The Georgetown Metropolitan

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 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. Continue reading →

Photo by Mike Maguire.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• The New York Times writes about Georgetown Visitation’s history with slavery (which GM wrote about back in April).
• ANC chair helps subdue shoplifter at 7-11.

1500 block of Wisconsin Ave.

Photo by DCPL.

This week on Georgetown Time Machine, GM is featuring a photo from the DC public library archives. It is an undated shot looking upriver from the Aqueduct bridge towards a series of boathouses.

As you may know, the Aqueduct Bridge stood approximately where the Key Bridge is now. Here it is when it was still standing after the construction of the Key Bridge: Continue reading →

Photo by DCPL Commons.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Lovely painting of the old Georgetown waterfront.
• The Clydes restaurant group (minus Old Ebbitt Grill) was sold to the Graham family company.

1300 block of Wisconsin Ave.

Over the weekend, Georgetown resident and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd attracted a great deal of criticism for a fairly out of touch column she wrote. Without getting into too much detail, essentially over the last week or so a lot of people on social media criticized her for being an out of touch socialite too chummy with powerful friends. This is house she responded Sunday:

Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.

I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.

Continue reading →

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.