Garrett Faulkner • June 18, 2013

The much-anticipated Mediterranean eatery Morso will open May 27, located at 3277 M St. The restaurant is the brainchild of tattooed Chef Ed Witt, who originally wowed Bay Area foodies at San Francisco’s Jardiniere. Reservations can be made here.

Morso’s take-out wing, Morso Express, has been open next door since March. While it initially received rocky reviews from a few locals, word on the street is that the menu has improved dramatically. We agree. First timers should try the lamb and pistachio kabob or the chicken pide, a delicious spin on typical flatbread dishes.

Garrett Faulkner •

The most notorious hotel in the country has sold for $45 million, the Washington Business Journal reports. The iconic and curiously designed waterfront resort was the site of the 1972 Democratic headquarters break-in that sparked a nationwide scandal and prompted Richard Nixon to resign the presidency.

Euro Capital Properties, a New York-based property investor, purchased the hotel on May 26 after the hotel endured a year-long spell in limbo. Monument Realty, which previously owned the property, was forced to give it up to foreclosure after an attempt to auction it off last July attracted few buyers. The hotel remained up for sale until yesterday’s deal.

Euro Capital, known for adeptly placing successful hotels in major cities, plans to revamp the Watergate property, perhaps even adding residential units to the mix.

Garrett Faulkner •

On May 25, the Georgetown BID’s Street Operations Manager Alfred Corbin, joined by District Department of Health reps and around 10 residents and business owners, led a public walk-through of the claustrophobic Cherry Hill Lane to show off the city’s latest efforts in rodent abatement. The cobbled, elbow-shaped nook wends through that forgotten part of west Georgetown, just off lower Wisconsin — it’s silent, shaded and carved from long-shuttered factories and defunct restaurants.

The alley, or at least part of it, may also be the paragon of pest-free living in Georgetown.

Rodent and insect control is one of those dirty, furtive little responsibilities of living with no place in polite conversation, making the Tuesday morning gathering seem a little taboo. Polite handshakes circled around, eye contact was sparse. There was an overwhelming expectation to hear someone jokingly drawl, “Let’s go find us some rats!”

That any irreverence was kept in check is a testament to the project’s seriousness — this is, after all, a neighborhood perched over a major river and pervaded by capillary roads closed to traffic and ripe for infestation. Staying on top of Georgetown’s delicately termed “rodent problem” requires the city to mandate strict preventative measures and hold residents and business owners accountable to them. For the extra cautious — or militantly anti-rodent — there’s the walk-through program, which shows firsthand how basic prevention can greatly impact sanitation and pest deterrence.

Arcing between Grace Street and Cecil Place, Cherry Hill Lane is a study in before-and-after dualism. Entering from Grace Street, amblers on foot immediately rattle down a dark strait of overgrown pavestones, tepid water and hugely blooming weeds — the perfect spawning conditions for rats and mosquitoes, pointed out Gabe Curtis, a city pest controller with DOH, on the walk-through. The alley — little more than the backside of a row of Wisconsin Avenue eateries — isn’t heavily trafficked, but pest populations, proliferous by nature, can spread outward at an alarming rate from a single spawn point.

Turn the corner, however, and the scene is suddenly less grim, the stonework brighter. A white concrete easement, troughed to shunt away standing water, has replaced the oil slick-colored cobblestones. Herbs grow unnibbled in the garden soil. Garbage pails, tethered to iron railings and lampposts, are sealed neatly. Having just seen the alley’s ugly step-sibling, the walk-through group was impressed. Curtis, who spoke of the urban rat problem with a sort of Ghostbuster-like nonchalance, credited the efforts of both the city and neighbors.

“The problem on this end is practically solved. Everybody took ownership,” he said.

Corbin reiterated the point, going on to deliver a sort of anti-rat manifesto, part biology lecture and part deconstruction of the rodent mind.

“If they don’t have all the elements they need to survive, it creates a stress situation … If you remove all the elements, you end up with what you see here,” he said, gesturing around.

