Posts Tagged “Burleith”
After a week of submissions and another week of voting, we’re ready to name the winner of our 2010 Campus Plan sign contest.
With a whopping 60 percent of the vote, “Raising Property Values Since 1789″ won outright. Congrats to Alison Crowley (COL ’11), who just earned herself a pair of tickets to the E Street Cinema.
Now for the fun part. When students move back to campus in August, we’ll be out in full-force, handing out these lawn signs to anybody who asks for one. If you already know you’ll want to display one of these beauties on your lawn, let us know at blog@georgetownvoice.com.
Thanks again to everybody who submitted ideas or voted for their favorite signs.
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You guys impress the hell out of us.
In the past week, you flooded the comments and our inbox with some great submissions for the 2010 Campus Plan sign contest. It took some time—and a little bit of Photoshopping—but we managed to whittle it down to the five best entries.
We’re putting the contest to a vote now, meaning that you all get to decide which sign will be mass-produced and distributed in late August.
Do you like the “Beware of college students” and “Raising property values since 1789″ signs, both submitted by Alison Crowley (COL ’11)? How about Steven‘s “Complain to my landlord, not to my school” sign? Or perhaps one of the other two entries?
Take a look at your choices, ponder over them a bit, and then vote for your favorite after the jump. The contest will end at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, July 15, so vote while you still can.
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Attention Burleith residents: If you don’t have time to write your own letter about Georgetown’s 2010 Campus Plan to University officials and local politicians, don’t worry—the Burleith Citizens Association is here to help.
The BCA created a form letter for residents of Burleith to send to a number of people who have the ability to affect the 2010 Campus Plan, including President John DeGioia, Mayor Adrian Fenty, Councilmember Jack Evans and Harriet Tregoning, Director of D.C.’s Office of Planning.
Like any good political campaign, the letter has a few misleading points—many of which Vox debunked following last month’s BCA meeting.
One such issue is the number of students that the University plans to add. The BCA’s letter states that the current plan “to add close to 3,400 new students by 2020 without providing additional housing on campus or in satellite communities is unacceptable.”
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Our trip into Burleith yesterday got us thinking about a few things. Why should the residents be the only ones who get to have fun with signage? How can students get involved with the 2010 Campus Plan? And why has it been months since our last contest?
And so, in the spirit of fairness, we’re launching a “2010 Campus Plan” sign contest. All next week, we’ll be checking blog@georgetownvoice.com for submissions. If you’d like to enter, don’t forget to include your name, school, year, and a little bit about what inspired your sign.
Next Friday, we’ll choose our favorite signs and then pit them against one another in a vote. That’s right—you choose the winner! Lucky you!
The winner will receive a yet-to-be-determined prize.
After the jump, we’ve posted a sample sign to spark your creativity.
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If you’ve walked through Burleith lately, you’ve surely seen the red and white signs that have popped up on residents’ lawns over the past week.
The signs, which read “OPPOSE GU’s Campus Plan” and “Our Homes Not GU’s Dorm,” are a part of the Burleith Citizens’ Association’s campaign against the 2010 Campus Plan. As we’ve reported here (many, many times), Burleith residents largely oppose the 2010 Campus Plan because they worry about the consequences of increasing the graduate student enrollment.
Vox decided to take a stroll through Burleith this afternoon to talk to some residents about the signs. While some residents are knowledgeable about the 2010 Campus Plan, others remain poorly informed about the Plan’s details. And many, such as S Street homeowner Larry Torrez, only put up signs after BCA representatives knocked on their doors asking for support.
“Personally, I like the thought of living in a college town,” he said. “To be honest, this is a nice, sleepy, little neighborhood.”
But if student behavior can be ascribed to “college students being college students,” as Torrez argued, then why did he agree to put up the sign?
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Early on Sunday morning, a robbery occurred on the 3700 block of Reservoir Road NW.
According to the Metropolitan Police Department incident report, an unknown suspect approached the victim at approximately 3 a.m. The suspect grabbed the victim from behind and told him he was “fucked,” while another unknown suspect rifled through the victim’s pockets. The two suspects stole the victim’s wallet and iPhone.
The victim, a 29 year-old resident of the Cloisters, could not identify or describe the suspects to police officers because he was “intoxicated” during the robbery.
The robbery comes merely days after the Department of Public Safety sent out a Public Safety Alert about two other violent robberies that occurred in the neighborhood last week.
Vox wants to take this opportunity to remind everybody to be careful late at night. While a surprising number of these robberies involve iPhones, which follows a trend seen throughout the 2nd District, anybody walking alone at night is at risk.
Travel in groups, use SafeRides, or hell, carry some pepper spray. Just try to stay safe.
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Although nothing agitates the blood of a Vox reader quite like a post about a Citizens Association of Georgetown meeting about the 2010 Campus Plan, you’ve got to hand it to our neighbors in West Georgetown—they know that plan backwards and forwards. CAG seems to have a clear idea about what exactly in the plan they don’t like and why it threatens their neighborhood.
Don’t believe me? Then you should go to the next Burleith Citizens Association meeting about the 2010 Campus Plan, where their take on the plan is unfortunately beset by speculation and half-truths.
