Town Topics

Ari Post •

You know what this place reminds me of?” spoke a passerby inside Eastern Market’s 19th-century brick building last Saturday, surrounded by specialty food vendors offering everything from meat and poultry, to cheese, baked goods, pastries and flowers. “Florence.”

Outside, amid the produce stalls surrounding the main building, where local farmers come every weekend to sell their seasonal bounty, a woman burst out upon sampling a fresh tomato: “It’s as good as they are in California!”

Behind the North Hall entrance, breakfast and lunch stands sell loaded crepes, fresh mini-donuts and lemonade, gumbo, a variety of flavored pickles and much more. It’s like walking into a food cart consortium in New Orleans. Lines snake about in makeshift fashion, an eclectic maze of all the Federal city’s inhabitants. Families and three-piece suits intermingle with hipsters and seniors, dog-walkers and local teenagers, all generously interspersed with young thirty-something couples.

Eastern Market, among many other apt definitions and descriptions, is a cultural hub for the city and surrounding area. People talk here. A lot. People stroll without agenda through the pleasant but crowded vendor aisles. They laugh easily. They actually sit on public benches and drink coffee. They get caught up in the sensations and hum of this open-air market that is utterly unique to the nation’s capital. Just the scents you experience are enough to tell the story: lavender soaps and handmade candles, lacquered wood and grilled tortillas, peaches, cucumbers, honeycomb, watermelon, roses, lilies, lemons, fried fish.

In this sense, Eastern Market is also as close as modern-day Washington gets to Southern culture, in pace and in attitude. Frequent the market enough, and you will be on a first-name basis with the farmers and food vendors. You will begin to run into other neighborhood regulars, who come to do most of their shopping here—the indoor vendors, who are open every day of the week, together function in the style of a European market, with each independent merchant specializing in a particular good (seafood, meat, cheese, baked goods, etc…).

However you decide to culturally classify Eastern Market, it is a buzz of excitement, community, food, music, art and local flavor. Summer is in full swing, but it will be over before you know it. If you don’t live on Capitol Hill already, pick a weekend morning and discover it again or for the first time. Here are some longtime Market staples and a few great new additions to the Eastern Market family to guide your explorations.

Weekend Farmers’ Line
Surrounding the market in the shade of a covered sidewalk, area farmers empty their trucks of recently harvested produce each weekend. They haul in from Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia with a smorgasbord of fruits, vegetables, homemade jams, local honey, fresh flowers, pies, homemade breads and even specialty spreads (stop by Wisteria Gardens’ stand for a sample of the basil and ginger hummus—made seasonally).

Tony, of Dunham’s Produce stand, holds a plate piled high with chunks of fresh peaches, which passersby pick at joyfully and without much constraint. Every tenth customer or so is so overwhelmed by their flavor that they buy a few—and ten customers come around in no time in an Eastern Market weekend. His farm, based in Berkeley County, W. Va., has come to sell their produce at Eastern Market every weekend for more than 30 years.

“Right now we’re selling peaches, heirloom tomatoes, strawberries, nectarines, watermelon—summer produce,” he says. “When fall comes around, we start selling honey crisp apples and your fall produce. And two days after Thanksgiving, we’re back here selling Christmas trees.”

Tony also let on that West Virginia is a major peach-producing state, with great quality fruit and high yield. We got to stop giving Georgia all the credit.

Just down from Tony, Ma Brown has manned her booth for 33 years and hasn’t forgotten a moment of it. A Brooklyn native, she moved to the District in 1968 and opened her Eastern Market stand in 1979. “I sold ginger beer—and regular beer back then,” she says. “There used to be auctions in the market on weekends, selling antiques and whatever else. And they would send the bidders out to get a drink from me, so they would loosen up and bid higher.”

She now sells a variety of tonics and baked goods—she calls them her “sweet sins.” Her homemade strawberry-ginger lemonade is something everyone should try, and her pecan and pumpkin pies are impossible to beat.

Many of these farmers and vendors have been around just as long as Tony and Ma Brown, and there is a warmth and familiarity about the community that you don’t find very often.