The take-home was that it’s a collaborative effort — the city can tidy up infrastructure and install traps, but the real onus lies with residents, who must preserve an inhospitable environment for the city’s furry and six-legged nuisances. The lesson was well taken. The walk-through-goers looked around, scribbled notes. Someone dumped an overturned garbage lid filled with stagnant water. The age-old battle of urban living seemed to be drafting some new combatants.

Still, the work is far from over for the Department of Health. Curtis said the rodent population enjoyed a resurgence this year, following the chaos of the February blizzard (which also yielded unusually high moisture levels). Traps baited with the rodent toxin diphacinone serve as a temporary solution, but city pest controllers are careful about installing them before ensuring the safety of their placement, especially in residential corridors. Street rehabilitation, repaving especially, is proving to be a headache for the city and residents alike, too. In the end, progress is slow: the next “expansion,” as the DOH terms it — slated for the 1400 block of Upper Wisconsin Avenue — isn’t scheduled to begin until 2011.

But as the walk-through showed neighbors, they needn’t wait around until then.

Tips for keeping rodents out of sight and out of mind:
1. Store garbage in metal or heavy plastic containers with tight lids.
2. Remove weeds and debris near buildings and in yards. Don’t give rats a place to hide.
3. Don’t leave extra pet food exposed. Instead, store it in a secure container.
4. Inspect your basement and house for cracks and holes, and seal them with mortar.
5. Make sure you have screens on your windows and inspect them regularly for holes.

(Source: doh.dc.gov)

Garrett Faulkner •

There was a little bit of a ruckus in the neighborhood last Friday. Perhaps you noticed it?

Okay, unless you rather presciently avoided lower Wisconsin around rush hour, unplugged your television and modem for the day or simply live in a cave, there’s probably no conceivable way you didn’t hear about the afternoon opening of the District’s first Apple store, the latest of the glass-housed, sleek-walled temples of cool to be added to the tech world’s register. The store, which last year gracefully navigated Georgetown’s notorious crucible of historical preservation edicts, had been so ceaselessly ballyhooed and elevated in the news and blogosphere that the formal announcement of the opening two weeks ago seemed a kind of deflated letdown, the journey’s quiet terminus, a gentle nudge to remind us that, oh yeah, it is just a store.

Yet no one in the snaking, variegated line of the iFaithful, stretching down 150 yards and curling around to M Street, seemed to believe that. In fact, if the Apple zeitgeist has taught us anything the past decade, it’s that the company (and the culture devoted to it) does nothing quietly, nor does it — ahem — simply open retail stores. Once dismissed as a caricature of serious computing, the PC’s irksome kid brother grew up in the 2000s into a hipster wunderkind, a sexy foil to the boxy, metallic slabs that spoonfed office drones their daily dose of Solitaire, PowerPoint slides and the occasional fatal blue screen. With a Mac, you could do stuff, the stuff that mattered, everything from mixing audio to launching a blog to renovating your baby videos with tasteful scene cuts and pop music overdub. By the end of the decade, the Mac, with the help of a take-no-prisoners marketing campaign, has become a rally point for the poets and painters of the digital age, a muse for the everyman, a culture where creation, not computation, is the watchword. The Harvard-pedigreed world of Bill Gates doggedly pursued productivity; Apple made it all about artistry. Later developments, such as the iPod and iPhone, have so securely cemented themselves in the popular consciousness and vernacular that they became must-haves for any consumer, status symbols of a plugged-in generation.

Co-founder Steve Jobs, who got the boot from company leadership in the ’80s before remanning the helm a decade later to launch its 21st-century renaissance, is to be congratulated, of course. Slinking around in a black turtleneck, bespectacled and spectacularly smiling, he is the most ungeekly of the geeks, a man with bottomless charisma and a fearsomely good nose for the trends and memes that spring up in the daily chaos of the tech universe. More impressive is his role as the face of Apple — he embodies it, more than any famous face they can air on TV, more than Einstein, more than Yo-Yo Ma, more than Justin Long, the actor who since 2006 personified the Mac’s “cool” image opposite a dweebish PC wonk. The world knows well that Jobs is the compass, the poster boy, the shepherd tending a technophile flock.

