The Georgetown Metropolitan

Welcome to your February update for northwest Georgetown!

Snow and Ice

The storm that hit us last week was genuinely a freak confluence of conditions. In the 26 plus years I’ve been in DC, I can’t remember a time when we had such a significant snow become so suddenly encased in such a thick crust of concrete-like ice. Honestly, I don’t remember a storm result like that from my New England youth or upstate New York college days. This really is a freak outcome.

I say that as backdrop to a discussion of how the city has handled the storm clean up so far. It has obviously been very disappointing to see roads and sidewalks continue to be partially or fully uncleared. And it feels to many that after the city made reasonably good progress on clearing the main roads that they largely gave up on the side streets. (In 9 DC storms out of 10, this would probably work out fine, as the snow often melts by the time the city even gets to the secondary and tertiary streets). But there is an explanation for this. Only the city’s big trucks with hug plows can blast through the icy crust. And these large trucks simply don’t fit on the smaller streets, let alone the alleys. The city’s smaller trucks simply can’t do much to make an impact on the chunky ice. They’re trying but it takes time. This Post article is a fair report on the challenges.

So please be patient. This includes trash. DPW has stated that they will pick up our trash tomorrow (i.e. Sunday). So put it out asap.

I am hopeful that a second trash pickup and a first recycling pick up will also happen this coming week. But keep an eye on DPW updates to keep informed on that progress.

My last plea: This ice is not kidding around. And that includes the sheets of ice on house and building roofs. As it starts to finally melt, those ice sheets on slanted roofs will threaten to become guillotines. I would be careful walking near building eaves once the temperatures start to rise! Keep your eyes up!

Resident Ony Parking

Just a quick update this month on this effort. In March, the ANC is likely to formally consider filing a request to the city to implement resident only parking in Georgetown. We wanted to give people one more month to get informed, consider the proposal and reach out to their ANC commissioner with their thoughts. So please read my summary of the proposal from last month, take the survey if you haven’t already, and let me know what you think!

Volta Park Human Remains

As many have heard, some human remains were left exposed to the elements at the suspended construction site at Volta several weeks ago. It is disturbing that that happened. And this came after a long period of poor communication from the Department of Parks and Rec concerning the project.

I was able to finally get a full understanding of the project, which I recounted in detail here. But in short, this is what I learned: While digging a trench across the baseball diamond outfield last year, the construction crews encountered a completely intact grave that was only 3-4 feet deep. On the one hand this was not surprising since it is well known that a great number of graves remained on site after a cemetery was closed here in the 1890s. But on the other hand, it was a surprise since it was so shallow. The work stopped in order to assess the grave and plan around it. During this work stoppage, a pile of dirt that had been dug up became eroded by the rain at which point bone fragments became exposed. These were found by nearby residents.

Finding bone fragments is also not a surprise for the site. And there is a protocol for that whereby the bones are reburied deep enough, in the park. That protocol was not followed due to the work stoppage, which is unfortunate. However, since becoming aware the archeologists have collected the bone fragments and the dirt piles have been covered with a tarp.

The work will continue and hopefully be completed by April or May. This will be followed by a month or two where the park will remain off-limits while the new sod is given a chance to get established. By mid-summer the park should be finally done and fully open.

Update on the Lobby Bar

In 2024, a new bar sought to open at 1660 33rd St. in a former bookshop space. Originally it was going to be called Créme, but ultimately called itself the Lobby. Part of the plan was the creation of a back patio (or “summer garden” in regulatory speak) that opens up to a group of private residences.

This obviously alarmed the nearby residents and property owners. The ANC, along with some neighbors and the Citizens Association of Georgetown, protested. I negotiated a settlement agreement with the applicant that allowed for the patio but set strict rules about how and when it could be used. Like all good settlements, neither side was terribly thrilled with it, but so it goes.

Despite the fact that the agreement was reached in September 2024 and the applicant was eager to get it signed in order to let him open as soon as possible, the bar didn’t actually open until August 2025. Unfortunately the bar immediately and consistently broke the settlement agreement on multiple fronts, most egregiously concerning the patio hours. Despite multiple polite reminders to the bar owner about the terms of the agreement, the violations persisted.

