The Georgetown Metropolitan

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!

Citibank

Janti Cafe

Sherwin Williams

College Scooters

Water Street Gym

Long & Foster

Garden Hill

Capitol Danks

Marston Luce

Ilo Day Spa

Detailz

Lovely

Mon Salon/Loft

Vicky’s Nails

Jaco

The Gallery

Brow de Bar

Empire Smokeshop

Personal Aesthetics

Edible Arrangements

Glosslab

Hersheys

City Sliders

Alkova

Storie Collective

Shouk

Mono

Donahue

Vape Shop

Ever Body

Woolford

Foxtrot

Hobo

District & Co

Vape store

Sleep Number

Carlisle Wood Floors

Georgetown Chiropractic

Wawa

Scotch and Soda

Tori Burch

Mason’s Lobster Rolls

Fangyan

High Road Cycling

Bakeshop

Stona

Roche Salon

Dixie Liquors

Running Company

District Donut

Sandro

Alanya Salon

Gong Cha

Scout

Big Wheel Bikes

Nisolo

Aerie

Pandora

Todd Snyder

Bitty & Beau’s

J. Crew

Atmos

Hatley

Up West

Ristorante Piccolo

Showfields

Amigo Mio

Outdoor Voices

Naadam

Ike Behar

Sand Lot

Funky Piece

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.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here is your weekly news update:

• Reminder: Friends of Volta Park Field Day and Spring Cocktail Party on June 7th. Buy tickets here.
• New sushi restaurant taking over the former Donahue space.
• Another office-to-residential conversion, this time on Water Street.
• And another, another conversion, this time with the Flour Mill.

Over the weekend I had the pleasure to serve as one of the tour guides for the now annual Architectural Walking Tour put on by the Citizens Association. Doing so reminded me of the field guide for Georgetown Homes that I pulled together a few years ago. I thought I’d share it again in case you missed it.

If I can pass along just one piece of information about Georgetown homes it’s this: Despite what real estate listings say, very few homes in Georgetown are federal, either in terms of period or style! The vast majority are some type of Victorian style (likely Italianate or a Queen Anne). Friends don’t let friends describe their homes as a federal rowhouse in real estate listings!! (Unless it really is…)

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m back in the archives of the DC Historical Society (did I ever leave it?) This photo is a fascinating one. It purports to show the “ruins of the old Georgetown Jail” on the west side of Wisconsin Ave. just south of the canal. But is it?

The photo is identified as being from between 1923 and 1927. There definitely appears to have been some old ruins that were identified as the old jail, as you can see in this article (whose headline could have been written today):

In it, a resident cites some of the derilict properties that could be razed in order to allow for more housing:

This description is somewhat hard to square with the old maps. Here is that stretch of Wisconsin in 1888:

There is no building identified as a jail. The Sumac Mill mentioned in the article is there though. And the police station is also there. Several of the remaining buildings are identified as warehouses. That leaves just a few possibilities. But they’re all either brick (the pink structures) or woodframe (the yellow structures). No stone structure stood here. But maybe it was already in ruins by the 1880s and simply not included in the map.

More evidence for the existence of the jail comes from Portrait of Old George Town, a memoir from Grace Ecker in the 1950s:

South of the canal on High Street stood the Debtors’ Prison. This was the only prison in the lower part of Montgomery County, although the county court was held at Rockville, and there the cases were tried. At one time the town clerk of George Town got tangled up in his money matters and was placed in this prison where he languished until his friends made good his debts. A report was made to the Town Council that he could not perform his duties because he was in jail! Nothing now remains but a part of the old stone wall.

But around the same time, Georgetowners were convinced that the Old Stone House was George Washington’s headquarters or perhaps the famous Suter’s Tavern. It was neither. It was just a really old stone house. And there’s something about the story of this old jail that feels similar to me. As early as 1875, a structure near the corner of Grace and Wisconsin (then High Street) was referred to as the old jail:

A 1903 article appears to speak with some authority about the provenance of the jail:

While these residents would have lived in a time much closer to when this structure was supposedly used as a jail, the problem is that I see no references to a Georgetown jail in older newspapers. (An 1810 ordinance by the city of Georgetown did authorize the creation of a jail or penitentiary. So some sort of a jail almost certainly existed at some point.)

So maybe this old stone wall really was a jail. Or maybe it was just an old stone wall that started to get called an old jail. In either event, it’s long gone…

The OGB agenda for this month reveals a few new stores on the horizon. They are:

The jeweler, Swarovski, is apparently taking over the space currently occupied by Wolford at 1234 Wisconsin Ave. This would be a fairly quick swap-out, since Wolford has only been there since 2023.

The next filing is somewhat cryptic. It is for 1420 Wisconsin Ave, the former M&T Bank (and legendary Commander Salamander before that). The materials do not even hint at what is proposed to take over this space, but I have been told that a restaurant is planned. The application itself is for minor changes to the windows and the rear of the building, so we’ll just have to wait more to find out what the ultimate plans are.

One more OGB filing far from the commercial corridors may raise some eyebrows. The application relates to 2920 R St., the Beall-Washington house, or more popularly known at the Katharine Graham house. It has been owned for over 20 years by Mark Ein, but it has remained vacant and in increasingly poor shape over that time. Ein has previously proposed to make renovations of the house, which were objected to by the immediate neighbors. You can read about the testy affair here.

That article details the fight in 2014 over the proposed addition. The proposal was not approved. But in a testament to how long this fight has been going on, the new materials include elements of the eleven year old submission, showing the current conditions. The new plans again call for an addition to the east side of the historic building:

I think everyone in the neighborhood looks forward to this historic property finally being restored and brought back to life (beyond getting used once a year to host Ein’s parties). But as far as I can tell, this new proposal is not substantially different from the earlier proposals, which were shot down. So it remains to be seen whether the outcome will be different this time. We’ll see.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the weekly news round up:

• The river levels will be rising dramatically through the day today, reaching a peak around 8 pm. There will be moderate flooding all along the waterfront as a result.
• Still time to bike to work today!
• Koryouri Urara sushi set to open May 20th.

The FedEx store at 3329 M St. is closing on May 24th. The closest store will now be the one in Glover Park.

This is a setback for Georgetown, as this location has long served as a convenient spot to handle larger print/scanning jobs, on top of the ordinary package services. A lesser known service they offer is to hold your Fedex packages for you when you don’t want to risk them getting stolen. (UPS offers a similar service at their N St. location). You can now have the packages re-routed to Glover Park, but that will be less convenient for many.

While the current store is a Fedex, longer time residents will remember it as the Kinkos. This predecessor of the FedEx store occupied the building since at least the early 90s:

So this will be the first time in over at least 30 years that you won’t be able to get copies at this location. Maybe we just don’t need copies like we used to, but it’s a shame nonetheless to lose a functional business like this.

Tuckernuck, the women’s clothing brand, is moving up Wisconsin Ave. to take over the former Foxtrot space at 1267 Wisconsin.

The store has been located at 1055 Wisconsin Ave. since 2016. The brand originated in Georgetown, and this remains their sole physical store.

As the brand grows, it has the potential to join a long list of brands with roots in Georgetown, including (in no particular order):

• Sweet Green
• Blue Mercury
• Scout
• Britches
• Framebridge
• IBM

Will Tuckernuck grow as big as IBM? Time will tell!!!

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:

• Bike to Work Day is next Thursday, not next Friday. This is a change from prior years.
• Waterfront building sold with plans to convert to residential.
• CitizenM hotel looking towards opening next year.
• Are you musical? Apply to play the Fete de la Music.