Latest News

Robert Devaney • January 11, 2016

Promoters, developers and designers of the future building and park that will emerge out of the West Heating Plant site at 1055 29th St. NW, just south of the C&O Canal and the Four Seasons Hotel, addressed the members and guest of the Citizens Association of Georgetown Dec. 9 at the Georgetown Public Library.

The development group, headed by Richard Levy of the Levy Group, showed the designs of British architect David Adjaye and landscape designer Laurie Olin. Others in the group include the Four Seasons and the Georgetown Companies of New York. The team bought the two-acre property from the federal government in 2013 for $19.5 million. High-end condo units — managed by the Four Seasons — will number 60 to 70, and half of the land will become a park.

Adjaye is the architect for the National Museum of African-American History and Culture as well as two D.C. public libraries. He presented his first design that echoes the way the building, shut down for 15 years as a power plant, now looks with its vertical lines. As the present structure is not designated a historic landmark, Adjaye’s second and preferred version reveals a differently aligned building with horizontal lines that echo the flat sweeping lines of the Kennedy Center and Watergate complex as seen from the Potomac River coming up to Georgetown. The footprint of the building would remain more or less the same.

The group has many hurdles for completion. It may take three years to tear down the building, clear the land and finoish the building — after many approvals. Ahead is an Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting in February as well as one with the Old Georgetown Board. Levy and his team have to get Mayor Bowser to deem their efforts a “project of special merit” to have a completely different building (though it is a similar size) for the site.

Meanwhile, there will more opportunities for public comment. Overall, impressions from the neighbors at the meeting about the new designs seemed upbeat. More to come on this project, no doubt.
[gallery ids="102187,131614,131607,131603" nav="thumbs"]

Peter Murray •

Mayor Muriel Bowser unveiled a two-year action plan Dec. 17 for the city’s Vision Zero program, an initiative started in Sweden that is aimed at eliminating traffic deaths in the District by 2024.

“We know over the past two decades we’ve seen annual traffic fatalities in our city reduced very significantly, but still too many people are dying as a result of traffic accidents,” Bowser said said. “That is why we talk not of reducing traffic fatalities, but getting to zero.”

The new plan, which spans 56 pages and 68 action items, is broken into four parts. Some steps are intended to create safe streets and protect vulnerable users, while others are meant to prevent reckless driving and promote transparency. Some steps are ambitious, like redesigning roads for all users, while others, like increasing fines for driving violations and expanding D.C.’s automated traffic cameras, are intended to deter bad behavior.

Learn more about D.C. and Mayor Bowser’s Vision Zero action plan here.

Gary Tischler •

Each year, we count up our losses — the passing of those who in the course or the whole of their lives were notable for their presence, for their achievements, for their personalities, for those moments when fame or something like it knighted or benighted them.

Memory and space are not democracies, of course, unlike the lengthy list that accumulates at Wikipedia every year, which appears to make an effort to circle the globe and search the nooks and crannies of accomplishment in every nation and municipality (which speaks well of the likelihood that even our own preordained passing might well be noticed by someone, somewhere).

So, we too choose to notice any number of people who have touched us, sometimes through specific, personal contact, sometimes for their impressive lives of achievement and contribution, sometimes for a singular kind of thing: a song, a book, a performance, a role in another singular life.

It is like an annual parade passing — full of leaders, writers, elected personages of high standing, singers of songs, poets, band leaders and band members, game players and athletes, more-than-average citizens, owners and inventors, people who encountered fame head on or were struck glancing blows by it.

Their proximity and contributions added to the richness of our own more humble lives. Take writers, for instance. When writers pass, they stop writing: books, essays, stories in the dwindling newspapers and magazines, poems, plays, words shaped to form a novel, a tale, six stanzas or librettos, the words spoken by actors on a stage.

