No Apple Store for D.C. Anytime Soon was originally published on City Desk on Dec. 29, 2008, at 3:39 pm
Attention local urban sophisticates! You will not be able to visit an Apple Store in the District of Columbia anytime soon!
That scoop comes courtesy of the underappreciated, under-Webbed Current newspapers, which explained in last week’s editions [PDF, see pp. 1 and 19] that plans for the District’s first Apple Store are held up in a thicket of regulatory approvals, from the Georgetown advisory neighborhood commission and the Old Georgetown Board.
Earlier this month, both bodies rejected Apple’s design—the third the company had submitted for the property at 1229 Wisconsin Ave. NW, a Georgetown storefront the company has owned for more than a year—because, as the Current’s Carol Buckley puts it, it “would not fit into Georgetown.”
Nay, not even this testimonial, delivered by an Apple project manager, can cut through the red tape: “Steve saw this design and really loves it.”
That’s Steve Jobs, people. Steve Jobs!
When will you hoity-toity bureaucrats wake up and realize that when Steve Jobs loves something, that means you must love it, too?
The Current describes said design as such: “a glass first story with a solid stone upper facade punctuated by a large window shaped like Apple’s logo.” The Old Georgetown Board, charged with preserving historic preservation standards, “felt that the design turned the building into a billboard,” according to a spokesperson. The ANC, charged with being parochial nitwits, raised concerns that the latest design was “too modern.”
What are you missing out on, obstructionist Georgetowners? Well, as the Washington Business Journal put it in 2007, you’re missing the “one retail store that any town, and any developer, covets above all others. A store with such cachet that any retail center blessed enough to land one becomes instantly certified as a platinum-level shopping mecca, with clientele who are urbane, savvy and have loads of disposable income.”
Georgetown, though, does not covet thy neighbor’s urbane, savvy, income-disposing customers—got plenty of those already.
So suck it, Jobs! Shoulda gone to Chinatown!
