The Georgetown Metropolitan

Hello, and welcome to your June northwest Georgetown ANC update! Although the recent weather sure has made it feel more like March, I assure you that it is actually June.

Bus Changes and Stop Eliminations

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to again warn you that the entire WMATA bus system is about to change dramatically. Starting on June 29th, every single route in the city will bear a new name, and a majority of them will travel new routes.

For a reminder, this is what I wrote last month:

I’ve described the changes in detail here, but here is a handy thumbnail description of how the existing Georgetown lines will appear starting June 29th:

D2: This will now be called the D96 and it will now travel from Bethesda all the way to Foggy Bottom. The Georgetown to Dupont section will largely remain the same.

G2: This will now be called the C91. It will still travel from Georgetown University to Howard University. But instead of traveling along O, P, and Dumbarton through Georgetown, it will travel on Q St.

D6: This will now be called the D94. It will still travel to Sibley, but no longer will it go eastward to RFK. It will now terminate in Chinatown.

38B: This will now be called the A58. It will still travel from Farragut out to Balston, by way of Georgetown, but now it will continue onward all the way to Seven Corners.

30 Series: The 30 series will be replaced with the D80 and the D82. Through Georgetown it will mostly be the same (although with an unfortunate number of eliminated bus stops). The D80 will travel to Union Station (like the current 33) and the D82 will go to Foggy Bottom (like the current 31).

Finally there will be a novel new route called the C85. It will travel from Foggy Bottom, along M St. through Georgetown. It will then head out to MacArthur Blvd. in the Palisades in order to reach the new MacArthur High School. Then it will wind its way back through Glover Park and up through Ward 3.

What I want to discuss this month is the euphemistically named “bus stop consolidation” that WMATA is also deploying at the end of the month. In English what this means is that WMATA is eliminating a bunch of bus stops.

I’ll get to the detail of the eliminations below, but first let me explain WMATA’s justification for eliminating bus stops. The first is most obvious: with bus route changes, certain bus stops are no longer along a bus route anymore. For instance, the G2 stops in east Georgetown are all being eliminated because the G2 replacement, the C91, will no longer wind its way through the middle of east Georgetown. It will now travel up on 35th St., hang a right on Q St., and then head to Dupont from there. So all the G2 stops that aren’t on that route will be eliminated.

The second justification is a bit less obvious and is a bit more controversial. Essentially the idea is that if buses have fewer stops along a route, they will move faster since they’ll stop less frequently. In theory this makes sense, but it may make less sense from your individual perspective if your bus stop is one of the ones that gets eliminated. (It reminds me of the old Onion headline “Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others”). Whatever time savings might be gained by the people whose stops weren’t cut comes at a cost of the extra time people whose stops were cut have to spend to walk to/from a more distant stop. In other words, it’s certainly good to speed buses, but if you’re degrading service in the process, the benefits might not be worth it.

So what are the Georgetown bus stops WMATA is proposing to eliminate?

It’s best to look at each bus route to describe them.

First the good news: no stops that currently service the D2 or the D6 are being eliminated. That also means that many of these stops will also service the G2-replacement.

Now for the bad news: some stops on the Wisconsin Ave./M St. lines are being cut. The less bad news is that the cuts to these stops are not quite as bad as it initially seemed when WMATA announced them. That’s because the document announcing the stop eliminations described the stops by location, not direction. So, for instance, it announced that the Wisconsin and P stop and the Wisconsin and N stop were being eliminated. That would make it seem that there will be no stop between M st. and Q St. on Wisconsin Ave.

But that’s not correct. WMATA is proposing to eliminate those two stops in only one direction each (southbound for the first and northbound for the second).

These are the actual stops on the Wisconsin and M St. routes and whether they will continue or not:

Southbound Eliminated?

Wisc. and 34th No

Wisc. and R No

Wisc. and Q No

Wisc. and P Yes

Wisc. and Dumb No

M and Wisc. No*

M and TJ Yes*

Penn and 28th No

Northbound

Penn and 28th No

M and 30th Yes*

M and 31st No*

Wisc. and N Yes

Wisc. and P No

Wisc. and Q No

Wisc. and R No

Wisc. and 34th No

So for the 30 series replacements, when you’re going downtown the eliminated stops are the one in front of Lutece and the one in front of the Barnes and Noble. When you’re heading back to Georgetown from downtown, the eliminated stops are the one in front of Sprinkles and the one in front of Ralph Lauren.

