Walk east on Pennsylvania Avenue past the Watergate complex and you'll pass a storefront that has sat dark for more than two years. It used to be Marcel's, Robert Wiedmaier's white-tablecloth French-Belgian dining room, a fixture at 2401 Pennsylvania Ave NW for a quarter century before it closed for good on May 12, 2024. The chef didn't lose his lease because business dried up. He lost it because a new landlord wouldn't renegotiate terms he could live with, according to his own statement at the time. Keep walking a few more blocks into Foggy Bottom proper and the empty storefronts you'll find have a different story behind them, one that has nothing to do with a single landlord dispute and everything to do with who still shows up to work in this part of the city.

That distinction matters if you live here, because the two neighborhoods share a name on real estate listings and a commercial corridor on the ground, but they have been recovering from the pandemic at two very different speeds.

One corridor, two recoveries

A 2023 study commissioned by the D.C. government and conducted by Jon Stover & Associates found that 63 percent of stores in the Foggy Bottom/West End area reported sales still below pre-pandemic levels, with storefront vacancy topping 60 percent in parts of Foggy Bottom. But the same study drew a clear line between the two halves of the neighborhood. The West End, with its concentration of hotels and premium office space, saw a stronger post-pandemic bounce back than Foggy Bottom did. The study pointed to remote work among GW faculty and government employees as one driver of the gap, along with a physical problem specific to Foggy Bottom: storefronts at Columbia Plaza and the Watergate itself sit back from Virginia Avenue and the Potomac River Freeway, both heavy car corridors, which makes those shops less visible to the foot traffic that keeps small retail alive.

So the empty windows you notice on a walk through Foggy Bottom aren't really about the neighborhood losing its appeal. They're about a retail geometry problem that hotels and office towers on the West End side never had to solve.

The Main Street effort trying to close the gap

That gap is exactly what a new organization was built to address. The Foggy Bottom West End Main Street program, established in 2025 under the umbrella of the Foggy Bottom Association, is part of a citywide network the D.C. Department of Small and Local Business Development first created in 2002 to bring businesses into vacant storefronts. In its first year, the program received $175,000 from the District and used the entire amount, distributing grants averaging $4,000 to nine local businesses to support brick-and-mortar improvements.

For fiscal year 2026, the program's funding actually dropped to $167,730, and the man running it wants more. Ben Sislen, the Main Street's executive director, has a resume that reads like a tour of D.C.'s neighborhood hospitality scene. He opened Kingfisher on 14th Street in 2016, followed by The Crown & Crow in 2018, before turning his attention to Foggy Bottom in 2020 with a company called Expat Hospitality. Under that banner he opened Expat and Hilltop Taproom in 2024, with Taco Cat following in 2025. He knows firsthand what it takes to open a storefront here, which is presumably why the Foggy Bottom Association put him in charge of helping others do the same.

Sislen told the GW Hatchet in February 2026 that if the city approves an additional $25,000 to $50,000, the Main Street's advisory board would use it to expand what it's already doing, offering larger grants to more businesses. Community leaders including Foggy Bottom Association president John George and representatives from Advisory Neighborhood Commission 2A and the West End Citizens Association are pushing Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto to add up to $35,000 to the program's budget in the upcoming city cycle.

George has a long view of the neighborhood that gives that ask some weight. He has owned a home on 26th Street NW in Foggy Bottom for close to three decades and has led the Foggy Bottom Association since 2020. If the funding increase comes through, the next round of storefront grants would likely reach more of the businesses in the corridors that the 2023 study flagged as struggling, the ones set back from Virginia Avenue where a passerby on foot would have to know to look.

What that money already looks like on the ground

The clearest picture of the program's reach so far isn't the dollar figures. It's the guest list at its own launch party. The event was held at Watergate Vintners & Spirits, a wine and spirits shop in the Watergate Shops that owner Sunil Sehgal opened on May 26, 2017. Door prizes for attendees included Sunday brunch for two at Juniper and cocktails in the courtyard for two at the Fairmont. Those are three businesses that have nothing to do with the Main Street's grant money directly, but their willingness to donate prizes to a neighborhood business group's launch says something about how tightly wound the commercial community here still is, even with vacancy rates the 2023 study called out.

If you're trying to get a sense of what's actually changed in the last two years without wading through funding memos, here's a short list worth knowing:

• Expat and Hilltop Taproom opened in 2024 under Ben Sislen's Expat Hospitality group, with Taco Cat following in 2025, all three part of the same operator's bet on Foggy Bottom specifically.
• Watergate Vintners & Spirits has been open since 2017 and now doubles as an informal gathering point for neighborhood business events.
• Marcel's closed permanently on May 12, 2024, after 25 years, and its former owner Robert Wiedmaier has since focused his RW Restaurant Group on locations in Maryland and Virginia rather than reopening in the District.
• The dining anchors that didn't go anywhere include Ris, chef Ris Lacoste's seasonal American spot on L Street, Blue Duck Tavern inside the Park Hyatt, Rasika West End, led by James Beard winner Vikram Sunderam, and Ten Ten West End inside One Washington Circle Hotel.

None of that is a story about decline. It's a story about a neighborhood where the hotel and office-anchored blocks kept humming through a rough stretch while the residential blocks a few streets over needed an actual funded intervention to catch up, and where that intervention is now in its second year with real names attached to it.

What to watch if you live here

The practical thing for a resident to track isn't the total grant pool, it's whether the city approves the requested increase this budget cycle. If Pinto and the Council add the funding George and Sislen are asking for, expect a second, larger round of storefront grants sometime after the new fiscal year begins, likely reaching further into the Columbia Plaza and Watergate storefronts the 2023 study singled out as the hardest to see from the street.

There's also a local election worth knowing about if you live in the specific slice of the neighborhood it covers. George is running for the ANC 2A03 seat, which represents Foggy Bottom and the West End, with the vote scheduled for November 3, 2026. Whoever holds that seat will have a direct line to exactly the kind of funding conversations that shaped the Main Street's first year.

None of this changes what your neighborhood feels like on a Tuesday night. Ris still has a line for the crab cakes, the Fairmont's courtyard is still a good excuse to sit outside, and the Kennedy Center is still a short walk from either side of the divide. What's changed is that there's now an organization with a name, a budget, and a person running it whose entire job is closing the gap between the blocks that recovered on their own and the ones that didn't. That's worth knowing the next time you notice a storefront sitting empty and start to wonder why.

If you're curious how any of this touches property values or timing on the West End side, the team at Premier Partners DC tracks this corridor closely and is always glad to talk through what it means for your specific block.