D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser and her economic development team have been looking for someone with a fresh vision and a robust balance sheet to restore the deteriorating but historic Franklin School building downtown. Bowser has selected a team led by Friedman, a former elementary school reading instructor who is married to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, to turn the historic former school overlooking Franklin Square into a $50 million museum dedicated to language and linguistics, dubbed Planet Word.