Scheele’s Market in east Georgetown is the oldest market in the neighborhood and the second oldest shop period (after Weaver’s Hardware). But its future is in some doubt. The owner of the building is putting it up for sale, which may make it impossible to keep the market going.
An effort from the neighbors who cherish this quintessential Georgetown landmark is forming to explore options to save the market. More information is here. The current lease that the market operator is on expires at the end of the year. What happens after that it unknown. Reach out to the group to see what you can do to help.
This would not be the first time the active souls of east Georgetown banded together to save Scheele’s. In 2012, they raised money to buy a covenant to keep the market open for 15 years. That convenant comes to an end at the end of the year.
Let’s hope history repeats itself and this treasure can remain open another 130 years.
Hello and welcome to your May northwest Georgetown ANC update.
Volta Park
After a long, long slog through some administrative and downright gothic delays, the Volta Park field renovations are nearly complete. Here’s what it looks like now:
And here is the fence that drew the most concerns during planning (the black fence, not the silver one, which will eventually come down):
The new sod will still need more time to grow and get established before the fences come down and the park will be fully open again. I look forward to that time!
With the arrival May, the annual departure of GU students begins again. The GU Office of Neighborhood Life provides these students with bulk trash pick up, to help them clean out their rentals. And luckily us neighbors get to take advantage of this service too. So if you have large items you’ve been meaning to haul to the dump, check out these informational forms instead:
Bulk Trash will be picked up daily from May 4th – June 1st, except during Memorial Day Weekend (May 23rd – 25th). Donations will only be picked up on the following days: May 6, May 11, May 12, May 14, May 19, May 20, May 22, May 27 and June 1.
There is not much to update you on our effort to bring resident only parking to Georgetown. We have submitted an initial map to DDOT for pre-review but have not received comment back yet. As a reminder, once DDOT approves a preliminary map, the ANC will vote whether to officially submit it for study and implementation. When that next step occurs, I will provide an update.
Trees
Our wonderful street trees need our help to get growing. If there’s a relatively newly planted tree on your block (i.e. planted within the last 3 years) it will need regular watering to thrive.
The basic goal you should have is to water young trees at least once a week with a good 20-25 gallons of water, from now until the trees drop their leaves in the fall . If you can’t water the new trees, try to find a neighbor who can.
The preferred watering device is the ooze tube (the bags that go around the bottom of the trees). You can differentiate them from the not-preferred gator bags because the gator bags have zippers. (They’re not preferred because they can create an unhealthy environment around the trunk and you have to remove them after each use.) With the ooze tube you can just fill it up and let it go.
If you don’t have an ooze tube, you can just leave a hose trickling into the tree box for 30 minutes to an hour.
Once a tree is mature, you can stop watering it. By then the roots are so spread out under the sidewalk that it doesn’t need your help anymore (although during any particularly dry periods, it can’t hurt to water it).
And with that, enjoy the nicest month of the year!
This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m back with the seemingly bottomless Emil A. Press collection at the DC Historical Society. This one shows a radically different Wisconsin Ave. to what we see now.
The photo apparently is from the summer of 1975. It shows Wisconsin and N, and specifically it shows the exterior of Martin’s Tavern, which certainly looks a lot cozier these days than it did then.
Dominated the center of the shot, of course, is a trash bin. The first notable thing about it is that the photo label identifies it as a “Pride” trash can. I have to guess that pride had a different connotation in 1975 than it does today, because there’s nothing seemingly about gay or lesbian pride on it.
The can also has a fun ad for a tropical plant store, unimaginatively named “Tropical Plants of Georgetown”. It was located at 3211 O St., which is now Arcay Chocolates.
This biggest difference between then and now is obviously the sidewalk itself. I suspect a lot of people think the brick sidewalks were laid down by George Washington himself, but no. They’re a relatively recent thing. They were cement like this for most of the 20th century. The old-time bricks were mostly added as part of the Georgetown Project back in the early 2000s.
The ANC will be meeting next Monday night for our May session. The meeting will take place at Visitation with a virtual option. The draft agenda is below.
Some highlights:
The Mayor’s office is scheduled to give a presentation on it proposed 2027 budget. This is a rough budget year, no matter how you cut it. So there will be lots of really difficult decisions to be made.
Georgetown Heritage will be present to discuss a couple of their initiatives, including Fete de la Musique and an art installation they’re hoping to stage later this year.
We’ll get a presentation on the Future Land Use Map from the Office of Planning. This sounds dry but it is an extremely important document in terms of how the city will grow over the next 25 years.
This week on the podcast, I am joined by my Chief Bagel Correspondent as we do a blind taste test of Georgetown’s three bagel shops. Listen here or at Apple podcasts or Spotify
This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m again flipping through the Emil. A. Press collection at the DC Historical Society. This one comes from 1965 and shows the legendary Crazy Horse bar at 3261 M St.
Crazy Horse was a rowdy bar that was open for decades until finally closing in the late 90s. Excerpts from the Post article from the 80s gives a good sense of the place:
THE CRAZY HORSE has gone upscale? Thankfully, not really. A few changes have been made by management to weed out the rowdies and defuse antagonism in the surrounding Georgetown area, but it’s basically the same beer-and-boogie bar that opened its doors on M Street almost 20 years ago. The Crazy Horse still fits one man’s definition of a good rock’n’roll club: a place in which most of the patrons have never opened an IRA.
Rodzilowski says that along M Street, only the nearby Paul Mall also offers live music, and that club attracts more of a suit-and-tie crowd. That’s something you haven’t seen much of at the Crazy Horse, which for years had the reputation of the bad boy of genteel Georgetown. Hard rock and wet T-shirt nights were among the elements that at times made the Crazy Horse a pretty rowdy spot.
“There’s no question about that,” Rodzilowski says. “When I came here 16 months ago, it attracted a much rougher crowd. You had a lot of fights, a lot of bums and guys with leather jackets. I remember when I first started here, I’d be working the door and I’d see some young women looking inside, like they’d like to come in. I’d say, ‘Why don’t you come inside?’ And they’d look at me like I was nuts.”
This sort of rowdy behavior was what eventually inspired the liquor license moratorium, which began the long slow death knell of these sort of bars.
After hosting the Coach for many years, this building now holds an Everlane, which is not nearly as much fun as Crazy Horse was:
At least somebody has faith that Gen Z is going to finally start dating each other settle down: a DTC diamond shop is opening up in Georgetown. The shop, Blue Nile, is apparently going to take over the James Allen space at 3109 M St.
But when I looked a little more into it, it turns out that Blue Nile is owned by the same holding company that also owns James Allen. So this is more like a repositioning of a brand strategy than one shop moving in to replace another.
This week on the podcast, I’m talking about the French Market coming this weekend, a French music festival later in June and finally the story of how a legendary American tune about a mountainous rural state was actually written here in urban Georgetown on 31st St.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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