The Georgetown Metropolitan

The ANC will meet for its July session next Monday night via Zoom at 6:30 pm. This is the last meeting of the ANC until September due to the annual August break.

The agenda is, frankly, pretty dry. It’s mostly just small construction projects. However, one item might get a bit more spicy: the proposal to build a semi-permanent beer garden on the site of the former Latham Hotel. The proposal calls for a 300-seat outdoor dinning and drinking area located on the northern half of the 3000 M St. property. This property has been in a state of suspended construction for years as various plans fall through. At one point it was going to be a micro-unit apartment building. More recently it’s been pitched as a hotel once more. But in either event, nothing is moving forward on that front any time soon. That’s where the beer garden comes in, as a way to use the space while a final plan is generated.

A 300-seat beer garden seems genetically designed to bring out livid residents complaining about the angry neighbor trifecta of parking, noise, and trash. But GM thought similar concerns would derail the Sandlot proposal at the intersection of M and Pennsylvania, and that went through. So who knows, maybe this has a chance?

Although the complaints will likely revolve around ABC-related issues, the matter is only now being considered by the Old Georgetown Board for its architectural impact. But then again, that never prevented non-architectural concerns from derailing a project in this venue!

Here is the full agenda:

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Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Major renovations in store for Washington Harbour.
• GU requiring all faculty and staff to be vaccinated by August 9.

Last week GM explored the baby boom in Georgetown, or lack thereof. And this reminded him that he hasn’t run a piece on the overall picture of Georgetown households in quite some time. So here is a 2021 update!

First a caveat: This information comes from the American Community Survey five year estimates. As GM mentioned last week, this dataset does not attempt to create a snapshot at a particular moment, but rather makes an estimate of the respective data series over a five year time frame. So instead of saying, for example, that there are 10,000 people living in a particular area as of January 1st, it rather says that on average over the past five years there were 10,000 people living there. For relatively stable metrics it’s good enough (and all that is available for geographic areas as small as a Census tract).

Georgetown is now made up of four Census tracts, but for this purpose we can exclude two of them. The first is Census tract 2.01, which represents just Georgetown University. Secondly, we can ignore the fact that this year Census tract 1.00 (east Georgetown) was split into two tracts: 1.01 and 1.02. The data here reflects when it was just one tract.

A second caveat is that as GM also discussed last week, this data often comes with huge margins of error. GM will try to identify when that occurs.

That said, here is the data!

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Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• National memorial commemorating Georgetown’s role in the slave trade proposed by Del. Norton.
• Here’s a nice background on the organization behind the effort.

The photo above is taken from the Washington Post on March 14, 1915. It accompanies an article hailing the growth at the Dumbarton Club. This was a club that once stood around Mount Hope, the mansion at the southwest corner of what is now R and Wisconsin.

The club was founded in February of 1900 by a group of Georgetowners wanting to build a country club for the community:

By the time it opened later that spring, the members had ambitious plans to construct tennis and croquette courts, and even a golf course:

Ultimately the club did build a nine hole course in Burleith:

The House of the Good Shepherd was an orpahnage that once stood where Washington International School is:

(It’s not clear from the contemporaneous sources, but it would seem that the golf course displaced the Black residents from using the area as a picnic grounds.)

Although golf appears to have been a big part of the club’s existence in its early years, that went away. It appears that the real estate development of Burleith pushed it out, as described in 1915:

By 1915 (the date of the first photo above) tennis was the primary focus on the club:

The courts appear to have taken up the south side of the property, essentially where the Long and Fosters is now:

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Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Looks like someone built what appears to be an illegal EV charging station at Prospect and 33rd.
• Where to get an epic ice cream sandwich in Georgetown (and elsewhere).