neighborhood

Snowpocalypse now: Looking back

By Gary Tischler

February 2010

So much of that by the end of it all, the season of winter in Washington, counting the Christmas storm, D.C. had managed to accumulate over 50 inches of snow, or four and a half feet, a record. The worst of it came during a period of less than week when two major blizzard-snow storms hit the city within days of each other, like a Three Stooges slap.
 
In the beginning, the snow was forewarned and transforming, beginning on a Friday evening, sometimes blowing furiously into whiteouts. In the beginning, everyone everywhere in all the neighborhoods woke up to a Saturday morning where streets had disappeared, trees had fallen down, many stores were closed, the buses stopped running and the Metro Rail system in the city turned partial. In spite of all that, in those rash first moments, the snow storm(s) of 2010 also resulted in great beauty, in neighborly moments of shared experience, in great silences broken only by human voices. Your neighborhood, whether you lived in Georgetown, Adams Morgan, Downtown or Anacostia, was transformed.
 
The novelty quickly wore off, as did the memory of the joy of having breakfast in one of the many restaurants that managed to stay open during the great blizzard of 2010. In Adams Morgan, it was the Diner, Tryst and a Starbucks, in Georgetown it was places like the Peacock Café, Café Milano, and Billy Martin’s, downtown in Penn Quarter it was places like Clyde’s or Jaleo.
 
A tale of two shops and restaurants in Georgetown
 
Some things, however did not change. Georgetowners, by now addicted to the rich taste of the offerings at Georgetown Cupcakes for the past two years, still got their cupcakes from the cupcake ladies.
 
“We were open the whole time,” Sophie LaMontagne, who with her sister Katharine Kallinis owns one of the real small business success stories of the city, said. “It was amazing. Most of our neighbor regular customers came, and we had a lot of people on snow shovel detail, but we managed to be open.
 
“Georgetown looked really quiet,” she said. “But inside, it was, I don’t know, almost celebratory. What more could you want — cupcakes and hot chocolate. There were people who skied here and stacked up their skies in the store.
 
“We were open all three storms. I think you really get to know who your neighbors are at times like this.”
 
Ron Newman, general manager of Billy Martin’s Tavern, a place that’s seen a few snow storms in its 76 years of operation, said the city plowing effort was awful. “It was especially bad on the side streets, and we had this thing were people were going down there and getting stuck, without four-wheel drive, riding into that much snow,” he said. “I don’t think they did a good job.”
 
But people found their way to the restaurant, which serves almost perfect, hearty down-to-earth fare made for blizzards. “Yeah, burgers, Brunswick Stew, that kind of thing,” he said.
 
Wait staff, chefs and cooks and the like were put up for a number of days at hotels, Newman said. “Let me tell you, it was packed. We never once closed. In fact, we’ve never closed in any storm over 76 years.”
 
Shahab Farivar, co-owner with his brother Maziar of the Peacock Café on Prospect Place, said it was difficult, but “we stayed open, and it was like a neighborhood get-together.”
 
“We prepared,” he said. “My brother, who has four-wheel drive, drove around the city and picked up employees, and we stayed open. But the plowing that was just not done on this side and Prospect, I think, might as well be a main street like Wisconsin and M.”
 
Farivar saw many people from the neighborhood make their way to the restaurant. “We always have regulars from the neighborhood, but now it became like a gathering, everybody’s friendly, talking to each other. It’s sharing a tough time. Vegetable chili was doing well. That’s when you realize how much you are a part of a community.”
 
Sara’s Market was open too, with no help from the city, but some extra shoveling on the part of owner Sukyant Johnson and her husband. “People come,” she said of her small market on Q Street, one popular in the surrounding neighborhood. “Neighbors, people walking. There was not much plowing. I think they forgot Georgetown.”
 
Johnson said that marshmallows were big and popular buys. “Everybody makes hot chocolate,” she said. “That was the biggest seller during the storm. We stayed open. People are glad to see a neighborhood store open in a storm like this.”
 
Downtown, Jo-Ann Neuhaus, executive director of the Penn Quarter Neighborhood Association, had a more favorable view of the city’s plowing efforts.
 
“I thought they did a good job, we had cement clearing on many of the streets, not just Pennsylvania but also E Street and Seventh Street,” she said. “Plus, many of the developers and building managers here did a great deal of shoveling and plowing and clearing the sidewalks, so you could around fairly easily if you were coming here or lived here.”
 
Neuhaus said that many of the restaurants were open during and after the storm, although not all of them. But they also changed and became more of a neighborhood gathering place. “I think most of the restaurants offering down-to-earth, hearty fare did well and were open,” she said. “Places like Clyde’s and the District Chophouse. But even Jaleo was open and it was full. But the thing was, in all of the restaurants that were open, it was a neighborhood atmosphere. You saw a lot of people out who lived in the area, as opposed to tourists.”
 
In Adams Morgan, you could trace the progress of the kind of one-two punch we experienced in Washington day to day. Milk flew from the Safeway and Teeter grocery stores. According to some reports, people were angry at the lack of plowing, so much so that the city sent out those small one-man shovel-pods which looked like a scene out of “Wall-E” as they moved up and down on Lanier.
 
When the city got around to the side streets, the plowing effort instantly turned every residential street in the city into a one-way street, with recurring standoffs and horn blowing and angry drivers everywhere.
 
As the snow began to melt you saw the sign on an 18th Street wall re-appear: “One Term Mayor,” with renewed political relevance.
 
You can measure the progress of a cleanup by how dirty things get. If the snow transforms a street, the slow meltdown strips it naked. You saw all kinds of things here, the back of a house wrapped in icicles, two cars buried totally on a side street, slowly appearing, a bit of window, a tire, a Lexus sign. Twigs, old leaves from summer, a Corona bottle, pizza and Snicker wraps vie with a Christmas tree that emerged from a pile of snow. It was as if a soot truck came by, followed closely by the junk man.
 
Throughout the city, the performing arts took a hit, with closures and cancellations of different duration at the Kennedy Center and local theaters like Arena Stage, the Shakespeare Theatre Company and others. Every cancellation was an economic loss.
 
But now, everything’s open again and you can surmount the sooty feeling by going out to a show: catch the repertory of “Henry V” and “Richard II” at the Shakespeare Theatre, the Mariinsky Opera doing “War and Peace” (snow again) at the Kennedy Center, “Sophisticated Ladies” at the Lincoln Theatre in April, a free Tuesday concert at the Church of the Epiphany, the exhibitions and concerts at the museums, the Big Apple Circus at the Dulles Town Center, “Orestes” at the Folger, “The Little Shop of Horrors” coming to Ford’s and “Fiddler on the Roof” coming to the National.

Time to give yourself a break and hope the weather will do the same.

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