And as we saw late last year with the iPad, he still has it. He strolls on stage, a cool customer amid a mob of reporters and rabid fans, dazzling them every time. At Apple there is a sort of bloodless revolution going on, with Jobs and a million Macolytes perched on the barricades.

It all begs the question: what would the sleek tech juggernaut want with static, fastidious Georgetown, especially when younger, hipper neighborhoods are springing up downtown and on Capitol Hill? The answer, as Apple’s Ilene McGee coyly suggested, may be self-evident.

As she led a small group of reporters around the store moments before the doors were thrown open to the public, I asked McGee, the regional director for Apple stores in the metropolitan area, why Georgetown was selected as the site of the District’s first, and for now, only planned Apple store.

“Why wouldn’t you pick Georgetown?” she responded. She added, quietly, that the decision was made from on high, as if it were calculated from the top.

If nothing else, the decision did not go unnoticed. When the buzz began in 2008, the concept drew both excitement and consternation from citizens, who wondered how Apple’s modernist, minimalist layout of its stores would even begin to fit in with Georgetown’s vaguely termed “historic fabric.” In early 2009, The Old Georgetown Board hewed so strictly to the neighborhood’s architectural dictums that it sent the blueprints through the wringer five times before they were approved.

Chairman Ron Lewis of ANC 2E, which vets architectural designs before their review by the OGB, seemed to have overcome any doubts his commission may have had.

“It’s great having Apple in Georgetown,” he said. “[The company] obviously saw the draw of being in Georgetown, and the design process worked out very well in the end.”

Walking through the doors for the first time, before the mad rush of customers, was like walking into a good library — there’s this pristine, sacred feel, a small whispering sound as if the tomes — or in this case, gadgets — contained within are passing information between one another. Up front is propped the company’s latest flagship toy, the iPad, just begging to be fiddled with. Behind it are the iPhones (and in a few days’ time, presumably, the new fourth-generation arrivals). Arranged throughout the store are display stands of Apple iMacs, Apple MacBooks, Apple software packages and Apple accessories below looming, backlit posters of Apple slogans. If it isn’t a cult, it’s most certainly a culture.

Georgetown’s store contains the standard trappings, including the Genius Bar (for tech support) and a kid’s center, a petite bank of eight computers where children can attend a three-day filmmaking camp for free. The store will also offer the company’s popular “One to One” computer training, this time in a truly unique venue: an indoor “courtyard” at the store’s rear, scattered with high wood tables dunked in sunlight that pours through a glass rooftop. McGee said the architecture is only the second of its kind among Apple stores worldwide.

“We’re so excited to be a part of the Apple-Georgetown community,” she said, all but quaking with enthusiasm.

Outside, the street milled with customers lined up behind a velvet rope. Most were unabashed Apple zealots — even though few had any plans to purchase anything that day, in part because they already own their share of iPods and OS X flavors.

Bob Schadler, who hopped in line an hour and a half before the official opening time, said he already owned several Apple computers. Next to him, Amy, who declined to give her last name, boasted that four iPhones circulate around her household.

“My whole family’s pretty much Mac,” she said. Neither intended to buy anything that day.

Ditto for West End resident Hannah Lockhart, the proud owner of an iPod, Macbook and iPhone. However, her friend Becky Hayes did say she had her eye on the “awesome” iPad.

For his part, Ward 2 Councilmember Jack Evans, who made a brief appearance at the kickoff, was pleased with the community’s reception.

“This is a real shot to Georgetown,” he said. “It really affirms that Georgetown is a retail mecca.” Given the ongoing economic slump, he hoped the opening would drum up business for surrounding retailers.

Moments before the appointed hour, an army of blue-shirted store employees sprinted up from the back of the line, high-fiving, shouting, fomenting excitement. It wasn’t hard to build a frenzy. When the doors opened the blue-shirts had formed a cheering gauntlet along the center aisle, and the world flooded in.

