgetown University has decided to sell the Wormley School building located on 3325 Prospect Street. The building has remained unused during the university’s eight-year ownership of the property. The decision was made in January.
Georgetown purchased the property in 1997 for $1.5 million, intending to use it for academic or administrative purposes. The university also considered using the building to house the Georgetown Public Policy Institute or the library’s Special Collections.
“Neither of those proved to be viable options due to community issues and philanthropic support,” university spokeswoman Laura Cavender said.
Developers have speculated that the property could best be used as high-end condominiums, but the idea has met serious opposition from residents in the area and the Advisory Neighborhood Commission. They have been working to keep the university from using the building for a purpose that would cause traffic and nocturnal noise.
The ANC has also worked to keep the building from being expanded, asking the District to dictate what the university could and could not do with the building.
Following the ANC’s recommendation, university architect Alan Brangman signed an ambiguously worded letter in 1997 saying that the university considered Wormley “an excellent opportunity to provide a significant amount of office space,” and that “the university commits to use the facility in that capacity.”
A dispute over what exactly the letter meant, however, interrupted progress. Members of the Georgetown community understood it to mean that the university would not expand the building and would not use it to house classrooms.
When the university announced plans to add classrooms and office space and to expand the building a few years after Brangman signed the letter, residents gathered 65 signatures to oppose the university’s plans.
Georgetown decided not to follow through with its plans for the building.
“The university decided in January of this year to sell the property because we didn’t have other immediate plans to use it in our current campus development plans,” Cavender said.
The building is now on the market and listed with Randall Hagner Co. Developers will be able to submit bids until today.
The Wormley School, which was built in 1885, was originally called the Wormley Public Elementary School for the Colored. It remained an all-black segregated school until 1952.
More recently, the building housed a vocational school for learning impaired children.
When the building closed in 1994, the Washington Post reported that the special needs students were moved “because of mold contamination and peeling lead paint on window frames.”
The building, which has remained vacant since 1994, is in the protected Georgetown Historic District and therefore cannot be demolished. It is currently condemned and potential buyers will not be allowed to enter it for inspection.
The building is described as having “four classrooms, and adjoining cloakrooms off a central hallway” on each floor where there are also teacher’s lounges. There is also a fenced-in parking lot and playground.
