"This is where I meet my neighbors, discuss community issues, and make friends," one regular wrote about the fenced gravel lot at 11th Street and Park Road NW. If you walk your dog there most mornings, you already know the place she meant without needing the address. You know the mud that pools after rain. You know the gate that needs a shoulder to close all the way. You know the loose gravel that finds its way into every paw and every stroller wheel for a block in either direction.
You've probably also heard, more than once over the years, that the city was "finally" going to fix it. This time the paperwork backs it up.
What's Actually Moving This Year
According to Axios's September 2026 roundup of D.C. dog park projects, the unofficial WMATA lot in this pocket of Mid City's Columbia Heights blocks is now becoming a sanctioned D.C. Department of Parks and Recreation dog park, with a surface upgrade to wood chips and turf. The project is currently working through permitting. No opening date has been set.
That last part matters. This corner has burned through enough false starts that the neighborhood group behind the effort, 11th & Bark, has learned to talk in stages rather than deadlines. The stage that's active right now is permitting, which comes after the harder, slower work already got done.
The Part Everyone Forgets: Nobody Actually Bought This Land
For a couple of tense years in the late 2010s, the story residents told each other was a save-the-park story. WMATA owns the lot. WMATA started shopping it around in 2018. Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau got $1.5 million written into the District budget to buy it outright, then pushed that offer up toward WMATA's roughly $2.1 million market estimate after the agency put the parcel up for auction anyway.
None of that purchase ever closed. WMATA eventually discovered federal covenants attached to the land that blocked a sale entirely. The auction stopped. The bidding war smart-growth advocates worried about, the one where market-rate housing might have replaced the park, never happened either, because there was legally nothing to sell.
What actually unlocked the park wasn't a purchase. It was a lease. In late 2023, DC's Department of General Services signed a 10-year lease with WMATA, the arrangement that let the District treat the space as its own for park purposes without ever taking title to it. That's the quiet mechanism sitting underneath everything moving in 2026. Here's how the timeline actually breaks down:
| Year | What Happened |
|---|---|
| 2009 | WMATA informally allows the lot to be used as a dog park |
| 2018 | WMATA considers selling; Nadeau secures $1.5M in the DC budget to buy it |
| 2019–2023 | WMATA auctions the land, then discovers federal covenants that block the sale entirely |
| Late 2023 | DGS signs a 10-year lease with WMATA instead of pursuing a purchase |
| 2024 | ANC1A gathers 64 community survey responses to support the DC Register application |
| 2026 | Application moves through DPR review; project enters permitting |
The lease is why the loud, public fight from 2018 gave way to a much quieter administrative process. There was no rally in 2023. No petition drive made headlines. A government lease got signed, and a few years later, wood chips are being specified.
What the Renovated Park Will Actually Look Like
11th & Bark has shared the working design with its listserv, and it's more modest than "renovation" might suggest. The surface will be primarily engineered wood fiber, the same material used under most playground equipment, with a strip of artificial turf running along the 11th Street side. DPR has said it plans to keep the existing fence and repair it as needed rather than replace it, and will swap in new mesh along the bottom so smaller dogs can't slip through the gaps that have been a running complaint for years.
A few things are staying exactly the way they are. DPR does not currently have lighting in the project budget. If the neighborhood wants it, the options on the table are solar lights the community would source itself, or a request to the city to add a fixture to the existing street lamp posts nearby. And WMATA isn't handing over the whole parcel. A portion stays reserved for the transit agency's own access to the infrastructure that runs underneath, which is the same reason the site has always felt oddly shaped for its size.
None of this turns the lot into a showpiece. It turns an unofficial gravel patch into a maintained public asset with a legal foundation under it, which is the part that was actually missing.
The Group That Kept Showing Up
11th & Bark has been the constant through all of this, and the group's own account of the process is a good reminder of how unglamorous most local wins actually are. Quarterly cleanup days. Donated benches. Vines pulled by hand. A 2024 survey that pulled in 64 responses, modest by any standard, but enough for ANC1A to draft a formal letter of support to DGS during the exact window when that letter mattered for finalizing the lease. ANC1A member Anthony Thomas-Davis, who takes his own dog to the park, is credited by the group for pushing that letter through.
That's the texture that doesn't show up in a headline about turf and permitting. The people who use this park most are the same people who spent years making sure it survived long enough to get fixed.
What This Means for Your Weekday Morning
If your routine already runs through this corner, not much changes in the immediate term. Grab a coffee at Columbia Heights Coffee, let the dog do its business, restock poop bags at Claws & Paws across the street if you forgot yours. The permitting phase doesn't come with a construction fence yet, and DPR hasn't published a target date for when it will.
What does change is the confidence you can have that this isn't another round of the same conversation. The years of uncertainty, the fact that this corner sat zoned for a small residential building instead of a park, closed out in 2023 when the lease got signed. What's happening now is the slower, more boring second half: permits, contractor selection, and eventually a surface that isn't gravel.
Keep an eye on 11th & Bark's site if you want the next update before it shows up anywhere else. They've been closer to this project than any government press release for going on seventeen years, and they'll know before Axios does.
If you're weighing what a corner like this one, a park that took a legal workaround instead of a purchase to survive, tells you about how Mid City actually gets things done, that's the kind of neighborhood-level detail worth having on your side before you make any move here. Jen Angotti has been tracking this stretch of Northwest DC block by block. Let's talk about your next move.
