Category Archives: Retail

As GM mentioned last week, Carol Joynt has the scoop on yet another revamp of Georgetown’s Marvelous Market. She writes:

The Georgetown location of Marvelous Market will be “revamped,” [store-owner] Thompson says, adding that there are 10 to 15 years remaining on the lease. “We plan to do some different things with the menu. We’re looking at bringing in a salad station, a pizza station.” The location already has a wine license, and Thompson mentions also procuring a liquor license. “We’ve got some good ideas about what we could do with that property,” he says, including a “wine garden,” but “we are constrained by local ordinances.”

Marvelous Market seems to undergo these sorts of revamps every few years. GM distinctly remembers them having pizza some ways back. And a retread is probably not what this space needs.

But it is true that the space has a ton of potential if they could just find the right operator, which they are seeking. GM would love (love) to see Jamie Stachowski expand his butcher shop here. A true farmers market, like Smuckers Farms on 14th St., would also be welcome. So too would a wider selection of craft beer.  Continue reading →

Ever since Cannons Seafood closed for unspecified medical problems a few months ago, GM has heard rumors that the closure wasn’t temporary but permanent. Sadly, Carol Joynt verified the rumor yesterday. She writes on her Washingtonian blog:

Bobby Moore contacted Washingtonian to announce he’s decided to close the business for good and lease the space to his 31st Street next-door neighbor, Il Canale Italian restaurant…Moore, 47, says the “medical reasons” are simple wear and tear on his body…He says he sat down to discuss it with his family recently, and they decided to “close [the restaurant] altogether.”

This is a sad day for Georgetown. Moore’s family has owned and run Cannon’s since it opened in 1937. After a time operating at the old Georgetown Market (now occupied by Dean and Deluca), Moore’s father bought the current building on 31st St. in 1966. So with the store’s closure, Georgetown is not just losing its only fish monger, it’s losing one of its last long-term family owned businesses. (The only ones left that GM can think of are the resilient Phoenix, owned and run by Betsy and Bill Hays since 1955 and Martin’s, owned and operated by the Martin family since 1933.) Continue reading →

Sometimes when you get too focused on the influx of large national chains into Georgetown, it’s easy to overlook how much Georgetown has served as a successful business incubator over the years.

The most obvious recent example is, of course, Georgetown Cupcake. Started in a small shop on Potomac St. in 2008, the company is now an indestructible national force. But it’s not the only business to make a splash after getting its first foothold in Georgetown.

Sweet Green was founded by some young Georgetown grads just a few months before and located in an old Little Tavern just two blocks west. Unlike the publicity-seeking Georgetown Cupcake, Sweet Green has quietly grown to 20 locations from here to Boston.

Dolcezza is another Georgetown-born success story. They still make quarts and quarts of the region’s best gelato in the basement of their Wisconsin Ave. location. (The production will soon shift to the ultra-hip Union Market, at which point, sadly, they possibly might close the Georgetown location.) Continue reading →

Every February, GM performs a census of commercial stores in Georgetown, tracking what opened, what closed, and what moved. He does this by simply walking up and down the streets (why he chose the coldest moth to do this outdoor exercise, who knows). Some interesting data comes out of this annual report.

Well the BID just release a report on the state of Georgetown that blows GM’s completely out of the water. It was produced by the recently expanded staff at the BID in part to facilitate the Georgetown 2028 process. GM has only started to absorb it, but it is an incredibly dense report with data GM could only dream about pulling together. And it’s beautifully presented as well.

The report is embedded below, but here are some interesting findings:

• There are almost 11,500 jobs in the Georgetown commercial district, with another 10,000 jobs at GU and the hospital. This results in a job density of about 60,000 per square mile, or about what you see in Dupont Circle or the Rosslyn-Balston corridor.
• About a third of the jobs are office workers, a little less than a third work in hotels or restaurants, and about 14% work in retail.
• There are 461 buildings along M and Wisconsin, comprising over 2.2 million square feet of rentable space.
• There are only 5 LEED certified spaces in Georgetown, compared with 349 for the rest of DC.
• The waterfront ice rink attracted 45,000 skaters last winter, twice the forecast.

GM could go on, but take a look yourself. It’s awesome, and the staff of the BID, particularly Josh Hermias the Economic Development Director, should be congratulated: