The Georgetown Metropolitan

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly news round-up:

• Martin’s featured (sort of) on SNL.
• Last call to participate in Fete de la Musique.
• Summary of our last ANC meeting.

The annual Bike to Work Day is this Friday. As is usual, the Georgetown BID will be hosting a pit stop at the Georgetown Waterfront Park. Register here if you plan to stop by.

Bike to Work Day is a great way to explore biking as an option for your commute. I’m a daily bike commuter myself, but 15 years ago I was not. I would occasionally try it out, and I was often quite surprised at how easy and quickly I could get to my downtown job using my old Schwinn. It wasn’t until my daughter started at a nursery school back in Georgetown that it started to be a regular thing. I came to realize that simply put. it was the most reliable way to get across town at rush hour.

The advent of Capital Bikeshare certainly helped. And having a shower in my office building helped even more. There was no moment when I consciously made the switch. It happened gradually. One day I realized that I had hardly ridden the Metro in months. I was a bike commuter.

Maybe that’s not your future. It’s not for everyone. But maybe it is for you. So it’s worth trying out. And Bike to Work Day is a great way to do that. So sign up and head on down to the waterfront this Friday!

The Citizens Association of Georgetown will be hosting their spring concert in the park this Sunday at Rose Park at 4:30 to 6:30. It’s always a great time with the music, food, fun and neighborhood get togethers. Hope you can make it!

Photo by Brian Macauley.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly news round-up:

• Georgetown’s gothic shrine to beef.
• Sezane returns to Georgetown.
• GU students work to prove man’s innocence.

Scheele’s Market in east Georgetown is the oldest market in the neighborhood and the second oldest shop period (after Weaver’s Hardware). But its future is in some doubt. The owner of the building is putting it up for sale, which may make it impossible to keep the market going.

An effort from the neighbors who cherish this quintessential Georgetown landmark is forming to explore options to save the market. More information is here. The current lease that the market operator is on expires at the end of the year. What happens after that it unknown. Reach out to the group to see what you can do to help.

This would not be the first time the active souls of east Georgetown banded together to save Scheele’s. In 2012, they raised money to buy a covenant to keep the market open for 15 years. That convenant comes to an end at the end of the year.

Let’s hope history repeats itself and this treasure can remain open another 130 years.

Hello and welcome to your May northwest Georgetown ANC update.

Volta Park

After a long, long slog through some administrative and downright gothic delays, the Volta Park field renovations are nearly complete. Here’s what it looks like now:

And here is the fence that drew the most concerns during planning (the black fence, not the silver one, which will eventually come down):

The new sod will still need more time to grow and get established before the fences come down and the park will be fully open again. I look forward to that time!

Speaking of Volta Park, here is a reminder of their annual cocktail fundraiser next month:

GU Move Out

With the arrival May, the annual departure of GU students begins again. The GU Office of Neighborhood Life provides these students with bulk trash pick up, to help them clean out their rentals. And luckily us neighbors get to take advantage of this service too. So if you have large items you’ve been meaning to haul to the dump, check out these informational forms instead:

Bulk Trash will be picked up daily from May 4th – June 1st, except during Memorial Day Weekend (May 23rd – 25th). Donations will only be picked up on the following days: May 6, May 11, May 12, May 14, May 19, May 20, May 22, May 27 and June 1.



The link to schedule a pick up can also be found here: https://tinyurl.com/MoveOutDrive2026.

Reach out to the Office of Neighborhood Life for more info.

Resident Only Parking Update

There is not much to update you on our effort to bring resident only parking to Georgetown. We have submitted an initial map to DDOT for pre-review but have not received comment back yet. As a reminder, once DDOT approves a preliminary map, the ANC will vote whether to officially submit it for study and implementation. When that next step occurs, I will provide an update.

Trees

Our wonderful street trees need our help to get growing. If there’s a relatively newly planted tree on your block (i.e. planted within the last 3 years) it will need regular watering to thrive.

The basic goal you should have is to water young trees at least once a week with a good 20-25 gallons of water, from now until the trees drop their leaves in the fall . If you can’t water the new trees, try to find a neighbor who can.

The preferred watering device is the ooze tube (the bags that go around the bottom of the trees). You can differentiate them from the not-preferred gator bags because the gator bags have zippers. (They’re not preferred because they can create an unhealthy environment around the trunk and you have to remove them after each use.) With the ooze tube you can just fill it up and let it go.

If you don’t have an ooze tube, you can just leave a hose trickling into the tree box for 30 minutes to an hour.

Once a tree is mature, you can stop watering it. By then the roots are so spread out under the sidewalk that it doesn’t need your help anymore (although during any particularly dry periods, it can’t hurt to water it).

And with that, enjoy the nicest month of the year!

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m back with the seemingly bottomless Emil A. Press collection at the DC Historical Society. This one shows a radically different Wisconsin Ave. to what we see now.

The photo apparently is from the summer of 1975. It shows Wisconsin and N, and specifically it shows the exterior of Martin’s Tavern, which certainly looks a lot cozier these days than it did then.

Dominated the center of the shot, of course, is a trash bin. The first notable thing about it is that the photo label identifies it as a “Pride” trash can. I have to guess that pride had a different connotation in 1975 than it does today, because there’s nothing seemingly about gay or lesbian pride on it.

If you zoom in, an explanation emerges. Along the side is written “Pride Keeps Our City Clean”. I guess it was a way to guilt people into not littering. Funnily enough, the city was still doing a version of this as recently as 2018.

The can also has a fun ad for a tropical plant store, unimaginatively named “Tropical Plants of Georgetown”. It was located at 3211 O St., which is now Arcay Chocolates.

This biggest difference between then and now is obviously the sidewalk itself. I suspect a lot of people think the brick sidewalks were laid down by George Washington himself, but no. They’re a relatively recent thing. They were cement like this for most of the 20th century. The old-time bricks were mostly added as part of the Georgetown Project back in the early 2000s.

The ANC will be meeting next Monday night for our May session. The meeting will take place at Visitation with a virtual option. The draft agenda is below.

Some highlights:

• The Mayor’s office is scheduled to give a presentation on it proposed 2027 budget. This is a rough budget year, no matter how you cut it. So there will be lots of really difficult decisions to be made.
• Georgetown Heritage will be present to discuss a couple of their initiatives, including Fete de la Musique and an art installation they’re hoping to stage later this year.
• We’ll get a presentation on the Future Land Use Map from the Office of Planning. This sounds dry but it is an extremely important document in terms of how the city will grow over the next 25 years.

Here’s the agenda:

This week on the podcast, I am joined by my Chief Bagel Correspondent as we do a blind taste test of Georgetown’s three bagel shops. Listen here or at Apple podcasts or Spotify

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly news round-up:

• Correction to the podcast episode from this week: La Fete de la Musique is on June 20th, not June 21st.
• Q&A Cafe next week with a disillusioned ex-Trump staffer.
• Barbour moves.
• Dramatic conversion of property at 28th and M moving forward.