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Apple May Give Up on Georgetown

Stingy local board may have scared cool tech company away, for good

By JIM NEWELL

| Tuesday, Feb 10, 2009 | Updated 7:35 AM EST

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Some landowning aristocrats known as the "Old Georgetown Board" reject a fourth store design from Apple Inc. Now Apple may finally be taking the hint.

Last week, in one of those baffling local stories making such little sense that it had to be true, a group of landowning aristocratic Lords known as the "Old Georgetown Board" rejected a fourth design from "hot to trot" robot company Apple Inc. for its proposed store in Georgetown. And now Apple may finally be taking the hint.

All of the kids (and even some adults!) love Apple and its iPod, among other products, so every resident of Georgetown not living off of inherited colonial land and interest less hates the "Old Georgetown Board" over this.

And after this latest rejection, even the patient corporates at Apple may have had enough, and the Georgetown gentry might lose this lucrative, modern business to another neighborhood of D.C. The Examiner's Harry Jaffe reported the new rumors this weekend:

My sources say [deputy mayor for economic development Neil] Albert is already working with Apple to look beyond Georgetown.

“We want them,” Councilman Jim Graham tells me. Graham represents Ward 1, in the city’s core along 14th Street north of downtown. “We can put them on U Street, or Adams Morgan or Columbia Heights. We have Metro access. We’ve got locations where they can truly prosper.”

Jaffe added, "I would not be surprised if many of the monied elite who inhabit Georgetown’s brick mansions are not quietly pleased by the Old Georgetown Board’s dismissal of Apple’s design." These are people who repeatedly reject new business designs for having too much glass in the front display, so yes, they probably never wanted this silly robot store for children in the first place.

Jim Newell writes stories for Wonkette and IvyGate from his Apple robot.