South Hall Market
Much like the Farmers Line outside, it is a combustible drum of activity each weekend—and most weekdays—inside the market. Thirteen vendors hold shop, among them Southern Maryland Seafood, Canales Delicatessen, Market Poultry, Bowers Fancy Dairy Products, and Blue Iris Flowers. A throwback to a different era, within these walls a way of life is preserved that has all but vanished from American cities: the local markets.

If you want meat, go talk to the butcher. Pastries and fresh bread is over at the Fine Sweet Shop. In the South Hall Market, the grocers and shopkeepers are part of the shopping experience.

Blue Iris Flowers is another member of the old guard, an Eastern Market stand that has been in operation for well over 30 years. Angie Brunson, who opened and runs the shop, has a reputation for putting together some of the finest floral arrangements in the area.

Market Lunch, the indoor market’s only restaurant, is another local staple. A favorite breakfast and lunch spot among neighborhood residents, Market Lunch is always bustling at mealtime—the line often wraps around itself (though it moves quickly) and on weekends it can be hard to find a seat at the 20-foot long bar-top table, where patrons sit elbow to elbow to chow down on their tasty American fare. Breakfast favorites include blueberry buckwheat pancakes, and the lunch menu teems with classic East Coast staples, such as fresh fish and oyster sandwiches, soft shell crabs and charbroiled burgers.

Outdoor Eating
On weekends, Market Lunch gets a little friendly competition. The outdoor food stands at the market’s north end are all pretty spectacular. Sweet Nuthouse is a family-owned specialty nut business that has been selling in Eastern Market for several years. Perfect for snacking or gifting, its offerings include Praline Glazed Pecans, Cinnamon Almond Crunch and, during the cooler months, Sweet & Spicy Almonds, all made without preservatives, artificial ingredients, dairy, butter or gluten. At the heart of Sweet Nuthouse’s business is its insistence on freshness. It is quite likely that the nuts you buy at the Market are just a day—or even hours—away from the time that they were made.

For a serious meal, this author’s favorite stop is Puddin’, a stand that cooks up divine comfort food—and regardless of your definition of “comfort food,” it’s hard to argue with how good this food is. Puddin’s chicken and sausage gumbo is the real thing, and its shrimp and grits hit the spot any time of year. But it’s the brown butter bourbon bread pudding that will keep you coming back. Owner Toyin operates Puddin’s food stand on weekends as a branch of her catering business, which sources from local vendors.
Other vendors sell wood-fired pizza, made-to-order fresh donuts, crepes, and an array of delicious and funky pickled pleasures.

There are also a few regular “dine-in” restaurants lining the adjacent street. The Mexican-Salvadoran cuisine at Tortilla Café has a huge cult following—café manager Catalina Canales knows what she is doing. Her pork and cheese pupusas are famously tasty, and her tamales, empanadas and Salvadoran chicken sandwiches are all great bets. The eatery was featured on Food Network’s Diners, Drive-ins and Dives in 2010, where host Guy Fieri said, “You gotta come try this. I’m not kidding you.”

Where All the Books Go
“This is a book store and not a phone booth,” says Jim Toole, owner of Capitol Hill Books, just across the street from the south end of the market. What he means is that he doesn’t allow cell phone conversations in his store. “There are [also] words and phrases that you can’t use in my store: like, oh my God, neat, sweet, have a good one, that’s a good question, totally, whatever, perfect, Kindle or Amazon. These words give me brain damage. I’m serious,” he adds.

If these words resonate with you, for reasons on which I won’t elaborate, Capitol Hill Books is the place for you. A small, unadorned townhouse (save an awning with the shop’s name) sandwiched on a block of converted residential spaces, Capitol Hill Books is crammed from floor to ceiling with more than 20,000 used books from every genre imaginable. Fiction, poetry and the mystery room are upstairs. Art and cooking is in the back. Russian literature is in the bathroom. And so on, in that order.

This cavernous old townhouse is a reader’s quirky paradise. It’s the kind of place where you stumble across an unknown book by an unknown author, sit down to glance at the first couple of pages, and then realize three hours later that you’re late for your lunch appointment. Capitol Hill Books is the best used book store in the city—go there and see for yourself.

