DCist is excited to welcome back our founding editor, Michael Grass, who comes to us this Sunday with a special Opinionist.

One of the most frustrating things about living in Washington, D.C., for me is walking along Eye Street up and around the corner from the International Monetary Fund. Between 20th and 21st streets NW sits Kinkead’s, one of the city’s long-standing respected restaurants. Kinkead’s sits in the house where my late grandfather and my great uncle grew up in the early 20th century.

Let me rephrase: Kinkead’s shares the same façade as my family’s old house … because only the exterior remains. The Eye Street address became 2000 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, home to the Shops at 2000 Penn, “where,” apparently, “the neighborhood shops,” according to its quirky Flash animation marketing promo — complete with someone shopping while eating an ice cream cone, a woman walking her dog and a baseball-cap wearing kid strolling down the sidewalk dribbling a basketball backwards while he’s talking on a cell phone … just before Grandpa Grass’ house drops down from the sky.

Yes, I’m of course grateful that when 2000 Penn was built, the Eye Street façades of the old homes were preserved. It’s a reminder that members of my family — German immigrants who arrived in the District during the Civil War — grew up down the street from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in an area that today is a hive of global economic policymakers, lobbying, trade and other national and international interests.

But yet, I’m sad, I’m frustrated.

To me, my family’s old house is a classic example of what Washington does so well with its buildings: rip out the old guts, but keep the face. We live in a façade-obsessed city where many, but not all, of our neighbors do indeed like the idea of history, as long as they can look at it from the sidewalk and don’t have to co-exist with it.

You can see this practice everywhere around town. From the Spanish and Mexican diplomatic complexes on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, to office building rehabs downtown or the countless row houses in Shaw, Columbia Heights and elsewhere whose interiors have been so skillfully toyed with by residential developers that they put the multi-talented plastic surgeons of the greater Miami area to shame.

But like a cheap chin implant, interior rehabs using drywall and particle board as gutted replacements for aging-but-solid construction do not grow old gracefully. But, as the reasoning goes, that doesn’t matter. Why build 100 or 200 years out when you can simply eviscerate and remodel again in 25 years. Why build for the future when you’re going to cash out in the short term or can easily patch things up Phyllis Diller-style in the long term? (And in some circumstances, keeping a façade can also win you huge tax breaks, as Joe Stephens of the Post skillfully reported in December 2004.)

Indeed, not everything old can and should be saved. Cities do change and must evolve to support their future. In order to make an aging office building financially successful and competitive, that building must often be gutted to incorporate the maximum amount of modern amenities. Downtown Washington’s renaissance of the past decade — from Gallery Place to Penn Quarter to 14th Street to McPherson Square — has been built upon on this practice.

But as Christina Larson wrote in the December issue of The Washington Monthly, there is a price our city is paying: The number of historic interiors in downtown Washington is slowly dwindling.

Two decades ago, there remained a handful of unrenovated historic buildings in downtown Washington. With their fanciful façades, columned entrances, crackling radiators, and below-market rents, these edifices became refuges for Washingtonians who came to do good, even if they don't always do well. One by one, each has undergone a make-over: the Southern Building in 1987; the Evening Star Building in 1990; the Investment Building in 1997; the Bowen Building in 2005.

In the current battle to save Dupont Circle’s landmark Heurich House museum (where my great-great grandfather, August Grass, carved the amazing interior woodworking) there is one important thing to keep in mind: This is not a battle to save the so-called Brewmaster’s Castle from the wrecking ball (it is on the National Register of Historic Places). It is a battle to keep its historic interior — its furnishings and ornate decorative elements — from being auctioned off, removed and closed off to the public. It’s an extraordinary interior environment that has been meticulously maintained for the past 110-plus years. But there is a serious threat facing the building unless $250,000 is raised by Feb. 15. If we lose that battle, it will be a great, great loss.

As neighborhood after neighborhood, building after building gets renovated and sees renewed life and investment, we should recognize the true definition of “historic.” We indeed live in a city that’s filled with history, but as a city, we should be truthful with what is actually historic and what is just a façade. Let’s not become too comfortable with the empty shells of architectural mediocrity.

Images courtesy of Mike Grass and furcafe.

Michael Grass, who co-founded DCist in summer 2004, is the Local editor of The Washington Post’s Express. He keeps a personal blog at The Washington Oculus.