Whitehurst Freeway

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The Whitehurst Freeway is an elevated highway over K Street in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was built in 1949 to allow traffic on U.S. Route 29 and Canal Road to bypass heavily congested Georgetown between the Key Bridge and K Street downtown. At the time, the Georgetown waterfront had a lumberyard, cement works and a meat rendering plant. It was named after Herbert Whitehurst, an early director of the D.C. highway department [1].

[edit] Proposed demolition

As of 2005, the Georgetown waterfront is in the process of redevelopment. Even though the freeway was last rebuilt in a project ending in 1998, the Government of the District of Columbia has proposed demolishing the Whitehurst Freeway and upgrading K Street to a 4- or 6-lane through street. One engineering difficulty in doing so is to connect K Street to Canal Road, which is about 60 feet above the waterfront. Another engineering difficulty is to connect K Street to the Key Bridge. To address the latter difficulty, architect Arthur Cotton Moore has proposed replacing the present ramp from the northbound Key Bridge to the eastbound Whitehurst Freeway with a spiral ramp that would loop under the Key Bridge before connecting to eastbound K Street.

[edit] External links

• Steve Anderson's DCroads.net: Whitehurst Freeway (US 29)
• D.C. Dept. of Transportation press release on Whitehurst Freeway deconstruction study