Additionally, the asterixes next to a couple of the stops relate to the the 38B replacement (the A58). It will in fact continue to stop at M and 30th (in front of Sprinkles) and M and Thomas Jefferson (in front of the Barnes and Noble). It will also continue to use the stops west of Wisconsin that it currently uses. But it won’t continue to stop at M and 31st (in front of the Urban Outfitters) or M and Wisconsin (in front of the Capital One Cafe). Essentially they took the four stops on M between 30th and Wisconsin and split them up, one half will keep being used by the 30 series replacement and the other half by the 38B replacement. This has the added annoyance of making it more difficult for a rider heading downtown to simply wait at one stop and take whichever bus comes first.

The only stop on M or Wisconsin to be fully removed is the one in front of Ralph Lauren.

While these eliminations are not as bad as they may have seemed at first, they are still not good. To eliminate four of sixteen former 30 Series bus stops in Georgetown will impact people who travel to or from Georgetown by bus. And I think the Ralph Lauren stop elimination is probably the worst. Now the buses will travel all the way from the Urban Outfitters to P St. before stopping again. That’s a big stretch without a stop for a dense commercial area.

WMATA does not seem interested in undoing these changes, especially since they’ve already installed signs for the new routes and stops. But the ANC will discuss adopting a resolution Monday night to request some or all these eliminations be reconsidered. Maybe we can bring them back eventually.

Repaving

Some residents living on or near the 3300 block of Reservoir Rd. have reached out to me recently to complain about the state of the road surface on that block. Walking down the block I could see that, indeed, the road is in terrible shape. I reached out to the city to get this block prioritized for repaving. Unfortunately, staffing shortages due to the budget shortfall made it difficult to get an answer back promptly. But I did learn that DDOT will send inspectors to evaluate the surface to see if it needs repaving.

It should be fairly obvious that it does. The challenge is that the city’s dashboard mistakenly states that the block was paved in the 2020 fiscal year. It definitely wasn’t. You can even use old Google streetviews to see the current pot holes grow over time, like some family album.

For instance, here’s one bad spot from last December:

Here’s that same spot in May 2021:

And in November 2015:

In fact, you can got back to July 2009 and see the beginning of the cracks that continue to grow today:

Clearly this block has not be repaved in at least sixteen years. Probably longer.

Hopefully the DDOT engineers will recognize the obvious, but to nudge them along I will be proposing a resolution Monday night asking them to prioritize this block.

Let me know if your block is being similarly neglected!

Quick Notes:

• Reminder: Volta Park field day and cocktail fundraiser this Saturday. Buy tickets for the party here!
• MPD announced the arrest of an individual suspected of car break-ins on the 3400 blocks of Q and R streets. Thank you to MPD for their diligence!
• Here are all the closures in Georgetown over the past 18 months or so. Keep an eye out for my complete report soon.

Photo by Adam Chandler.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly update:

• MPD yesterday announced the arrest of an individual suspected on committing multiple car break-ins around 34th and Dent area.
• More on the Executive Branch club.
• Brief interview with new BID CEO.

I’m still cleaning up the data from my State of Georgetown census, but I wanted to publish another interesting preview today: the list of all the closures.

Before I get to that, just a quick moment on nomenclature. I used the words stores or establishments to encompass all the categories of businesses I track with my survey. They include every type of retail store, restaurant, salon, and even real estate offices. (My rough rule of thumb is that it counts if you could walk in without an appointment and get service.)

So with that said, here is a list of every establishment that was open in Sept. 2023 but is not as of last week. A couple required a guess. Bitty and Beau’s, for instance, has been closed for months and has a sign on the window saying it’s closed for renovations. But I’m skeptical they’re coming back, and their website no longer lists the Georgetown location. Same with Tom Snyder next door. It’s been well over a year since the fire caused their closure. Maybe they’ll actually come back, but for now I’m calling it a closure. Similarly, some establishments change ownership and name, and while the new store is offering nearly identical services to the old, I’m calling it a closure. That wraps in Ilo Day Spa and Janti Cafe.

