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.