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campaign to shut down Philly Pizza’s location on Potomac Street, which has been operating illegally since its license was revoked in mid-February.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.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you ever needed proof that Georgetowners are sometimes way too fond of their community, look no further than Carol Joynt’s bizarre treatise on why Georgetown should secede from D.C. to form its own city.

No, you did not misread me. In a weird and naive jeremiad about how much the rest of the District sucks, Joynt suggests we go Confederate on their asses, leaving their Home Rule-less, broke city behind:

“Reason one is that DC’s not going to get home rule. I just don’t see it happening. Why should we wait around, caving into powerlessness, when we could come together to create a governing body that helps to improve the quality of living right here where we live? ….

“If you think about it, it makes sense. If you live in Georgetown, how much of the management of the city government relates to you in a positive way? How many city government decisions are made with Georgetown even remotely in the equation?

“On the other hand, we pay high taxes. I would imagine a good chunk of the parking enforcement haul comes from Georgetown. We are a major tourist attraction, from which the city benefits. I’m just not convinced an appropriate amount of our tax dollars come back to Georgetown.”

Joynt also points out how super unfair it is that Georgetown has to share their councilmember, Jack Evans, “with too wide a swatch of the city and other neighborhoods that don’t share all our issues.”

Later in the day, a friend expressed concern that Georgetown would do a severe disservice to neighborhoods like Anacostia who benefit from Georgetown tax dollars, Joynt was not at all worried:

“Being our own city wouldn’t mean that Georgetown would become irresponsible. We would give and be involved in ways of our own choosing, and hopefully more effectively. [She] feared, too, that Georgetown would lose any hope of diversity. But if we were a well-run community we could attract more diversity, yes? It was an interesting debate.”

Basically, Joynt is saying, the rest of D.C. will miss us when we’re gone and saving them from the outside, and lots of people from all background will vie for entry to our idyllic, magnanimous community.

Wanna bet?

We’ve been speculating about whether or not the 2010 Campus Plan would be hampered by the kind of neighborhood opposition that beset the 2000 Campus Plan. We can stop wondering now. Georgetown alum and CAG President Jennifer Altemus (COL ‘88) has announced that the Citizens’ Association of Georgetown is launching a campaign against the Campus Plan—and it’s not just an advocacy campaign.

“[I]t is clear that we will need support from experts to enhance our efforts in advocating the needs and concerns of the residential community,” Altemus wrote in an e-mail that went out over the Georgetownforum listserv. “To that end, we are asking you to help us fund this important effort.”

She goes on to ask residents to visit the CAG website and donate to the “Save Our Neighborhood” fund, where suggested donations start at $300 and go up to $5,000. Or neighbors can make a (tax-deductible) donation of any amount. In either case, they’ll receive an invitation to the “Save Our Neighborhood” cocktail party at Georgetown restaurant il Canale.

She also announced an April meeting among neighbors to discuss the 2010 Campus Plan specifically from the neighbors’ point of view.

Members of the CAG and the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners have made no secret of how much they dislike Georgetown’s 2010 Campus Plan. Even at a community meeting where Georgetown administrators more or less promised that they were rerouting the GUTS buses according to the ANC’s wishes, ANC Commissioner Ron Lewis openly threatened to impede the plan’s passage if Georgetown did not acquiesce to more neighborhood demands.

“There is a problem,” he said. “And the problem is that people who come to your classes are jamming up our streets by parking. It’s not our role, it’s not our job to figure out the solution—it’s the University’s. But there is the problem. And unless the problem goes away, it’s going to be a problem for the plan.”

I guess those problems start now. Read Altemus’ full letter after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Eclipse, a lauded indie Irish flick that debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, just opened in D.C. this past week. And apparently, it’s not without some local influence.

According to the Washington Examiner’s Yeas & Nays blog, director Conor McPherson embellished the plot, which was supposed to be about a love triangle at a literary festival, by adding ghosts to the story after he made a visit to Georgetown.

“I really wanted to visit The Exorcist house and Georgetown. I just found it really, really inspiring,” he told Nikki Schwab and Tara Palermi. “People think I’m absolutely crazy saying all this.”

McPherson and Eclipse star Ciarán Hinds visited the Exorcist stairs before the movie’s special screening in D.C. at the Georgetown AMC on Tuesday, too.

Hinds, an “oh right, that guy” actor slated to play Dumbledore’s brother in the remaining Harry Potter films, was impressed.

“It just takes you right up in a very strange gray-lit area up there.”

Complaining about Monday classes? Well, Vox doesn’t blame you, but the D.C. media and their readers are complaining about you.

That’s right, upon hearing about Georgetown’s earnest Facebook efforts to protest the administration’s decision to bag our Presidents’ Day holiday, NBC Washington and Wonkette commenced with the mocking.

“Cranky Georgetown Students Protest Monday Classes; Georgetown ruins snow days. And won’t someone PLEASE think of the founding fathers?” was the headline of NBC’s Carissa DiMargo’s stinging brief about our Facebook group and general displeasure over the snow day.”

“We get it, kiddos — a lot of you had already made travel plans,” she writes. “But let’s be honest. Are you reeeeally trying to ‘Protect Our National Holiday!’ as the name of the group suggests?

