RESIDENCES AT ST. ELIZABETHS EAST

The Continuous Treatment (CT) Campus is part of the current redevelopment of St. Elizabeths to establish a new residential and commercial hub in DC’s Ward 8. As part of the District of Columbia’s St. Elizabeths East 2012 Master Plan, Cunningham | Quill Architects worked with the developers Anacostia Economic Development Corporation and Flaherty & Collins Properties to convert the Campus into new affordable and market-rate housing. St. Elizabeths Hospital opened in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane. It is located on a prominent site surrounded by diverse neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River. The Campus served as a significant employer to generations of DC residents, and yet remained closed to the public and operated as a self-contained institution. It is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is a National Historic Landmark, and a local historic district. Constructed in the 1930s, the seven interconnected CT Campus buildings designed in the Italian Renaissance Revival style housed permanent residents of the hospital. The design team’s mandate was to transform a self-contained environment that limited movement of its former residents into a new inviting residential environment. This included taking spaces that were built to “contain” and changing them into open, vibrant and welcoming spaces. The adaptive reuse of the CT Campus into the Residences at St. Elizabeths East illustrates how we can shape our communities through the revival and repurposing of cultural and economic resources. The proposed design of the CT Campus was shaped by the tools that make equitable development possible: development that represents the community’s needs, tax credit financing and historic preservation.