There is so much more to Eastern Market than can be understood without being experienced. It is a slobbery dog bumping your leg as you step back to admire a piece of jewelry. It is antiquing, discovering quirky, beautifully handmade and historic furniture, tiles, clothing, sculptures and paintings. It is a scene, a feeling, a spectacle. It is taste, sight, smell and sound. It is conversation, community and friendship. This is where you go on the weekend to take your time, to break distinctly from your work-a-day weekday pace. Eastern Market is just a good place to exist, and there’s nothing else quite like it in Washington, D.C. [gallery ids="100938,129961,129969,129977,129984,129991,129998,130005,130013,129956,129948,129941,130044,130037,129912,130032,130027,129921,129927,129934,130020" nav="thumbs"]

Garrett Faulkner •

In the midst of a grisly recession with a tight grip on Georgetown, it’s nice to know we have a few fine eateries that are still setting up shop. Take a walk to one of these restaurants, freshly opened — or nearly there — and eager to please.

Il Canale — 1063 31st Street

In a city where pizza is an art and the competition is stiff, our first impression of this new Italian gem was, well, we were impressed. Have a look at this new addition to 31st St., serving the gamut of gourmet pizza and other Italian delights.

Puro Cafe — 1529 Wisconsin Ave.
Puro has been in the works since early last fall, finally opening in January 2010. The patisserie has gathered to itself all the finer accoutrements of modern Europe: uber-modern decor, cozy, quaint lounging and some of the best muffins, croissants and sweets you’ll find in Georgetown.

Morso and Morso Express — 3277 M Street

The flagship wing of the Turkish eatery, headed up by Chef Ed Witt, won’t open until April, but kebab junkies can get in on the action as early as March 22, when the next-door Morso Express will begin serving its more casual fare of flatbread and shish kebabs.

Crepe Amour — 3291 M Street

Sri Suku and Surag Gopi set up shop in the space once occupied by Amma Vegetarian Kitchen, naming their project Crepe Amour and offering a rich menu filled with crepes for both dinner and dessert (their sweet crepe menu is particularly impressive). We tried a Da Vinci crepe recently — filled with pesto, chicken and tomatoes — and left feeling stuffed and happy. Don’t miss it.

Serendipity 3 – 3150 M Street

As we noted above, the New York frozen dairy craze will soon arrive at the lonely corner on M and Wisconsin. What’s got the Yankees so abuzz over a dessert joint? Well, besides its long list of celebrity patrons and appearance in a handful of Hollywood flicks, the restaurant boasts a thickset menu of sundaes, “frrrozen” drinks and, if you’re the type to wait on dessert, a long list of crepes, burgers and foot-long hot dogs. Look out, Georgetown.
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Garrett Faulkner •

There’s so much ado about Georgetown, so much bustle, so many dollars and words and honks exchanged at a daily clip.

It’s nice to know there’s always time for a little history.

That was true at CAG’s monthly meeting on Feb. 22, held at Mt. Zion Methodist Church on 29th Street, a nod to Black History Month. Dozens of congregation members and other Georgetowners filed into the pews to hear the stories and words of an unlikely pair: Carter Bowman, the official historian for Mt. Zion, and Mary Kay Ricks, a one-time attorney who founded a walking tour company and, fascinated by the tales she uncovered, wrote a book on the rather hush-hush topic of slavery in Washington.

That book, “Escape on the Pearl,” is an exhaustively researched work on the tangled web of human bondage that clung to the capital’s upper classes: presidents, senators, powerful
socialites. It is also concerned with the little-known yet bold escape attempt of 77 slaves on a chartered schooner from Philadelphia named the Pearl. While historically the event is overshadowed by John Brown’s raid of Harper’s Ferry and the Kansas wars, it was viewed at the time as enough of an abolitionist shenanigan to spark riots across the city. The year was 1848 and secession was barely a decade off.

