The Georgetown Metropolitan

Photo by Victoria Pickering.

• City Tavern Club sold to Cechi Group, which plans to maintain it as an event space.
• Just an update from my Barnes and Noble article, apparently they do plan on having a coffee shop on the third floor. They are aiming to open it by the spring.

Late last week, my neighbors on 33rd St. woke up to find no parking signs plastered up an down the block. This is not a rare phenomenon. But what was particularly irksome was that the permit claimed the entire block for a whole month. This would be unprecedented. So I dug into the permit and here’s what I found.

First of all, while the permit is good for 30 days, my understanding is that it will be a moving project and once they are done with a block, the restrictions will be removed. It looks like they are going to take about 3-4 days a block, which is a pain, but is far better than 30 days. Also, while the restrictions are post on both sides, it looks like the work is mostly on the east side and they are not demanding cars be moved from the west side of the street.

So the parking restrictions are annoying but not the end of the world. But what is really irking me (and anyone I mention this to) is that this work is involving digging a trench. But this trench is getting dug in a street that just was repaved last year!! This is such a wasteful destruction of public infrastructure. But surely it’s for a good cause?

Eh, about that. This is what it’s for:

It’s for a slightly upgraded business internet service. That’s it. Our streets were nicely repaved just last year, but that gets to be thrown into the dumpster because AT&T wants to make a buck.

Looking through permits, this work has been going on across the city. This particular job appears to be heading up 33rd St. and spreading on Volta and Q. It may spread beyond that in Georgetown, and I’m digging for answers on that question.

And it’s not just our nicely paved streets that AT&T is being allowed to vandalize. As part of the digging, they spray paint all the sewer and gas lines going into each house. So now our sidewalk and street look like this:

And, of course, they only just replaced all these bricks a year or two ago. So these neon lines will be with us for a long time.

I levied a complaint with DDOT for this wasteful practice. They acknowledged that they are supposed to coordinate work like this with plans for repaving. But “it just fell through the cracks”. Of course, falling through the cracks doesn’t apparently lead to any consequences for the massive telecom company. Only residents and taxpayers.

I will be asking AT&T to come before the ANC and explain this work, why we had zero notice, and how much more of it we’re going to have to endure. I’ll keep you posted on that.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• More on Call Your Mother getting its zoning relief.
• Large office-to-residential project still trying to move forward.

Feeling like it’s 2011 again, I went to visit the Barnes and Noble the other day. The bookstore, newly returned to its location at M and Thomas Jefferson, felt both familiar and strange. Come check it out with me!

Right off the bat, the entrance might throw you off, were you to have magically appeared here from 13 years ago. The old entrance was through a vestibule on the corner, not the mid-block entrance that the Nike Store created. But that’s really neither here nor there, in terms of the experience.

Once you enter, you see a spacious first floor that is part new releases and part gift shop:

(You also might notice that they kept the Hoya-themed gym floor that Nike installed)

I was a little surprised that they did not use this first floor for the coffee shop. But I guess putting it upstairs would force customers past the bookshelves. It does, however, leave a somewhat empty feel to the first floor (an excessive spaciousness that afflicted the Nike Store too):

The second story is where the real book-heavy sections begin:

As you may recall, in its old iteration the store had a large music section on the second floor. It also had the Starbucks there. Again this new iteration appears to have located its coffee shop even higher up as it does not appear on the second story.

Onward to the third story I expected to finally find the coffee shop. But no. There’s not one there either. They really did build the store without a coffee shop. That seems mad to me, because coffee shops and bookstores go so well together. And in Georgetown specifically, opening a coffee shop seems like a no brainer for generating foot traffic. Maybe they’re planning on adding one later?

One section I was pleased to find was the magazine section:

In the old Barnes and Noble you could find a huge variety of magazines. Moreover you could find a good selection of dry political journals that hardly anyone read. Since my girlfriend (now wife) worked for one of those journals that hardly anyone read, it was nice to at least see them on the newsstand. The selection of magazines at the new store is much smaller than the old one, which probably reflects a decline in publishing generally rather than a choice by B&N. It does have a tiny vestigial dry political journal section though!

