Residents of East Georgetown typically don’t partake in Georgetown student-bashing or get involved in the major campaigns against University expansion in any form. They’re just too far away from our noise, trash, and general aura to care.

But they’re not too far away from George Washington students to complain about them. And on Saturday, when a gaggle of GWU students descended upon Rose Park to barbecue, they struck a nerve with an East village resident who sent this message out to the georgetownforum listserv:

“Today, a large group of GW students took over Rose Park with two volleyball nets and a cookout. Apparently they did have a permit, BUT they are completely tearing up the grass and there is a very big crowd there making lots of noise. I am mostly concerned about how torn up the grass will be after turning it into essentially two volleyball fields.

“Rose Park is scraggly enough looking as it is, unfortunately, and I think it was just sodded with new grass last fall. I also do not want to encourage GW students to make Rose Park and this corner of Georgetown an outpost of GW. Who approves these permits, and who can I complain to about the fact that this event was permitted?”

Won’t somebody please think of the children?

And here we were, feeling like the black sheep of the D.C. college family because George Washington’s Ten Year Plan process is going so much more smoothly than our 2010 Campus Plan.

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.

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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.

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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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A resident at 35th & O St noticed this graffiti on the exterior of Saxby’s earlier this week.

On a georgetownforum listserv e-mail, e said he saw “punks outside the neighborhood” have been hanging out near the coffee shop lately—and it’s pretty clear he suspects they defaced the building. From his e-mail:

“i have noticed some punks from outside the neighborhood skateboarding on the O St side of Saxby’s Coffeeshop sidewalk recently.

“today, on the same building next to the picture window, i noticed gang graffiti along the same stretch of sidewalk.  it’s not particularly distinctive, bold black linear with a few anatomical suggestions…of the variety you’ll see in urban ghetto’s”

Maybe they did. But when you assume, you can make “a few anatomical suggestions” out of yourself.

Photo by Hilary Nakasone

Not in my backyard

This semester, Georgetown students and residents alike complained loudly about rats and mice invading the neighborhood.

In the Georgetown University Student Association Senate, Arman Ismail (COL ‘11—Reynolds) led efforts to mollify what he called “a growing problem” that have culminated in a $200 allocation for waste disposal awareness and improvement.

On the georgetownforum listserv, a neighborhood complained that the problem had gotten out of hand using some vivid imagery:

“We have a never ending supply of monster sized ravenous rats boring through the walls of my house. [T]he whole neighborhood is over run with rats,” the resident wrote, adding that introducing snakes to Georgetown was a possible solution.

But when asked if Facilities had been receiving more work orders regarding vermin recently, Director of Facilities Karen Frank wrote in an e-mail that her office “[has] in fact noticed a sharp drop off of calls about vermin.”

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You’ve come a long way, baby

The Wisconsin Ave. Safeway has been closed for about a month and a half and construction has started in earnest.

Unsurprisingly, it’s already started to irk the neighbors. On the GeorgetownForum listerv, a resident named Michael wrote yesterday:

Construction vehicles at the 1855 Wisconsin Ave site started at 6:30 AM today with their beep beep beep alarms, audible from at least 2 blocks away. Tuesday June 9 they finished after 11:15 PM. Are there limits on when construction activity can occur and if so, who’s responsible for enforcing them? How can the community assure the volume of the beep beep beep be muffled so they can be heard on site and not 2 or more blocks away from the site?

No one is against construction activity if it really has to proceed late at night. The community wants a grocery store sooner rather than later. It seems we can have both the construction activity and reasonable noise levels in the neighborhood. Any ideas?

Now that’s a pretty reasonable complaint, especially by local listerv standards. According to Safeway’s website (www.socialsafeway.com, I kid you not…), they’re doing special nighttime construction this week, so that may explain the after hours beeping. Still, it’s going to be a long year on the listservs…

How’s the actual construction going, though, you might wonder. The ever-obliging Safeway has set up a construction webcam which is updated daily with a new, impressively high-resolution photo of the site. So now you can stare longingly at the mound of dirt, remembering the good old days when it used to house actual groceries, as you try to figure out what else to add to your online cart to get to the $50 free-delivery threshold…

Photo from Safeway’s construction webcam.

Most people see graduations as joyful, special occasions. Not our neighbor, Matthew Donahue, though.

In response to an announcement of transportation recommendations for grads and their guests on the GeorgetownForum listerv, which included information about which streets would be closed for parking (3700 block of Prospect Street, 3600 block of O Street, 1200 and 1300 blocks of 37th Street and 3600 block of N Street NW), Donahue sent one of the grumpier emails ever written:

I object to Georgetown University closing streets and making certain streets one-way and having their campus police impersonate DC Metropolitan Police enforcing their illegal behavior. They prohibit parking space for my guests. They deprive parking space for Holy Trinity parishioners. They deprive the District of Columbia income from the parking meters. Were such proposals presented to the ANC?

Sincerely,
Matthew E. Donahue

Would you like a little cheese with that whine?

Photo from Flickr user michellebflickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Georgetown’s neighborhood listserv, georgetownforum, is generally pretty dull: most of the messages are requests for plumber recommendations or notices about boring university events. Every so often, though, they’ll come out with a spectacular gem of unfounded cantankerousness that reminds you how high-strung and thin-skinned some of our neighbors are.

Here’s a prime example, sent out by “Shannon” on Wednesday:

Subject: ugly newpaper box on Prospect

A bright blue newspaper box containing “The Hoya” has been placed on the sidewalk in front of the car barm on Prospect street. It’s a real eyesore. Whom should I contact to request its removal? Seems like it could be placed inside the car barn where the university community could still have access but the neighborhood would not be affected.

Listen, Shannon – we’re not the biggest fans of the Hoya here at the Voice either, but even I have to say: man up. Seriously, the most pressing problem in your life is that occasionally you have to a walk past a not-entirely-aesthetically-pleasing newspaper box?

The best thing about Shannon’s complaint is that the darn box is in front of a university building–it’s not like it’s just dumped in front of her house.