What ties the two speakers together is that Mt. Zion played an integral role in the daring flight of the Pearl. And, as Bowman explained, the church served as a refuge for those in shackles for much of the antebellum 19th century and a community locus thereafter.

Mt. Zion was founded in 1816 by black members of the Montgomery Street Church (now the Dumbarton Avenue United Methodist Church) who, though they usually comprised half of the congregation, were fed up with being segregated from white worshippers. Autonomy was not all theirs, however — members of the newly formed Mt. Zion still held services under the auspice of Montgomery and, as it turned out, were presided over by white pastors.

But it began a rich cultural and religious identity for blacks in Georgetown, who made up nearly a third of the population, the majority of them free men. It became one of the few places under law where blacks could congregate in large numbers, and it was, at the height of the abolition movement, a major stop on the Underground Railroad. Whispers would travel electrically through the congregation: who was being hidden in the churchyard, who was up for sale, which families were close to being rent apart. The success of the cotton gin in the early 19th century ignited a demand for slaves in the South, and so with it a widespread sundering of families as mothers and sons and sisters were sold downriver. Around 600,000 slaves were fated to endure this “Second Middle Passage” to New Orleans or other Southern cities. As Bowman explained, church “classes” really became organized sects for keeping abreast of the latest news on local slaves and, when possible, spiriting those away who were being bought up for market.

Mt. Zion, then, is immutably wrapped in the history of slave resistance in Washington. One of the Pearl escapees, Alfred Pope, was a member of the church and later bought a plot of land in Georgetown on which to build a permanent house of worship. After the war, after Emancipation, it burned to the ground in 1880, but was rebuilt four years later. Walking through it now, you can almost taste the history, the stories it has witnessed. You almost hear small noises, something like ghosts or singing voices long past. CAG President Jennifer Altemus called it the “perfect venue” to discuss Ricks’ story.

“[This church] puts you in a place, gives you a feel for the history,” Bowman said. At 87, he has seen a good portion of it.

Ricks is much younger, a scholar at heart, with a soft and wavering voice that teems with emotion. Her book centers around Mary and Emily Edmonson, daughters of a free black man from Georgetown. Because their mother was a slave, however, they inherited their bonded status,
along with 12 other siblings.

The year was 1848. At that time, slavery was hardly taboo in Washington. Having been comprised of land ceded by slave states, the city was firmly rooted below the Mason-Dixon line, and slavery, as Ricks put it, “literally came with the territory.” Dolley Madison owned a slave late into her life, which she sold to Senator Daniel Webster the year before the Pearl made its dash for the North. That slave, Paul Jennings, was one of three men who conspired to charter a ship that would whisk away the slaves of Washington. The other was Samuel Edmonson, the older brother of Mary and Emily. The plan was simple: gather up the slaves marked for sale, steal away in the night to the ship and sail up the Chesapeake to safety. For a few, it was the only option.

“Many of the people boarded the Pearl that night because their security … was threatened by the slave trade,” Ricks said.

She went on to tell how, on a foggy August evening, the Edmonsons and the rest boarded the Pearl, moored close to the future site of the Washington Monument, and sailed away. They made for Point Lookout, the mouth of the Potomac, but when they arrived they found the weather had made it impassable. The captain, a white Pennsylvanian, had no choice but to anchor the boat in a leeward cove. Slaveowners in Washington had already awakened, discovered the plot and were in hot pursuit. Anti-abolitionist riots had already begun surging across the city.

The Pearl was eventually discovered right where it was anchored, its passengers manacled and dragged back to Washington. Most were sold and sent to New Orleans as punishment. One of the luckier Pearl escapees was Alfred Pope, whose owner took him back and freed him in his will two years later. He was serving on Mt. Zion’s board of trustees when he appointed
the 29th Street space nearly 30 years later, a free man.

Mary and Emily Edmonson became one of the first causes for a young Henry Ward Beecher,
the flamboyant abolitionist preacher who later would ship rifles (“Beecher’s Bibles”) off to Bleeding Kansas. With his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, they secured the Edmonson sisters’ freedom and their admission to Oberlin College.