Overall, the store certainly is a genuine full service bookstore. It’s not a sparse and token offering of books like the short-lived Amazon bookstore was or what you’ll find in airports these days. But without a cafe, I don’t know that it will restore its place as a prime “third place” like it once was. We’ll see…

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Call Your Mother receives thumbs up from BZA.
• I keep on linking to news about Ostera Mozza, apologies. But it is really a big deal for the neighborhood’s dining scene. Here’s one more.

There will be a Volta Park clean up this Sunday morning from 8:30 to 10:30. See you there!

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Osteria Mozza is now open.
• Round up of last week’s ANC meeting.

Well, last week’s election likely disappointed a lot of my readers. But win or lose, it’s important that we all vote when we can. And here is how Georgetown voted:

President

Harris and Walz carried Georgetown comfortably with 82% of the vote. Trump got about 13%. That’s about the same split that Biden and Trump got in 2020 (Biden actually got 84% last time, while Trump was right on the same 13%).

Despite dropping out and endorsing Trump, RFK Jr. still got 39 votes (which was about 0.75%). There were 178 write-ins and 49 people just didn’t choose a candidate.

Trump only got about 7% of the vote city-wide, which makes Georgetown a more Trump-favoring neighborhood than the average. But it’s far from the Trumpiest neighborhood in DC. That is, surprisingly, Hill East.

Council

The only ostensibly competitive election for DC Council this year was for the two At-Large seats. One can go to a Democrat and the other has to go to someone not registered as a Democrat. In recent years that’s meant it goes to a former Democrat who just pretends to be an independent. That trend continued this year. Robert White was the Democratic nominee and won one of the seats easily. Citywide he garnered 62% of the vote. In Georgetown he also was the leading vote getter, but only received 30% of the vote. (This is a weird vote to tally. Voters are given two votes, so if everyone voted both votes the most any one candidate could get is 50%. With White winning 62% of the vote citywide, it’s clear a lot of people just vote once and stop there.)

Christina Henderson is the faux-independent for this election cycle. She got 23% of the citywide vote to secure the second At-Large seat. In Georgetown she got a lot closer to White with 11% of the vote.

By far the biggest vote getter for this seat in Georgetown was “undervote” (i.e. didn’t vote for one or both the slots). That came in at 46% of the vote.

For the Ward Two seat, the race was even less competitive. Brooke Pinto ran unopposed and won 81% of the vote in Georgetown (which is about what she got Wardwide). Her biggest “competitor” was undervote, which got 15% of the total. The 81% tally is an increase over Pinto’s Georgetown total she received four years ago when she got 77%. That, however, was a contested election, with Dupont’s Randy Downs making an independent run.

Initiative 83

The only really competitive ballot line for DC this year was for Initiative 83. This would change how we vote in DC by introducing ranked choice voting and semi-open primaries. Ultimately though, it wasn’t even close. The initiative won easily across the city, with 73% of the vote. (Which really should not have come as a surprise since literally no ballot initiative has ever lost in DC). This came despite opposition to the measure from the DC Democratic party, which (probably correctly) views this change as a minor erosion of its power in the city.

Georgetown backed the measure by a similar share. Of the people that voted either yes or no, the yeses totaled 71% of the vote. (Honestly given that Georgetown has a higher number of non-Democrats, you’d think it would do even better.)

As someone who has long been advocating for a change along these lines, I was thrilled to see it win. But unfortunately it is no self-activating. The Council needs to actually ratify the change via the budget. There was some talk that if the initiative passed without getting support from African-American voters that the Council could use that to ignore the results. However, even in Ward 8 the measure won with 71% of the vote. The lowest ward-wide vote for it was Ward 4, which is historically a Black ward (although lesser so these days) and it still gave the measure 68.5%.

So if the Council nonetheless chooses to ignore the will of the voters, it won’t have much of a leg to stand on to do it.