Coincidentally, the license came up for renewal last fall. The parties to the agreement decided to protest the renewal. We now anticipate going to a full protest hearing on the license this month. If you are a nearby neighbor impacted by the operations of the Lobby, please reach out to me at [email protected].

I will give an update next month to let you know how it went!

Please see this update from DPW. Front side trash will be picked up on Sunday:

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly update:

• The city is obviously not doing a good job dealing with this snow. For particularly unpassable streets, please call in to 311. I was told informally not to expect any trash pick up until next week, but check DPW’s notices for confirmation.
• Q&A Cafe with Jamie Peva next week.
• Looks like Allbirds will be closing its Georgetown location as part of a wide scale reshift.
• Foreclosure scheduled for former Georgetown Suites property.

The ANC will be meeting for our February session next Monday night. During this meeting Councilmember Brooke Pinto will be with us to give her annual update and answer questions from the Commission and public. So please come prepared with questions for her! See you there.

The bridal shop at Volta and Wisconsin appears to be changing hands again. An application with the Old Georgetown Board indicates that Love Couture Bridal is aiming to take over the shop.

Love Couture Bridal is a bridal shop located out in Potomac. This would appear to be their second location.

The Georgetown shop was originally run as Hitched. I always thought that was a great name for a bridal shop and they always had a really nice appearance from the street. In 2018, the shop became Modern Trouseau. Ironically, in 2023 a totally unrelated wedding ring shop also called Hitched moved in up the street.

Part of the nice appearance of the original Hitched shop was the lovely awning. It was replaced by a less attractive blue awning by Modern Trouseau. The new shop appears to want to get rid of the awning altogether.

After an extended period, the C&O Canal will finally be re-flooded this year and the canal boat will return. This is according to an update from Georgetown Heritage, which was responsible for bringing a new boat back to the canal in 2022.

After a year of plying the waters, the boat was put up in dry dock again to allow the canal to receive critical repairs. The work is set to be completed this year and the canal will be filled with water again. (In case you’re wondering, the canal is not flooded with, like, a hose, or something. Up at Lock 5, in Brookmont, MD, there’s an inlet from the river that can be open or closed to fill the canal.) Once the canal is full, the boat will be floated again and the rides returned.

Georgetown Heritage is fund raising to support the boat and the tours, so if you want to help them out, give them some dough!

Parts of east Georgetown will have their water turned off for an extended period tonight as part of the lead pipe replacement project. Here are the details:

This work is scheduled to take place tomorrow,  Wednesday, January 21st, beginning at 8:00 pm, takes approximately 8 hours to complete, and there will be scheduled water service outage to customers at the following addresses during the tie-in:

• 1200-1400 blocks of 27th St NW
• 1200-1400 blocks of 28th St NW
• 1200-1400 blocks of 29th St NW
• 1200-1300 blocks of 30th St NW
• 1315, 1321 31st St NW
• 2600-3000 blocks of Dumbarton St NW
• 2700-2900 blocks of N St NW
• 2600-2900 blocks of O St NW
• 2700-2900 blocks of Olive St NW
• 2600-2900 blocks of P St NW
• 2700 block of Poplar St NW

All impacted customers at the above listed addresses have been given our standard 48-hour notification prior to this portion of work and scheduled water outage.

So schedule those evening baths on the early side tonight if you live on these blocks!

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, I’m exploring a fascinating photo that came to my attention from this interesting thread from a vintage photo group on Facebook. The photo itself is the Library of Congress collection. It’s from roughly 1909 and shows the Georgetown waterfront viewed from the south.

There are a lot of interesting elements to this photo. Moving left to right, this is what I notice:

First off you notice the old aqueduct bridge. I discussed this bridge last week. That photo was from 1889 and showed the bridge fairly soon after it had reopened as a second version of the original bridge (which opened as a genuine aqueduct in 1843). There was no “third” version of the bridge, so the version you see in today’s photo is the same from last week. You can see fairly clearly how the bridge was constructed on the old piers, which remained from the original design. They were fairly substantial both in size and number. I suspect that once the bridge stopped carrying water, there wasn’t a need for so many huge piers. But that’s just a guess.

The bridge remained until the 1920s, when the Key Bridge was built. The old bridge was torn down in the 1930s. Most of the piers remained until the 1960s when all but one was dynamited. One pier near the southern shore remains as a relic.