It was a story the audience had trouble digesting. A silence, an eeriness hung in the air a moment, the realization that those on the front line of this country’s greatest conflict, the figures in old daguerreotypes, the names in textbooks, had once been a part of or helped this congregation, now housed in the very church where they sat. It was black history, American history, animated and made real.

Also in Georgetown:

As always, store openings and closings are making a few headlines this week. No word yet on the rumors surrounding a new Nathans tenant. Late-night junk foodies will be disappointed
to learn Philly Pizza has been ordered to shut down by the city’s Department of Consumer
and Regulatory Affairs. The Potomac Street pizza parlor, which is open until 4 a.m. on weekends, was found to have exceeded its allotment of carry-out orders, a violation of their license to operate as a sit-down restaurant. This would routinely attract a throng of noisy bar-hoppers and students, who clashed with neighbors across the street. This may not concern you if you’re somewhat of a pizza connoisseur, but the opening of Il Canale (1063 31st St.) should. We stopped by for a slice and were impressed. If you need a break from Pizzeria Paradiso, check out this new addition to the Georgetown restaurant scene. Finally, Georgetown’s Benetton store recently closed for remodeling. It should be ready by April, just in time to pick up some pastels and cashmere for spring.

Last month’s Jelleff imbroglio at the ANC meeting should be enough to convince you community politics are heating up this year. Ready for more? Stop by the next ANC meeting
on March 1 at Georgetown Visitation, 35th Street and Volta Place, 6:30 p.m. [gallery ids="99060,99061" nav="thumbs"]

Garrett Faulkner •

FotoWeek flourishes

The numbers are in from last week’s FotoWeek DC festival, and they’re impressive.

Judges received over 3500 submissions for the annual awards competition, hailing from 28 countries and 39 states. Elsewhere, nearly 150 associated events were conducted by the House of Sweden, the Corcoran Gallery and others in conjunction with the seven FotoWeek studios — five in Georgetown, two downtown. An estimated 20,000 photo enthusiasts attended the galleries, lectures and competitions across the city. Ten times that number browsed the festival’s website just this month.

The turnout was so successful the event commissioners have extended studio hours on weekends through Dec. 13. The Georgetown FotoWeek Central galleries can now be visited Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

EcoFest draws a crowd, for a good cause

O Street’s Hyde-Addison Elementary School, recently lauded by DCPS Chancellor Michelle Rhee as one of the best performing public schools in the District, invited parents, teachers and school supporters out in style to the 12th annual EcoFest, hosted — appropriately so — by the House of Sweden. Minister of Trade Claes Hammar, who presided over the event with Hyde Principal Dana Nerenberg, said the famously green venue was perfect for an event devoted to educating children about sustainable living.

EcoFest is the project of the school PTA to raise funds for the school’s environmental science program, which now consists of only a single faculty member. From the get-go, the event netted $30,000 in sponsorships, and by the evening’s end had auctioned off a panoply of donated gifts, vacations and special out-of-school excursions — led by Hyde faculty — for students and their friends.

Event co-chair Lee Murphy estimates a total of $90,000 was raised by the end of the evening.

Word on the Street:

The artistic talent of Georgetown resident artists will be on view for the first time under one roof at the former Smith and Hawken store (1209 31st St.). Govinda Gallery owner Chris Murray will speak at the opening reception on Nov. 19, discussing the history and evolution of the Georgetown art scene — drawn from his 34 years as a central presence in the ever-changing Georgetown art world.

The show, sponsored by CAG and featuring more than 20 Georgetown artists, will include painting, photography, sculpture, 2D and 3D mixed media. The gallery will be on display Nov. 19 from 6 to 9 p.m., Nov. 20 from noon to 8 p.m. and Nov. 21 from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

On Nov. 7, TD Bank cut the ribbon of its new branch at 1611 Wisconsin Ave. The Canadian-based bank, widely known for staying open seven days a week, has been a household name in New England for years, but only recently has begun to open branches in the Washington area. TD now has five branches in the District.

The Wisconsin branch was built using the company’s usual modern and glass-intensive style, but also includes a large mural of the iconic Georgetown street in the early 20th century.