The Georgetown Metropolitan

Georgetown Waterfront

Washingtonian magazine published a piece last week about an interesting project that uses Wikipedia data to identify the most famous person associated with each city, town, and (in some cases) neighborhood. For Georgetown, that person turns out to be John F. Kennedy. While this comes at no surprise, it doesn’t answer a more interesting question: who is the most famous person who’s actually from Georgetown?

GM doesn’t have a definitive answer, but he’s got a couple candidates:

Olivia Wilde

Olivia Wilde is a successful television and Hollywood actress, most famous for her role on the medical drama House. She has also performed on stage and even directed a recently released movie (Booksmart).

Wilde was born in New York, but raised in Georgetown. She is the daughter of Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, DC-based journalists and prominent socialites. (Leslie Cockburn ran unsuccessfully for Congress representing Rappahannock County, VA last year). She attended Georgetown Day School for high school.

Rostam Batmanglij

Rostam Batmanglij is a musician most famous for being in Vampire Weekend, a group he helped form at Columbia University. In that band he contributed significantly towards the group’s sound by handling keyboards and backing vocals. He split with the band in 2016 and is now a solo artist performing simply under the name Rostam.

Like Wilde, Batmanglij is also the child of talented parentage. His mother is Najmieh Batmanglij, who is a famous cook and author specializing in Iranian cooking. The family lived on 35th St. (the house just sold for $3 million). Batmanglij also attended Georgetown Day School Potomac School. Continue reading →

Photo by Bill Starrels.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• GM noticed that the fountain is finally on at the waterfront.
• A large building with lots of retail had been planned for the parking lot across from Cafe Milano. But construction never started, and now the developers are pitching a much more residential-focused project.

Key Bridge

Photo by Bill Starrels.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• How an Irishman became the whiskey chief at Ri Ra, by way of Atlanta.
• 31st St. bridge closing for a year and a half starting next week.

Rock Creek

As GM mentioned last week, the East Village red Ferraris have multiplied. He went by the block yesterday and conveniently found them all on the same block.

GM noted three years ago that the collection of two Ferraris–a Ferrari California and a Ferrari F12berlinetta–cost about $500,000. Now they’re joined by a Ferrari 488, which costs at least $250,000. So that brings the grand total to $750,000 worth of Ferrari on the block. Continue reading →

Photo by Catherine Shyu.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Updates to the plans to build condos over Gypsy Sally’s.
• Unsurprisingly, there’s basically no housing in Georgetown set aside for middle or lower income residents. (GM can actually think of a couple units, but the totals still basically round down to zero percent.)

2800 block of M St.

Women are woefully underrepresented in the various memorials and monuments around DC, and a Georgetown teen wants to change that. Raya Kenney came up with the idea of creating a memorial in DC for the women who worked on the Home Front during World War II. Lots of people come up with ideas like this, but it’s rare for anybody–let alone a teen–to form a non-profit and enlist the aid of a Congressional rep to actually get it built. Kenney has done both. Continue reading →