The Georgetown Metropolitan

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• What you (may have) missed at the Garden Tour.
• I’m happy to report that the Volta pool fence is repaired, but the pool is still empty. I am pushing to get DPR to clean it up and fill it with water in time for Memorial Day weekend. (Separately, city crews cut through the iron fence on the north side of the park to get a truck out. Yet another thing at Volta Park the city needs to fix now!)

The time is here! Start watering those street trees!

It might feel like it’s rained a lot recently. And it has. But it’s already getting pretty hot. So you need to make sure every week that young trees have actually received at least 25 gallons of water a week. Heavy but brief rain showers don’t actually drop that much water on us. So it’s good to supplement it with water from a hose.

If it’s a new tree, hopefully it has an ooze tube, those large bags around the base of the tree that can be filled from a hole on the top. Fill them up once a week and you’re all set. If you don’t have one, you can just leave a hose dribbling out water for about 20-30 minutes, and that will suffice.

It is rewarding to see trees that were once meek become giants. I’ve lived on my current block for 11 years and I’ve already seen several trees make that transition. I’ve also seen several older trees cut down. It’s the inevitable end, but an end that can be softened by the presence of young and thriving trees. And keeping on top of watering them will ensure their future for many more years.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Great Georgetown-centric Q&A Cafe today as Carol interviews the man renovating Julia Child’s house.
• $4 million price drop for Jackie Kennedy’s old home. (Still crazy expensive…)

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m dipping again into the 1993 photos, as I’ve done a lot recently. This one shows M St. just east of Potomac. And the photo really highlights something that has largely left M St.: cheap food.

From left to right, this stretch had a Subway shop, a Burrito Brothers, and a pizza shop (whose name escapes me). Nowadays this stretch includes Aesop (an expensive bodycare shop) and Dyptique (an expensive fragrance shop).

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Don’t forget the meeting tonight to discuss all things transportation for Georgetown. Your voice can shape how we’ll move in the future!
• The BID is experimenting with a different arrangement for streateries, with the tables on sidewalk adjacent to the restaurant, and the passageway directed where the tables were.

This Monday night, the first community meeting will be held as part of the important Georgetown transportation and access study. It will be held at the Georgetown Library from 6:30 to 8:00. It will also be available virtually, but you’ll need to sign up here to get the link for that.

This first meeting is incredibly important since it will be focused primarily on gathering every and all idea the public has to improve transportation to and through the neighborhood. No idea is a bad one! Want more bike lanes? Want fewer bike lanes? Want traffic cameras? Want more one-way streets? Want a six lane superhighway? Whatever the idea, just bring it. The point right now is to get every idea on the table, and the process moving forward will take those ideas and kick their tires to see what would actually make the neighborhood’s transportation system work better and safer.

Thankfully what this meeting will not be is an opportunity for a couple people to stand up on a soap box and monopolize the meeting with their pet grievances. It will be broken out into two main sections. The first will involve a series of boards around the room where people can meet with DDOT and the consultant staff to discuss their ideas and suggestions. Then later there will be breakout sessions where small groups will discuss in more depth their suggestions and ideas. The idea is to get more input from a wider population, not just the usual suspects.

So please do try to come, even if only for part of it! Your participation is crucial to getting the most out of this process!

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• First public meeting of the Georgetown Transportation study next Monday. (I will be echoing this later!)
• This is a time as old as time, but yet another example of a faraway building claiming “Georgetown” status.

I was working on another article idea that fell through, but was reminded of this old article from 2018. I thought I would repost it:

A little over two years ago, GM came across an image in the archives of the Library of Congress that was a bit alarming. It was a map of a proposed “Francis Scott Key Boulevard” which would run from the Key Bridge down M St. to Pennsylvania Ave. This is the image:

As you can see, this plan would call for a large traffic circle where Key Bridge meets M St. M St. would be replaced by a grand boulevard interspersed with three different medians. All of Georgetown from N St. south would, apparently, be destroyed.

There have been a variety of plans floated that would call for the construction of highways through downtown DC. Thankfully most of them were stopped. But none of those plans called for anything like this for Georgetown. (Most simply used the Whitehurst Freeway, which would have been attached to an expressway to the west that would cross the Potomac at a new Three Sisters Bridge and link up to the GW Parkway near Spout Run.)

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m dipping back into the pile of 1993 photos I’ve got. Today I’m visiting the northwest corner of Potomac and M St.

This late 20th century building has an odd layout, which remains to this day. Every other door goes to the basement level. And at this corner, the two street-level doors enter into one large space. This has been through a bunch of different tenants recently, from Moreso to Cafe Prague to a mini-food court with Subway, District Pizza and an Acai place. But in 1993 it hosted Fettoosh, with a takeout version called Fettoosh Express to the left. Fettoosh, not surprisingly, sold Middle Easter food. It lasted quite a long time, only closing around 2008.

Next door to Fettoosh was the legendary record shop, Smash Records. It was opened in 1984 and only moved out of Georgetown in 2006. It’s been in Adams Morgan ever since.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Small fire at the Potomac Boat Club, which luckily did not lead to major damage.
• New ice cream shop on Prospect opening May 11th.