The embassy for Romania appears to be opening offices in the former Long and Foster building at Wisconsin Ave. and Reservoir Rd. This information comes from a recent filing with the old Georgetown Board.
The filing relates primarily to security upgrades for the building:
Recently I’ve been wondering what was going into this building. Peeking in I could see they were constructing teller windows, which made me suspect a bank was moving in. But now I see that the windows will be manned by consular employees, not bank employees.
I do not believe this will be the capital “E” embassy for Romania. They currently use the far more elegant Embassy Row mansion on Sheridan Circle for that:
So I think the Georgetown building will be strictly a consular office, but time will tell.
Yesterday I told you about how leaf collection season is coming soon. But that also obviously means that leaf peeping season is even sooner. Here is an article I’ve written in the past giving advice on how best to enjoy this part of the fall around Georgetown:
Fall foliage is a little late this year in Georgetown due to the warmer days. But it’s right around the corner. And when it arrives, there are plenty places to take it in right here without hopping off for the country.
In 2013, Casey Trees pulled together some recommended walking routes around the city to take in the brightly changing leaves. In Georgetown it recommended a meandering trail through the heart of the village to enjoy its sugar maples:
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. So please read on!
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.
Georgetown Main Street’s annual Fall Market is returning this weekend! The events will take place along Wisconsin Ave. from N St. up to Reservoir Rd. It will include over 34 businesses. And there will be an activity hub at the Chase Bank lot with pretzels, kettle corn and books!
At our last ANC meeting, the house at 2900 Dumbarton St. came up for review. The owner is interested in converting it to several apartments. But what caught my eye about the property is that it is clearly another example of a former commercial building buried deep in the residential portions of Georgetown. I decided to resuscitate my long dormant series called Ghosts of Georgetown’s Market Past to dig into the history of the building!
But first: why did I instantly conclude that this was originally a commercial building? It’s due to the fact the door opens up horizontally on the corner. It is literally a corner shop. That almost always indicates that the building was constructed to host a shop on the first floor (often with the shop keeper living on the second). It’s also probably not a coincidence that the building is catty-corner to Scheele’s.
So I dove into the local newspaper archives to see what I could find. And right away I learned that while it was a commercial building, the business operating there was not a market. At least not during the period I could find evidence for. It was a real estate office:
Here is another announcement:
Hill bought the agency in 1942. I was able to find only a couple more ads listing this office’s address:
Perhaps the reason I only found a couple of ads using this office address is that Hill appears to have stopped using it only a year later:
Oddly enough, I ran into a dead end trying to find older businesses at this address. But then I realized that Hill changed the address of the building. Previously it was 1326 29th St. Searching that address opened up the history. As I originally suspected, it did host a grocery store. At least as of 1918 when a Mrs. L.P. Bernsdorff operated a market there.
A year earlier it was apparently the R.W. Thompson grocery store:
But most of the hits I found for this property related to the rental apartment on the second story. And as this was near the hear of Georgetown’s Herring Hill district, the housing was used by Black families:
I could find no references to a commercial establishment at either address after the 1940s. So It appears the property was a grocery store in the early part of the 20th century, converted to a real estate office for a stretch around the 1940s, and then it either was used for an office or otherwise converted wholly to residential.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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