This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m dipping again into the 1993 photos, as I’ve done a lot recently. This one shows M St. just east of Potomac. And the photo really highlights something that has largely left M St.: cheap food.
From left to right, this stretch had a Subway shop, a Burrito Brothers, and a pizza shop (whose name escapes me). Nowadays this stretch includes Aesop (an expensive bodycare shop) and Dyptique (an expensive fragrance shop).
I moved to the area in 1999, and Georgetown became an early nightlife destination for me and my friends. As a result, we came to know this stretch of M St. well. I have many hazy memories of scarfing a pizza on the sidewalk with my friends downing their burritos. But in retrospect, these were the late days in Georgetown’s nightlife era. As I’ve documented before, the first 15 years of this century marked a steady and unrelenting decline in the number of nightlife destinations in Georgetown.
It makes sense that joints like these that catering to those crowds disappeared as well. I’m not certain when the Burrito Brothers or the pizza shop closed up, but I believe it was around 2005 or so. They were replaced by a Lucky Jeans shop, before it more recently was taken over by Dyptique. The Subway held on longer, not closing until 2016. Aesop moved in shortly thereafter.
Of course, there still is some cheap-ish food on M st. But ever since Philly P’s closed, there really is no place around that caters primarily to a drunk late-night crowd. It would be a terrible business plan these days…
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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