It seems kind of funny now. When Miles Groves was looking for a new neighborhood in 1995, he was drawn to Penn Quarter in part because of its abundance of … parking.
Since then the neighborhood has exploded into the city’s hottest locale for restaurants, sports and theater, but with that spectacular growth has come a diminishing number of spots to park the car.
“I certainly wouldn’t use that as a reason to come here now,” Groves says, chuckling. “But a lot of people here now don’t even have cars.”
In many ways, Penn Quarter represents the ultimate in urban living. With the Gallery Place/Chinatown Metro station in the heart of the neighborhood and dozens of restaurants within a few blocks, there really is no need for a car. This “mixed-use” philosophy for neighborhood development has proved to be highly attractive to the collection of young professionals and empty nesters who live in the neighborhood’s primary form of housing, condos.
Defining the boundaries of this ever-growing and ever-popular neighborhood is difficult, but Jo-Ann Neuhaus, executive director of the Pennsylvania Quarter Neighborhood Association, considers them to be Pennsylvania Avenue to the south, Massachusetts Avenue to the north, New York Avenue to the west and somewhere near Fourth Street to the east. Most people can agree, however, that the heart of the neighborhood is the Verizon Center and the many restaurants, bars, clubs and shops that have sprouted up around it since it opened in December 1997.
“The Verizon Center came at a wonderful time in the real estate cycle and gave the neighborhood a great boost,” Neuhaus said. “One of the things that made it wonderful was the mix of activities. You have people working in the same neighborhood where they’re living. Developers had problems with retail downtown for some time, so they looked to restaurants to occupy ground floors.”
Ah, food. It’s become the backbone of Penn Quarter. In addition to many of the mom and pop ethnic restaurants that still serve authentic Chinese, Thai and Vietnamese cuisine in Chinatown, a slew of trendy hot spots have turned Penn Quarter into the city’s culinary capital.
Cafe Atlantico, Jaleo, Rosa Mexicana, Zaytinya, Matchbox, Oyamel, Rasika, Proof, District ChopHouse. The list could — and does — go on, but the point is clear. There’s a restaurant for every palate in Penn Quarter.
“This is a happening place to be,” said Groves, president of the Downtown Neighborhood Association. “There are lots of restaurants, lots of bars, two movie theaters, lots of live theaters.”
In fact, Neuhaus traces the genesis of the Penn Quarter revival to the opening of the Shakespeare Theatre. With Ford’s Theatre, and smaller venues like Black Box, the stage rarely is dark in Penn Quarter. Museums like the National Portrait Gallery and a handful of quirky landmarks (the Potbelly’s sandwich shop on Indiana Avenue claims to have the nation’s oldest working elevator) balance out the abundance of chains that surround the Verizon Center.
What isn’t abundant is parking. It’s a fact Groves made peace with long ago.
“We left the neighborhood for about 10 months, and it was a mistake,” he said. “It’s a place that is alive all the time.”