Next over we see the Potomac Boat Club. While the club dates to 1869, this is actually the third club house it occupied. It was built roughly five years before the photo was taken. And it really hasn’t changed much since then. The downstream annex is bigger now and has a couple floors constructed above it, but the main part of the building looks pretty much the same (although it looks possible that the siding may have been unpainted back then).

What I find particularly cool is that there used to be a balcony connecting the club to the bridge:

You can still see where the balcony once stood:

Back to today’s photo:

Here you can see the foot of what was 60 some years away from being called the Exorcist Steps. I did a deep dive once into the history of the steps themselves. And in that article I noted that there once was a shed at the bottom of the steps, although I didn’t really know what it looked like.

There was a car service station there for many, many years (and is still there in a zombie fashion). But I don’t think that’s what this was. Perhaps it was a place trolley cars could pull into to get out of the weather without having to go into the Car Barn itself?

Moving right from there you can see a series of buildings that once stood on the south side of M St. across from the Car Barn:

These were a row of buildings that included the famed Key Mansion, which was where Francis Scott Key once lived. They were all leveled in the 1940s to accommodate an off-ramp for the Whitehurst Freeway.

On the western end of these buildings is a building with a fun billboard painted on its back. The sign appears to say “POP IN TO HOPKINS HARDWARE”. This appears to have been a hardware store that dated to the 1870s (although not at this location). It seems to have gone out of business in the 1940s, probably due to the building demolition.

Right at the center is the building that is the subject of the Facebook posting in the first place. Commenters appear to have agreed that it was some sort of a mill-related building. But what’s particularly interesting is that it’s still around, albeit a bit hidden:

The lots down there are a bit of a fee simple nightmare. For many of them it’s hard to know exactly what entity or government body owns it. The zoning map says it’s the federal government, but there could be competing claims from the city or WMATA or who knows.

The last thing that catches my eye is this rather lovely boathouse. I was not aware that there was a boathouse at this location. By this date, on top of the Potomac Boat Club there were boathouses for the Washington Canoe Club (still mostly standing) and Dempsy’s (burned down in the 1960s). But I didn’t know about this one.

Baist’s Real Estate map from 1919 doesn’t really shed light on who owned this one. They simply labeled it “Boat Ho”:

A news article from 1919 about a flood mentions two clubs I was not familiar with the Great Falls Canoe House and Capt. Moore’s Boathouse.

The boathouse in the photo looks more like a canoe boathouse that a rowing one, due to the narrow doorways (plus there’s a canoe in the water by the dock). So perhaps it’s this Great Falls Canoe house.

(After some more digging I believe that it the right answer):

Later references to the club locate it at 3800 K St., which would put it upstream of the Washington Canoe Club. Neither building remains.

Photo by M.V. Jantzen.

Good morning Georgetown, here’s your weekly news roundup:

• Los Cuates appears to be closed.
• I spoke with NBC4 about the Volta Park situation.
• Halcyon House sells for $28 million.

This week on Georgetown Time Machine, I’m exploring yet another interesting shot from the DC Historical Society. According to the photo’s record, it is showing the old Aqueduct Bridge during the great Potomac Flood of 1889.

To orient you, the old aqueduct bridge ran south from just west of where the Key Bridge now stands. So the photographer is standing roughly in front of where the Car Barn now stands. Here is a clearer photo of the bridge before it was demolished:

Interestingly, this steel version of the bridge only opened the year that the photo was taken.

The photo record doesn’t really provide a whole lot of detail. It just says “View south along the Aqueduct Bridge Georgetown bridge during Potomac River flood of 1889”. It’s not even clear what time of year this flood happened. Some Googling tells me that it occurred on June 1st-2nd and was due to spring rain storms:

More to the point, the flooding was a direct result from the much more famous and tragic Johnstown Flood that took place days before. A wonderful article on the Potomac Flood can be found here.

The silly old timey bike that you see in the photo is called a penny farthing. Interestingly enough, it was already out of style by the time the shot was taken. They were being replaced with the “safety bicycle”, which is what they called bikes with two smaller wheels (i.e. the same type we have today). You can even see one of these “safety bikes” just to the left of the penny farthing.