Happy New Year! I hope everyone made it through last night's festivities relatively unscathed, and are enoying a day of rest, relaxation, and college football. A lot of blogs are using the calendar change to look back and look ahead, but I generally wait until late January to do that as part of my annual State of the Hood report, so you'll just have to hang on a few more weeks. But it doesn't take a lot of surfing around the site to get a feel for the changes that came to Near Southeast in 2007--35 demolished buildings, one nearly completed baseball stadium, and a bunch of new skeletons and holes in the ground. I've updated my somewhat neglected Development by the Numbers today to accurately reflect the stats on construction in the neighborhood since the first wave of development began in 1999, and suffice to say the difference between "completed" and "under construction" tallies shows that things accelerated just a touch in 2007. But as I said, I'll be doing a much more complete report soon. In the meantime, I'm trying to charge my batteries for the onslaught that 2008 will bring, especially leading up to Opening Day.

I also took some new photos to capture the progress at 55 M Street, plus the completion of demolition at 1345 South Capitol.

If you don't feel like clicking around on all those links, here's all the photos I've posted in the past week. Try not to be blinded by those blue skies!

A few other items of note: The BP Amoco station on the northeast corner of South Capitol and N has fences up around it--I can't believe no one let me know! It's owned by Monument Realty, and I haven't heard about any near-term plans for the site. This leaves only one gas station in Near Southeast--the Exxon way over at 11th and M. There used to be three gas stations on South Capitol, now there aren't any. (And I've lost yet another source for my Gas Prices page. Waah!)

Also, new fences have gone up around the 1015 Half Street site, taking up one lane on K Street and on Half Street. Some exterior work was done to the DC Foreign Car building, but the little building is still there. For now.

I hope to get updated photos of 70/100 I and the pile of rubble that used to be old Capper Seniors within the next week. There's just too much activity to document these days--I've got to break it up into manageable pieces....

This FAQ is now the default ballpark page, and replaces the old Stadium Renderings gallery, which has now been moved to a new page (after all, renderings are less important when the dang thing is just about three months away from opening!). So if your bookmarks have changed, apologies. The exterior and interior stadium photo galleries are still in their proper places.

(As for why on earth I didn't do a page like this a loooooong time ago, I plead insanity. Yeesh.)