Category Archives: Uncategorized

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Although they said they’d stay open till August 1st, the Dean and Deluca closed permanently on Friday.
• In other restaurant news, Moby Dick’s is supposedly closed for renovations (after just having done renovations a few years ago) but a disturbing video of rats running loose on the inside might complicate those plans.

1300 block of Wisconsin Ave.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Water, water everywhere, and not a place to take a dip? That’s the attitude most people have taken to the idea of swimming in the Potomac river by Georgetown. But if an ambitious effort is successful, Georgetown will be ground zero for river swimming in DC.

WAMU wrote this week on steps the city and others are taking to make the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers swimmable. Specifically:

In 1971, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency pressured city lawmakers to ban swimming. They passed a law making swimming or wading in the Potomac, Anacostia or Rock Creek punishable by a $300 fine or 10 days in jail.

Fast forward almost 50 years: Billions of dollars have been spent cleaning up the rivers, and some environmentalists and swimmers say it’s time to get back into the water. City leaders are talking about relaxing — if not lifting entirely — the decades-old swim ban, and discussing where swim platforms or beaches could be located.

The article concludes optimistically that within five years it may be safe and legal to swim in one or both of the rivers. This would largely be due to massive projects of DC Water to stop raw sewage from being dumped into the river.

It seems crazy that even in this day and age such a thing could occur, but it does happen with just about every heavy rain fall. That’s because in DC’s older sewage pipes, stormwater drains (i.e. the drains on the street) run into the same tunnels that take away our sewage. When rains get so heavy that these pipes can’t handle it all at once, the overflow has to go somewhere. Rather than send it back up the storm drains (or our toilets) the overflows are dumped into the area’s waterways. These spots are called combined sewage overflows, or CSOs.

To prevent the pipes from overflowing, DC Water has been building a series of gigantic underground pipes that can act as temporary reservoirs of the water until the Blue Plains treatment facility can work through the backlog. By 2023, authorities hope to be able to divert 98% of sewage overflows from the Anacostia. Additional tunnels in Alexandria and DC will be open by 2025 and 2030, respectively, which will keep similar amounts out of the Potomac. So within 12 years or so, the rivers really ought to be about as pristine as they’re going to get.

But what about swimming now? Continue reading →

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• A shop that specializes in DC-made goods is opening a location in Georgetown.
• Indochino is moving into the old Cusp space.

1500 block of 35th St.

Photo by Beyond DC.

The Georgetown Dean and Deluca is closing August 1st. This should come as no surprise to anyone following the chain’s recent troubles. It has recently closed locations across the country. And the Georgetown location has been in a depressing state for a while now, with half empty shelves and out of season items filling the abundant gaps. This will be a loss for the neighborhood.

GM would write a retrospective, but frankly he didn’t shop there that much, and the Washington Post’s Maura Judkis already wrote a fabulous one:

I remember walking through the Georgetown market, in its historic brick building, and looking at all the cheeses and smoked fish and exciting ingredients — not that I even knew what to do with half of them, at the time. I remember marveling: This is where fancy people buy their groceries. I think I bought one of the prepared salads, displayed behind glass in ceramic bowls. For less than $20, Dean & DeLuca made me feel like I could be a fancy person, too.

What GM can do is give you a little context about the building’s possible future.

The market building itself was built in 1865. There had been a market building at that location dating to as early as 1795. Throughout this period, the property was owned by the city of Georgetown. In fact, it’s still publicly owned. When Georgetown was subsumed into the District of Columbia in 1871, the ownership of the market passed to the District. And to this day the property is owned by DC. Continue reading →

Photo by Bill Starrels.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Georgetown real estate: still pricey.
• Dean and Deluca to close August 1st. (more on this later)

Potomac River

Photo by Brett Young.

There is a meeting tonight being held by DDOT on the future of the Foundry Branch trolley trestle, just west of Georgetown University. The meeting is at St. John’s church on O St. at 6:30 pm.

The Foundry Branch trolley trestle is the spindly bridge you can see from Canal Rd. near the split with Foxhall:

It once carried streetcars from Georgetown out to Glen Echo. The 20 line, to be precise, used to travel all the way from Cabin John through Georgetown down to Union Station. The right-of-way that the street car used is still owned by the District. It winds its way from the western edge of the trestle bridge, through the Palisades and into Maryland. At some points it feels like a trail already; at other spots, residents have expanded their backyards to gobble up the public right-of-way.

(The trestle bridge itself is actually owned by WMATA. This ownership is the result of a complicated history, and WMATA wants nothing to do with it but to tear it down.)

The city is current studying whether it would make sense to restore that right-of-way into a proper pedestrian path. The great thing about these rail-to-trails conversions is that railroads (or trollies) need flat land. So the trails end up fairly level and perfect for non-motorized travel.

Part of the general idea that DDOT is studying would be to carry the trail across the trestle bridge and onto Prospect St. in Georgetown. This would be a boon to walkers and cyclists looking for a level way to get from the Palisades to the heart of Georgetown. As it is now, you need to either travel all the way up to Reservoir Rd., or down through some fairly awful sidewalks to M St. Continue reading →

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• The heat is breaking just in time for another movie in the park tonight.
• Farmers markets in Georgetown, and beyond.