The Georgetown Metropolitan

Hello and welcome to your July Northwest Georgetown ANC update!

I just spent a week in Portugal so I am just getting back up to speed, and as a result this update may be a bit briefer than usual. But here goes:

Bus Overhaul Complete

The long discussed bus overhaul has finally come as of today, June 29th. I have been trying to alert people to the changes for a while now, and hopefully those that rely on the bus are already up to speed. But there will certainly be some that only just find out when they walk up to a bus stop. Here are a couple links that should help:

• Detailed breakdown of the changes and each new Georgetown line.
• Discussion of what bus stops are now eliminated.
• Link to WMATA bus trip planner.
• Finally, I strongly recommend you download the Transit app to your phone which will give you real time information for when the next bus is coming and where it is going.

The changes will surely be bumpy with unanticipated (and anticipated) difficulties. There is still a great deal of unfortunate service cuts in the new system, but hopefully the impact will not be as bad as feared.

New Boathouse Coming

This is not in my ANC district, but may interest my constituents regardless: after decades of discussions, Georgetown University is finally taking concrete steps towards constructing its own boathouse along the Potomac.

If approved, it would occupy the lot directly west of Key Bridge (where the public rentals of Key Bridge Boathouse currently take place). GU is gaining access to this property by exchanging a parcel it owns further up the river along the Capital Crescent Trail.

Here is what the boathouse could look like:

If approved, this boathouse will transform the waterfront, as well as this end of Water Street. We already have many issues involving how drivers come down this block. Many are mislead by their GPS units which incorrectly think the cars are on the Whitehurst Freeway. They get to the Capital Crescent trailhead and realize they can’t go further. They then do a dangerous u-turn right where people are exiting the trail and zoom off back east in frustration. Limiting this is already something we need to do. The boathouse and the new hotel will make that worse. That’s not a reason to not approve the boathouse, but it will put the problem in sharper focus.

Summer Break

The ANC has no meeting in August, so I will be skipping an August update. But I will continue to be reachable at 2e02@anc.dc.gov. Have a great summer!

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly round-up:

• A Georgetown resident unsuccessfully sued Georgetown University over the pot smoke coming from their undergrad neighbor.
• Large block undergoing long-term renovations changes hands.
• I’m off to a week in Portugal starting tomorrow, so no updates until the week after…

The monthly OGB agenda again provides us with a peek at some new stores on the horizon.

J Crew

This first one is not a surprise, as word was already out that this move was coming. But these plans appear to confirm that the recently closed J Crew is reopening in the old Brooks Brothers building at 30th and M:

As someone whose wardrobe is basically almost all J Crew, this news comes as a relief to me.

Dutch Darlings

A stroopwafel and sweets store named Dutch Darlings is coming to 1003 Wisconsin Ave:

The store is a local creation and this is their first brick and mortar location. Congrats and welcome!

Hästens

Finally a store called Hästens is coming to 1510 Wisconsin Ave.:

Despite the umlaut, this is not a Häagen Dazs spin-off. It is a luxury bed manufacturer that is famous for its ridiculously expensive mattresses (the New York Times regretfully reported that they “wished this $56,000 mattress weren’t so incredible”.)

That’s it for this month!

As I reported last week, Georgetown University is finally moving forward with plans to build a boathouse after decades of efforts. The school submitted its design concept to the Old Georgetown Board, which became publicly available over the weekend.

You can see a 3D rendering above,which show that the boathouse will have a traditional look, similar to the Potomac Boat Club on the left (that building was constructed in 1908, and is the club’s third location believe it or not). GU’s building is proposed to have a granite facade, echoing the academic buildings up on the hilltop.

Here’s a closer rendering:

This image shows the public dock that will also be a part of the proposal. The ramp on the right down to the small dock will be available to the public to put in their own canoes, kayaks and paddle boards. (The Key Bridge Boathouse, which offers boat rentals and storage, will be relocated just up the river past the aqueduct abutment. It will occupy the former location of Dempsey’s boathouse, which similarly offered public rentals in the first half of of last century).

This is what GU’s boathouse could look like from Water Street:

The interior will match the layout of similar boathouses. The first floor will house the shells and other equipment. The second will have locker rooms, meeting rooms and and central multi-purpose room opening onto to an ample porch.

This space will surely be used by the school for functions, but most of the time it will likely serve the same purpose that a similar ball room at the Potomac Boat Club does: a place for rowing machines.

If approved, this will genuinely be a breathtaking facility and surely a new crown jewel of the school.

The Boys and Girls Clubs of Greater Washington will be holding a fundraiser BBQ at Jelleff on June 20th from 5 to 8 pm. Please come on out a support a great organization that provides critically necessary programs for DC youth. Buy tickets here.

The Boys and Girls Club has operated Jelleff throughout its entire existence. The club constructed the facilities in the early 50s and ran its programs there ever since. The facilities themselves were sold to the city in 2009 and the club continued to operate there under a contract. The city provides much of the funding that goes towards the clubs after-school programs, but as the flyer below demonstrates, the funding is not entirely enough to cover the needs. That’s were private fundraising comes in:

Please come out to the BBQ and support a great cause!

