The Georgetown Metropolitan

Photo by Marc Andre.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• GM is hearing that Scheele’s has been sold and the new business owner is taking over in two weeks.
• Wolfgang Puck’s CUT is supposed to be opening in the Rosewood hotel by the end of July. But that’s today and it doesn’t appear quite open yet.

2700 block of P St.

Q St. in Georgetown is blessed with a rare collection of beautiful mature American elm trees. The group miraculously survived the Dutch elms disease epidemic, and stands as a virtual museum to how streets across this country used to look. But while it was not devastated by the disease, it still is touched by it. And so we still occasionally lose one of these giants every so often. And this month we lost a lovely one.

The tree stood at the northeast corner of Q st. and 31st St. It was just next to Nancy Taylor Bubes’ house (famous for her elaborate Halloween decorations) and across the street from the apartment building where John Denver wrote “Take Me Home Country Roads”.

Of course, the location was not really what made this tree so grand. It was a massive elm, displaying all the traits that made this species so popular in the first place. It had a huge cascading vase-like shape that bathed a huge swath of that intersection in cooling shade. Branches shooting off from the trunk were themselves as massive as the mature trunks of other trees. It was stunning.

But last fall it started to show signs of illness, with multiple dead branches. And it got worse this spring. With other species, the city perhaps would cut back the dead branches and try to get some more years out of the tree. But with American elms, it’s best to cut them down fast to prevent spreading the disease.

Hopefully the city will plant a new American elm in its place. New cultivars of the species, like the Princeton elm, have shown resistance to Dutch elms disease and have been planted around the country in an attempt to revive the tree’s place in cities and towns. As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best is today. That’s especially true if today’s the day you cut down another tree. (Although, this is more metaphorically than literally true. July is a terrible time to plant a tree! The city will likely wait till the fall at the earliest.)

RIP, you lovely tree.

Photo by Ehpien.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Capital One signage now going up on old Nathans. Blech.
• The fantastic story behind one of the piano players at the Georgetown Piano Bar.

3200 block of P St.

The Dean and Deluca is now officially dead. The end of a 27 year era. But what would you like to see replace it?

As GM reported, there is a federal law mandating that the building be used as a market. But that could be lots of different concepts. Here are a couple possible models that could likely satisfy that mandate:

Photo of Balducci’s in NYC by Riccoboni6.

Another High End Grocery Store

This would probably make a lot of people happy. There probably isn’t any grocer out there that replicates the high-boogie offerings of Dean and Deluca (or at least the Dean and Deluca of yesteryear). But there are a handful that would aim for the same experience within the same smaller footprint that the building offers (versus, for instance, a typical Whole Foods). Balducci’s and Wagshall’s are two regional grocers that could probably fit that bill. There are other grocers not based in DC that also deliver a market along these lines. Citerella in the New York area would be a great candidate, but there are many more just like it.

Photo of Eastern Market by Zach Stern.

Eastern Market-Style Market

Rather than having a single grocer using the space, the building could return to its roots as one of the constellation of markets that once dotted DC, including the still operating Eastern Market. Under this model, the building space is chopped up into booths with a vendor taking each space. Continue reading →

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Although they said they’d stay open till August 1st, the Dean and Deluca closed permanently on Friday.
• In other restaurant news, Moby Dick’s is supposedly closed for renovations (after just having done renovations a few years ago) but a disturbing video of rats running loose on the inside might complicate those plans.

1300 block of Wisconsin Ave.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Water, water everywhere, and not a place to take a dip? That’s the attitude most people have taken to the idea of swimming in the Potomac river by Georgetown. But if an ambitious effort is successful, Georgetown will be ground zero for river swimming in DC.

WAMU wrote this week on steps the city and others are taking to make the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers swimmable. Specifically:

In 1971, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency pressured city lawmakers to ban swimming. They passed a law making swimming or wading in the Potomac, Anacostia or Rock Creek punishable by a $300 fine or 10 days in jail.

Fast forward almost 50 years: Billions of dollars have been spent cleaning up the rivers, and some environmentalists and swimmers say it’s time to get back into the water. City leaders are talking about relaxing — if not lifting entirely — the decades-old swim ban, and discussing where swim platforms or beaches could be located.

The article concludes optimistically that within five years it may be safe and legal to swim in one or both of the rivers. This would largely be due to massive projects of DC Water to stop raw sewage from being dumped into the river.

It seems crazy that even in this day and age such a thing could occur, but it does happen with just about every heavy rain fall. That’s because in DC’s older sewage pipes, stormwater drains (i.e. the drains on the street) run into the same tunnels that take away our sewage. When rains get so heavy that these pipes can’t handle it all at once, the overflow has to go somewhere. Rather than send it back up the storm drains (or our toilets) the overflows are dumped into the area’s waterways. These spots are called combined sewage overflows, or CSOs.

To prevent the pipes from overflowing, DC Water has been building a series of gigantic underground pipes that can act as temporary reservoirs of the water until the Blue Plains treatment facility can work through the backlog. By 2023, authorities hope to be able to divert 98% of sewage overflows from the Anacostia. Additional tunnels in Alexandria and DC will be open by 2025 and 2030, respectively, which will keep similar amounts out of the Potomac. So within 12 years or so, the rivers really ought to be about as pristine as they’re going to get.

But what about swimming now? Continue reading →

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• A shop that specializes in DC-made goods is opening a location in Georgetown.
• Indochino is moving into the old Cusp space.