The Georgetown Metropolitan

This week marks the beginning of August, and with it my annual break. Here is my paean to the eight month, see you in September!:

August is here. And it is perhaps the greatest time of year for Georgetown.

Sure, this month is tagged with the “dog days” of summer gibe. And the heat of July is still a houseguest with its feet comfortably sprawled on our couch, with its bags not remotely packed upstairs.

And gardens get long in the tooth this month too. Black-eyed Susans wilt. Geraniums burst further out of their pots, knowing the end is near. Petunias get leggy and brown. Even in its overgrown state, an August garden is one succumbing to decay.

And despite the fact that school is still a month away, camps across the city shut down, as if we’re all French and heading off to the Cote D’Azur in our Renaults for four weeks.

But August is still one of the greatest times of year in Georgetown. True, the holiday season fills Georgetown streets with twinkling lights and festive greens. And surely the scent of magnolias and the sight of Yoshinos puts springtime on top. But August is close behind.

Because, in August, Georgetown is empty.

The streets are empty. You can park your car like it’s a suburb in the 60s. The pools are empty because the interns left. The sidewalks are empty because even tourists have better sense than to visit DC in the summer.

Despite the stifling, turgid air, you can breathe. You can walk into a restaurant at 7:00 on a Friday and get a seat. You can even walk on M St. on a weekend.

And like spring, it is great because it is brief. We don’t ultimately love Georgetown because it’s empty, but because it’s decidedly not. That restaurant walking you to a table would be out of business if it were like that year round. Those streets without parking in September mean more people coming and keeping our thriving businesses thriving. Quiet is nice, but too much is boring.

Knowing August is fleeting is the best way to enjoy it. So enjoy it, it’s already later than you think.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly news roundup:

• Blues Alley celebrates 60 years.
• Feta restaurant closed, to be replaced with a Bibibop Asian Grill (which was what it was before Feta, oddly enough)
• Profile of the new sushi spot in the old Smith Point location.

I reported on Monday that Volta Park construction was finally going to begin that very day. But given all the delays, I think I can be forgiven holding on to a bit of skepticism that an actual activity would start up right away.

So color me pleasantly surprised when I swung by the park last night and could see for myself that they really are doing it!

So far the work mostly involved fencing going up. The fences aren’t simply going around the whole park, as you might expect, but rather appear to be marking off different areas. So for now, on off hours you can still walk through the park, but that may soon change.

But for today: hooray! It’s actually happening.

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’ve got a bit of an unsolved mystery. The photo (from the DC Historical Society) is labeled as an unidentified unpaved street in Georgetown. The date is given as a range of 1895 to 1905.

But beyond that, it’s a mystery. I thought perhaps it was somewhere in the east village. The wood frame houses were common for the Herring Hill area, mostly occupied by Black families. While that may be true, the blocks I checked it against don’t match.

There are blocks with wood frame houses on the west side as well. But I can’t match it up to any of those either.

(Another possibility is that this is a photo from another primarily black neighborhood nearby Georgetown that has since been erased for highways. This was a neighborhood on the western edge of Foggy Bottom that bordered the east side of Rock Creek.)

It’s a fascinating photo in either event. It shows what life was like on our streets 125 years ago. There were muddy streets that surely got awfully messy after a rainy day. You can understand why there used to be so many boot scrapes around!

After years of delay, the city is finally moving forward with the long planned field restoration at Volta Park. The work is scheduled to begin today and to last until the fall. Here is the press release with some more detail about the field closures and the anticipated work:

Dear Community Stakeholder:

The DC Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR) and the DC Department of General Services (DGS) are pleased to inform the community that the project to address the erosion issue at Volta Park Baseball Diamond (1555 34th Street, NW) have completed the permit process. The work on the field will begin on Monday, July 21, 2025, and the field will remain offline for the summer and into the fall until the grass has had sufficient time to root and stabilize. Meanwhile, the pool, recreation center, playgrounds, and tennis and basketball courts will remain open to the public. Please note, these amenities will only be accessible from the northern entrance at the driveway off of Q Street NW or from the two stair entrances south of the recreation center and playground off of Volta Place NW. All entrances to the field will be closed for the safety of the community. 
  
This project includes the following, among other improvements:

• Installation of a French Drainage system to address the stormwater and erosion issues;
• Installation of a new irrigation system for the baseball diamond
• Regrading the clay infill on the baseball diamond
• Repairs to the seating area
• Resod the disturbed areas and overseed all grass areas

For additional details on this project and to stay up to date, please visit the DGS webpage for this project here: https://dgs.dc.gov/node/1631006

Residents are welcome to contact DPR’s Customer Care Center at (202) 673-7647. The call line is open during regular business hours (9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.), Monday through Friday, and is closed on weekends and holidays. You may also contact us via email at dprcustomercare@dc.gov. 

Losing use of the field through the rest of the summer and into the fall is a disappointment, of course. But getting the field back into a good state is critically needed at this point. Please let me know if you have any questions or issues as the project gets underway.

(To answer one question I’m sure some people have: Yes, I believe the fence dividing the ball field from the de facto dog area is still part of the plan. I understand that there are still divided opinions on that element, but the reality is that the city insisted upon it. I hope that it comes to be appreciated as a means to help avoid conflicts over the [let’s face it] illegal off-leash dogs and people trying to use the ball field.)

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly roundup:

• Preview of hip new bar/restaurant coming to old Papparazzi space.
• Gelato place getting closer to opening at 34th and M.

