This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m checking out a scene that has change quite a small amount in the thirty years since the photo was taken. This particular shot, taken in 1993 at the corner of Bank and M, shows that the building was occupied by Kinko’s copy shop. And now it’s occupied by…Kinko’s copy shop.
Technically it’s a FedEx Office store, but that’s only because FedEx bought Kinko’s.
Some things are different, of course. The upstairs is occupied by a kitchen design studio, not a temp agency. More noticeable there’s a large London plane tree shading the block. It’s encouraging to see such a large tree succeed on M St., which can be rough on street trees.
The building itself dates to 1979. As I’ve covered before, this lot was once occupied by the Bank of Columbia, from whom the Bank Alley name derives.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
London plane trees are a good choice for urban street planting. According to the Arbor Day Foundation, they are moderately drought-tolerant; “Tolerate pollution and other urban conditions well: Transplant easily; Is resistant to anthracnose; … [and] Lives longer than many other shade trees in urban settings.”
I love London planes. The one problem with them is that the city planted so many of them over the last 10-15 years that we’re more vulnerable to a blight should one ever arise that affects them.