Town Topics

Garrett Faulkner • June 18, 2013

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.

Alla Rogers •

The world embraced the iPod, the MacBook and the iPhone with open arms, but has the iPad been greeted with the same enthusiasm?

According to the Washington Post, members of the White House staff have gone gaga over the product. But not all Georgetown residents have caught the fever.

Kate Radi, a D.C. resident who lives near Georgetown, doesn’t own an iPad but does have other Apple products.

Radi generally reads a lot but hasn’t taken the time to learn about the iPad because she hasn’t heard much interest in the product, she said.

“I’ve never heard someone say, ‘I love the iPad,’” she said.

She added that she needs someone to really like the product before she would consider investing in one.

Michelle Laughlin, a recent graduate of Georgetown University, said she is familiar with the product, but to her the iPad is just an enlarged iPhone.

“It’s an unnecessary piece of equipment that Apple is using to get business,” Laughlin said.
The iPad is useful for reading or for someone who constantly travels, but for others having an iPhone is sufficient, she said.

John Cunningham, a student in D.C., has used the iPad numerous times but decided against purchasing one after becoming familiar with the product through a friend.

“It lacks the functionality of a laptop,” Cunningham said.

However, Nadeem, a Georgetown resident, plans on acquiring the product soon.
“It’s exactly what I needed,” he said,

Nadeem called the iPad a combination of a laptop and cell phone, where checking email and news on the Internet is all possible. You “can’t read in the same way” on a Blackberry, he said.

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)

Jenna Dewitt •

Alcohol sales from liquor stores will be permitted on Sunday, July 4 after a meeting of the D.C. council. Liquor stores will be allowed to remain open, despite current Sunday alcohol sales regulations, by a resolution the council passed on Tuesday in an additional legislative meeting.

Since D.C. legislation prohibits fireworks that explode or move after being ignited, many community members said they are not worried about safety risks. Some, however, still have reservations about the combination of alcohol and fire.

“I think it has been successful not to have it,” Georgetown resident Charles Rumph said. “There are crowds. It’s very rowdy. There have been injuries. Even with the professionals, there have been accidents.”

Others in the District said they would support a permanent lift on the ban that restricts liquor store sales to six days a week.

“They should always allow alcohol on Sundays,” Chinatown resident Layla said. “People have to take responsibility for their own actions.”

Layla said the most important thing people can do to stay safe is to watch their children carefully and stay alert when dealing with fireworks.

“There is always a safety concern. You don’t have to be drunk to blow your hand off,” she said.

Tai, a former Dupont Circle resident, agreed with the element of personal responsibility and said he agrees with the council’s decision.

“I think it is great. This is the United States. There shouldn’t be those limitations,” he said, also voicing support for a permanent lift on the ban and the legalization of marijuana.

Caitlin White •

Under the Ward 2 moratorium law, Georgetown can accommodate no more than 61 liquor licenses issued in the neighborhood. However, a new ruling has added seven licenses, extending the allowed number to 68.

An amendment to the moratorium, which has been in effect since 1989, was approved unanimously by DC’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board Wednesday night according to a report by the Washington City Paper.

The D.C. Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration will accept license applications on a first-come, first-served basis, starting at 8:30 a.m. June 17.

Members of the ABC Board believed the increase in licenses would not adversely affect the neighborhood, but residents at the June 16 hearing argued it would add noise and disorder to Georgetown, according to the Washington Post.

The board will revisit the decision in three years to determine if changes need to be made.

Georgetowner •

The Georgetown BID celebrated another year of representing the village’s business interests at the BID Annual Meeting on June 10, held at the Four Seasons Hotel. Neighbors and business owners alike came out to mingle, tip a few back and hear the BID’s take on a business market often subjected to a fair share of doomsaying.

