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Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Capital Bikeshare valet back for the summer at Wisconsin south of M.
• Sezane moves in to the old Tory Burch store.

Hello and welcome to your May Northwest Georgetown ANC update!

Spring is here, and with it comes the need to start watering our street trees. While the city and organizations like Trees for Georgetown can plant dozens of trees around Georgetown, it’s incumbent on residents to keep them alive. This is particularly true for the first 3-5 years that they are planted along our streets.

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).

I can speak from experience that diligence pays off! When I first moved into my house on 33rd St. in 2011, a London plane had recently been planted up the street. This is what it looked like in early 2012 (you can barely see it honestly):

The trunk was only about an inch or two wide. I made sure to water that tree diligently for about four years, and then left it to its own (with some mulch and weeding). And now this is what it looks like:

The trunk is over a foot thick. and the tree has got to be nearly 50 feet tall. And most important of all, it creates a pool of shade on the sidewalk at least as wide as that. (Another London plane to the south is about five years behind it in growth, but combined they already create about 100 feet of shade in the summer).

So please water any young trees on your block! If you have a young tree and cannot water it, please let me know and I’ll try to find a neighbor to take care of it!

Volta Park

I wish I had concrete news to announce on the Volta Park field renovations. Unfortunately DPR tells me that it is still “going through permitting”. I am still hopeful the work will get done, but I am not going to try to give timing estimates any more.

Speaking of Volta Park, there is a dangerous sinkhole in the playground. It has been there for well over a year at this point. At least one child has already been seriously injured by it. Specifically, this child broke their femur due to it.

Despite repeated pleas from the Friends of Volta Park and the ANC, the sinkhole remains unrepaired. The ANC will attempt once more to bring a spotlight on the problem this Wednesday night at its May meeting (6:30 pm at Visitation). We will keep demanding that the city fix it until it finally acts.

Pot Stores (Revisited)

The city is moving forward with its sea change on cannabis stores. Several stores in Georgetown are on the cusp of receiving a license to operate a retail medical cannabis store. The ANC has negotiated a strong settlement agreement with the stores, and I am hopeful that their operation will not cause an adverse impact on the neighborhood.

However, over a dozen unlicensed “gifting” stores remain. The message from the city is clear: the days of these stores has come to an end. But it will take time and coordination between multiple agencies to see them actually go away. In March, ABCA sent warning letters to six of the stores in Georgetown. At least one has already closed. But a bunch remain.

All I can say is that this is all new territory for ABCA. They were only given the authority to go after unlicensed shops earlier this year and they are proceeding cautiously. I can assure you that the ANC is working close with them and looks forward to a time (hopefully in the near future) when the only cannabis shops in Georgetown are licensed and in compliance with the law and our thorough settlement agreement.

(If you want an in-depth discussion on what is happening with cannabis enforcement in DC, please see my update from last year.)

Bulk Trash Pick Up

The GU school year will come to an end this month and with it will come the annual student move-out. The Office of Neighborhood Life coordinates a robust effort to clean up the bulk trash that this migration causes. And full-time residents can benefit from the service as well. See below for more information:

Let me know if you have any questions or if there is trash on the sidewalk that is not getting removed!

Quick Updates:

• Final community input meetings for the Access and Circulation Study the week of May 20th (details in link).
• Final community meeting on Jelleff Rec Center renovation this Thursday night.
• The Barnes and Noble is reopening in June after being gone twelve years.
• Speaking of returning after being away for a while: Wingo’s on O Street has reopened.
• Friends of Volta Park spring cocktail fundraiser will take place on June 1st.

Happy May!View draft history

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Green Almond Pantry to open sister restaurant next to Reverie.
• Reminder, meeting on Jelleff renovation tomorrow night.

The Georgetown Barnes and Noble is set to reopen in Georgetown on June 19th, according to the stores Instagram account. That would mark exactly 4,550 days since it closed New Years Day, 2012. Surely that must be a record for a gap between the time a store occupied the exact same location?

In either event, this reopening is really a strong endorsement of the Georgetown neighborhood as a retail destination. We are so back!

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Home sales in Georgetown now averaging over $2 million.
• Final community meetings on the Access and Circulation Study to take place late May. Here are the details.

The ANC will be meeting for our May session this Wednesday night at 6:30 pm at Visitation (with a Zoom option here). Please note the odd day of the week. We shifted from our normal Monday time to accommodate Passover.

The agenda is as follows:

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• The “bitter end” at the Georgetown Foxtrot.
• The unintended consequences on cracking down on on-campus partying.

Next Thursday night, at 6 pm, at the Georgetown Library, the Department of Parks and Rec will hold a community meeting on the long-planned renovations to the Jelleff Rec Center. (Note, earlier announcements had this meeting on Wednesday, but it was rescheduled to avoid conflicting with the ANC meeting).

The meeting will include the final concept designs for the project, which the community has been waiting a long time to see. So please come out and offer your input!

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Interesting commercial building on O St. for sale. Lots of potential there.
• What we’ll miss (or not) from Foxtrot.

The Georgetown Foxtrot closed for good suddenly yesterday. It was part of a chain-wide closure as the company has gone bankrupt. The CEO wrote:

We explored many avenues to continue the business but found no viable option despite good faith and exhaustive efforts,” Foxtrot said in a statement on its website. “This decision has not been made lightly, and we understand the impact it will have on you, our loyal customers, as well as our dedicated team members.

(For a more honest appraisal of what went wrong, read this deep dive.)

The Georgetown location was consistently packed, which would suggest (although certainly not guarantee) that it was a profitable location. The business plan of “open coffee shop with marked-up prepared food” has been pretty much idiot-proof in Georgetown over the last couple years. And you could see how this location shifted more towards this model over time (and away from its early pretenses of being a small scale grocery store). So I would not be surprised if someone else takes over this location and tries something similar.

Although it could take some time. Remember that a similar chain-wide collapse resulted in the Georgetown Dean and Deluca closing in 2019. Nearly five years later it’s still empty, with the much anticipated Mozza still months away from opening. So, maybe don’t hold your breath, but the retail (especially casual food retail) environment in Georgetown is smoking hot, so there’s reason to be hopeful.