Please see the message below from the fantastic Trees for Georgetown group!!!
Dear Georgetown Tree Lovers,
We’re hot – and so are our trees! Unlike people, however, trees can’t move into air conditioning or take a dip in a pool, river or lake. With average temperatures on the rise, how do trees manage our extreme heat, and how can we help our trees beat the heat?
Trees handle heat stress in their environment just like humans do. We call it sweating, trees call it transpiration, Too much heat for extended periods can cause excessive transpiration, leading to a loss of water within the tree. In heat stress situations, trees are losing water faster than they are absorbing it. Ultimately, that can lead to the death of trees. Young trees are especially at risk.
We can help trees combat the heat by watering. Long, deep waterings of 25 gallons a week (1.5 inches of rainfall) each week – or more, in times of extended extreme heat and/or lack of sufficient rainfall. To water, place a slow hose at the base of the tree for 30 minutes or more, occasionally moving the hose to water the entire root zone. If you have a gator bag, simply fill with water once or twice a week depending on the size of your gator bag. Also, applying 2-3 inches of mulch will help reduce evaporation from the soil. Don’t let the mulch touch the trunk of the tree!
To this end, Trees for Georgetown has hired a contractor to water, once a week, all trees newly planted during the 2023-2024 planting season in Georgetown. Watering began on July 8 and will continue until the last week of August. Ideally, we would like to continue watering until the end of October but, unfortunately, due to lack of funds, we cannot.
Trees for Georgetown is now under the auspices of Casey Trees and is no longer affiliated with the Citizens Association of Georgetown (CAG). If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to Trees for Georgetown, please make out a check to:
“Casey Trees” and write “Trees for Georgetown” in the memo line. The check should be sent to: Casey Trees, 3030 12th Street, NE, Washington, DC 20017.
As part of filing to run for ANC, the Board of Elections gives candidates the complete voter rolls. I thought it would be interesting to aggregate the data and see what it says about the make up of the Georgetown (and Burleith) electorate. Here are the results!
Total Numbers
Our ANC is broken up into eight individual single member districts (“SMDs”). The SMDs are as follow:
2e01 – Burleith and Hillandale
2e02 – The best part of Georgetown full of beautiful and smart people (i.e. northwest Georgetown)
2e03 – Western Georgetown above M St.
2e04 – Half of the Georgetown University’s campus
2e05 – Lower Georgetown
2e06 – Eastern Georgetown above M St.
2e07 – Northeast Georgetown
2e08 – The other half of Georgetown University’s campus plus some blocks just outside the gates
The map is drawn in a way to have approximately 2,000 residents in each SMD. But that doesn’t mean that they have 2,000 registered voters. It’s 2,000 residents, including those who are too young to register, non-citizens, and those that either choose not to register or keep a registration in another state. That’s just how apportionment works in this country.
So it should not come as a surprise that each SMD has fewer than 2,000 registered voters. But some of them have way less than 2,000 registered voters. You’ll not be shocked to hear that 2e04 and 2e08 (the two student SMDs) have very few registered voters. Students rarely change their registration when they attend Georgetown. SMD 2e08, which has several blocks that include non-students, clocks in at 158 registered voters, or just about 8% of the residents. But that’s huge compared with 2e04, which has just nine registered voters. That rounds down to 0% of the 2,000 resident total.
Of the other SMDs, the voter totals vary a decent amount. East Georgetown (2e06) leads the pack with 71% registration rate, with northeast Georgetown (2e07) close behind at 65%. The rest fall back a bit further with Burleith (2e01) at 61%, western Georgetown (2e03) at 57%, northwestern Georgetown at 49%, and lower Georgetown (2e05) at 46%.
The overall registration rate for all of ANC2E is about 45%. But if you take out the student SMDs it’s at about 58%. That’s pretty low compared with the rest of the city, which has a registration rate closer to 75%. I’d like to think that is mostly due to how many international residents we have here. But I fear it also reflects a level of apathy that many residents have towards voting in DC.
Registration Date
The rolls also list when each voter first registered in DC (with a big caveat I’ll get to below). This is not necessarily the date when you first registered to vote anywhere. Just when you first registered to vote in DC. (I’m not sure what date it would list if you registered in DC, Moved away and registered there, and then registered back in DC. I assume it’s the more recent date, but it’s probably not a hugely common situation.)
Aggregating the data together, you can see what the median registration date is for the whole ANC and each of the respective SMDs. While the registration rates varied quite a bit across the SMDs, the median registration date is fairly close, at least among the non-student SMDs. They are as follow:
2e01 – 1/8/2016
2e02 – 9/15/2016
2e03 – 4/13/2016
2e04 – 2/25/2022
2e05 – 11/8/2016
2e06 – 2/12/2016
2e07 – 1/3/2017
2e08 – 7/19/2022
Not surprisingly, the median date that voters in the student districts registered is fairly recently, both coming just before the last election. But for the rest of the SMDs, the dates all fall within the twelve months starting on January 2016.
