The Georgetown Metropolitan

The house at 3337 erupted into flames Saturday morning. It drew a huge response from the DC fire department. By the time it was out, it appears to have destroyed the entire interior of the house (at least the front rooms).

From what GM heard, it was an electric fire. Thankfully nobody was in the house at the time. GM heard from a neighbor that the residents were actually just coming home from a trip to California on Saturday. Continue reading →

Photo by Olli Thompson.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Historical graffiti found on canal lock.
• It doesn’t look like there’s any funding for it anymore, but there’s a meeting tonight on the proposed extension of the streetcar to Georgetown tonight.

1600 block of Wisconsin Ave.

Photo by Jennifer.

The original Dolcezza location has closed for renovations. This is according to the sign on the front door:

As the sign indicates, the location should be reopened in March. That the store is remodeling came as a bit of a surprise to GM since the store underwent a pretty extensive remodel just a few years ago.

And that remodel was itself a bit of a surprise since as of late 2013 the plan appeared to be to close this location. The idea was to move within Georgetown closer to the busy foot traffic of M St. As someone who lives approximately 50 steps from Dolcezza, GM was distraught over the possibility of the move. But then the renovations happened. And now they’re happening again. So it seems likely they’ll be sticking around Q and Wisconsin for a while. Continue reading →

Photo by Mark Andre.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Nice piece on the Mt. Zion cemetery.
• Miss Daisy Pebbles Sewell, resident of 27th and P St., who was probably the oldest member of the historic Georgetown African-American community passed away

1300 block of 33rd St.

This week on Georgetown Time Machine, GM visits Water St. below the Whitehurst Freeway.

This is a fairly straightforward edition. The date is crystal clear from the photo itself, which states that it’s from July 11, 1991. The photo was taken in conjunction with a rehabilitation project that was performed on the Whitehurst. (Another such rehab project would be performed in the late 90s).

There’s not a lot that’s particularly striking about this photo except the obvious. Namely, the giant parking lot which once stood where a the Georgetown Waterfront Park now is.

The photo is taken from approximately the intersection with Potomac and Water. This is what it looks like today:

As other photos from the same set indicate, there were still railroad tracks down the center of Water St. and K St. at this point: Continue reading →

Photo by Augie Ray.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Descendants of people enslaved by Georgetown University press for reparations.
• A nice summation of what the opening of an Amazon bookstore “means”.

C & O Canal

The already precarious M St. dining scene took a sizable blow over the past month as three different restaurants closed. The decline of restaurants is a long term trend that GM has been documenting for a while. While the recent closures are largely consistent with this long term trend, it is isolated along the eastern end, which has up till now been somewhat more resilient.

The closures (first reported by the Georgetowner) are Unum, Maxime’s (next door) and Pier 2934 (across the street). Unum was a well regarded, if not particularly high profile, restaurant that replaced Mendocino, another relatively well regarded restaurant which closed in 2012. (Mendocino itself replaced the beloved Geppetto’s Pizza, which was the highlight of GM’s family trip to DC in 1986:

Maxime’s replaced the short-lived Rialto, which itself replaced the long-standing Guard’s. Pier 2934 was a reinvention of its predecessor Little Viet Garden as a cajun crab house. This format is apparently popular for Vietnamese restaurants in the suburbs, but this is the second attempt at it in Georgetown that ended in closure (Yummi Crawfish was the other). Continue reading →