It’s official: Children’s National Health System to build research hub at old Walter Reed site

Washington Business Journal by Tina Reed

With plans to create a future hub for medical innovation in the District, Children’s National Health System will finally take ownership Thursday of nearly 12 acres of the former 110-acre Walter Reed Army Medical Centercampus.

In a deal nearly two years in the making, officials from the U.S. Army and Children’s National said they will sign an agreement transferring the land, including a research facility known as Building 54, to the pediatric hospital. The expansion allows the hospital’s research group to take on more projects than it could at its cramped space in the hospital’s landlocked Michigan Avenue NW home.

“It has been a bit of a journey. But anything this valuable and this important requires time to achieve,” said Dr. Kurt Newman, CEO of Children’s National. “We want to use this land and the buildings on it to further our research enterprise … and create a new and expanded hub for innovation and research for children.”

That vision includes taking over the 348,000-square-foot Building 54 laboratory research facility. The hospital will also acquire a conference center and auditorium, a former ambulatory clinic used to treat Army soldiers, and a 341,000-square-foot parking garage. Hospital leaders also see opportunities to create a new outpatient clinic in a part of the city where Children’s had lacked a presence.

The hospital has hired two consultants, Houston-based FKP Architects and Los Angeles-based CBRE Group Inc., to create a master facilities plan, said Charles Weinstein, chief real estate and facilities officer for Children’s National. It will conduct a national search for architectural firms and has yet to hire a contractor for the project.

The goal is to begin construction on the site by the end of 2017 and begin moving researchers there by the end of 2018, Weinstein said.

It is the final remaining parcel at the former Walter Reed campus — and part of a larger vision to transform it since it was left vacant from the Defense Department’s base realignment and closure initiative.

A larger, 66.27-acre parcel of Walter Reed was transferred to the District government, which will pay $22.5 million for it. There, city officials are planning what’s been dubbed The Parks at Walter Reed, which calls for more than 2,000 residential units, 250,000 square feet of retail, a Hyatt hotel and conference center, 20 acres of green space and an “Innovation Core” anchored by George Washington University’s medical research department, bioscience and pharmaceutical companies, and a branch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Newman said the new campus is located in “the sweet spot” for research partnerships with its proximity to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Food and Drug Administration in White Oak, University of Maryland in College Park, and Children’s National’s main campus and other hospitals around the District.

“This campus sits right in the epicenter of all that, and you can just feel the natural location [will] bring a lot of those organizations together around pediatric research and innovation,” he said. “We’re focused on children, but there’s no reason this can’t be bigger and broader than that.”

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