If you read our coverage of the first meeting the BCA held about the final plan draft in April, you’re already familiar with Burleith residents’ main gripes with the 2010 Campus Plan. And if you didn’t, I’m sure you can guess the usual suspects. The plan doesn’t add new on-campus housing for undergraduates; it adds over 2,400 graduate students to the school in the next ten years; it threatens to increase traffic in the neighborhood; and in general, it gets residents talking about how awful it is to live near students. With a few adjustments, the slides at the two meetings that the BCA held this past Saturday and Sunday to talk about the 2010 Campus Plan were more or less the same as the last meeting.
So I’ll spare you another rundown of what Burleith hates about the plan. What’s more interesting is what they just don’t get about it.
Let’s start with the portion of the presentation led by Candith Pallandre, the BCA’s treasurer, which consisted almost entirely of assumptions and misunderstandings. Pallandre zeroed in on the road that will run the length of campus between the woods and Kehoe Field, the tennis courts, and the power plant.
“This was supposed to be a service road, and now they’re saying that buses are service vehicles,” she said. With a knowing smile, she continued, “Buses carrying students are not really service vehicles.”
Pallandre didn’t give any clues as to why it would be a problem for GUTS buses to drive along a road that is bordered by woods and Georgetown University property. But it’s clear that she assumed the University thought it was being sneaky by classifying GUTS buses as service vehicles, and that this would have sneaky consequences.
In reality, the road will allow Georgetown University to pick up passengers from the north end of campus and then exit out Canal Road—which is what Burleith residents have been demanding for years.
After the jump, we recap the rest of the gripes from last weekend’s BCA meeting.
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So, maybe Georgetown students aren’t drunk all of the time.
In recent days, both the University and students have responded to “Drunken Georgetown Students,” the website that’s fueled rampant procrastination all week long.
In an e-mail statement, Director of Media Relations Andy Pino wrote, “[The University does] not believe the site is a constructive attempt to improve safety or quality of life issues in our community, and we believe it runs contrary to the collaborative efforts we’ve engaged in with many of our neighbors.”
Meanwhile, students have launched websites and Facebook groups that lampoon Stephen R. Brown, the Burleith resident who runs “Drunken Georgetown Students.”
One student, who declined to be named, even made a video titled “Fun with Stephen Brown.”
“I just wanted to comment on Mr. Brown’s godawful blog while standing up for my fellow constantly intoxicated Georgetown students,” the student said in an e-mail.
Vox has also learned that Brown has been photographing student parties since last summer.
After the jump, hear from some of the students who Brown has photographed.
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Drunkengeorgetownstudents.com, the website every Georgetown student loves to hate, was taken offline these evening by server host Heller Information Services (HIS), only to reappear hours later at drunkengeorgetownstudents.blogspot.com.
“I was pressured by the server to take [the site] down,” Stephen R. Brown, the Burleith resident who runs the site, said in a telephone interview. “I was told that at 7 p.m. tonight they would shut it down and they did.”
In coverage earlier today, Vox reported that HIS requested in an e-mail that Brown “either remove the pix or blur the faces” because the photographs violated the server’s Acceptable Use Policy.
Before the original site went offline, Brown put out a call for residents’ photos of Georgetown students. “If you can get some pictures without confronting the offenders, please do so and we’ll being posting as soon as I find a more aggressive server who’s up for a 1st Amendment lawsuit,” Brown wrote.
Brown claims that Blogspot edition of his site “is totally legit.”
On the latest post, he doesn’t waste any time to beat his chest a bit, while making some bizarre claims about his life and the success of the site.
“I am one of the few people in the world who is ‘persona non grata’ in the State of Israel and proud of it!!! So if you don’t like this site, tell it to God (or in this case, [Google CEO] Eric Schmidt)” Brown wrote in his latest post. “I am getting requests for footage from ‘Inside Edition’ so …thanks…and welcome to ‘Drunken Georgetown Students’!”
“I apologize to students who are doing a great job at Georgetown University and doing something,” Brown said. “But those drunks in my alley—fuck ‘em.”
After the jump, read Brown’s latest rants:
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Heller Information Services (HIS), the server operator behind the website “Drunken Georgetown Students,” has asked Stephen R. Brown, the Burleith resident who runs the site, to “either remove the pix or blur the faces,” according to an e-mail posted by Brown.
Yesterday, Vox reported that Brown has been publishing photographs of Georgetown students on his website, www.drunkengeorgetownstudents.com. But, a visit to the site earlier today revealed that Brown has blurred out the faces of all persons in photographs published on the site.
That’s not to say that Brown censored his site willingly, however. At the top of the site, Brown posted a missive about how “[his] first amendment right to photograph has been usurped by the Universtiy.”
According to the excerpted e-mail written by an HIS representative, “[Brown's] site has stirred up quite a hornet’s nest, and [HIS] received several dozen complaints about the photographs … We’ve looked at the pix, and whether or not there are any legal issues with them, in our opinion they do meet our criteria for harassment mentioned in our [Acceptable Use Policy.]”
According to the HIS Acceptable Use Policy, clients are prohibited from “[using] the service for illegal purposes,” “[using] the service in such a way as to cause harm to HIS or other parts of the internet,” or “[using] the service to abuse or harrass others.”
After the jump, read Stephen Brown’s response to the HIS e-mail, as well as the excerpted e-mail Brown posted on his website.
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