Yesterday, Georgetown University and the city announced a land swap deal that will enable the school to build its own boathouse for the first time. The deal has been literally decades in the making, and still has a few hurdles to jump (or maybe bouys to pass?) before it will come to fruition. But it’s still a milestone day for the school and the greater DC rowing community.

The school published this page giving some details of the deal. But in short, the proposal is this: the school will relinquish a parcel of land it owns along the Capital Crescent Trail. In exchange, the school will be allowed to build a new boathouse on the parcel of land currently occupied by the Key Bridge Boathouse. The public will have access by way of the boat house to a dock to put in with canoes, kayaks, etc. Key Bridge Boathouse will move its public rental services just up the river to the grassy area just past the old Aqueduct abutment.

I’ve seen renderings of the proposed boathouse, and it is impressive. It is approximately the size of the historic Potomac Boat Club just up the shore. It has a granite facade, in line with the school’s buildings on campus.

By building its own facilities, GU will now be able to vacate Thompson’s Boat House, which will create much needed space for the high school and college programs that also use Thompson’s.

To get a sense for the challenges that GU had to get through to reach this point, as well as some of the challenges that may remain, check out this excellent article by the Hoya twenty years ago.

Given my bend towards history the bit I’ll add is to give some images of the school’s former make-shift boathouses. As described in GU’s announcement, the rowing team operated out of a former athletic club around 1900. That was the Columbia Athletic Club, which once stood at the foot of 32nd St. (which is now Wisconsin Ave.):

Here it is seen from up 32nd St:

According to an exhibit at GU on its rowing history:

The boathouse, located at the foot of 32nd Street on government property, was purchased from the Columbia Athletic Club in the spring of 1901. According to the College Journal, it consisted of three rooms – the boat room, ball room and locker room. The boat room had ample space for the six eight-oared, five four-oared, one centipede, four out-riggers, two four-oared, and two gunwale boats, together with a fifty-foot ten oared barge. Georgetown used this boathouse until July 1904 when it was razed.

The GU website also discusses how the team temporarily used a floating boathouse. I covered this oddity in 2020, but this is what it looked like:

The boathouse was actually originally used by an inventor who was trying to beat the Wright Bros. at being the first to flight. He lost out and as a result the barge ended up with the Georgetown rowing team instead of the Smithsonian. Sadly it sunk a year later.

Hopefully GU’s new boathouse will not be similarly cursed!

Photo by Jon Hayes Photography.

Spring is here. and while it has been an unusually wet and cold one, pretty soon our street trees will get thirsty. 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.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown! Apologies for the missed posts last week. I was out of town. Here is your weekly nes wrap-up:

• Fete La Musique returning June 21st.
• MacArthur High School to be renamed after John Thompson.
• Everything known about the Executive Branch club.
• New executive director at Georgetown Ministry Center.
• Sally Quinn at Q&A Cafe.

Hello, and welcome to your June northwest Georgetown ANC update! Although the recent weather sure has made it feel more like March, I assure you that it is actually June.

Bus Changes and Stop Eliminations

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I want to again warn you that the entire WMATA bus system is about to change dramatically. Starting on June 29th, every single route in the city will bear a new name, and a majority of them will travel new routes.

For a reminder, this is what I wrote last month:

I’ve described the changes in detail here, but here is a handy thumbnail description of how the existing Georgetown lines will appear starting June 29th:

D2: This will now be called the D96 and it will now travel from Bethesda all the way to Foggy Bottom. The Georgetown to Dupont section will largely remain the same.

G2: This will now be called the C91. It will still travel from Georgetown University to Howard University. But instead of traveling along O, P, and Dumbarton through Georgetown, it will travel on Q St.

D6: This will now be called the D94. It will still travel to Sibley, but no longer will it go eastward to RFK. It will now terminate in Chinatown.

38B: This will now be called the A58. It will still travel from Farragut out to Balston, by way of Georgetown, but now it will continue onward all the way to Seven Corners.

30 Series: The 30 series will be replaced with the D80 and the D82. Through Georgetown it will mostly be the same (although with an unfortunate number of eliminated bus stops). The D80 will travel to Union Station (like the current 33) and the D82 will go to Foggy Bottom (like the current 31).

Finally there will be a novel new route called the C85. It will travel from Foggy Bottom, along M St. through Georgetown. It will then head out to MacArthur Blvd. in the Palisades in order to reach the new MacArthur High School. Then it will wind its way back through Glover Park and up through Ward 3.

What I want to discuss this month is the euphemistically named “bus stop consolidation” that WMATA is also deploying at the end of the month. In English what this means is that WMATA is eliminating a bunch of bus stops.

I’ll get to the detail of the eliminations below, but first let me explain WMATA’s justification for eliminating bus stops. The first is most obvious: with bus route changes, certain bus stops are no longer along a bus route anymore. For instance, the G2 stops in east Georgetown are all being eliminated because the G2 replacement, the C91, will no longer wind its way through the middle of east Georgetown. It will now travel up on 35th St., hang a right on Q St., and then head to Dupont from there. So all the G2 stops that aren’t on that route will be eliminated.

