The Georgetown Metropolitan

The Board of Zoning Adjustment is about to start their public meeting. On the agenda is the application for Call Your Mother to remain at its current location at 35th and O St. (read here for background).

If you would like to watch on, go here for instructions on how to view the meeting. Please note that the Call Your Mother item is at the end of the agenda, after at least six other matters. So it probably won’t be actually discussed for a while.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Quick summary on the Call Your Mother zoning fight.
• Reminder: Giant donated book sale this Saturday at the library.

St. Mary’s Hall is a building on the northeastern end of the Georgetown University campus. It’s been there since it opened in 1956 (there was an earlier St. Mary’s Hall on Prospect St.) St. Mary’s is primarily the home of the Nursing and Health schools of GU, but it also houses the mathematics and computer science departments.

And it’s looking absolutely fantastic these days.

With the opening of the new grassy square between the building and Reservoir Rd, St. Mary’s looks so much more inviting and collegiate than it did just a few years ago.

What did it look like before?

Like this:

When fields build for cars get replaced with fields build for humans, it’s genuinely jarring to look back at the previous use and believe that people were ok with it. And this particular field for cars has been marring the view of St. Mary’s for as much as sixty years. You have to go back to around 1964 to see how the original plan was laid out:

A similar experience occurs when you’re reminded what the Georgetown Waterfront used to look like not that long ago:

The transformation of St. Mary’s is not on the level of the transformation of the Georgetown Waterfront, but it’s in the same ballpark. So next time you’re walking down Reservoir Rd., pause and take in the view and see what is possible when we prioritize people over cars.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Dancing classes return to the waterfront Tuesday nights this summer.
• Tudor Place honors Tom Birch.

Above you’ll see a bluish gray Ford Bronco. This new style of Bronco is eye-catching. And that is especially true with the bright white wheels.

I know it’s eye-catching because it caught my eye on Thursday while I was walking my foster dog. And then it caught my eye on Friday. And then, once again on Saturday. And each time it’s been in the exact same place along 35th St.

And it’s a perfect example of a problem that has been deviling me since I started on the ANC. That’s because this car has Maryland plates. And it doesn’t have a visitors parking pass. And yet it also doesn’t have a single parking ticket sitting in its windshield wiper. Whoever it is who owns this car has successfully parked it in this spot for at least three straight days without getting a parking ticket.

There’s nothing particularly special about this car. We have all seen out of state cars parked well past the two-hour limit over-and-over again without seeing any pink tickets applied. The only thing that is notable about this car is that it is literally notable due to its style. And yet it didn’t catch the eye of any DPW ticketing authority.

As Commissioner, I’ve had meeting after meeting with representatives from DPW pleading with them to please start enforcing the parking rules. Ever since the pandemic in particular, people have learned that there simply is no risk in parking all day long in Georgetown. The response from DPW is always that they’re doing their best and everyone across the city is asking them for the exact same thing. It’s frustrating and exhausting.

What the city is promising is a significant increase in the number of automatic license plate readers. These are scanners on the DPW cars that can log every car on the block simply by driving down it. This is a huge improvement over the manual method that currently reigns, whereby the ticketing officer has to enter each car manually into the system. And then do it again at least two hours later before they can give a ticket. With an automated reader, an officer can scan their whole beat in a fraction of the time it currently takes.

Right now the city has ten license plate readers for the whole city. They will soon have 100. That’s a huge jump, but I’m still not sure it’s sufficient to get us to the point where people (particularly those from the region) have any genuine fear that they will get a parking ticket in Georgetown if they park all day (or all many days). Even when they have an eye-catching brand new Ford Bronco with sparkling white wheels.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Georgetown President John DeGioia suffers stroke.
• Write up of the always fun Volta Park cocktail fundraiser.

Call Your Mother, the hugely popular bagel shop, may have to close its Georgetown location in the near future. “What!?” you may be asking. Yes, indeed. Depending on the outcome of the decision of the Board of Zoning Adjustment, Call Your Mother may no longer be able to operate as it has been doing at its Georgetown location since 2020.

How did we get here?

It’s a long story, so settle in.

Let’s start way back in the 1850s. (I wasn’t kidding about it being a long story). Sometime around 1859, a building was constructed at the southeast corner of Fayette and Second Streets. It was constructed to have a grocery store on the first floor, with a residence on the second floor. This was a common sight in Georgetown in the century before supermarkets were invented. Back then most people bought their food from small corner grocery stores, which themselves obtained their supplies wholesale from the large city markets, like Central or Eastern Markets.

