Georgetown Time Machine: Call Your Grandmother

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m checking out another photo from the Emil Press Collection at the DC Historical Society. It shows the southest corner of 35th and O St. in January 1969.

What you see now, of course, is the psychedelia-by-way-of-Miami otherwise known as Call Your Mother:

But in 1969 the building hosted Feldman’s Market. This was one of the many small (often Jewish-owned) grocery stores that once dotted Georgetown (and the rest of DC) before the age of the supermarkets. I wrote a bit about the history of this market and the building itself a few years ago:

Let’s start way back in the 1850s. (I wasn’t kidding about it being a long story). Sometime around 1859, a building was constructed at the southeast corner of Fayette and Second Streets. It was constructed to have a grocery store on the first floor, with a residence on the second floor. This was a common sight in Georgetown in the century before supermarkets were invented. Back then most people bought their food from small corner grocery stores, which themselves obtained their supplies wholesale from the large city markets, like Central or Eastern Markets.

A grocery store stood at this location well into the 20th century. For a long time it was a location of the chain of small grocery stores operating under the name “Sanitary Grocery Co.” Here’s an ad from 1926 listing the address (by then Fayette Street had become 35th and Second Street became O St., and so the address was, and is, 3428 O St.):

But the arrival of the supermarket model in the mid-20th century brought the days of the ubiquitous corner grocery store in DC to an end. For this location that end was in 1970, when a health foods store opened up in its place. It only lasted about a year and was then replaced with an antiques store. This lasted for many years and was ultimately replaced by a flower shop. The flower shop closed in 2019 at which point Call Your Mother signed its lease to operate here.

So this photo was actually taken nearly at the end of the grocery store’s operations. In fact there’s a for rent sign by the door. Maybe that’s for the apartment upstairs, but more likely it’s for the store itself (moreover, often store space like this were rented along with the apartment upstairs where the shop owner would live.)

I’m not sure when it ceased being a Sanitary Grocery Store. That chain was actually bought up by Safeway in the 20s, but most of the small grocery stores kept operating under the original name until about 1940. In fact, if you look closer, the window has a sign saying it was part of the District Grocery Store chain. DGS, as it was called, was more of a cooperative among independently owned and run stores than a proper chain. It was a major part of DC’s landscape until their decline, especially after the 1968 riots. It ceased operations in 1972, just a few years after this particular location stopped operating as a grocery store.

The former DGS Deli on Connecticut Ave. in Dupont was named in honor of the DGS coop. Sadly it closed in 2018.

Lastly, I’ll point out that the building that is just south of Call Your Mother, which sure looks like it was also once a commercial building, was in fact a commercial building. In 1969 it appears to have been a real estate agent’s office.