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.
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.
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.
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.
Today on Georgetown Time Machine, I’m exploring another photo from the DC Historical Society. The file indicates that it is from 1925 and shows “View to east from Wisconsin Avenue NW down M Street; laying of Belgian block pavement.” But what’s the story?
The location appears correctly described. I believe this is basically the intersection of Wisconsin and M St., with the former Riggs Bank on the left and the old Heon Pharmacy (later Nathans and later still Capital One Cafe) on the right.
But what are they doing in the photo? I searched through local newspapers for items describing this event around 1925 and did not find anything. However I found a couple clues that might suggest what’s actually happening.
The photo record indicates that it includes Isaac Nordlinger. Nordlinger was the President of the Citizens Association around this time, so it suggests that this event may have been organized by the group. But newspaper articles from around that time call into question the description that they are laying Belgian blocks. If anything, they may be removing them.
Belgian blocks (sometimes mistakenly called cobblestones, which are technically something different) got frequently mentioned in newspapers of the day. But it was normally in the context of groups complaining about them. The complaints related to how they affected car traffic. And in Georgetown specifically the Citizens Association was complaining about the vibrations from the paving (which is really a complaint about the cars, of course, but the pavement got the blame instead) In classic Georgetown fashion, the worries center on broken china:
Read that last article to the bottom: It describes the proposal to shrink the M St. sidewalk width (it says Wisconsin Ave., but they’re clearly talking about M St.) in order to allow more car traffic through based on the evergreen illusion that by merely widening a road you’ll finally solve traffic congestion. At least a century ago they could be forgiven for falling into this logic trap since cars had not been around that long; plenty of modern day people do it without such an excuse.
So instead of 15 foot wide sidewalks on M St., we were left with 10 foot sidewalks, which is what we’ve still got. The irony of this is that some opponents to the widened sidewalks and streateries cite history as a reason to oppose the very idea of wider sidewalks in Georgetown. As with a lot of arguments about history in Georgetown, a fake or otherwise mistaken understanding of history is doing a lot of work justifying positions that are really more about modern day aesthetic preferences than anything related to the actual history.
As for our friends posing for the camera in 1925, I can’t really say for sure whether they’re installing Belgian blocks or removing them. Belgian blocks remained on M St. for decades after this photo in connection with the streetcar lines. Here’s what M St. further east looked like in the 1950s:
It seems unlikely to me that they were installing new Belgian blocks on M St. in 1925, just a few years after they were asking the city to pave them over. But who knows.
Interestingly, a lot of those Belgian blocks are still there under the pavement. I’ve long wished the city would consider bringing them back the surface on some streets, china tea service be damned.
Next Thursday is Bike to Work Day. As usual, the Georgetown BID will be sponsoring a pit stop in the Georgetown Waterfront Park from 7 am to 9 am. Stop by to get a bunch of tasty neighborhood treats and bike-related schwag.
Register here! (It’s not required to register in order to partake, but it helps them plan and track).
If you are one of the many being mandated to return to the office, now is a great time to get into (or back into) the biking to work habit. It’s one of the best ways to improve your mental health!
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
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