The Georgetown Metropolitan

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Large house next to Evermay for sale.
• GU mints a lot of Fulbrights!

Dumbarton Oaks

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, GM checks out a behind the scene photo from the epochal film St. Elmo’s Fire.

The movie was filmed in Georgetown in the fall of 1984. This shot shows the cast sitting in a Jeep CJ between filming. They’re parked at the corner of P and 31st. Seated are Rob Lowe, Mare Winingham, Emilio Estevez, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Demi Moore, a veritable quorum of the Brat Pack.

This set up appears in the film. Here they are driving down P St.:

Later they’re shown on O St.:

A closeup scene:

Fun fact: the film came out June 1985. By November DC adopted its first seat belt laws. Coincidence???

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Useful updated food and drink guide for Georgetown.
• Water Taxi service resumes.

1500 block of 33rd St.

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, GM is featuring a photo recently featured by the fantastic Old Time DC account. It shows the Georgetown waterfront sometime in the 1980s.

For those relatively new to the city, you might be shocked at the appearance of a large surface parking lot taking space that is now a beautiful riverfront park. But you really don’t have to be that much of an old timer to remember it. It only fully disappeared about 2006 when construction of the park began in earnest. Here’s what it looked like from the sky in 2005:

It’s probably fair to say that until the new park was completed, it was literally centuries since the Georgetown waterfront was a calm and idyllic location as it is now. Before the large parking lot, it was a field of industrial plants and train tracks:

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Maman as a “study sanctuary“.
• February’s business ins and outs.

3200 block of R St.

Here’s your Northwest Georgetown March ANC Update (Sign up here to get these directly!):

Alley Buildings:

I wanted to focus this month on a project that the ANC reviewed this week that would be somewhat novel for Georgetown: a new alley dwelling.

Of course, alley dwellings have a long history in Georgetown. In the 19th and early 20th century, the small houses tucked away off the street were home to a large percentage of Georgetown’s working class residents, both black and white. While some were demolished as part of the city-wide alley clearance efforts of the 1920s and 30s, many in Georgetown were simply refurbished and remain, such as homes on Pomander Walk or Poplar St. Inevitably the working class residents were priced out and now the homes sell for six to seven figures.

But since then, few or no new alley dwellings have been built in Georgetown. But that may soon change. The District amended the zoning regulations recently to make it easier to obtain permission to construct a new alley building and use it as a home. (Zoning regulations are largely the reason alley dwelling construction ground to a halt in the first place). And a homeowner in our district is making use of these changes to construct a new home adjacent to her own (which, oddly enough, is itself technically an alley dwelling).

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Jayne Planck, whose son started Underarmour in her Georgetown house, dies.
• An ignoble end to a disastrous Hoya men’s season.