This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m moving further through the 30 year old photos I have of Georgetown. Today we see some familiar names and sights.
The block is 1300 block of Wisconsin, just above the Georgetown Inn. The first shop of the left is Towne Liquors. It…pretty much looked exactly the same until it moved up the block last year. Now sadly there’s a vape shop there.
Next up the block was a sports clothing store. There is no signage, but it appears that it basically sold the same type of gear that you can still buy at this location from GT Players. So I’m guessing either this was GT Players or an earlier iteration of the same.
Finally on the right we see Coffee, Tea & Spice. This store sold a wide variety of coffees and teas on Wisconsin Ave. from at least the 1970s. It appears to have shut down in the mid 90s. It should not be mistaken (as I briefly did) with Just Paper and Tea, which is right around the corner on P St. That shop opened in 1989.
The utterly essential Georgetown Village organization is seeking board members. They need members willing to help out with communications, developments, health care, membership and organizing volunteers. They meet just once a month. If you think you’re a good candidate, reach out to them at 202-999-8988 or visit Georgetown-village.org.
Just last week I was writing how the possibility of a Metro station finally coming to Georgetown was still inching (millimetering?) forward.
And of course that news drew the predictable clucking from people who believe deeply in the folk myth that Georgetowners block Metro from coming here in the first place. (They didn’t). While it’s one thing for internet commenters or others to spout this false story, it is quite another thing when the Washington Post publishes a letter doing the same. That is what you see above, where DC native John Schelp (who now resides in North Carolina) confidently asserted the myth and the Post decided to run it without any disclaimer.
What’s especially frustrating is that in the online version, the Post links to an article definitively debunking the myth. Why is the Post publishing a letter based on a lie that it knows to be untrue?
I do commend you to read that linked article by the way. It is by Emma O’Neill-Dietel at WETA and it is quite good.
Back in 2015, Georgetown was witness to one of the more ham-fisted attempts at extortion. An individual purchased at auction a group of tax lots on an alleyway between Potomac St. and 33rd. He then proceeded to seek approval to erect fences blocking homeowners from using the alleyway. It was a fairly naked attempt to get the homeowners to pay-up. It failed, largely due to the intervention of the DC Attorney General’s office.
I bring this story up because a similar story appears to be playing out on the other side of Georgetown.
First let me relate the public story you may have heard over the weekend:
An historic wall has just been listed for sale for $50,000. The wall occupies a tiny sliver of a lot between the Truist Bank at 30th and M and the rowhouse at 1213 30th St. According to an article in DC Urban Turf the wall has a whimsical backstory:
In the early 1970s, Allan Berger’s father got wind of a tax lien auction in Georgetown. During a break from his job in the federal government, he wandered over to see what was on the block.
“He wanted to be able to say he owned property in Georgetown,” Berger told UrbanTurf.
Berger’s father came away from the auction as the proud new owner of an interesting piece of property: a red wall near the corner of 30th and M Street NW (map). Now, his son has put the wall up for sale.
In short, this story is bullshit.
Berger’s father did not obtain this lot in a tax lot auction in the 1970s. He acquired it in 1992 from a woman who was in the business of acquiring these sort of lots. As I explain more below, she bought the lots in the 60s in a tax auction and the transfer to Berger’s father has some suspicious elements.
(ed: To DC Urban Turf’s credit, they corrected their article after these facts were pointed out to them)
But before I get to that, let me talk about the wall itself.
The DC Urban Turf article does not discuss the wall’s provenance, but I am fairly confident that it is actually a remnant of the historic Union Hotel, which once stood at 30th and M.
This hotel was originally built in 1796 and later served as a military hospital during the Civil War. Louisa May Alcott served as a nurse there. As NPS wrote:
[Alcott] wrote a book about her experiences at the Union Hospital called “Hospital Sketches”. In it she describes the scene on the streets outside:
“Long trains of army wagons kept up a perpetual rumble from morning until night. Ambulances rattled to and fro with busy surgeons, nurses taking an airing or convalescents going in parties to be fitted for artificial limbs. Strings of sorry looking horses passed, saying as plainly as dumb creatures could, ‘why in a city full of them is there no horsepital for us?’ Often a cart came by, with several rough coffins in it and no mourners following; barouches, with invalid officers, rolled round the corner and carriage loads of pretty children, with black coachmen, footmen and maids.”
Life in the hospital was a tremendous strain on Miss Alcott and she succumbed to typhoid fever. Six weeks after it began, her nursing career came to a close when her father came to Washington and took her home.
It returned to service as a hotel after the war, but was later converted to flats, as you can see from this 1888 map:
You can also see in this map how the building abutted 1213 30th St. (That row of homes was built in the 1870s-80s. You can see a walled up window in the wall from when the hotel had an empty lot to the north). The former hotel was torn down in the 1930s and replaced with a gas station, as you can see in this photo from 1971:
While the former hotel was gone, the wall remained because the structural beams of the home next door were attached to it. The gas station was itself later torn down for a bank. According to DC Urban Turf, previous owners of the bank agreed to maintain the wall despite not actually owning it.
A lovely house on O St. just came up for sale. It’s at 3115 O St. and it can be yours for a cool $5.5 mil.
I hope whoever does buy it has a flair for quirky history. Because this house was once quite notable for its unusual paint job, as I wrote about a few years ago.
When I wrote about this photo (taken from the DC Historical Society) I could quite locate it, nor remotely explain its story. I figured it was a bunch of hippies. Luckily Tom Birch reached out and provided the back story:
This is 3115 O St NW, across the street from Christ Church. The house was owned by George and Patty Herman. He was a correspondent for CBS news. In the course of planning to have their house painted they had various samples applied to choose. They couldn’t make up their minds so decided to leave it with a facade of many colors. I can’t comment on the white daisy, but the lower right hand corner carried the signature “Emilio”, for Pucci! The facade stayed this way through the 70’s and early 80’s. They weren’t hippies by any stretch of the word.
So here’s your chance to bring a bit more silliness to the neighborhood…
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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