I watched for a minute, smiled and left. It’s finally here. Enjoy, Georgetown.
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Garrett Faulkner •

You better believe Georgetown celebrates the Fourth of July.

On the afternoon before celebratory fireworks again lit the monuments of our capital, the denizens of its oldest neighborhood gathered at Volta Park for a little music, a little picnicking and a little time to soak in what would prove to be a model summer day.

That event, of course, was Concerts in the Park, the last installment of CAG’s three-month series armed with a simple formula: bring a band and a few tasty treats to the park, and they will come. It was enough to lure around 100 neighbors, which wasn’t a bad turnout for a holiday weekend, CAG President Jennifer Altemus said.

Co-chaired by Elizabeth Miller and Renee Crupi, the concert series’ afternoon finale kicked off with a parade around Volta Park before transitioning to a lively festival, the kind where everyone’s on a first-name basis and the music is good, no matter who’s playing (for the record, it was reggae-esque rockers Son of a Beach).

Volunteers passed out plush linen towels from Cady’s Alley décor shop Waterworks, along with a few raffle tickets for a facial care package from local doctor Mark Venturi. Most of the youngsters, parents in tow, haunted the activity booths, ranging from cookie and flag decorating to a water balloon toss to the time-honored estimation station (kudos to Edwin Steiner for his correct guess of 4118 M&Ms). Others simply lounged on their blankets, chatting with adjacent picnickers and soaking up the expiring daylight. Miller and a few committee members manned the ice cream stand, scooping up cones here and there for any passerby with a free hand.

Elsewhere, Georgetowners tested their mettle at a lineup of good-old-fashioned, county fair-like contests. A tug-of-war match pitted East Georgetown against West (this year, the East villagers came out on top), and a long table clothed in blue plaid served as battleground for a pie-eating contest, in which a handful of boys, their braggadocio notwithstanding, gave up the ghost to eight-year-old Emma Robinson, who apparently can chow down with the best of them.

It was, as you so rarely see in the city, a family affair. Kids and adults came and went, some rushing off for fireworks, others mingling with friends, carefree as summer.

Most of all, it was an instance of Georgetown as it should be — an aggregate of neighbors and loved ones, joined as one community.
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Garrett Faulkner •

Local blogger Topher Mathews posted an interesting update today on the long-anticipated second phase of the Georgetown Waterfront Park. The two-part project opened the first half of the park in summer 2008 to widespread acclaim, but the second phase, which includes a waterfront staircase (doubling as seating for boat races), fountain and promenade, has stalled in recent months, owing to budgetary snafus and unforeseen construction obstacles. (You know, the usual.)

The final tab overshot the original budget by $2.2 million, $1.9 million of which has been covered by appropriations by the city council and matching NPS funds. Now it looks like it’s largely up to the public to cover the remaining $300K (and indeed, it’s risen to the challenge, already having raised half that figure for the project). If enough money is raised, Georgetowners can expect to see a completed waterfront as early as 2011.

Prospective donors can go here to make a contribution.

Garrett Faulkner •

As part of a three-year project to rehabilitate the aging roadways that cross Georgetown’s C&O Canal, Thomas Jefferson Street’s bridge will close on July 26 until July 30, 2011, according to an announcement released by DDOT.

The project, which slated a year of repairs for each bridge, recently completed its work on 30th Street. 29th Street is on deck after TJ.

The project caused an initial stir when it was proposed last summer, mostly by residents who argued it would exacerbate the notorious traffic congestion already facing the village. Sustained opposition to the repairs never materialized, however, and so far the work seems to have had a minimal effect on traffic flow.

Parking will be restricted only on the west side of TJ, and traffic will still be able to access businesses and residences from M Street or K Street (and yes, you can still get to Baked and Wired).

All work will be conducted from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Friday and Saturday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. No work will be conducted on Sunday.

Garrett Faulkner •

Try this sometime: hang around some Georgetown locals for a while, and you’ll notice the word “village” gets tossed about quite a bit.