Thusly, there will be no more words from the great, Nobel Prize-winning and complicated German writer Günter Grass, who spent his life writing novels that addressed the impossible 20th-century history of Germany through characters that included a boy who willed himself to stop growing in “The Tin Drum” and Hitler’s dog in “Dog Years.”

There will be no more thick, addictive books from Colleen McCullough, the Australian novelist who produced a melodramatic best seller called “The Thorn Birds,” then proceeded to delve into Roman history in a series of story-telling triumphs that began with the stories of Marius, Sulla and a young Julius Caesar and ended with Caesar and Cleopatra.

There will be no more elliptic, haunting novels by E. L. Doctorow, who chased American history as if it were an elusive heiress through “Ragtime,” “Billy Bathgate” and “The March,” among many books. There will be no more poems from Rod McKuen, who, for a time in the 1960s, was the hugely popular Pied Piper of quasi-lonely young men who, he wrote, “were left with the Saturday night consolation prize, the Sunday paper,” and no more poems from the much more respected and less best-selling Philip Levine.

For that matter, there will be no more true-crime books from Ann Rule, who knew Ted Bundy, and no more thick volumes on the history of Soviet horrors like “The Great Terror” by Robert Conquest. And no more of the elegant medical writings and books of Oliver Sacks, and the less elegant, but totally juicy novels of Jackie Collins, sister of Joan.

Actors from the silver screen and the small screen remain with us forever. There are no small roles in small or big movies or shows, and so we remember the rich face of Al Molinaro who played a guy named Delvecchio in “Happy Times” and Murray the cop in “The Odd Couple.” We remember Jack Larson, who spent part of his life as Jimmy Olsen on the 1950s “Superman” show, and Judy Carne, for being on “Laugh-In” (and being married to Burt Reynolds) and Gary Owens, who told us that “Laugh-In” was coming from “beautiful downtown Burbank,” and Alex Rocco, who got shot in the eye as Moe Greene in the climactic cleanup at the end of “The Godfather.”

We remember the shining old-movie beauty of Joan Leslie as Gary Cooper’s love in “Sergeant York” and the good girl in Bogart’s “High Sierra,” the boyish face of good man Martin Milner in “Route 66” on television and as the book-reading kid who got shot storming the beaches in “Sands of Iwo Jima.” We remember French suave personified in Louis Jordan, courting Leslie Caron in “Gigi,” and Rod Taylor, the hunky, not-quite-big-star in “The Time Machine” and “Young Cassidy.” Then there’s “Our Gang” member Dickie Moore, who gave Shirley Temple her first screen kiss. Trust me, it’s all there, somewhere, on celluloid, in digital, big screen, YouTube, the back of my mind.

Fred Thompson, who was a senator and once ran for president, straddles the line — he was a district attorney on “Law and Order,” where he can be seen any time you want, and appeared in any number of movies.

Leonard Nimoy and Christopher Lee were part of our fascination with space. Nimoy transcended the “Star Trek” series as Mr. Spock, becoming a kind of gentle philosopher. Lee was a villain in the second round of “Star Trek,” which — hold on to your hats — is back again, but touched pop culture over and over as the bad wizard in “Lord of the Rings” and the most memorable Dracula ever (excuse me Lugosi and Langella and all the rest). I did not see “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and so cannot comment how good Gunnar Hansen was as Leatherface.

Fame is funny — it’s almost like a pool table or six or two degrees of separation. Here’s one for you: Three Dog Night (“Joy To The World”) lost co-founder and lead vocalist Cory Wells and keyboardist Jimmy Greenspoon, not to mention June Fairchild, an actress who was noticed in the Cheech and Chong get-high movie “Up in Smoke” and suggested the band’s name to her boyfriend, a band member. Her life is an abject lesson in what even a light touch of the spotlight can do to a vulnerable soul.

