Two developments in Georgetown business news recently:

First off, the United Colors of Benetton store at the corner of M Street and Wisconsin Avenue is slated to reopen in April, the Georgetown Dish is reporting.

The store, which had been undergoing renovations, was originally slated to reopen yesterday, March 18, but for unknown reasons, the reopen date has been pushed back.

On the waterfront, Washington Harbour, the enormous office and retail complex that’s home to restaurants like Nick’s Riverside Grille, Tony & Joe’s, and Sequoia, is up for sale by its owner, Prudential Real Estate Investors.

The Washington Business Journal reports that Prudential originally bought the complex, shown left, for $220 million, but there is no listed asking price yet.

Vox doesn’t necessarily share the same enthusiasm of the Safeway press release announcing Social Safeway’s impending reopening—which is entitled “The Return of a Washington, D.C. Legend”—but we are excited to hear that after almost nine months of construction, the Safeway on Wisconsin Avenue has a scheduled a definite date for when it will reopen, May 6, 2010.

And its reopening with enough amenities to make you think you’ve wandered into a Barnes & Noble, maybe a mall. The new, 24-hour Safeway store will include a Starbucks bar, an indoor and outdoor seating area with a fireplace, WiFi, and HD televisions, a sushi bar, a gelato bar, and a dry cleaner’s.

Safeway is also boasting that this will be its ‘greenest’ store in the District, and it will seek LEED certification when it opens. LEED certification is awarded by the U. S. Green Building Council, a non-profit organization which bills the award as the “nationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.”

Safeway will continue its free delivery to Georgetown area codes for orders over $50 until it reopens. The code for free groceries is “FREE642.”

Today saw the end of a long campaign to shut down Philly Pizza’s location on Potomac Street, which has been operating illegally since its license was revoked in mid-February. Its doors closed last night, and today, they remain shut.

After a February 19 Board of Zoning Adjustment ruling that barred its continued operation and a subsequent order to vacate the premises failed to shutter the late night drunk food joint, Philly Pizza got taken to D.C. Superior Court, where a two day hearing that concluded this afternoon ordered the establishment to remain closed, or else find itself in contempt of the court.

Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Vice-Chair Bill Starrels said that as a result of the ruling, at today’s hearing, Philly Pizza agreed to remain closed. An e-mail from D.C. Office of Attorney General’s Michael Stern that Starrels provided to Vox reiterated the hearing’s success at shutting down the pizza joint for good:

“I am pleased to report that after a hearing for most of the day yesterday, when we returned to Court this morning Mr. Greenberg, the attorney for Philly Pizza & Grill, Inc., conceded our point to the Court and voluntarily agreed to close the establishment. We reduced that agreement to writing, and made it an Order of the Court.”

Well, almost certainly for good. Starrels said that Philly Pizza owner Mehmet Kocak has filed with the D.C. Department of Consumer Regulatory Affairs for a new certificate of occupancy.

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After Nathan’s closed in July, the building at Wisconsin & M has remained empty, with plenty of rumors as to who would be moving in. Looks like we need wonder no longer!

According to local blogger K Street Kate, popular New York restaurant Serendipity 3 will be opening a branch in Georgetown as soon as this Spring. Local owners Rodrigo Garcia and Britt Swan have reportedly already signed a lease for the building.

Serendipity 3 is known and loved for its decadent desserts, but also has a wide selection of savory menu items, including macaroni and cheese pizza and footlong hotdogs.

Let’s hope it opens before the semester ends so we can try it out!

Photo from Carol Joynt’s Blog

Defying the trend of recent store closings in Georgetown, M29, a new “lifestyle boutique,” opened their flagship store on Monday in the Four Seasons Hotel at 29th and M Streets.

The store sells a hodgepodge of lifestyle goods, ranging from original art and clothing/accessories, to home furnishings plus these sweet foldable bikes. The store also employs some pretty cool marketing concepts – like allowing children to play in and decorate a cardboard playhouse while their parents shop in the store.

Picture from Twitter user M29Lifestyle

Simply Soles, a women’s shoe store located in Columbia Heights, is abandoning its current location and moving to 3222 M Street NW in Georgetown, Prince of Petworth reports.

A letter PP received from the owner, Kassie Kempel, suggested she thought business would be better for her in Georgetown, where she says she can get the same rental rates as she pays in Columbia Heights now.

Vox hope she brings that adorable storefront getup with her, but we have our suspicions about this new store’s business practices. Commenters on PP’s post chided the store for never being open.

In other Georgetown retail news, Commander Salamander, which had originally planned to close in January, is not shutting its doors after all, at least for now.

Carol Joynt reports that she’s received word that the store is remaining open, and an employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity confirmed it for Vox.

“There’s no date at which we expect to close,” the employee said. “We’re just hanging on.”

