The Georgetown Metropolitan

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Deadly car crash on Rock Creek Parkway by Rose Park late Tuesday night.
• Some great businesses are opening really soon!

If you’re planning on heading east of Georgetown by car this Saturday morning, be forewarned that there will be a lot of road closures for the Rock n Roll Half Marathon. The closures begin very early and will run, in part, through to noon.

The biggest closure that may impact Georgetowners is that Rock Creek Parkway will be closed from 7 AM until Noon. Virginia Ave. and Consitution will also face extended closures. While the bridges, like Pennsylvania, P and Q, will remain open, just keep in mind that your car won’t be able to go past the blue line in the map above. So if you need to get to Brookland, for instance, you’ll have to take the long way around.

Of course pedestrians and cyclists will be permitted to cross the blue line, so keep that in mind!

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• DC Council considers making your parking permit tie to your ANC not your ward.
• Grace Street coffee moving off Grace Street to Water Street. Will still be called Grace Street Coffee.

Dumbarton Oaks

It’s St. Patrick’s Day again this Friday. And with the last of the pandemic measures relaxed, you can enjoy it like you (may have) used to! So without further ado, here is GM’s annual St. Pat’s article giving you a guide to enjoy the day around Georgetown:

As you may know, during the early 20th century, parts of Georgetown were heavily Irish. The center of it was on the west side, close to the Catholic landmarks of GU, Trinity and Visitation.

The Irish concentration is long gone, but with the help of old photos you can imagine the ghosts still walking the streets. In the 30s, photographer Carl Mydans walked through the poor and heavily Irish blocks of west Georgetown and captured the scene of children treating the sidewalks as their playroom:

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Eleven notable Georgetown real estate proposals.
• GU reinstates weekend GUTS bus service.

Dumbarton Oaks

You may have noticed puffy white flowers on trees around the neighborhood. But these trees are not the beloved cherries; they are the dreaded bradford pear. GM wrote about them as part of his Know Your Trees series and here is that article again:

Today on Know Your Trees, GM explores a tree even worse than the ginkgo: the bradford pear.

Badford pear trees are trees that often get confused for cherry trees since they bloom with poofy white flowers around the same time that cherries do. But they are not cherries, and their flowers are not quite as attractive. They lack the subtle shade of pink and have small green leaves:

Once you realize how to distinguish a bradford pear from a cherry, you realize they are everywhere. Where once you thought you saw street after street lined with cherries, you now see pears.

And if the only distinguishing factor was that the flowers are not quite as attractive as cherries, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But that’s not the case.

Bradford pears are invasive. They were introduced in the 1960s as a sterile ornamental tree. But they turned out not to be sterile. And they started to spread like wildfire.

And the worst thing about bradford pears is that they grow so fast that their limbs are extremely weak and fragile. There was a lovely row of them on GM’s block a while ago, but after every slightly serious storm, the street would be littered with broken boughs. And the trees only have a lifespan of 20-25 years, which is extremely short for large trees.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Learn about America’s most dangerous female spy at this month’s Q&A Cafe.
• Unsurprisingly, Patrick Ewing let go from the Hoya’s men’s team.

Tudor Place