An Interview with the founder of The Georgetown Metropolitan
Topher, the Founder and Editor In Chief Of the Georgetown Metropolitan standing in front of his favorite bakery.
I am always interested in speaking to people who are contributing to their sense of place in a non-commercial way; simply because they love it. Topher, the Founder and Editor In Chief of The Georgetown Metropolitan has been running a hyper-local blog focused on the Georgetown Neighborhood for nearly twenty years. That’s twenty years of almost daily posts combined with long form, deeply researched work about the history of Georgetown and its impact on the modern day neighborhood. Topher has contributed to other publications like Greater Greater Washington and his blog has been cited multiple times in The Washington Post
Over coffee and a croissant at his favorite neighborhood cafe, Topher shared more about why he (re)started The Georgetown Metropolitan, his perspective on the blogging landscape after the early aughts, and his run for ANC Commissioner in 2020 and 2022 (spoiler: he won in 2022).
This interview has been lightly edited for conciseness and clarity.
How did you find your way to DC and start The Georgetown Metropolitan?
I came down to the DMV for law school right after graduation. I went to Colgate University in upstate New York and then American University for law school. I was working at a law firm in DC and knew that what I really wanted to do was work in the public sector. Eventually I was able to make that jump and for the first time in my career was home at a normal hour. I had more free time and realized that I was the type of person who just really liked digging into things. I moved to Georgetown in the early 2000’s when there were a million neighborhood blogs. Every neighborhood had a blog. In December of 2008 I decided to create my own and have just kept doing it. I felt there was a niche to focus more on the history of Georgetown rather than new restaurants and new openings that The Georgetowner specializes in. It’s funny, early on I read an article by another blog called Why I Hate DC (now defunct) and one of the authors wrote a parody of a cliche blogger from that era. They described the person as being extremely excited in the first few months and then not posting for 6 months and posting sporadically before finally shutting it down. I think I was a bit motivated by the fear of being that blogger who just starts and quits things quickly. Even twenty years later I still think about that.
Writing the blog has branched out into other things because I wasn’t involved in the neighborhood before and the blog led to me joining the citizens association, the zoning committee and some other ad hoc committees. Eventually I ran for an ANC seat in 2020 because I figured I had wanted to do it eventually. In 2020 so much was going on and I was very worried that the neighborhood was facing an existential threat where the commercial district would just go away and nobody knew what was going to happen.
In Fall of 2020 my neighbor was stepping down and that led to this opportunity to run. I thought I had it locked down and then this person ran against me and she ended up beating me by 15 votes. After one term she stepped down and the seat opened up again. I ran again against another neighbor. I ended up winning in 2022 and then ran again last year and won again.
I’ve kept the blog up at the same time. At one point I thought about setting it aside but I haven’t been able to. There are now some limitations since I am on the ANC but it’s still very similar to what it was.
What’s your favorite thing you’ve written about?
I am most proud of an article I wrote about a proposed bus shelter that was set to be installed on 35th street near Duke Ellington school. A former ANC Commissioner was trying to rally people against it with the argument that it would ruin the historic beauty of Georgetown. I ended up writing a long impassioned article about the history of Black Georgetown and the role of historic preservation. I made the argument that historic preservation is not really about history it’s about preserving a preferred aesthetic in Georgetown that doesn’t necessarily accurately reflect the historical reality. The history doesn’t back it up. In the early 20th century Georgetown was approximately 30% black and there was a vibrant community of doctors and dentists and store owners and it was still around until the middle of the 20th century. Historic preservation was used as a tool to encourage gentrification, pushing out that specific community while maintaining this idea of Georgetown that wasn’t accurate. The claim was that the important thing was to keep a building looking pretty and old, not to keep the people who live there, there. In fact, often the opposite if they were viewed as a detriment to maintaining the facade. I wrote a very impassioned piece about the history and how the bus shelter was going to be used by kids at Duke Ellington, some of whom are potentially descendants of that prior Georgetown diaspora who now have to take a bus to Duke Ellington since they were pushed out of living nearby and this commissioner wants to stop these kids from having a shelter. We got the bus shelter installed!