This week on Georgetown Time Machine I am checking out yet another photo from the DC Historical Society. It shows the scene just west of the old Aqueduct Bridge circa 1930.

There are several notable features that jump out. The first is, of course, the fact there’s a railroad track. In case you didn’t realize it, there once was a freight rail line that went along what is now the Capital Crescent Trail. It came all the way down Water and K Streets. Trains ran on the track as late as 1985.

Here’s a train at 33rd and Water St. in the 70s:

Next, the aqueduct abutment is still around. But this photo shows the bridge superstructure that once stood on top of the abutment. By this time, the aqueduct bridge was really just a normal bridge. But it once was a real aqueduct as you can see from this 19th century photo looking south across the aqueduct from Georgetown into then rural Arlington:

The aqueduct bridge was replaced by the Key Bridge in the 1920s and torn down soon after. The bridge abutments remained for decades though. Here they are in the 1960s:

Most of them were blown up with dynamite in 1962, but they left one near the southern shore as a relic.

Finally, the last notable thing about the top photo is that it shows the entrance to the old Dempsey’s Boat House. This was a public boathouse that offered boat rentals to the public for decades in the early part of the 20th century. When Thompson’s Boathouse was opened in the 1950s, though, it was abandoned. It later burned to the ground in a spectacular 1961 fire:

History is coming somewhat in full circle though. The location of the old Dempsey’s Boathouse is the future site of the relocated Key Bridge Boathouse, which will move once Georgetown University starts building its boathouse.

As part of my survey on Georgetown establishments, I always like to parse out the various cuisines at the restaurants around the neighborhood. And so above is that chart.

As was the case last time, “American” still leads the way. Last time “Sweets” came in second. And if I were to group them all together like that again, they would still be in second. But this time I decided to break them out.

French now comes in second, and shows an uptick from 8.5% to 9.7%. In truth, Italian would be second if I grouped all the pizza places with the general Italian. But I decided not to do that.

Japanese was another big gainer, going from 4.6% to 6.7%. In nominal terms it’s a jump from 6 to 9 (reflecting to sushi boom we’ve been having).

All in all, you can get cuisines from just about every corner of the globe around Georgetown these days. Bon Appetite!

I finally got around to crunching the numbers from my latest street survey and can now present the State fo Georgetown 2025:

I’ve been doing this survey since I started this website in 2008, and so the accumulated data reflects the ebbs and flows of the Georgetown retail community. And the overall message from this year is that Georgetown is still soaring out from the Covid depths.

But before I get to the numbers, I need to issue my typical disclaimer: First, it’s important to know that my counting is more of an art than a science. The term “establishments” or “store” as used here refers to just about all commercial establishments serving the general public: retail stores, restaurants, salons, gyms, etc. I don’t count pure office space. The rule of thumb I use is if you can walk in without an appointment, I count it. But again, sometimes it’s a close call (for instance, I count realtors but not lawyers). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Overall Picture

The last time I did this survey (about 20 months ago) the story was one of a neighborhood rebounding well from Covd. And the story of this survey is that that rebound has reached escape velocity. To put numbers to that: right before Covid, I counted 509 stores in Georgetown. While that’s still down from an overall peak I counted before the mall closed, it’s still on the higher end for the neighborhood. in 2021 I counted 451 stores, an 11% drop. By 2023, though, the numbers were already back up to 464. This year the numbers have continued to climb, up to 480. That’s still down from 2019, but it’s nearly there.

I measured 89 openings and 73 closures. While that seems a jump over the last measure (62 openings and 46 closures) I was very overdue for the survey. So as a result I was measuring a longer time period. If I calculate the number of openings and closings per month the picture is a bit clearer:

The opening rate per month (the blue line) jumped from about 2.25 coming out of Covid to over 4 in 2023. It’s stayed roughly there. The closure rate per month (the red line) obviously jumped due to Covid but has settled to a little above 3 per month. In other words, since 2021 there are an average of four stores opening in Georgetown a month with three stores closing. That’s a healthy positive surplus.

Independents vs. Chains

One of the main reasons I started conducting this count was to push back against the widely held perception that Georgetown is only mall chain stores. While it may sometimes feel that way (depending on what block you’re on), as a matter of pure head count, Georgetown has always had a clear majority of independent establishments.

(Just for clarity: I don’t have a hard and fast rule for whether something is “independent”. Basically I ask: is it based in DC? Does it have fewer than five locations? But even a “no” to either might still get an independent tag. It’s a gut thing.)

I counted 303 independent shops in Georgetown. That’s essentially the same I’ve counted over the last handful surveys. What that means is that the growth in stores has come almost exclusively from chains. I counted 158 chains in 2023. Now it’s 177. But that also means that independents still dominate in terms of pure numbers, with 63% of the total.

Store Variety

The variety of establishments has remained fairly stable over the years. The largest category remains restaurants, with clothing stores a close second, and salons comfortably back at third:

Last time I noted that I created a “cannabis” category for the first time and hoped it would be a smaller number the next time I counted it. In 2023 I counted 15 such shops. This time I counted 9. Progress!

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Eric Hilton, one half of the legendary Thievery Corporation, has set up a music studio in Georgetown.
• Georgetown University received a positive reception from the Old Georgetown Board last week for their boathouse plans. They had a couple small suggestions and requests, and asked for the school to come back one more time, but expects to give the concept the green light at that point.