Once mainly a dumping ground for hotels in easy striking distance of both Georgetown and downtown, the District’s West End neighborhood has lately experienced a building boom that may bring more residents than ever into the quiet area east of Rock Creek Parkway, north of Foggy Bottom, and west of Dupont Circle.
For years, the West End had been a veritable eye of the storm — remaining oddly quiet, while the rest of the town swirled busily around it. But in early 2004, developers started work to turn the former site of the venerable Columbia Hospital for Women into the Columbia Residences — a retail/condo complex that wouldn’t be out of place in overgrown Clarendon. Soon after, the Park Hyatt Hotel — diagonally situated from the building site at the corner of 24th and M streets NW — closed for major renovations, taking down the highly respected Melrose restaurant (and its delicious crabcakes, too) with it. Two blocks to the west, on an island bordered by by New Hampshire Avenue NW, 22nd Street NW, and M Street NW, an overpriced Exxon station shut down to make way for X on West — a triangular condominium structure that aims to resemble a glass version of the I.M. Pei-designed east wing of the National Gallery of Art. And not two weeks ago, Lulu’s Club Mardi Gras at the corner of 22nd and M Streets tossed its last beads — only months after the adjacent Blackie’s House of Beef served Chateaubriand to its final table of former L.B.J. administration officials.
Although the West End — a property value-driven moniker — has traditionally turned off residents unwilling to pay to live in an area whose major asset was proximity to other places, developers and speculators are now taking an “if you build it, they will come” strategy. In 2004, D.C. bar magnate Joe Englert opened up 51st State on the notoriously difficult block of L Street alongside Pennsylvania Avenue NW between 25th and 26th Streets. A Subway sandwich shop appeared across the street not less than six months ago. And next door, the Xcaliber Lounge refashioned itself into the more user-friendly National Grille — replete with fresh fish specials that aren’t half-bad.
