The Georgetown Metropolitan

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.

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.