After it unceremoniously parted ways from D.C.’s Southwest waterfront last year, Captain White Seafood City is up and running at its new Oxon Hill location. There are some differences from the original, however: The water’s a little farther away — and the parking is no problem.

After moving their barges away from the place they’d called home for decades, the family-owned business purchased a former bar and pizzeria on Livingston Road at the beginning of January and started up business again at the end of February with a small selection of fresh seafood — right now it’s mostly crabs, because they are in season.

While the building is being gutted, Captain White’s is selling just the fresh-caught seafood — no sandwiches or other prepared dishes — from underneath a tent they have set up in the parking lot of their new property.

“I mean here, this is a community; this is what a community is. You support one another,” Penny White, co-owner of Captain White Seafood City, says of their new location. “We have something to offer and people have something to offer, so it’s a community. You feel wanted.”

Although the market — and Captain White Seafood in particular — had become an iconic D.C. landmark over the last half-century, the family found themselves up against The Wharf’s developers and the District government in a legal battle over leasing rights that started in 2015 and concluded with Captain White’s departure in November.

“It wasn’t about the community anymore and what the people wanted,” Penny says of the contention around the Southwest waterfront location. (Wharf developers Hoffman-Madison Waterfront haven’t publicly addressed Captain White’s departure, telling Washingtonian in November that they were “committed to preserving the vibrancy and legacy of the Municipal Fish Market” there going forward.)

So now they sell their seafood near National Harbor, after publicizing the relocation through word-of-mouth and on social media. On Mother’s Day afternoon when DCist/WAMU visited, a neat, single-file line of about fifty people waited patiently to pick out live crabs as Usher’s love songs played on loudspeakers. Most cars were parked in the designated spaces — which are free of charge — while others were parked next door in a closed bank’s parking lot.

Customers made small talk with each other as they inched closer to the bins of crabs. A single police officer leaned against his vehicle, surveilling the line and occasionally chatting with the staff. It was relaxed and spacious, a welcome contrast to the hectic and cramped space the business previously occupied in D.C., according to the owners.

Penny and her grandson, Douglas White, a manager at the company, say parking is one of the biggest perks of the relocation. Also, the business is closer to a large portion of their faithful customers.

“A lot of our clientele is over here — in Southeast, Oxon Hill,” says Douglas. “We have more room to expand. You see that we’re in a parking lot here. Down in D.C. we weren’t allowed to operate on our docks or anything. Just solely on our boats.”

The building renovation is moving fairly quickly; the family aims to complete the work this fall. At least for now, “it’s not really going to be too much different” than the previous operation in Southwest D.C., Douglas says. About two thirds of the 6,000-square-foot building will be a market similar to the old setup and the other third will be for carryout.

“It would probably be a bar table where people can eat. You can come in, get a fried sandwich, eat it and then go back to work,” said Douglas. Now that they have a liquor license, the carryout will also serve a small selection of mixed drinks and a few drinks on tap.

Even though they have more physical land to call their own, the new building is only a fraction of the sales area they had on their combined boats at The Wharf. The family would like to grow the business more, but an expansion is still just a “pipe dream,” as Douglas puts it. He envisions a crab house or outdoor seating one day, but it feels far away and would require a lot more space — perhaps through acquisition of a neighboring property.

Although they’re excited about what’s coming, they pointed to the irony that the 50-year-old business, which played a huge role in creating the tourist attraction at the D.C. waterfront, is basically starting over.

“This is how they started. They started on a picnic table on the dock and they grew into that big business that you used to see at the Wharf. We have our name though,” Douglas says.

The White family considers these next few months a soft opening, and plan to announce a grand opening once the building’s remodel is finished.

Looking out at the line wrapped along the perimeter of the parking lot on Mother’s Day, the two generations of White family members summed it up. “The beauty in all this is that when you treat people good …” Penny started, “they treat you good,” Douglas said, finishing his grandmother’s sentence.

“We’ve done something right. And that’s a good feeling,” Penny added. “That’s what keeps me going. It has been an emotional ride — believe me — but this helps.”