February 28, 2012 · 10:00 am

ANC Round Up: Food Truck Edition

The ANC met last night for its March session. As with last month, GM’s new familial responsibilities meant he couldn’t stay for the whole meeting. But there was plenty in the first two hours he could attend.

Food Truck Regulations

Last month, the ANC adopted a rather hasty resolution requesting that in adopting final regulations for food trucks, DCRA should not allow food trucks on RPP streets (i.e. spots that require a RPP sticker to park more than two hours). After DCRA decided to open the regulations up for further comment, the ANC decided to make a more comprehensive resolution.

The commissioners ran through a litany of issues relating to the food trucks. While many of them, particularly those from Bill Starrels, could have been simply cribbed from press releases from the brick-and-mortar restaurants, who generally hate the food trucks and want to put as many roadblocks up to their success as possible, but some of the issues were valid beyond simply squashing competition.

After an occasionally fiesty back and forth, the ANC came around to a resolution that asked for three things. First, it repeated its request for a ban on food trucks on the residential streets. This is an expansion on its earlier request which was limited to RPP spots. This is an attempt to address the issue of trucks being parked in metered spaces right off of Wisconsin. Second, the ANC asked for a pilot period for the regulations, in order to allow a review before any permanent regulations go into effect. Finally, the ANC asked, quite rightly in GM’s opinion, that the final regulations call for proper trash disposal by the trucks.

Oh and GM would be remiss not to relate that Starrels twice made a point of objecting to the possibility that food trucks might park outside “$2 million condos” on Water Street. No explanation was offered why home price has anything to do with how the public space outside said home should be regulated.

Out of dismay that such rich people might wake up one day to see food trucks parked across the street from their $2 million condos serving people who don’t have $2 million condos, Starrels voted against the resolution for not being strong enough. Continue reading →

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February 28, 2012 · 8:00 am

The Morning Metropolitan

Photo by Videren.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

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February 27, 2012 · 2:00 pm

The Georgetown Metropolis

1600 block of 30th St.

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February 27, 2012 · 10:00 am

Walls Can’t Talk But the Census Does

Last November, GM moved into a house on 33rd St. City records say the house was built in 1900, but that’s the default year the city lists when the house was built before 1877 or the city just doesn’t know when the building was built. But from a database GM has, he was able to identify that the original building permit was issued to a Mr. D. Haggerty in 1895 (if you’re curious when your house was built, drop GM a line). So GM’s home was built sometime around 1895, but what GM was really curious about was who actually lived there. And that’s where the Census comes in.

The Census records from 1930 and earlier are publicly available (responses to the Census are confidential for 70 years). Most of what these records get used for is to build family trees, which they can be invaluable for. And that’s why the best websites for accessing old census records are typically genealogical websites. GM uses a pay website, Ancestry.com, but a good free one is FamilySearch.org. The problem is that they don’t normally let you search the census records by address. So in order to find your house’s record, you need to learn how the forms work and how to browse them.

Start with this one from 1900. Right at the top is President William McKinley and his family. If you read down the left side you’ll see that the street is Pennsylvania Ave. The second column tells you what street number the house is (except that in this particular case, no address is listed, so maybe it’s not a great example, but you can see how President McKinley’s neighbors, the Morisi family at 1710 Pennsylvania Ave., have their house number listed). Continue reading →

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February 27, 2012 · 8:00 am

The Morning Metropolitan

Photo by Dave DeSandro.

 Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

  •  Today’s the last day to enter the DCPS lotto for a pre-K slot at Hyde-Addison.
  • Anyone know what’s going to happen to all those early daffodils once (well, if) winter finally shows up?

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February 24, 2012 · 2:00 pm

The Georgetown Metropolis

1300 block of 33rd St.

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February 24, 2012 · 10:00 am

ANC Preview: Tudor Place Edition

The ANC meets for its next meeting on Monday. One of the bigger items on the agenda is our old friend Tudor Place.

As covered here in the past, Tudor Place needs to dramatically renovate its facilities to protect its collection of documents and thrive in the 21st century. Their proposals have been objected to by some neighbors who don’t like the scale of the changes. This is particularly the case with the 32nd St. neighbors who object to the proposed changes to the garage along the west side of the property.

Since Tudor Place last made a public proposal, they have hired a new architect and produced plans that have addressed most of the neighbors’ concerns. But some neighbors still object to the proposed changes to the garage. GM personally thinks the concerns are overwrought and that the proposal is not materially different than the current structure. But the neighbors are tenacious and will put up a fight. So come check it out.

Another interesting item on the agenda is on the topic of food trucks. DCRA release rules for comment a while back that would allow food trucks to continue to thrive while finally operating under rules designed for them. When DCRA director Bill Howland was at the ANC meeting last month, he was somewhat blindsided by a presentation by brick-and-mortar restaurant lawyer Andrew Kline, who railed against the proposed rules and requested that the ANC take a position against them. The ANC didn’t take all the bait that Kline laid out, but they indicated that they would probably object to allowing food trucks to operate on residential streets. The ANC is scheduled to talk about food trucks again on Monday, so expect a formal resolution on the matter of trucks on the residential streets.

Here’s the rest of the agenda:

Continue reading →

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February 24, 2012 · 8:00 am

The Morning Metropolitan

Photo of bike at the bottom of the canal by Brownpau.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

  • Did you know there’s a Wikipedia page just dedicated to the change in Georgetown’s street names? You do now.
  • Profile of the couple opening Macaron Bee on Wisconsin Ave. GM’s glad to see they aren’t going to try to sell out their window after all.

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February 23, 2012 · 2:00 pm

The Georgetown Metropolis

1200 block of Grace St.

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February 23, 2012 · 10:00 am

Bayou Documentary Looking Towards Finish Line

As described in yesterday’s Current, a small group of dedicated filmmakers have been working on a documentary of the legendary Bayou club that once stood on K St., where the Loews Theater is now. According to the Current:

For the creators of a documentary on The Bayou nightclub in Georgetown, a dawdling approach has turned out to be the right fit…But after 14 years of soaking in The Bayou’s posthumous wealth of anecdotes and artifacts, the team members now speak of the venue with intimate affection. They describe it as a complex, offbeat and raucous place that survived its decades on the Georgetown waterfront — on the site beneath the Whitehurst Freeway that’s now a Loews movie theater — by constantly shifting identities.

“Once we looked under the hood and saw this engine with odd parts and gunk and weird assembly … it became a story worth coming to,” said writer Vinnie Perrone, a former Washington Post staffer who has interviewed subjects for the documentary.

After fourteen years, the filmmakers are close to putting the final touches on the project. But they need cash to get it over the finish line. So check out the trailer up top, and if you want to see more, check out their Kickstarter page and pitch in.

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