Additionally, Water Street Gym moved up to Glover Park and J. Crew is supposedly going to reopen at 31st and M. I’m calling them both closures since right now neither of them are open in Georgetown.

Let me know if any of the following are listed in error!

Citibank

Janti Cafe

Sherwin Williams

College Scooters

Water Street Gym

Long & Foster

Garden Hill

Capitol Danks

Marston Luce

Ilo Day Spa

Detailz

Lovely

Mon Salon/Loft

Vicky’s Nails

Jaco

The Gallery

Brow de Bar

Empire Smokeshop

Personal Aesthetics

Edible Arrangements

Glosslab

Hersheys

City Sliders

Alkova

Storie Collective

Shouk

Mono

Donahue

Vape Shop

Ever Body

Woolford

Foxtrot

Hobo

District & Co

Vape store

Sleep Number

Carlisle Wood Floors

Georgetown Chiropractic

Wawa

Scotch and Soda

Tori Burch

Mason’s Lobster Rolls

Fangyan

High Road Cycling

Bakeshop

Stona

Roche Salon

Dixie Liquors

Running Company

District Donut

Sandro

Alanya Salon

Gong Cha

Scout

Big Wheel Bikes

Nisolo

Aerie

Pandora

Todd Snyder

Bitty & Beau’s

J. Crew

Atmos

Hatley

Up West

Ristorante Piccolo

Showfields

Amigo Mio

Outdoor Voices

Naadam

Ike Behar

Sand Lot

Funky Piece

I finally got around to performing my annual-ish census of the state of Georgetown. This is the survey I do where I walk up and down the streets keeping track of every establishment that has either opened or closed since the last time I took the snapshot. I’m about 6-8 months overdue, so this snapshot is more like a little over a year and a half since my last one. So the numbers will seem a little more dramatic once I tally them all up.

I’m still sorting through and cleaning up the data. But here is a preview of the top line numbers:

• There were 88 establishments opened since Sept. 2023
• There were 77 establishments that closed since Sept. 2023
• Of the 77 closures, 25 spaces have already been reoccupied

Just for comparison, in 2023 I measured 62 openings and 45 closures. That covered a period of 15 months to the 2022 measure. That suggests an opening rate of 4.1 stores a month and a closure rate of 3 per month. This year’s snapshot covered 19 months of changes. So that calculates to a opening rate of 4.6 a month and a closure rate of 4. So the openings are up a touch but the closures are up a lot.

But even with the closures going up, they’re still behind the openings. So the overall numbers are up. In fact, my preliminary numbers suggest the total is now back over 500 for the first time since 2019. I’m still cleaning up the data, as I mentioned, so that could be a miscalculation. But if it’s roughly true, it would put us close to the highest count I’ve had since I started doing this way back in 2009. And that would be especially note worthy since that 2009 number was “inflated” by the Georgetown Park Mall, which was still open at the time.

The details are still to come, but any way you slice it, Georgetown is booming.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here is your weekly news update:

• Reminder: Friends of Volta Park Field Day and Spring Cocktail Party on June 7th. Buy tickets here.
• New sushi restaurant taking over the former Donahue space.
• Another office-to-residential conversion, this time on Water Street.
• And another, another conversion, this time with the Flour Mill.

Over the weekend I had the pleasure to serve as one of the tour guides for the now annual Architectural Walking Tour put on by the Citizens Association. Doing so reminded me of the field guide for Georgetown Homes that I pulled together a few years ago. I thought I’d share it again in case you missed it.

If I can pass along just one piece of information about Georgetown homes it’s this: Despite what real estate listings say, very few homes in Georgetown are federal, either in terms of period or style! The vast majority are some type of Victorian style (likely Italianate or a Queen Anne). Friends don’t let friends describe their homes as a federal rowhouse in real estate listings!! (Unless it really is…)

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m back in the archives of the DC Historical Society (did I ever leave it?) This photo is a fascinating one. It purports to show the “ruins of the old Georgetown Jail” on the west side of Wisconsin Ave. just south of the canal. But is it?

