This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m exploring a story that at first glance seemed to be a story about whether preservation rules are too strict but actually turned into a wild history of police chiefs getting bitten and WWII era latin jazz.
But lets start with the seemingly innocuous photo. It comes from the DC Historical society. It’s from the Emil Press collection and was taken around March of 1964. It shows 3213 O St. which at the time was a former coffeehouse named Gallery. It operated here (with “red jacket waiters sedately serving cappuccino and darjeeling” according to the Washington Post) for seven years.
The owner, Amanda Goudie, decided in 1964 to pick up sticks and open a new coffee shop a block away at 3210 N St. You can see the announcement in the window of the coffeeshop intentionally(?) misspelled:
cum and see are new garden coffeehouse at 3210 N St. It looks like this-> (with a drawing of the new location).
That new location, however, would turn out to be a big headache for Ms. Goudie. According to a Washington Post article from a couple months later, she got into some serious trouble with the preservationists:
Apparently she needed to do some work on the new location, including fixing the door. According to the article, the plans she got approved by the CFA included one design for the door, but she installed a different one. This lead to a summons from the DC government. She was nonplussed:
She was due to appear before the DC government and account for her actions two days after this article appeared, but at the last minute the CFA came to her rescue:
Sadly for Ms. Goudie, this small victory did not save her from being savaged by the Post a few years later when her shop chased the fondue craze:
I’m not sure when the shop closed, but Ms. Goudie eventually made her way to Harpers Ferry, WV where she opened another coffeehouse. She also appears to have become a bit of a local gadfly. After a violent run in with the police chief in which she apparently bit him, she stood trial and acted as her own lawyer. It was, as it always is, a mistake:
She was fined $500 and then promptly announced she was running for mayor. She got seven votes.
Another source states that before all this, she sung under the name Amanda Lane with the Desi Arnez Band. Here she is singing East Street in 1946:
It’s pretty incredible sometimes what stories you uncover when you start digging around a completely innocuous photo of a closed coffee shop…
For the record, 3210 N St. still has a window with 8 rows and a square-topped door.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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