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You may already be following the story of the Capital City Diner, a new restaurant planned by Trinidad resident Matt Ashburn (City Paper wrote about it yesterday). Ashburn and his partner, Patrick Carl, bought a Silk City Diner, one of those original 1940s era sleek modular diner buildings, in upstate New York and planned to install it on the site of one of the former used car lots shut recently shut down by Mayor Fenty. Great idea, right? We were definitely intrigued by the news, and had already set up a time for a photographer to go down there this weekend to check the place out.
The actual installation of the building was planned for today, but when the diner arrived at 1050 Bladensburg Rd. NE around 10:30 a.m. this morning, Ashburn Tweeted that an inspector from the D.C. Department of Consumer & Regulatory Affairs forbade them to move the building onto its concrete foundation. There's actually a pretty interesting Twitter exchange between Ashburn and @dcra regarding the stop work order.
"@dcra Please help."
"@dcra We followed guidance given by DCRA reps."
"Not exactly @capcitydiner. We 're trying to work with you and help walk you through this. You need to do it right though."
"@capcitydiner We're coming to you right now. Check your email as well."
And so on. For most of the day, Ashburn was then forced to leave the diner itself in the middle of Bladensburg Rd., prompting him to later update that "city is giving us a parking ticket."
But DCist just got off the phone with Ashburn, who lamented that it's "a long story" that he didn't have time to tell right now, but confirmed that just as the evening rush hour was starting, he had finally received permission to move the diner out of the road and onto the foundation property. He estimated the move would begin around 5:30 p.m.
We've got a call in to DCRA to find out more of the details on what went wrong with Capital City Diner's inspection process, and will update when we hear back. MORE: DCRA spokesperson Mike Rupert explained the diner saga to us, and clarified that the diner has actually been OK'd to move not onto its foundation, but onto a set of wooden blocks on the property. The department still needs to approve the attachment plans for the foundation before the building can be placed on its intended spot.
So what happened? It sounds like Ashburn and Carl got a raw deal from a shady architect. The foundation was not poured correctly according to city code - there wasn't enough concrete and it hadn't set for long enough. And when the architect was contacted today to provide certification from the project engineer, Rupert says the guy faxed over what turned out to be a forged signature. The engineer himself did show up to the site to go over his work with DCRA, but Rupert said the architect, who is not licensed in the District, appears to have "railroaded" the Cap City Diner guys.
The temporary solution to place the diner on the property will have to do until the whole thing can get sorted out, Rupert said, which is a shame, because he's all for the project.
"This is exactly the type of thing we were hoping to promote" when the city shut down those shady used car dealerships, Rupert said.
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"You need to do it right"
Translation: The foundation did not include an envelope of small unmarked bills tucked in the corner.
W00t! Silk City in DC?
http://www.silkcityphilly.com/
NOOOOOOO!!! Real food for real people! NOT another restaurant serving seared ahi and braised weasel penis accompanied by an $11 Shit-tini.
Gawd no. If there is an "Asian Spiced Tuna Burger" on the menu then I will lead the boycott.
Not the same people. Silk City was a brand of Diner. Like Winnebago is a brand of motor home.
Clearly, DC doesn't deserve a classic diner like this. All the DC gummint cares about is office cube farms and snooty restaurants that generate tons of tax revenue. How much money are they going to get off $10 blue plate specials? Businesses in DC, and residents for that matter, are just a buncha suckers with wallets attached.
As for DCRA, if Ashburn is to be believed, he's had zero response from licensing and inspections, which is par for the course. If you've ever had business dealings with them, or tried to get a permit for even the most minor work on your house, it's the same deal: the left hand doesn't know who the right hand is jerking off. DCRA sits with it's thumb up its @$$ for weeks, ignoring phonecalls, having zero contact apart from giving conflicting guidance, then swoops in at the last minute to take a massive dump on the construction site and issue a stop work order. And Ashburn is the one who "needs to do it right though."
Bring the diner to VA/MD, guys. They won't treat you like $h!t out there. And our mayors don't coverrup their trail of dead hookers they strangled in Vegas. Not anymore, at least.
Get your greasy monkeypaws off our diner suburb boy. You got the guns, can't you at least give us this?
The Mall would have been the other perfect spot for that diner.
The Mall would have been the other perfect spot for that diner
Yo. Right next to the Smithsonian's Museum of Bowling.
What an utterly retarded use of the uber-retarded Twitter.
@DCRA - Show us the money. Harriet Walters 'aint the only one who has gotta get paid.
actually, this is the type of thing that makes Twitter so useful.
Yup. If you check @dcra's twitter feed, you can see that @capcity started begging them to intercede, then DCRA actually showed up at the site within a few hours.
drlronhoover: could you please refrain from that use of retarded. it's offensive.
If they owners cannot make the diner happen, I wonder if they would be willing to sell the car to me. I can attach it to my house as part of my man-cave complex I plan to build as soon as I win the lottery.
DCRA is such a nightmare to deal with. No one knows who to talk to, where you should go, which permits you need. It's such a ridiculous, time consuming ruse for not only the citizens of DC, but also the other government agencies that have to deal with them.
Someone needs to take a long, hard look at their process and unwavering inefficiency.
Fact of life- you have to deal with permits and inspections. If you don't get it right you don't get approved. The twittering part is the only unique aspect of this story, and its not all that interesting.
And why did they hire an architect that was not licensed to practice in DC? If they're in the business of forging the signatures of their consulting engineers, they should not be licensed anywhere. There are plenty of good, legitimate, licensed architects in DC, all of them probably looking for work.
The problem is they did do it right, by the book, and got a stop work order anyway because their "architect" was a fraud. Where was DCRA when Mr. Fraudchitect was peddling his bogus applications? Nobody's saying that DC should get rid of permits and inspections. But you never hear about these Kafkaesque nightmare scenarios in surrounding jurisdictions. You have legitimate businesspeople trying to contribute to the DC economy getting screwed to the floor with circle-jerk permitting fiascos and no-show inspectors, meanwhile next door, you've got gutted crack dens where absentee landlords collect tax refunds on their properties and tax-exempt churchies squatting on vacant land and sticking the taxpayers with the cleanup bill. Whatever attempts previous administrations have made to streamline the process have been sunken beneath a squalid morass of red tape, bureacratic circlejerking, and ass covering. Meanwhile, DC's leadership argues over baseball tickets, strangles Vegas hookers with power ties, and feasts on roasted babies while lusting after fresh kidneys. If Cap City Diner wants to get in the good graces of DC's elitist scum, they better have some decent kidney, baby, and dead hooker recipes.
I guess they could have taken it upon themselves to check if the architect was licensed to practice in DC in the first place. That should be pretty much SOP.
I don't know how DC could have determined that the work was shoddy, that the engineers signature was forged, or that the architect was a fraudulent cheap forger without a site inspection. Which is exactly what happened- within less than a week of the foundation being poured- and it took DCRA less than a day to unravel the confection. It just so happened that was the same day the 18-wheeler arrived. The timeline was obviously tight.
If you want to blame "DC's Leadership" for not catching willfully fraudulent private construction in 6 days, also credit them with closing the chop shop/waystation for oversees auto sales and creating the location for the new business in the first place.
It could have been worse. The pancakes could have come with a side order of, well, pancaked foundation.