I wrote another article about the Transformers issue in Georgetown which is another example of people wanting to control their environment using historic preservation as a tool. For the Transformers example, those are homes from the 1950’s and aren’t truly historic, they simply have the Federal style facade but were built in the mid-late 20th century.
How long do you see yourself running the blog?
I don’t know! I thought I would quit when I had a kid, I thought I would quit during covid but I don’t know I just keep doing it. It’s kind of like exercise: you don’t always love it when you do it but you look back and it’s such a good thing that you did it.
I think there has been a recent resurgence in blogging from Substack, but there was a while when it went away. What do you think about that sort of ebb and flow?
There has definitely been a big decrease in blogs over the last 10-12 years. I think people just quit. Twitter really changed things. A blogger used to have to sit and write a couple of paragraphs and only a few people would read it but with the advent of Twitter people could tweet and 80,000 people would read it. It’s funny, the last time I was interviewed in this coffee shop was by a writer for The Georgetown Current. It was a weekly, physical newspaper that was delivered free to your doorstep that covered everything local, all of the ANC stuff, the restaurant stuff, the zoning stuff. There would be Georgetown stories on the front page but it covered everything from high school sports to other things in NW with a lively editorial page and letters to the editor.
You could argue that sometimes that isn’t good but now it’s just people on Nextdoor posting a lot of complaints if they are even going to post at all.
Substack is definitely getting more popular, and I use Substack to share ANC updates. I don’t necessarily think neighborhood blogs have seen a resurgence. I think the main model of Substack is for professional writers who can actually make money writing as opposed to writing for a big newspaper.
Tell me about your other writing, you’ve written for other publications previously!
The well-researched posts are the ones I like doing the most and I do those less frequently these days. Some of my best articles in the past have been extremely research driven.
I also used to write for Greater Greater Washington and enjoyed reaching a writer audience with that type of research. There was a group of us who would write articles for different platforms for a broader audience. For a while I was also in the Washington Post. The Post had a thing called “All Opinions Local” where they basically got a group of bloggers at the time and would aggregate their writing. They would moderate those blogs and if they saw something interesting they would post it on the Washington Post website. Someone told me they saw it in the print itself but I never saw it.
You’ve seen a couple of iterations of DC, I’d love to hear your perspective!
Yeah I think back and I wish I was more adventurous. It was particularly late before I really spent a lot of time in the city. It’s been through a couple of big swings and if you stick around long enough you’ll get to see new things. For the longest time in the early to mid 2000’s there was a sense that DC was going to see property values go up and up and we thought that it had to go down eventually but twenty years later its still going up.
When did DC start to feel like home?
In 2004 I was starting law school and was dating my now wife who was in New York. I started thinking about moving to New York and I remember coming across the Memorial Bridge by the Lincoln Memorial and just thinking “Wow, I am going to miss this.” It’s funny because it’s very “official Washington” but I remember that moment specifically.
For me, I was also living in Arlington for four years when I initially moved here and when I moved to DC proper in 2003 I sort of went through this gradual process of starting to feel defensive about the city.
Topher’s “Best of” List
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Fountain Inn- It’s not in my ANC district but it’s fantastic.
Patisserie Poupon - Great coffee and really well made pastries. It’s a little ways up Wisconsin so it’s not quite as populated with tourists.
Pizzeria Paradiso - I like to get a beer at Pizzeria Paradiso. They have a great beer selection and I used to go there every Thursday for pizza and a beer until I had a kid when pizza night moved to Fridays.
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Pizzeria Paradiso - I know it sounds boring to say it twice but it is great.
Boulangerie Christophe - A very good lunch spot
Chez Billy Sud - I haven’t been there as much as I’d like but it was really good when I went.
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Nathan’s - It’s where Capital One Cafe in Georgetown is now located. It was a cheap little American style bar with a bit of a dive feel. It was a relaxing place right in the center of Wisconsin run by a longtime Georgetown resident who did her best to keep it for years before eventually using it because of rent increases.