“Yep, won’t someone just think of the founding fathers for a change? The founding fathers WANT these students to have off from class! Jeez!”

Read the rest of this entry »

Flurries have been falling intermittently for the past hour, which means round two of this monstrous snow storm has officially begun. Current National Weather Service predictions for the next 24 hours are 7″-14″.

We’re not going to make a snow pun here (although Vox considered several: “The more you snow,” “Just snow you know,” etc.), but we want to give you an update of what we know about how the University and surrounding area have fared in the snow:

• School: Georgetown University’s Main Campus, the Medical Center, the School of Medicine, the Law Center, and all locations of the School of Continuing Studies have been closed for the last two days, with emergency personnel, like Hospital Staff, DPS officers, Student Health Center workers, and student guards still expected to report for duty.

  University spokesperson Andy Pino cannot provide information right now about if and when Georgetown students will need to attend make-up classes. In an e-mail last night, Provost Jim O’Donnell alerted students to the possibility that professors can still choose to hold class, which some have done.

• Food: Establishments like Wisey’s and The Tombs have remained open in spite of conditions. Many other Georgetown food establishments, however, were shuttered due to snow. Leo’s has remained open but is operating under weekend hours, Pino said. Leo’s has enough food to weather the impending second round of snow.

  Corp services have been operating normally, with some exceptions, like MUG’s closure, and The Corp stocked up on supplies before the storm. However, at the beginning of the week, some daily deliveries were jeopardized by road conditions. “Many coffee shop deliveries, like bagels, muffins, and milk, come early in the day on a near-daily basis [and many] of these have been delayed or canceled in the past couple of days,” Corp CEO Brad Glasser (COL ‘11) wrote in an e-mail on Monday. Today, he said deliveries had normalized.

Read the rest of this entry »

The District Department of Transportation is undertaking a massive effort to install 37 miles of streetcar tracks in D.C. That includes uncertain plans to run a streetcar line up Wisconsin Avenue, connected to the line that will run down K Street and Benning Road to the H Street NE corridor, shown in red on the map at right.

A group of Georgetown residents, however, are trying to turn the potential line into a sure thing. They’re called the Wisconsin Avenue Streetcar Coalition, and they want DDOT to make firm plans to route a streetcar through Georgetown.

Of course, as with any local ambitious project, there’s a lot of anxiety surrounding this issue.

Ben Thielen, who is heading up the Coalition, wrote on the wall of the WASC Facebook page that a member of the Tenley neighborhood listserv posted a Human Transit article to erode support for the streetcar. (The article argued that streetcars aren’t any faster than buses.) Meanwhile, he’s suspicious that upcoming construction on Wisconsin Avenue near Glover Park will impede streetcar tracks, and Glover Park residents are questioning how serious about the possbility of expansion DDOT really is in the Gazette (PDF).

For its part, the Voice is internally divided over whether a streetcar is such a good idea. In the Fall, the editorial board warned that streetcars were a foolish thing to pursue, considering that DDOT has enormous year-to-year budget shortfalls. In his feature story about the up-and-coming Atlas District, however, Chris Heller pointed out that the connectivity a streetcar line offers can mean big things for individual D.C. neighborhoods.

Via Georgetown Metropolitan

Yesterday, the D.C. Department of Consumer Regulatory Affairs mailed letters to over 125 Georgetown University-area landlords it believes are renting properties without a valid business license. The letters issue an ultimatum: apply for a business license and have their properties inspected within 10 days, or DCRA will take “enforcement action.”

The DCRA has intensified its focus on policing university-area property owners since it launched the Collegiate Off-Campus Housing Initiative last Fall. When the school year began in 2009, it launched a website for student renters in the District, ThisShouldBeIllegal.com, a Twitter feed, and a Facebook page all aimed at helping students determine whether their landlords were properly licensed to rent to them.

Voice News will have more information on Thursday.

Photo from the Collegiate Off-Campus Housing Initiative’s Facebook.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

A comparison of crime levels in Georgetown from 2008 to 2009 shows that there wasn’t much difference between the two years.

In Georgetown Metropolitan’s analysis, for which he used the information the Metropolitan Police Department provided to OCTO, he found that thefts—most of which, he notes, are shoplifting incidents—took up most of Georgetown criminals’ time, with a fair number of robberies (stealing by force or coercion, often involving residents) and burglaries (entering a residence or business with the intent of committing a crime) taking place, too.

Total crime dropped by 34 incidents last year, but on the whole, it wasn’t a significant reduction. No homicides took place this year—in fact, none have since a violent attack in 2006—and car theft was way down.

According to information from OCTO, violent crime has gradually decreased over the last three years, with 503 such crimes in 2007, 489 in 2008, and 475 in 2009. Property crimes in Georgetown the Second District, however, which include most thefts and burglaries, have been steadily on the rise for the last three years, according to information from OCTO—from 4,364 in 2007, to 4,821 in 2008, to 5,097 in 2009.

The cumulative result in the shifts for Georgetown, GM found, is that crime rose at a not insignificant pace from 2006 to 2008, but dropped in 2009.