The Georgetown Metropolitan

DDOT conducted its public workshops last week for the Georgetown Transportations and Access Study. Hopefully you were able to attend, but if you were not, there is still an opportunity to weigh in. Please participate in the survey DDOT is conducting on the draft recommendations! The information is below:

Community Workshop #2 Meeting Materials
Georgetown Transportation Access and Circulation Study

The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) hosted two (in-person and virtual) community workshops for the Georgetown Transportation Access and Circulation Study, a multimodal transportation study for the Georgetown neighborhood. The purpose of the workshop was to present draft recommendations were presented to the community and obtain feedback. Thank you to everyone who attended one of the two meetings.

The presentation slides from the in-person meeting (PDF) and virtual meeting (PDF) are posted on the project website. The boards (PDF) presented at the in-person meeting are also posted to the project website. A recording of the virtual meeting (link) is available on DDOT’s YouTube channel.

There is a short public survey open now until April 30th for all Georgetown stakeholders to provide feedback on the draft study recommendations. We invite you to provide your comments and share it with neighbors, coworkers, friends and others.

Take the Draft Recommendation Survey Now

All Georgetown Transportation Access and Circulation Study information, materials and updates are on the project website at engage.dc.gov/georgetownstudy

For more information, please contact Ted Van Houten, DDOT Project Manager at theodore.vanhouten@dc.gov or (202) 716-5302.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Condos in former church for sale.
• Speaking of real estate for sale: Pamela Harriman’s home is also available.

They say eclipses can mess with wild animals’ heads. Perhaps that explains why this, frankly, giant fix showed up in my alley yesterday. Red foxes aren’t totally unheard of around DC, but my particular alley is many blocks from the type of forest you’d expect to find one.

Any they’re nimble guys! This one made its way to the top of the garages on the alley, necessitating quite the leap:

Keep your eye on your small pets if you live around Cashell Alley, I guess!

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• If you weren’t able to get out of town to see the total eclipse yesterday, don’t worry, DC will host it’s own total eclipse in a mere 176 years! Eat your veggies!
• French Market coming the weekend of April 26th!

Photo by Jon Hayes Photography.

Spring is here. And while most trees haven’t started to leaf out for the season, they will sooner than you think. And once they do, it is critical for residents to water our street trees. So now is the time to make plans for it, especially if you have a young tree on the sidewalk in front of your house or apartment. This is especially true if it was newly planted this year. The basic goal you should have is to water young trees at least once a week, so long as you get a good 20-25 gallons of water. If you can’t water the new trees, try to find a neighbor who can.

The preferred watering device is the ooze tube (the bags that go around the bottom of the trees). You can differentiate them from the not-preferred gator bags because the gator bags have zippers. (They’re not preferred because they can create an unhealthy environment around the trunk and you have to remove them after each use.) With the ooze tube you can just fill it up and let it go.

If you don’t have an ooze tube, you can just leave a hose trickling into the tree box for 30 minutes to an hour.

Once a tree is mature, you can stop watering it. By then the roots are so spread out under the sidewalk that it doesn’t need your help anymore (although during any particularly dry periods, it can’t hurt to water it). At what point does a tree become “mature”? That depends on the tree. It’s better safe than sorry so you might as well do it for the first eight years or so.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Sara’s Market offering breakfast burritos every other Saturday.
• CAG to celebrate the Georgetowner’s 70th year.

At the ANC meeting this week, a plan was presented to renovate the group of properties between 1220 and 1234 31st St. For many years this complex has been called Hamilton Court and it was primarily used for offices. But in the middle part of the the 20th century, it was called the Hamilton Arms, and it was a truly wild and original place.

Hamilton Arms was created by a retired colonel named Milo Brinkley in 1939. Originally centered around a coffee shop, the property was home to dozens of dwellings that attracted a distinctly bohemian crowd. It was supposedly the location of DC’s first salad bar and pot party.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Pizzeria Paradiso reconsidered (from a beer POV).
• The mayor released a proposed budget yesterday that would complete end the Circulator service. Write your councilmembers if you want to keep it!

This Saturday, CAG is hosting its second annual architectural walking tour. I will be leading one of the groups around, trying to dispense what knowledge on architectural history I’ve picked up over the years. But to that end, last year I tried to distill that into a short document, which you can read above. Even if you can’t make the tour, I hope you enjoy this guide!

Keep in mind, I’m hardly a trained architectural historian. But I’ve tried to gather information from a wide variety of reliable sources to help you better tell the difference, for instance, between a Second Empire and a Richardsonian Romanesque. Think of it like a birders guide, but for houses.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• City Tavern Foundation to take ownership of City Tavern.
• Review of the new La Bonne Vache.