I was going to list the approximate date of the voter with the oldest registration in the ANC, but then I ran square into DC’s unfortunate history with democracy. You see, I noticed that the oldest dates I was finding were all in early 1968. That didn’t seem right, but then I remembered that after the end of Home Rule in the late 19th century, there would be no reason to register in DC before the passage of the 23rd Amendment in 1961.
This amendment gave DC residents the right to vote in presidential elections, but other than the presidential election, they still had no other elections to vote in. So the earliest a (still living) District resident would have registered in DC would be sometime ahead of the 1964 election. Perhaps the data from that election is no longer available. But 1968 was a big year for DC voters. This was obviously the second presidential election they could take part in, but it also was the first year of the elected school board. This was the first local election that District residents could vote in since 1874. (As argued in the book Dream City, a great deal of DC dysfunction in the late 20th century can probably be blamed on the fact that the city was denied democracy for 100 years).
So some of the voters with 1968 registrations probably voted in the 1964 elections, but regardless of age, no one, regardless of age, registered in DC prior to 1961.
Party
Each voter’s party identification is also listed. If you suspect that Georgetown is more Republican than the rest of DC, you’re not wrong.
Approximately 5% of District voters is registered as a Republican. But in our ANC it’s 13%.
And the Democratic portion is reflectively lower. For DC-wide it’s about 77%. In our ANC it’s 62%.
Independents are also more common here. For DC the total is 16%, but in our ANC it’s 24%.
There are fewer than 100 voters here registered with the Statehood Greens, the Libertarian party, or “other”.
The party breakout for each SMD (except the student ones) is largely similar to the overall numbers. West Georgetown (2e03) has the highest Republican percentage (15%) but northeast Georgetown (2e07) has the highest number of Republicans, with 184. But it also has the highest percentage of Democrats, at 66%.
Lower Georgetown (2e05) has the highest percentage of independent voters, at 27%.
One of the best pieces of advice I got when I ran for ANC was from a former commissioner who served for many terms. He told me to not put the year of the election on my posters so I can reuse them. With that in mind, I’m dusting off my pile of campaign signs and running for reelection for ANC 2E02!
I have really enjoyed my term so far, and I hope that I have served my constituents well. My main priorities when I ran were as follow: Constituent services, pedestrian and traffic safety, and commercial revitalization. I believe I have made significant progress on each of these priorities and I will continue to hold them close to my heart if I am reelected because there is still much work to be done.
I plan to pick up my ballot petitions this week and will be around the neighborhood seeking signatures. So I many be knocking on your door soon!
That's the question we ask of @POTUS in our refreshed mural in Georgetown.
Come see for yourself how long some of those timelines are. How much of their lives our loved ones have lost. All the milestones they missed. pic.twitter.com/dXF4d0dl7s
— Bring Our Families Home Campaign (@BOFHcampaign) July 17, 2024
The hostage mural painted alongside the former Ri Ra on M St. has been updated. This new version highlights the length of time the hostages have been detained. One hostage featured has been captive since 2007.
There was a stabbing near the Safeway yesterday. Early reports indicate it was an argument that got out of hand. In other crime news, there was a robbery on O St. near 30th in the middle of the day on Tuesday.
This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m visiting one of the quintessential commercial pockets buried deep in the Georgetown neighborhood. This particular pocket is the 1200 block of 36th St. It comes from the DC Historical Society archives.
The information with the photo states that it comes from February 1965. And that should help us identify some of the shops on this stretch. Just to the left of the center of the photo is Wisemiller’s Deli. Even at 1965, Wisemiller’s was already a stalwart, having opened twelve years earlier.
Moreover, the 1789 Restaurant and the Tombs were also open by the mid 60s. But their sister bar, F. Scott’s, was not open by 1965. According to the Post archives, a barber shop occupied 1234 36th St. (the north half of what would become F. Scott’s). The other half of what would become F. Scott’s was already a restaurant, as you can see when you zoom in:
The restaurant was named Tehaan’s (which is sometimes mistakenly spelled “Tehan’s”). It operated at this location starting in 1911, according to this matchbook:
How can one forget the place where he had his first beer? I’ll never forget where my friends and I gathered: Sam Tehan’s on 36th Street in Georgetown (next to what is now the 1789). Ernestine, our waitress, made sure we were well taken care of and, as one of our group after devouring two cheeseburgers and a large plate of fries would say, “Once around again, Ernie.”
It was my freshman year at Georgetown, and I spent frequent evenings with my classmates at Tehan’s. On one of those evenings, after consuming several glasses of draft beer while listening to repeated playings of Jo Stafford’s rendition of “You Belong to Me” on the jukebox, I stood, in a burst of youthful exuberance, to propose a toast. Before I could utter a word, nearly everyone in the place shouted, “Sit down! You can’t stand up with a drink in D.C.”
Puzzled but chastened, I shrank back into my chair, where it was then explained to me that there was a District law prohibiting anyone other than bartenders and servers from standing or walking while carrying an alcoholic beverage. I never felt quite so much like the newcomer from Ohio that I was.
— Jim Smith,Potomac
That leaves the rest of the block between Wisemiller’s and N St. As far as I can tell, this whole building was operated as the Georgetown University Shop, which specialized in clothes for college students:
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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