On Friday, Allen wrote, “Apple is now finalizing a real estate deal for a flagship store on what’s called ‘the best corner of the most powerful city in the world,’ at Wisconsin and M Street NW in the city’s Georgetown area.”

Allen lives in Berkeley, Calif., and currently edits Dispatch Monthly magazine (he was a police and fire dispatcher for 20 years). He says that his Apple Web site gets more than a million hits a month and has a successful track record of reporting where Apple stores will next pop up (most recently, he first reported news of a planned Apple store in San Luis Obispo, Calif.).


Carol Joynt, who owns Nathans, was taken aback by Friday’s rumor. “Do I want it to be true? Hell no,” she wrote on the restaurant’s Web site. “Does it scare me down to the core? Absolutely.”

Allen tells Yeas & Nays that the tip came from a D.C. insider and, based on how the “the specificity of the information dovetails with what I know about the way Apple does business,” he called his source “totally reliable.”

An Apple store at the Wisconsin and M corner, he said, is “classic Apple: The place, the foot traffic, the location and the way it’s close to the shops in Georgetown.”

After doing a little digging, Joynt later updated the Web site to declare that “The Apple item at ifoapplestore.com apparently is untrue” and she noted that Allen’s item also got a few basic facts wrong, including the date her lease expires.

But Allen’s unlikely to be deterred. He concedes that his tipster said“there are no plans yet.  …  It sounds as if it’s in the very early lease negotiation phase.”

“Apple will say nothing, they reveal nothing and they admit nothing,” he told us. “The Apple name is almost never on the documents submitted to the city. … They retain a local architect to submit those plans to the city and are described in the architectural plan as ‘a major retailer.’ … Non-disclosure agreements are a way of life at Apple and they swear everyone to secrecy.”

To be continued …