Carol Joynt, the former Nathan’s owner who’s ever watchful for Georgetown businesses that are opening or folding, is reporting on her blog that Benetton and Aldo are both doing suspicious “remodeling” that indicates that they’re pulling out of Georgetown. If they indeed close for good, they’ll join a long list of big names that have left Georgetown in the last few months, including Up Against the Wall, Commander Salamander, and American Eagle.

Carol Joynt, who’s well-connected in the Georgetown rumor mill, has also heard that Ristorante Piccolo, a date-night favorite that was finally going to be reopened this year after being routed by a three-alarm fire in 2008, may not reopen after all. They’ve undergone nearly complete rennovations, but they are reported to be having trouble with their insurers. Finally, Joynt reports that a Bloomingdale’s is not completely out of the question for the Shops at Georgetown Park—it’s just on the back burner.

Sigh. At least we’ll have an Apple Store soon…

A few of you who land fancy-pants jobs upon graduating may need to upgrade from polo shirts with eagle insignias to higher-quality shirts with an insignia of a limp sheep hanging from some sort of ribbon getup.

I’m speaking of course, about Brooks Brothers clothing, and the impending opportunity to shop for it in Georgetown. Georgetown Metropolitan scoured the upcoming Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2E agenda to find that the uppity clothier is applying for permission to make cosmetic changes to a storefront at 3077 M Street, which Smith and Hawken has recently vacated and Pottery Barn will soon abandon, too.

So, Brooks Brothers is coming to Georgetown. About the same time GM discovered this, Carol Joynt noticed that urban-chic favorite Up Against the Wall, located on M Street, is about to close its doors and become the latest of several recent business casualties in the Georgetown area. Up Against the Wall management did not respond to Vox’s calls about whether it was relocating, but those “Up to 80 Percent Off,” “Total Liquidation” signs in the window do not look promising.

Georgetown for Haiti, last Friday’s fundraising event for Doctors Without Borders, sounds like a big success. The event, which was co-sponsored by dozens of local businesses and catered by Georgetown favorites like SweetGreen and Rugby, was well-attended—particularly by Georgetown students—and has probably raised between $12,000 and $15,000, according to event organizer Richard Bahar.

It was a very Georgetown University crowd, too. Of the thousand-or-so locals that attended GFH, held in Lululemon, Bahar said that “easily half of them were undergraduates from Georgetown.” Georgetown student Anique Drumright (COL ‘10), a Lululemon employee who helped work the door, said that some students were from GWU, but added that Georgetown DJ duo MecTec provided the music.

And as far as events go, it got pretty solid reviews. Georgetown Dish editor and local resident Beth Solomon thought it was a “really nice mix of young people and an established Georgetown crowd.” Drumright said, “I would just say that the fact that students came, it was amazing gesture that just shows how much they find the situation [in Haiti] important.”

And Bahar was pleased with both the crowd and the take. “One hundred percent of the profits will go to Doctors Without Borders … We got both students and some of the more well-known, high maintenance donors and sponsors,” like Anthony Lanier, who “owns half of M Street,” and Oprah Winfrey’s stylist. “Those are the ones where I had to work the room take them scotch,” he said.

Sounds like a success, right?

Almost—you can’t please everyone, and in this neighborhood, you can always count on one grouch-asaurus to complain about student presence on the georgetownforum listserv:

I attended this event and was VERY disappointed. This was NOT a community gathering in support of Haiti – it was basically a Georgetown frat party with a $10 cover charge and unfetered [sic] access to free booze.
This event should NOT have been called Georgetown for Haiti since it lacked any of the class and style of a Georgetown fundraiser – right down to the DJ – and should have been held directly on the GU campus instead. As my husband said when I called and told him I was leaving, “leave it up to Georgetown students to ruin an event”, though the slightest bit of restriction on the part of the event organizer would have eliminated that.

When I asked her about the criticism, Drumright was surprised. “Do we dance? Do we laugh? Yeah. But I think it was a great community event,” she said. You can read the full screed after the jump, or you can save yourself the headache. You already know what it says.

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The recession may be “over”, but a shopper walking down Wisconsin Avenue or M Street might see the area’s vacant buildings and “going out of business” signs and get a completely different picture of how Georgetown’s businesses are faring.

After taking such a walk and learning that Commander Salamander would soon be joining the list of Georgetown stores that had either closed or moved in the last year, Vox decided to try to get a clearer picture of the area’s economic climate by talking to James Bracco and Nancy Mirahira at the Georgetown Business Improvement District and John Asadoorian, a retail broker who represents property owners and stores like Rugby and Georgetown Cupcake.

Although some retailers have suffered recently, Georgetown’s businesses weren’t hit any harder than other commercial districts, according to Bracco, the executive director of the BID.

“People are just shopping a little smarter now,” he said, citing the country’s still high unemployment numbers. ”Those are all potential consumers who don’t have money in their pocket to go buy a new pair of jeans, much less a designer couch.”

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