ANC

Oh, I almost forgot the ANC. Six of us ran for reelection and were all unopposed. Not surprisingly we all won with North Korea-like voting totals.

The student commissioners are graduating in the spring and thus did not run again. No one made the ballot given the difficulty in getting qualified signatures on campus in the middle of the summer. But at least two students announced write-in candidacies. Who actually won those contests will be announced soon.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Dikembe Mutombo’s legacy at GU.
• Call Your Mother’s building just sold. (This shouldn’t impact the still pending zoning case).

Hello and welcome to the November Northwest Georgetown ANC update!

Parking

I wanted to jump right into it with a question I hear about all the time: parking.

This is obviously a perennial problem for Georgetown, but several factors seem to have converged to make this problem even worse. Those include the rise of work at home, the shopping/dining renaissance that Georgetown has experienced in recent years, and the collapse of enforcement during the height of Covid. There’s probably nothing to be done about the first factor. And there’s probably nothing we’d want to do to erase the second factor. And that leaves the third: enforcement.

The simple fact is that a lot of people learned a lot of bad driving-related behaviors between 2020 and 2022 (or so) and it will take a lot of effort to unlearn them. The worst of these behaviors involve reckless driving, but for this particular topic it’s enough to point out that a lot of people figured out that they could drive to Georgetown and park all day long without any consequences. This was literally true for several years when the city simply stopped giving tickets. And sadly it has continued to be effectively true as the city’s enforcement efforts have come up way short.

I have been involved with several efforts to increase the scope and effectiveness of the parking enforcement, particularly for my district. One of these initiatives grew out of the Georgetown Community Partnership with the university. Through its annual transportation survey, Georgetown determined that a large number of students and staff of the school were coming and parking illegally in west Georgetown.1 The school acknowledged that this a problem and committed to work with the GCP to address it.

This effort led to periodic meetings with the Department of Public Works (DPW), which maintains the parking enforcement for the city. DPW agreed to increase the amount of enforcement around the university (i.e. west Georgetown, Burleith and Foxhall Village). I’m sure my constituents are skeptical, but DPW has reported that it now dedicates two parking enforcement officers to this area every morning. (And this is strictly an anecdote, but Georgetown did start getting complaints from its staff about how many tickets they were getting.)

But this is clearly not enough. So I wanted to describe several longer term fixes that are coming online or are just over the horizon:

More License Plate Readers

It’s important to understand how parking enforcement is currently handled. An enforcement officer needs to first see a car without a Zone 2 sticker and manually log it in his or her hand-held device. Then he or she has to come back more than two hours later, notice the same car, and then manually record the violation. The agents can get good at this, but there is only so many cars a human can track and record like this.2 It leaves a great deal of wiggle room for our daily scofflaws.

The answer to this is to use automatic plate readers. These are scanners attached to DPW vehicles which enable the agent to simply drive down a block and all the cars will be logged into the system. And the same cameras will tell the agent that a car on the block has been parked for more than two hours. This increases an agent’s ability to patrol by an order of magnitude. Now an agent can patrol an entire neighborhood in the time it used to take him or her to do a handful of blocks.

But the problem is that currently DPW has only ten such license plate readers for the whole city. That means that we simply cannot expect Georgetown (let alone west Georgetown specifically) to get constant coverage from one or more of these readers. The good news is that the city is looking to increase the number of these license plate readers from ten to one hundred. The “yes but” news is that the Council has not yet authorized this expansion. It is currently before the Committee for Public Works, chaired by Councilmember Brianne Nadeau. (So if you’d like to help: send her an email!)

Reimbursable Detail

Hopefully the license plate readers will finally get funded and purchased in the near future. However other options are also potentially coming. One of the more interesting ideas being considered would be reimbursable details for parking enforcement.

“Reimbursable details” is a term which refers to a program whereby private businesses can arrange with the city to be assigned MPD officers to provide additional security. It’s win-win: the business gets the dedicated policing, and the MPD officers get paid overtime.

