Coming soon to 14th Street: a restaurant named “Policy.” Goes well with the jazz club named after a piece of legislation down the street.

UPDATE: Opening March 19th.

Hi and welcome to theGarance.com. Nothing to see here! This blog is on hold, as it has been for much of the last year. If you want to read about the 2008 campaign, try here.

Continuing with the theme of the U Street corridor’s retail retraction, turns out now Pop on 14th is closing. I asked the owner why yesterday and she said: a) because she has another store in Brooklyn and has been living in NY the past three years already, and b) Target. The new Target in CH has apparently lessened the market for her wares.

Now, I never quite thought Pop was quite right for the market here — the clothing all seemed really young for the neighborhood, both too expensive for the lower income residents (as compared to, say, Milo), and not well-made or sophisticated enough for the higher-income ones. But I guess it must have worked well enough for a number of years — the owner now is going to open an online store, ShopPop.com, as well as maintaining her Brooklyn shop.

A fun quiz, via Apartment Therapy.

I do not think Kevin Drum is “a weird sociopath.”

Other post-Austin thoughts: I’d only been there once before, on a very abbreviated stop during the Howard Dean Sleepless Summer Tour in 2003, so didn’t have much of an impression of the place. Now that I have a bit of a better sense of it, I’d say that it seems a bit like a cross between Santa Fe, N.M., and Los Angeles, with a dash of Berkeley, too.

The one thing I did not expect, and which I have since been informed is something not specific to Austin but has in fact been going on for two years all across America and we just missed it living here in sartorially conservative D.C., is the short-shorts trend. I have never seen so many women in hot pants and heels in my life.