It’s high noon the day after Christmas, and the streets of Georgetown are crawling with shoppers and gawkers and tourists. The high end chain stores that line M Street are teeming with monied men and women trying to squeeze the last sale out of shops such as Coach, Steve Madden, Ralph Lauren and so forth. Fathers are piloting baby carriages as fortified as Hummers across the main intersection of Wisconsin and M Streets.
Not a cop in sight at a crossing where cars and kids and couples are blocking the box.
It’s a far different vibe in the Shops at Georgetown Park, the indoor, three-story mall that occupies the southwest corner of Georgetown’s main crossroads. The place has the smell of death. On a day when people are opening their wallets just because it’s a sunny day in Georgetown, the neighborhood mall is a wasteland of shuttered stores.
Riccardo and Sport, an Italian clothing store, is closing December 31. The Tibet Store is dark. Fans of Exquisite Fabrics better show up soon. Big yellow signs say “Everything Must Go.” All that’s left of Celine Lingerie is busts of busty French ladies in the empty storefront window.
Sisley, the hip Italian clothing store, has posted a sign in the mall side window that reads: “Please Use Door on M Street. This door is broken.”
The Shops at Georgetown have been broken for years. Herb Miller, our local version of Donald Trump — with better hair, more class and projects that don’t have to bear his name — built the inner city mall in 1981. It was ugly from the start. The designer should lose his license. It’s a monument to wandering corridors and wasted space, with metal work that reminds one of both Mad Max and Victorian ostentation.
Miller sold it in 1985 and bought it back in 2007 with grand plans to open the deadened structure to the canal to the rear and M Street along the front. But Miller became embroiled in lawsuits with EastBanc’s Anthony Lanier. The Shops festered and floundered.
Now there’s hope for the soggy mall, and a chance for a general Georgetown resurrection along with it. Miller lost control of the Shops in 2010 in a foreclosure, and control is now in the hands of Vornado, a major New York developer with local projects managed by veteran Mitchell Shear.
So far Vornado has been stymied. It’s been trying to lure a major tenant, such as Target or Bloomingdales or Nordstrom. The city has been balking at requests for incentives of one kind or another. I can’t see Mayor Vince Gray or Council Chair Kwame Brown shelling out tax breaks to Georgetown.
What to do with such a prime spot? Gotta gut the place and start from scratch. And perhaps ditch the retail sector. Georgetown has plenty of shopping. What it needs is high end condominiums, with views of the Potomac River, Georgetown University and the monuments.
Imagine all those new shoppers hitting the streets on the day after Christmas.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected].
