Updated Web Pages

Bridge Openings

Lane Closures

Neighborhood News
Jones Point Park

The plan that had been proposed by the Project, in conjunction with the Jones Point Park Stakeholder Participation Panel, the City of Alexandria and VDOT was approved through the City Council process.

An Environmental Assessment was prepared by the National Park Service (park owners), completed in 2001, and comments were received. A final document, incorporating the comments, was not completed.

• As a result of the events of September 11, 2001 and citing of bridges as potential terrorist targets, restrictions around the bridge were implemented. Several of these require long-term implementation into the access, parking and therefore landscape plans of Jones Point Park. These elements include:
  
  • No long term (daily or longer) parking under the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge or within 80-feet to its north
    
  • Restrict access to beneath the bridge to authorized vehicles only

The National Park Service desires to maintain access to the Potomac River. The concepts included in the Environmental Assessment are currently being reconsidered and new concepts have been developed by the Project. VDOT has forwarded three concepts to the National Park Service for consideration in an update to the Environmental Assessment. The City of Alexandria has been invited to submit concepts from their constituents, as well, and the communities are working on their concepts for the City submission.

The new parking and access need to be in place prior to opening the new Outer Loop Beltway in 2006. Otherwise, all access on Jones Point Drive will be closed as the contractors prepare to demolish the existing bridge and complete the new Inner Loop Bridge by 2008. In order for construction to take place, the Environmental Assessment needs to be completed, a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) completed, including the chosen alternative for parking and access contract plans developed, approved, advertised, bid and a construction time allowed.

The landscape plans will be developed as a part of the parking and access but are not planned to be completed until the contractors have completed all bridge construction work, after 2008.

Once a narrow spit of land jutting into the Potomac, Jones Point has changed significantly in the last several hundred years. Originally, the lighthouse was built on a narrow peninsula that jutted out far into the Potomac, to ensure ships would see the light and stay clear of the shallows. Studies conducted during the archaeological investigations have tracked the changing dimensions of the point.

In 1910-1911 the Army Corps of Engineers dredged part of the Potomac, placing the dredge material in the water to the northeast of the peninsula, an area formerly known as Battery Cove, creating a land mass four times the size of the original Point, or 46 additional acres.

What is currently the park area was extended out into the river, alongside the peninsula on which the lighthouse stands, making the lighthouse part of the shoreline.