PN Hoffman, now teamed with Madison Marquette, was chosen from five developers that made formal proposals, narrowed from a field of 17 that responded to the city’s initial request for bids. Gaining the needed approvals from more than two dozen agencies took seven years, Mr. Hoffman said, and required an act of Congress to decommission the federally owned channel so that it could revert to city ownership. The 99-year lease that PN Hoffman then obtained from the city allowed Mr. Hoffman to secure outside financing to supplement his team’s $90 million investment.

“We went all over the world looking,” he said, including to China, the Middle East and New York, before landing PSP Investments, a Canadian pension equity firm, as the project’s major financier, investing $220 million. “They were looking more for yield” than to build and sell off the project, he said. In addition, the project is to receive $198 million from city-backed bonds.

The project’s simple name stems from a conversation that Mr. Hoffman had with the city’s nonvoting congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat. Mr. Hoffman said he had spent “tens of thousands of dollars with marketing people to come up with all these fancy names” for the development.

He recalled his talk with Ms. Norton: “She said, ‘You know, we used to call it the wharf.’ I said, ‘That’s brilliant, that’s what we’re going to name it.’ ” He also plans to name a public plaza for the delegate, whose great-grandfather escaped from slavery in Virginia to “the wharf” in the 1850s. Ms. Norton shepherded the crucial decommissioning bill through Congress.

The waterfront is “incredibly valuable because of its proximity to the Mall,” she said in an interview, referring to the National Mall, the green space between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. “There you have upwards of 20 million visitors a year, and there was not much happening should they stroll down here. This was perhaps the most undeveloped asset in D.C. Well, it is going to become a destination.”

Inside the construction office, a converted three-story hotel, the walls are lined with black-and-white photographs of the waterfront from the 1860s to the 1960s. The last vestige is the 200-year-old Maine Avenue Fish Market, at the waterfront’s western end, where fish is sold from floating barges. Mr. Hoffman plans to retain this colorful artifact but add picnic tables, transient docks for day trippers, and vendors hawking fruits and vegetables.