There you would have never guessed it. The buffet spread was impressive, laughter reverberated around the room and a few celebrities even popped in at the gathering’s fringes (reports circulated that Laura Bush stopped by to say hello). In one corner, BID marketing staffers Debbie Young and Nancy Miyahara presided over a cut-and-paste project where participants could cut pictures from magazines and affix them to one of several sheets of butcher paper labeled with a specific neighborhood-centric theme, such as “My Hopes for Georgetown,” “Shopping in Georgetown,” and “Georgetown Makes me Feel…”

Some guests turned their nose at the project, others gutted entire periodicals to get their ideas down on paper, so to speak. In the end, the activity highlighted the theme of the evening: that a successful Georgetown will rely on a vast collection of images and ideas to form a single identity as a commerce center that can draw business from visitors and Washington natives alike. The BID calls it their “brand review,” and earlier this year hired The Roan Group, a local consulting firm, to help articulate Georgetown’s “brand” and derive an edge from it. The firm’s principal Neill Roan gave a presentation on his company’s findings that evening, and BID board President Crystal Sullivan delivered an upbeat speech on the neighborhood’s business prospects.

“[The BID looks] forward to 2010 with anticipation and also optimism,” she said.

So far, BID’s sanguine outlook appears to be dead on. Sullivan was excited to announce that at long last the blue bus, often thought of as the runt of the bus routes traversing through Georgetown, would be assimilated into the enormously popular Circulator system beginning Sept. 1, 2010. The new Circulator route, which extends through Georgetown between Rosslyn station and Dupont Circle, will mirror its predecessor, which has for a decade ferried riders in and out of the mass transit-challenged Georgetown, despite recurring funding lapses that nearly axed the program on several occasions.

The numbers also looked good for BID-sponsored community events, which in the past year have grown enormously in both popularity and controversy (the exorbitant budget for the Merriment Christmas celebration ignited particular ire among board members last summer). Nevertheless, public attendance has been on the rise, with a record 12,000 attendees and 30 restaurants participating in the October 2009 Taste of Georgetown event. The April 2010 French Market also enjoyed record attendance, and charitable donations collected for the Georgetown Ministry Center through BID-sponsored events increased 10 percent over last year. In September, Sullivan said, the BID plans to organize a Georgetown chapter of Fashion’s Night Out, Vogue magazine’s international fashion gala for charity. At present, Georgetown plans to be the only District neighborhood involved with the project.

Finally, the BID’s finances were reported to be in healthy shape. Board Vice President Andrew Blair said the organization had budgeted a revenue increase of over a quarter million dollars in 2010 (totaling $4.8 million), while anticipating an increase in program expenses to $4.4 million, nearly equaling the total revenue figure from 2009.

Afterward, Neill Roan took the stage and delivered a slideshow presentation on the brand identity of Georgetown, based on data and interviews gathered from local businesses and residents. In his presentation, big on aphorism but hazier on more practical conclusions, Roan called the Georgetown cachet “an identity driven by perception, myth … and experience,” citing its stature as a unique historical district seldom matched nationwide in both historical preservation and proximity to a major city. The direct benefits of this identity, however, remained unclear.

Roan did have a few more concrete responses to typical complaints about the neighborhood, notably its scarcity of on-street parking and inaccessibility for mass transit passengers. He also questioned the usefulness of Georgetown’s liquor moratorium, an ordinance he called “a barrier to new restaurant development.”
[gallery ids="99147,102806,102804" nav="thumbs"]

Gary Tischler •

David Roffman, for many years the publisher and owner of The Georgetowner, was feted with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Georgetown Business Association at its Senior Advisor Luncheon at the City Tavern Club June 16.

That brought out not only members of the Georgetown Senior Center, which Roffman was instrumental in keeping alive after the passing of founder Virginia Allen last year, but also a lot of other Georgetown old-timers who appreciated Roffman’s long-time status as a village historian, promoter, champion and swain. At an occasion like this, you tend to hear some phrases repeated often, among them “I haven’t seen you in ages,” “I thought you were … never mind” and “No thanks, I don’t drink anymore.”