A grocery store stood at this location well into the 20th century. For a long time it was a location of the chain of small grocery stores operating under the name “Sanitary Grocery Co.” Here’s an ad from 1926 listing the address (by then Fayette Street had become 35th and Second Street became O St., and so the address was, and is, 3428 O St.):

But the arrival of the supermarket model in the mid-20th century brought the days of the ubiquitous corner grocery store in DC to an end. For this location that end was in 1970, when a health foods store opened up in its place. It only lasted about a year and was then replaced with an antiques store. This lasted for many years and was ultimately replaced by a flower shop. The flower shop closed in 2019 at which point Call Your Mother signed its lease to operate here.

In the background of this story is another, deeply consequential story: the history of zoning.

The District of Columbia adopted its first significant zoning code in 1920. Modeled on the relatively new zoning laws in New York City, the zoning code, not surprisingly, required a zoning map. The map delineated which blocks had which zoning. The first zoning map for Georgetown acknowledged what had always been true: that there were commercial blocks tucked away in the neighborhood. As you can see in this map, the dark blocks were commercially zoned blocks:

Notably, despite the fact that the grocery store at 35th and O St. had already existed for well over a half century at this point and several other buildings on the block were also built and used for commercial purposes, this particular block does not appear to have been zoned commercial. (Similarly, all the other corner store lots that were all over Georgetown were also not zoned commercial.) But notably, all of 36th St. south of P St. was zoned commercial (this will become important later).

By 1936, the city bowed to pressure from groups like the Citizens Association of Georgetown, which took a hostile view on mixing commercial uses in primarily residential blocks. So the commercial zoning was limited in the 1936 map:

(But again, note that 36th St. remained zoned for commercial despite the fact that it only had about as many commercial establishments as 35th St. did.)

Finally in 1958, the city adopted this map, which remained in place until last decade:

By this point, only a few pockets of commercial zoned blocks remained tucked away off of M and Wisconsin.

But a handful of the corner stores remained, despite the pressure from the regulations and the challenges from the supermarkets. Neighborhood gems like Sara’s and Scheele’s remained. That’s because the zoning regulations allow “non-conforming” uses (i.e. otherwise illegal uses) to continue under grandfathering. So long as the non-conforming use continues the zoning regulations will permit it. But if the use is interrupted for three years, the grandfathering evaporates and the store must close. So, for instance, if Sara’s, which recently was closed for an extended period, had remained closed for three years, it could not reopen at that location, with one big exception (which I will get to, I promise).

So the Sanitary Grocery store that existed at 35th and O Street for many decades was operating as a non-conforming use due to it operating before the regulations were adopted. (Hell, it was operating before most of the people who wrote the regulations were even born.)

Continue reading →

Hello, and welcome to your June Northwest Georgetown ANC update!

This month I wanted to focus on a single issue that will likely affect us in the near future: dramatic changes to the Metrobus.

WMATA is in the process of completely restructuring the entire Metrobus network. Literally ever single bus line is being revamp, replanned and renamed. The end result, dubbed the “Better Bus Network”, will completely alter how people in our city and region get around by bus.

Here is a video put out by WMATA explaining the project:

These changes would substantially impact Georgetown’s bus service. Each of the bus routes that travel through Georgetown is being redesigned (and renamed). These changes, if they got through, would start taking effect as soon as next year. So get ready!

WMATA has released the details for the proposed changes. The changes may be hard to grasp at first, since the network is so complicated. So the best way to analyze them is to consider each existing line and compare it with the line WMATA is suggesting will replace it.

There are six Metrobus routes that service Georgetown (not including the Circulator, which I’ll get to later). They include: the D2, D6, G2, 31, 33, and the 38B. Each of these routes would be replaced with new routes. I’ll discuss each below with a map:

The D2 would be replaced with the D96:

The first thing you will notice with this proposed route is that it doesn’t particularly resemble the D2. But the parts of it that traverse between Burleith and Dupont, it is basically identical to the D2 (its eastbound route through Dupont appears to be slightly different). It’s just that north of Burleith it takes a long journey through Wesley Heights all the way to Bethesda. And after Dupont it goes down through Foggy Bottom. That is because this route is expected to replace more than the D2. It’s also replacing parts of the N2, N4, N6, 42, and the 43.

Next, the D6 replacement, the D94:

Unlike the D96, the D94 is not an amalgam of multiple routes. It’s just the D6, shortened and renamed. It will still travel the same route from Sibley, through Georgetown to downtown. But rather than continuing on to RFK, it will stop and turn around at Chinatown. (The proposed D24 would provide service on the former D6’s eastern half).

Next up, the G2 replacement, the D92:

When the first sketches of the Better Bus Network were released last year, the route to replace the G2 did not include service directly to Georgetown University. So it is progress that this new route would go all the way to 37th St.

However, it would not travel the G2’s current east-west routes through Georgetown, which look like this now:

Continue reading →

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Georgetown would be most hit by proposed mansion tax.
• Might Foxtrot return for another dance?

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Georgetown’s existence as a separate municipality came to an end 153 years ago, Saturday.
• How Georgetown is especially lucky in the public pool department.