The second justification is a bit less obvious and is a bit more controversial. Essentially the idea is that if buses have fewer stops along a route, they will move faster since they’ll stop less frequently. In theory this makes sense, but it may make less sense from your individual perspective if your bus stop is one of the ones that gets eliminated. (It reminds me of the old Onion headline “Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others”). Whatever time savings might be gained by the people whose stops weren’t cut comes at a cost of the extra time people whose stops were cut have to spend to walk to/from a more distant stop. In other words, it’s certainly good to speed buses, but if you’re degrading service in the process, the benefits might not be worth it.

So what are the Georgetown bus stops WMATA is proposing to eliminate?

It’s best to look at each bus route to describe them.

First the good news: no stops that currently service the D2 or the D6 are being eliminated. That also means that many of these stops will also service the G2-replacement.

Now for the bad news: some stops on the Wisconsin Ave./M St. lines are being cut. The less bad news is that the cuts to these stops are not quite as bad as it initially seemed when WMATA announced them. That’s because the document announcing the stop eliminations described the stops by location, not direction. So, for instance, it announced that the Wisconsin and P stop and the Wisconsin and N stop were being eliminated. That would make it seem that there will be no stop between M st. and Q St. on Wisconsin Ave.

But that’s not correct. WMATA is proposing to eliminate those two stops in only one direction each (southbound for the first and northbound for the second).

These are the actual stops on the Wisconsin and M St. routes and whether they will continue or not:

Southbound Eliminated?

Wisc. and 34th No

Wisc. and R No

Wisc. and Q No

Wisc. and P Yes

Wisc. and Dumb No

M and Wisc. No*

M and TJ Yes*

Penn and 28th No

Northbound

Penn and 28th No

M and 30th Yes*

M and 31st No*

Wisc. and N Yes

Wisc. and P No

Wisc. and Q No

Wisc. and R No

Wisc. and 34th No

So for the 30 series replacements, when you’re going downtown the eliminated stops are the one in front of Lutece and the one in front of the Barnes and Noble. When you’re heading back to Georgetown from downtown, the eliminated stops are the one in front of Sprinkles and the one in front of Ralph Lauren.

Additionally, the asterixes next to a couple of the stops relate to the the 38B replacement (the A58). It will in fact continue to stop at M and 30th (in front of Sprinkles) and M and Thomas Jefferson (in front of the Barnes and Noble). It will also continue to use the stops west of Wisconsin that it currently uses. But it won’t continue to stop at M and 31st (in front of the Urban Outfitters) or M and Wisconsin (in front of the Capital One Cafe). Essentially they took the four stops on M between 30th and Wisconsin and split them up, one half will keep being used by the 30 series replacement and the other half by the 38B replacement. This has the added annoyance of making it more difficult for a rider heading downtown to simply wait at one stop and take whichever bus comes first.

The only stop on M or Wisconsin to be fully removed is the one in front of Ralph Lauren.

While these eliminations are not as bad as they may have seemed at first, they are still not good. To eliminate four of sixteen former 30 Series bus stops in Georgetown will impact people who travel to or from Georgetown by bus. And I think the Ralph Lauren stop elimination is probably the worst. Now the buses will travel all the way from the Urban Outfitters to P St. before stopping again. That’s a big stretch without a stop for a dense commercial area.

WMATA does not seem interested in undoing these changes, especially since they’ve already installed signs for the new routes and stops. But the ANC will discuss adopting a resolution Monday night to request some or all these eliminations be reconsidered. Maybe we can bring them back eventually.

Repaving

Some residents living on or near the 3300 block of Reservoir Rd. have reached out to me recently to complain about the state of the road surface on that block. Walking down the block I could see that, indeed, the road is in terrible shape. I reached out to the city to get this block prioritized for repaving. Unfortunately, staffing shortages due to the budget shortfall made it difficult to get an answer back promptly. But I did learn that DDOT will send inspectors to evaluate the surface to see if it needs repaving.

It should be fairly obvious that it does. The challenge is that the city’s dashboard mistakenly states that the block was paved in the 2020 fiscal year. It definitely wasn’t. You can even use old Google streetviews to see the current pot holes grow over time, like some family album.

For instance, here’s one bad spot from last December:

Here’s that same spot in May 2021:

And in November 2015:

In fact, you can got back to July 2009 and see the beginning of the cracks that continue to grow today:

Clearly this block has not be repaved in at least sixteen years. Probably longer.

Hopefully the DDOT engineers will recognize the obvious, but to nudge them along I will be proposing a resolution Monday night asking them to prioritize this block.

Let me know if your block is being similarly neglected!

Quick Notes:

• Reminder: Volta Park field day and cocktail fundraiser this Saturday. Buy tickets for the party here!
• MPD announced the arrest of an individual suspected of car break-ins on the 3400 blocks of Q and R streets. Thank you to MPD for their diligence!
• Here are all the closures in Georgetown over the past 18 months or so. Keep an eye out for my complete report soon.

Photo by Adam Chandler.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly update:

• MPD yesterday announced the arrest of an individual suspected on committing multiple car break-ins around 34th and Dent area.
• More on the Executive Branch club.
• Brief interview with new BID CEO.