These annals of pop and rock and blues are full of one-hit wonders, but B.B. King wasn’t one of them; the king of the blues led a musical life that was one big hit. Not quite so big, but totally memorable, were the stylings of Ben E. King, with and without the Drifters: “Up On the Roof” and “Stand By Me.” And there were one-hitters — Billy Joe Royal with “Down in the Boondocks,” Frankie Ford with “Sea Cruise” — and multiple-memorable hitters, like Lesley Gore with “It’s My Party” and Lynn Anderson with “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” and Little Jimmie Dickens, a Grand Old Opry mainstay.

Ernie Banks (“Play Two,” Chicago Cubs), Minnie Miñoso (Chicago White Sox) and eternal Yankee Yogi Berra form many of our baseball memories, where it’s always déjà vu all over again.

Locally, the losses included, most notably and most recently, Austin Kiplinger, a forward-looking gentleman and publisher of the old school who treasured history enough to help in the creation of a museum of Washington history and serve as president of Tudor Place. He defined the idea of leading a full life in the midst of history.

You could find no one more helpful and kinder than Cherie Cannon.

Both Moses Malone, player, and Flip Saunders, coach, are fondly remembered by fans of the Washington Wizards (the Bullets in Malone’s time). And let’s throw in Dean Smith, the classy University of North Carolina basketball coach, for causing so much pain to the Georgetown Hoyas and the Maryland Terrapins.

We left people out. This happens — in life and in death. But imagine, for just a moment, all these people at a lawn party, say at Tudor Place or the Kennedy Center or your backyard. Who would be watching out for Uggie, the dog from “The Actor” and Jack the Bulldog Sr., the Hoya mascot?

Peter Murray •

The District Department of Transportation announced Friday that the prices for tickets related to traffic violations are going way up. Under the new proposal, exceeding the speed limit by 25 mph or over could cost you $1,000 while turning right on red without stopping could cost as much as $200.

Other newly proposed fines include $500 for drivers who fail to slow down or move out of the way for emergency vehicles and $100 for going over the speed limit near recreation and senior centers. There’s also a new $500 fine for failing to yield for buses reentering traffic.

The new proposal also includes fine increases for a number of violations regarding car-bike and car-pedestrian interactions. For example, the fine for hitting a bicyclist will increase from $50 to $500, parking in a bike lane will go from $65 to $200, hitting a pedestrian will cost $500 instead of $50, and failing to yield to a pedestrian before turning right on red will run $200 rather than $50.

DDOT proposed the new changes without the District Council’s input, a development that auto club AAA Mid-Atlantic questions. “DDOT is doing this through the regulator process,” said AAA’s John B. Townsend II. “Why not do it through the legislative process, where you can have public hearings?”

DDOT Director Leif Dormsjo told the Washington Post that there is no formal vote required by the Council on the changes, which are part of Mayor Bowser’s Vision Zero plans, but members can ask to amend or reject the proposed rules through the legislative process.

Bicycle and pedestrian advocate groups supported the proposal as a part of the larger Vision Zero initiative. They argue that stricter penalties will make D.C.’s roads safer for all users, whether they are pedestrians, bicyclists or drivers.

Under D.C. law, regulations can be changed after they are published in the D.C. Register twice, with a comment period of 30 days in between publications. So, while these rules are not final, they are currently in effect.

Robert Devaney • January 10, 2016

That fellow at Dog Tag Bakery just might be a veteran who has quite the story to tell. Some are more intense than others.
Lizandro Mateo-Ortiz and his wife Milena were part of the inaugural class of Dog Tag fellows. Army veteran Mateo-Ortiz barely survived being pulled under a Humvee in Iraq in 2007 and required many surgeries. He still walks with a brace and works with his wife of nearly 25 years. They have been in stories about the bakery.

Another story recalls the days of “Shock and Awe.” The newest Dog Tag fellow is 32-year-old Ayad Ahmed, who got swept up during the Battle of Baghdad in April 2003 . . . actually and harshly. His life changed forever. A bunker-busting bomb hit his street in the Mansour district, looking for Saddam Hussein on incorrect intelligence. The shock bombing killed his girlfriend and left his mother bleeding and grandfather in a coma. Eleven were killed. Ahmed was the only local who could speak English. Tough special operations soldiers grabbed Ahmed, tossed him in a Bradley fighting vehicle, threw a bullet-proof vest at him and told him to translate. None of the Americans spoke Arabic. Ahmed thought to himself: “You came all this way with no translator? What is Saddam doing in my garden, dude?”