The idea being considered is to extend this concept to parking enforcement. Essentially organizations like Georgetown University would be allowed to fund their own dedicated parking enforcement officers. In conjunction with the GCP, these officers would focus exclusively on west Georgetown, Burleith, and Foxhall Village.

The bill is currently in front of that same Council committee chaired by Coucilmember Nadeau. I am hopeful it will be passed by next spring. This has the potential to dramatically increase the amount of parking enforcement in our neighborhood, which could finally “unlearn” all those bad habits adopted during the height of Covid.

Georgetown Visitation

Another likely source of the daily parking crunch in west Georgetown is Georgetown Visitation. We are working with the school to address the situation of students or staff parking around the school all day. The school’s zoning order states that Visi is supposed to prohibit this behavior. Unfortunately, this appears to be another case of learned bad behavior. For instance, one resident reported to me the other day that she asked a Visitation student from Virginia why she was parking all day on 35th St. The answer was that she didn’t have anyone to car pool with (a requirement to park on campus) and so she just takes her chances with the tickets. Her luck is mostly good on that front.

In a meeting with the school recently, the leadership committed to doing more to “police” around the school for this. To that end, if you do see a car frequently parked by a Visi student or staff near the school. Please let me know and I will pass the report on to the school (2e02@anc.dc.gov).

In short: Yes, parking is an issue and we are working on it!

Leaf Collection

The city is rolling out its annual fall leaf collection effort very soon. Like last year, the collecting will occur in stages, depending on your location.

Georgetown is split into two zones for these purposes: 2C and 2D. The letters are all that actually matter. So basically if you live east of Wisconsin, you’re in group C and if you live west of Wisconsin, you’re in group D.

The way it will work is that when you’re time comes, you are instructed to gather all the leaves that you want collected (including leaves from street trees) into the tree boxes on your block. If there are no tree boxes by your house, just rake them into a pile by the curb. You do not need to bag the leaves.

To avoid people gathering the leaves too early and them simply blowing or washing away, the city is not publishing a pick up schedule ahead of time. You will be alerted with a door hanger and online two weeks ahead of the pick up time. (I’ll also try to give you a heads up). You will be given a date at which point the leaves should be gathered. For what it’s worth, the city is starting with group A at the end of October.

There is a map to track the progress here.

New Embassy in Our District

Our little neck of Georgetown is getting another embassy3 (or diplomatic mission, at least). The Embassy of Romania is taking over the former Long & Foster building at the corner of Reservoir and Wisconsin. I do not believe this will be the actual main embassy building, since Romania currently uses a former mansion on Embassy Row. So it will likely be a supplemental facility.

The building has its own lot, so I do not believe there will be any diplomatic parking spaces taken from Reservoir or Wisconsin, but I will report to you all if there will be.

Reelection

I am running for reelection! I am the only candidate on the ballot so I decided to spare people from more political signs or door knockers. But if you want to discuss any issue affecting you in our district, don’t hesitate to reach out at 2e02@anc.dc.gov! Even though I have no formal competition this year, I still want to earn your vote!

Quick Updates:

• Nice leaf peeping map for Georgetown.
• ANC meeting Monday night.
• The tavern at 33rd and Wisconsin has changed its name from Creme to the Lobby. The same management remains and, rest assured, that the terms agreed to during the liquor license process will continue to apply. The agreement runs with the license, so name or even ownership changes don’t affect the agreement. The tavern will likely open within a month or two.

Happy Thanksgiving!!

1

By “illegally” I mean they park for more than 2 hours without a Zone 2 sticker. Students and staff are also not even supposed to park for less than 2 hours under school guidelines, but obviously the city can’t enforce that. In case you’re wondering, Georgetown undergrads are also not permitted to have a car even if they live off campus.

2

There is also a daily shift change that complicates matters. One agent may first notice the car, but he or she may leave before two hours has passed. The car will still be in the “system” so another agent will be able to give a ticket during the second shift. But they might be less likely to notice the car the second time around since they didn’t log it the first time.

3

I say “another” since we already have the African Union embassy.