In everyday usage, it’s probably not a throwback to a time when Georgetown was a village in the literal sense, and it’s certainly not a offhand suggestion that Washington’s most famous district is dusty or parochial. And it’s not just an earthier, more lustrous synonym for dry buzzwords like “community” or “neighborhood,” though that’s a little closer to the truth.

The “village,” in this sense, is about the people who make it tick, the movable parts, the folks who greet each other on the street by name and raise their children together and meet every month in churches and schools to determine their common destiny as neighbors and friends.

The Georgetown Village, as in capital-V Village, owes much to that school of thought, while bringing something quite unprecedented to the table. Conceived largely by Georgetowner Sharon Lockwood and based on a similar concept in affluent neighborhoods such as Boston’s Beacon Hill and, in the District, Capitol Hill, the Village would form a kind of local volunteer cooperative to keep an eye on its aging citizens — helping seniors change a light bulb, drive to a doctor’s appointment or simply keep them company, all while allowing them to “age in place” at home rather than a nursing facility. While less expensive than traditional assisted living programs, beneficiaries will still be required to pay an annual membership fee to cover the non-profit’s operating costs.

An informal meeting of Georgetown residents — who, the Village leadership hopes, will be among the project’s first brigade of volunteers — was held on July 21 at the N Street home of Angie Leith. Sharon Lockwood, a retired World Bank employee who is now carrying the torch for the concept in Georgetown, conceded that at present, though the Village has pulled together advisory and officer boards, the project is little more than a gleam in the eyes of a few handpicked committee members, including Lockwood herself, who will spearhead the fundraising effort. The project is still zeroing in on a final membership fee, and volunteers still will require recruiting and training. Even securing office space is still on the to-do list.

But, as Lockwood and her committee chairs pointed out, the tasks that still need doing haven’t hindered their progress so far. The project is already finalizing its 501(c)3 non-profit tax status, and has been given a green light to begin accepting donations (Lockwood has wasted no time here, already having corralled $25,000 since the first meeting in March). While Georgetown will be the top priority, the project will also cover Burleith, and possibly Glover Park. The organization’s Web site, though still in its infancy, is now online. The Village has also come up with a logo and a catchy slogan: “Neighbors helping neighbors.”

The central focus of the meeting was a presentation by Capitol Heights residents Mike and Judy Canning, who founded a village project in 2007 spanning four square miles between the Capitol and H Street. The Cannings, who have mentored Lockwood extensively on the Georgetown project, described an uphill but successful battle to kickstart the concept in Capitol Hill, which managed to raise $160,000 from neighbors alone by launch day. Even more challenging than fundraising was recruiting dedicated, effective volunteers to perform house calls and services, which now number as many as 200 per month. Keeping volunteers enthusiastic, Judy Canning said, means preserving the village theme, the camaraderie that, when cultivated, blossoms even between strangers.

“Keep it personal,” she reminded the Georgetown gathering. “You may find out there’s a person around the corner who you’ve never met who’s willing to take you to a doctor’s appointment.”

That idea might sound crazy in a big city, but it’s getting noticed. The day after the meeting, the Washington Examiner, which did not attend the meeting but had spoken earlier with Lockwood, ran a short write-up about what’s next for the non-profit. Even Georgetown University, often at loggerheads with neighbors over town and gown spats, has expressed interest in the project. The University’s community relations execs, Linda Greenan and Brenda Atkinson-Willoughby, pledged support for the idea at the meeting and offered to brainstorm closely with the Village leadership.

In order to launch in early 2011 as planned, the Village hopes to recruit enough volunteers in the fall to begin providing tangible assistance to residents. The project will also need to secure $200,000 in donations by the end of the year.

The next recruitment and planning meeting will be held Wednesday, Aug. 25 at the home of Rose-Marie Catonio, 3139 N St., 6 to 7:30 p.m. Twenty-three neighborhood homes have volunteered to host informational meetings this fall before the project takes off.