His language skills saved the lives of some of his neighbors, whom he never saw again. “Everyone in the neighborhood hated me,” he said. There remains a bounty on his head, and he has never returned to Iraq. He lived with U.S. forces from 2003 until June 2009, when he left for Fort Riley, Kansas, for five years. “I was stuck with them.”

Ahmed became a U.S. citizen in November and wanted something more, he said, perhaps in Washington, D.C. While visiting the Pentagon, he stood in first of the office of Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pondering his future. In a moment, Ahmed’s life would change again, when he was urged to contact Dog Tag, Inc. He began working at the bakery last week.

Georgetowner •

Dog Tag Bakery’s Can-Do Spirit Provides Jobs for Disabled Veterans, Along With Sweet and Savory Treats for All

“True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

FDR could have been speaking about Dog Tag Bakery, located on the perfectly named Grace Street, just past the C&O Canal below Wisconsin Avenue and M Street.

It’s an airy place, busy, with room enough to sit in style and ponder the world, take in really good cup of coffee, order up sandwiches, scones, sweets and soups, all while supporting veterans. You can see the bakers, the cooks, the people manning the cash register, the kitchen itself.

Here, the baguettes are exceptional, the chocolate cake great, the ginger pear torte exquisite and the soups super. This place is among the best in the city.

Yet this is more than your neighborhood coffee shop. When you step into Dog Tag Bakery — with its wide entrance for easy wheelchair access — you become a part of something larger than the time of the day, the aroma of coffee, the pleasantries, and stories shared around a table. Becoming a customer at Dog Tag Bakery lets you see the results of a unique program in action.
One of its slogans is “Baking a Difference.”

Dog Tag Bakery is part of Dog Tag Inc., which operates a six-month training program aimed squarely at “driven, entrepreneurial-minded wounded veterans and their spouses.” The program, through Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, concludes with a group of fellows — all wounded veterans, or their spouses, and other professionals who have served in combat zones — well on their way to perhaps owning their own businesses or finding sustainable slots in the workplace. Its inaugural group of fellows has already graduated, and a second group started last month.

Dog Tag Bakery is a kind of physical, practical and workaday manifestation of the program, where veterans put their new business skills into practice: managing, keeping the kitchen running, preparing food, handling the counter. A chandelier of 3,456 dog tags is both a reminder of purpose and an additional way for customers to get involved. A $125 donation lets you hang one there too.
The program — which also features a lecture series and opportunities for wounded veterans to tell their own stories — is the first of its kind, a pilot program which its founders and operators hope to see duplicated in other cities.

Dog Tag has gotten a lot of attention from media, local and national, from the get-go. Its goals and the stories of the veterans are compelling. Retired Army Ranger Sedrick Banks, who had his neck broken in Iraq, told CBS News: “Dog Tag was my first major step back into the working mindset. Before the program, I didn’t have confidence. I didn’t feel like I had the ability. Now, I’m confident in myself, you know?”

The mission of Dog Tag has also earned the confidence and support from the likes of Mark and Sally Ein, Steve and Jean Case, Tammy Haddad, Roy and Kelley Schwartz, just to name a few.

Among the many human ingredients that go into Dog Tag’s operation are co-founders Rev. Richard Curry, S.J., and Constance Milstein; Chief Operating Officer Meghan Ogilvie; General Manager Justin Ford; Head Baker Rebecca Clerget; and Director of Development Simone Borisov.

Yet the most critical human ingredients are the fellows, the wounded veterans themselves, seeking doorways to enter the workforce, learn new skills, become entrepreneurs, become a part of the American mainstream. And that’s where the 72-year-old Father Curry comes in.