Good memories and some irony, story-telling and laughter were the hallmarks of this occasion. Roffman had once been president of the Georgetown Business Association and now he had the group’s Lifetime Achievement Award to go with the Citizens Association of Georgetown’s Peter Belin Award. Not bad for a guy who would be the first to admit that he’s not much of a businessman.

You might suspect that his singular achievement for which he was being honored was that of being a highly visible, active and energetic publisher of The Georgetowner after founder Ami Stewart passed away. That would be about half right, or even less than that.

You might suspect that the award was about a love affair — the one between Roffman and Georgetown and its people and history. People like Sally Davidson (widow of Stuart Davidson, the founder of Clyde’s), Earl Allen, the seldom-seen Mike O’Harro, king of disco, the Wheelers and the Weavers, Pat Burke, who was in his young cop days Georgetown’s live-in policeman and is now MPD’s homeland security assistant chief, Grace Bateman and a host of others, all of whom showed up along with a few folks from the senior center. And where there’s a newspaper publisher, there are candidates for office —Kwame Brown and Vincent Orange, both vying for city council chairman, also made an appearance.

Small community newspapers are tricky businesses — they’re usually free, they depend on the kindness of local businesses to provide advertising revenue, they reflect and report on and are reflective of the community they deserve. With all due respect to other such publications in this city, no other paper is so associated with place than The Georgetowner. And it’s fair to say that Roffman, when he owned and published the paper, reflected the community in all of its facets.

He wasn’t just a publisher, and his efforts weren’t only about stories, scoops, ads, deadlines and headlines. He was the village’s biggest cheerleader and booster, acting as if Georgetown were a particular lovely, elegant lady who needed to be helped across the street. He sometimes acted as if she were a party girl, to be sure, but that was part of the times.

Roffman would do stuff — he hosted parties, fund-raisers, publicized charity events (at good old reliable Nathans), promoted festivals (the annual Francis Scott Key day), institutions (the Georgetown Senior Center was a particular favorite) and events (Volta Park Day). He got involved — he went to ANC Meetings and CAG meetings, not just to report on them, but to speak at them and make himself heard. At times, he was brilliantly inventive — when a print run came back with two blank middle pages, he turned them into material to pick up doggy poop, a particularly hot issue at the time.

He had an unabashed passion for this place — the Old Stone House, the university, the cemeteries, the people from the Harrimans to Sky King. At the publishing level, he was more citizen than editor. And he was an eclectic original doing it, from the elephant vac effort to a startling proposal launched in the paper for the village to secede from the city.

If one of the great folks of Georgetown passed away, an Alsop, a Bruce, a Harriman, it was duly noted, but so was the passing of Freddie the Bum in a phone booth. If the paper highlighted galleries, antique shops and Earl Allen’s clothing store, Commander Salamander and Tramps got equal space.

In the pages of Roffman’s Georgetowner, the neighborhood became full bodied — it was the sleepy village and the noisy night time, it was contemporary and historic all at once, it was a classy place but it was also democratic.

So, the achievement was not just that David Roffman published The Georgetowner for many years. He became, whether he was here or not, a Georgetowner in full.

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.
[gallery ids="99149,102815,102809,102811" nav="thumbs"]

Jessica Gelfarb •

Over the past week, a few citizens of Burleith began displaying signs that protest the increase in graduate student enrollment called for in Georgetown University’s 2010 Campus Plan, according to Vox Populi, a University blog.

The plan, which will increase graduate enrollment by 2400 over the next 10 years, led citizens to display lawn signs reading, “Oppose GU’S Campus Plan” and “Our Homes: Not GU’s Dorm,”

Neighbors opposed to University expansion fear that an increase in graduate enrollment would overwhelm Burleith and Georgetown, and argue that too many students will begin living — and partying — in the neighborhood after the plan is implemented.

Read more on Vox Populi.