The photo is identified as being from between 1923 and 1927. There definitely appears to have been some old ruins that were identified as the old jail, as you can see in this article (whose headline could have been written today):

In it, a resident cites some of the derilict properties that could be razed in order to allow for more housing:

This description is somewhat hard to square with the old maps. Here is that stretch of Wisconsin in 1888:

There is no building identified as a jail. The Sumac Mill mentioned in the article is there though. And the police station is also there. Several of the remaining buildings are identified as warehouses. That leaves just a few possibilities. But they’re all either brick (the pink structures) or woodframe (the yellow structures). No stone structure stood here. But maybe it was already in ruins by the 1880s and simply not included in the map.

More evidence for the existence of the jail comes from Portrait of Old George Town, a memoir from Grace Ecker in the 1950s:

South of the canal on High Street stood the Debtors’ Prison. This was the only prison in the lower part of Montgomery County, although the county court was held at Rockville, and there the cases were tried. At one time the town clerk of George Town got tangled up in his money matters and was placed in this prison where he languished until his friends made good his debts. A report was made to the Town Council that he could not perform his duties because he was in jail! Nothing now remains but a part of the old stone wall.

But around the same time, Georgetowners were convinced that the Old Stone House was George Washington’s headquarters or perhaps the famous Suter’s Tavern. It was neither. It was just a really old stone house. And there’s something about the story of this old jail that feels similar to me. As early as 1875, a structure near the corner of Grace and Wisconsin (then High Street) was referred to as the old jail:

A 1903 article appears to speak with some authority about the provenance of the jail:

While these residents would have lived in a time much closer to when this structure was supposedly used as a jail, the problem is that I see no references to a Georgetown jail in older newspapers. (An 1810 ordinance by the city of Georgetown did authorize the creation of a jail or penitentiary. So some sort of a jail almost certainly existed at some point.)

So maybe this old stone wall really was a jail. Or maybe it was just an old stone wall that started to get called an old jail. In either event, it’s long gone…

The OGB agenda for this month reveals a few new stores on the horizon. They are:

The jeweler, Swarovski, is apparently taking over the space currently occupied by Wolford at 1234 Wisconsin Ave. This would be a fairly quick swap-out, since Wolford has only been there since 2023.

The next filing is somewhat cryptic. It is for 1420 Wisconsin Ave, the former M&T Bank (and legendary Commander Salamander before that). The materials do not even hint at what is proposed to take over this space, but I have been told that a restaurant is planned. The application itself is for minor changes to the windows and the rear of the building, so we’ll just have to wait more to find out what the ultimate plans are.

One more OGB filing far from the commercial corridors may raise some eyebrows. The application relates to 2920 R St., the Beall-Washington house, or more popularly known at the Katharine Graham house. It has been owned for over 20 years by Mark Ein, but it has remained vacant and in increasingly poor shape over that time. Ein has previously proposed to make renovations of the house, which were objected to by the immediate neighbors. You can read about the testy affair here.

That article details the fight in 2014 over the proposed addition. The proposal was not approved. But in a testament to how long this fight has been going on, the new materials include elements of the eleven year old submission, showing the current conditions. The new plans again call for an addition to the east side of the historic building:

I think everyone in the neighborhood looks forward to this historic property finally being restored and brought back to life (beyond getting used once a year to host Ein’s parties). But as far as I can tell, this new proposal is not substantially different from the earlier proposals, which were shot down. So it remains to be seen whether the outcome will be different this time. We’ll see.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the weekly news round up:

• The river levels will be rising dramatically through the day today, reaching a peak around 8 pm. There will be moderate flooding all along the waterfront as a result.
• Still time to bike to work today!
• Koryouri Urara sushi set to open May 20th.

The FedEx store at 3329 M St. is closing on May 24th. The closest store will now be the one in Glover Park.

This is a setback for Georgetown, as this location has long served as a convenient spot to handle larger print/scanning jobs, on top of the ordinary package services. A lesser known service they offer is to hold your Fedex packages for you when you don’t want to risk them getting stolen. (UPS offers a similar service at their N St. location). You can now have the packages re-routed to Glover Park, but that will be less convenient for many.

While the current store is a Fedex, longer time residents will remember it as the Kinkos. This predecessor of the FedEx store occupied the building since at least the early 90s:

So this will be the first time in over at least 30 years that you won’t be able to get copies at this location. Maybe we just don’t need copies like we used to, but it’s a shame nonetheless to lose a functional business like this.