“He is the Jesuit father, and I am the Jewish godmother,” Milstein, one of Washington’s — and the country’s — leading philanthropists, told the crowd at the bakery’s grand opening in December. The attorney and real estate developer said she considers their partnership “a match made in heaven.” She is committed to helping veterans — her involvement with Blue Star Families is one example — and has also set up nonprofit bakeries in New York.

“It is because of my father, friends I lost in Vietnam, and those who continue to defend our freedom today that I am dedicated to our military and to helping empower and care for our military families,” Milstein has said.

It is Curry — a Jesuit brother who was ordained a priest at age 66 — who brings with him just what is needed to help disabled, wounded veterans. If there were degrees and medals in empathy, affinity, the ability to listen to and tell stories, Curry would have a fistful of them.

Curry founded, and headed for three decades, the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped, a nonprofit theater-arts training institution for persons with physical disabilities. Reaching out to disabled combat veterans, especially amputees, he began the Writers’ Program for Wounded Warriors, which encourages wounded veterans to tell their stories.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, he is technically disabled himself, having no right forearm. “I was born this way,” he told us in an interview at Dog Tag Bakery. He laughed. “I’m still wrestling with that. It still hurts.” But it also lets him understand with deep feeling, intellect and sometimes humor the plight of wounded veterans.

“Many people faced with a loss of a limb or internal organ internalize things. They can’t let it out,” he said. “And they think they won’t be able to do anything in life, all the things they could have done, all the tools to provide for a family. And that’s not true.”

“I don’t think of myself in terms of my disability,” Curry said. “And it’s important that our wounded warriors not be defined by their disabilities. This program is about confidence.”

Curry himself is a lot about building confidence — he exudes not so much strength as a kind of viability. He has that air of Irish curiosity about him, a conviviality that comes naturally, a love of the human race and its individual spirits.

In many ways, he is the heart of the Dog Tag enterprise, or at least its warmest cheerleader. The veterans themselves are the real stories, of course, and over the years Curry has managed to get them to tell their stories, time and again, in school and on stage; the stage at Dog Tag is one of his innovations.

“That was one of the reasons I started the wounded veterans’ writing program. There is this need for them to tell and write their stories,” Curry said. “Look what happened during the course and aftermath of the Vietnam War. The veterans, many of them badly wounded and maimed, and just as much psychologically, couldn’t tell their stories. Nobody wanted to hear them.

“This is about their stories as much as learning how to run a business, how to be part of a business,” he said. “So many buried their stories in silence and they have made us realize that war has its price.”

The need is obvious. Nearly 120 veterans applied for spots in the first group of fellows. Ten were chosen.

Curry decided to enter the priesthood after many of the wounded veterans he dealt with asked him to hear their confessions.

According to one story, a veteran asked him why he wasn’t a priest and Curry said he felt he had not been called. “Well, I’m calling you,” the man said to him.

Beyond his ability to administer the sacraments, Curry has written two books, “The Secrets of Jesuit Breadmaking” and “The Secrets of Jesuit Soupmaking.”

At Dog Tag Bakery, he’s already sharing his finely tuned Jesuit gift for compassion, hitched to intellectual curiosity and empathy, linked to worldly action. [gallery ids="102126,133741,133739" nav="thumbs"]

Peter Murray • January 9, 2016

After weighing a number of redevelopment options for the Franklin School at a special meeting on Nov. 16, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, or ANC, with jurisdiction over the area, voted unanimously to support Georgetown University and Thoron Capital’s plan to turn the old school into new academic center focusing on technology and multi-media art. Previously, the school was slated to host a contemporary art museum but Mayor Muriel Bowser shelved those plans in February shortly after coming into office.

Four companies presented redevelopment proposals for the school, built in 1869, to the ANC. The crop of proposals included plans to turn the space into a co-working office space or a boutique hotel, with a focus on either the arts or on fine dining.

