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.:
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!
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.
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:
SouthboundEliminated?
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!
I’m still cleaning up the data from my State of Georgetown census, but I wanted to publish another interesting preview today: the list of all the closures.
Before I get to that, just a quick moment on nomenclature. I used the words stores or establishments to encompass all the categories of businesses I track with my survey. They include every type of retail store, restaurant, salon, and even real estate offices. (My rough rule of thumb is that it counts if you could walk in without an appointment and get service.)
So with that said, here is a list of every establishment that was open in Sept. 2023 but is not as of last week. A couple required a guess. Bitty and Beau’s, for instance, has been closed for months and has a sign on the window saying it’s closed for renovations. But I’m skeptical they’re coming back, and their website no longer lists the Georgetown location. Same with Tom Snyder next door. It’s been well over a year since the fire caused their closure. Maybe they’ll actually come back, but for now I’m calling it a closure. Similarly, some establishments change ownership and name, and while the new store is offering nearly identical services to the old, I’m calling it a closure. That wraps in Ilo Day Spa and Janti Cafe.
Additionally, Water Street Gym moved up to Glover Park and J. Crew is supposedly going to reopen at 31st and M. I’m calling them both closures since right now neither of them are open in Georgetown.
Let me know if any of the following are listed in error!
I finally got around to performing my annual-ish census of the state of Georgetown. This is the survey I do where I walk up and down the streets keeping track of every establishment that has either opened or closed since the last time I took the snapshot. I’m about 6-8 months overdue, so this snapshot is more like a little over a year and a half since my last one. So the numbers will seem a little more dramatic once I tally them all up.
I’m still sorting through and cleaning up the data. But here is a preview of the top line numbers:
There were 88 establishments opened since Sept. 2023
There were 77 establishments that closed since Sept. 2023
Of the 77 closures, 25 spaces have already been reoccupied
Just for comparison, in 2023 I measured 62 openings and 45 closures. That covered a period of 15 months to the 2022 measure. That suggests an opening rate of 4.1 stores a month and a closure rate of 3 per month. This year’s snapshot covered 19 months of changes. So that calculates to a opening rate of 4.6 a month and a closure rate of 4. So the openings are up a touch but the closures are up a lot.
But even with the closures going up, they’re still behind the openings. So the overall numbers are up. In fact, my preliminary numbers suggest the total is now back over 500 for the first time since 2019. I’m still cleaning up the data, as I mentioned, so that could be a miscalculation. But if it’s roughly true, it would put us close to the highest count I’ve had since I started doing this way back in 2009. And that would be especially note worthy since that 2009 number was “inflated” by the Georgetown Park Mall, which was still open at the time.
The details are still to come, but any way you slice it, Georgetown is booming.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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