The Georgetown Metropolitan

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• How a Book Hill boutique is dealing with Covid.
• The Sandlot opened in Georgetown over the weekend, anyone go?

Lover’s Lane

Monday night, ANC2E voted to support a proposal from DDOT to continue the improvements along Water St., including the extension of the separated bike lane.

Serious efforts to improve Water St. stretch back to (at least) 2015. That’s when the BID, led by its transportation director Will Handsfield, hired Toole Design to create a plan to improve pedestrian and bicycle safety along Water St., as well as improve the traffic management.

Central to the plan that Toole came up with was a separated bike lane on the south side of Water St. After some contentious discussions, this proposal was implemented by DDOT in 2017, and the results can be seen today.

However, two elements of the plan Toole created were not initially adopted by DDOT: the extension of the bike lane to the Capital Crescent Trailhead and the creation of a small traffic circle at 34th st. Both of these proposals were put on the back burner due to the imminent Key Bridge rehabilitation project, which needed the space.

With the rehab project complete, DDOT is now moving to complete the vision created by Toole.

The overarching goal with this last piece is to discourage cars from heading west of 34th St. Take a trip down to Water St. on a Saturday afternoon and you can see immediately how unsafe it is. Cars come driving all the way down Water St. looking for free parking, and then need to turn around when they don’t find it. Pedestrians and cyclists are also forced to walk down the center of the street since there are no sidewalks. It’s a combustible mix and it is only a matter a time before someone gets killed or maimed.

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Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Another look at the fight over the Transformers.
• How the comprehensive plan is charting DC’s future, including a future where Georgetown’s waterfront sinks below the river.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• The new beer garden at the intersection of M and Pennsylvania opens this weekend.
• GU continues to record lower Covid cases week-over-week.

You may have noticed the construction of the above unusual looking structure along the canal recently (GM jokingly called them flying buttresses). What is it about and what’s going on with the canal generally? GM is here to help!

Like real flying buttresses, this structure (which is in the canal just west of Wisconsin Ave.) was put up in order to stabilize the adjoining wall. Last year, Georgetown Heritage, the non-profit that is leading the effort to restore the canal through Georgetown, became alarmed at the state of the old stone wall on the south side of the canal and the way it was bulging out. With the help of structural engineers, it determined that the wall was at risk of a catastrophic failure. It alerted NPS to the crisis and even commissioned blueprints for this support structure.

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Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Georgetown a good place to be old!
• They finally released a trailer for that movie about the Drath murder. (The way they’ve held back this movie makes GM think it’s pretty bad!)

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, GM is visiting upper Wisconsin Ave. The photo comes from the DDOT archives.

GM believes the photo is from the 1960s, based upon the cars and the fact that there are no streetcar tracks down the center of the road (the streetcars stopped in 1962).

To get your bearings, the large building up the hill in the center of the shot is now the British School. That is just about the only building on the east side of the street that is still standing today.

The most notable building in the photo is the Safeway at the center:

This was the first Safeway building at this location. It was built in 1955:

Despite being built during the height of suburbanization, the store was built right up to the street. To be sure, it was still surrounded by a large parking lot, but there was somewhat of a consistent streetscape. Interestingly, before its construction, this stretch of Wisconsin Ave. was just parking lots:

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