Georgetown’s plan, on the other hand, involves turning the space into “a technology, arts, and media center envisioned as the ‘Y Combinator start-up model meets Juilliard with live performance, educational activity, and a dynamic space where technologists, artists, and entrepreneurs come together,” according to the ANC. Robert Taylor, founder of Thoron Capital, explained to the Washington Post that the plan is based off “the idea of bringing different arts disciplines together and letting them play off of one another.”

Included in the plans are a performing arts hall run by the operators of Bohemian Caverns, a live music staple on U Street, an outdoor performance courtyard, and a restaurant facing 13th Street NW. According to Urban Turf, “there will also be community-based courses for Georgetown students which the public can audit, as well as a partnership with various public high schools in the city to teach and train youth and provide college students with community-based learning credits.”

Randall Bass, Georgetown vice provost for education, suggested to the Washington Post that a new university center at the Franklin School would help connect the school’s other downtown programs, like its continuing education campus near Mount Vernon Square and the Georgetown Law premises close to Union Station.

“We think that this is a really unique opportunity to be able to bring the music and film studies work to the heart of downtown,” he said to the Post.

Under the ANC’s recommended plan, Thoron would lease the old school from the city and undertake renovations, while Georgetown University would be the primary tenant. Thoron will consult with a number of experts on historic preservation for the project, but Taylor called the project a “comfortable undertaking” because it will not seek to “radically change the layout of the building.”

A panel within the Deputy Mayor of Planning & Economic Development’s office is in charge of the final decision on the building’s redevelopment. Bidders anticipate a decision by the end of the year and the Bowser administration aims to begin construction in 2017, around the same time that the National Park Service will be putting the finishing touches on its overhaul of Franklin Square Park.

Robert Devaney • January 6, 2016

Pre-parties, post-parties and brunches, as usual, surrounded the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton on Connecticut Avenue April 27. Friday night parties involved a Creative Coalition Coalition and Lanmark Technology, Inc., dinner at Neyla, a Vote Latino reception at the Hay Adams and a People-Time party at the St. Regis. On Saturday afternoon, Tammy Haddad’s brunch at Mark Ein’s place on R Street created more buzz. At the Hilton, several receptions went on before the dinner bells chimes. Afterwards, Bloomberg-Vanity Fair, Capitol File and MSNBC parties commenced. On Sunday, more brunches by Politico on Q Street and Reuters and Yahoo at the Hay Adams. Besides the parties and dinners, Georgetowners spied WHCA dinner headliner Conan O’Brien on P Street and Korean rapper Psy in front of the Four Seasons Hotel. [gallery ids="101272,148463,148457,148451,148445,148438,148431,148425,148419,148413,148475,148406,148480,148399,148485,148490,148469" nav="thumbs"]

Robert Devaney • December 22, 2015

Cardinal Donald Wuehl, Archbishop of Washington, was the main celebrant of the Dec. 6 Mass, which formally installed the 52nd pastor of Holy Trinity Church, Rev. C. Kevin Gillespie, S.J. Founded in 1787, Holy Trinity on 36th Street NW is the oldest Catholic parish in Washington, D.C. Formerly the president of St. Joseph’s University, Gillespie also taught religious studies and coached baseball at Gonzaga College High School and Georgetown Prep.

Robert Devaney •

At the Nov. 30 meeting of the Georgetown-Burleith Advisory Neighborhood Commission, representatives of DC Water, also known as the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, stood in front of a table of commissioners and were scolded like schoolboys.

What was the problem? If you live or drive along P Street on the east side of Georgetown, you have no doubt experienced the slow progress of the water work, digging and repaving.

P Street resident and commissioner Monica Roache criticized DC Water representatives, who said they were also frustrated and wanted the pace of work quickened — and put the blame on their contractors. Roache and her neighbors got the noise and parking restrictions reduced. After months of disruption, streets around 27th and P were fully paved and smooth this week.