The Georgetown Metropolitan

There are too many damn banks in Georgetown. And until recently, it felt like it was a one way ratchet; more and more opened, but none ever closed. But then hope arose last year with the closing of HSBC. And now hopefully that glimmer will bloom into a trend with the news that M & T Bank is closing as of next week.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Fitzgerald’s opens in the former F. Scott’s space. (Shame to see the old Art Deco F. Scott’s replaced with what looks like just another Clyde’s).
• This is one of GM’s favorite houses, and it could be yours for a measly $8.5 million.

The ANC will meet for its July session next Monday night via Zoom at 6:30 pm. This is the last meeting of the ANC until September due to the annual August break.

The agenda is, frankly, pretty dry. It’s mostly just small construction projects. However, one item might get a bit more spicy: the proposal to build a semi-permanent beer garden on the site of the former Latham Hotel. The proposal calls for a 300-seat outdoor dinning and drinking area located on the northern half of the 3000 M St. property. This property has been in a state of suspended construction for years as various plans fall through. At one point it was going to be a micro-unit apartment building. More recently it’s been pitched as a hotel once more. But in either event, nothing is moving forward on that front any time soon. That’s where the beer garden comes in, as a way to use the space while a final plan is generated.

A 300-seat beer garden seems genetically designed to bring out livid residents complaining about the angry neighbor trifecta of parking, noise, and trash. But GM thought similar concerns would derail the Sandlot proposal at the intersection of M and Pennsylvania, and that went through. So who knows, maybe this has a chance?

Although the complaints will likely revolve around ABC-related issues, the matter is only now being considered by the Old Georgetown Board for its architectural impact. But then again, that never prevented non-architectural concerns from derailing a project in this venue!

Here is the full agenda:

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Major renovations in store for Washington Harbour.
• GU requiring all faculty and staff to be vaccinated by August 9.

Last week GM explored the baby boom in Georgetown, or lack thereof. And this reminded him that he hasn’t run a piece on the overall picture of Georgetown households in quite some time. So here is a 2021 update!

First a caveat: This information comes from the American Community Survey five year estimates. As GM mentioned last week, this dataset does not attempt to create a snapshot at a particular moment, but rather makes an estimate of the respective data series over a five year time frame. So instead of saying, for example, that there are 10,000 people living in a particular area as of January 1st, it rather says that on average over the past five years there were 10,000 people living there. For relatively stable metrics it’s good enough (and all that is available for geographic areas as small as a Census tract).

Georgetown is now made up of four Census tracts, but for this purpose we can exclude two of them. The first is Census tract 2.01, which represents just Georgetown University. Secondly, we can ignore the fact that this year Census tract 1.00 (east Georgetown) was split into two tracts: 1.01 and 1.02. The data here reflects when it was just one tract.

A second caveat is that as GM also discussed last week, this data often comes with huge margins of error. GM will try to identify when that occurs.

That said, here is the data!

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• National memorial commemorating Georgetown’s role in the slave trade proposed by Del. Norton.
• Here’s a nice background on the organization behind the effort.