In late 2011, the chain bookstore Barnes & Noble closed its location on Georgetown’s M Street amid hand-wringing over the company’s future in the age of Amazon and e-books.
Now, after an Amazon brick-and-mortar bookstore in Georgetown has come and gone from the same address, Barnes & Noble is returning to the building it vacated during the first Obama administration. Absent permitting delays, the store will open this summer, according to company spokesperson Janine Flanigan. A company social media post put the opening date at June 19.
“We’re coming back,” Flanigan said. “It’s a market we would love to be in again. We’re super excited for the opportunity.”
Barnes & Noble never wanted to leave Georgetown, where it occupied a massive, multistory space, Flanigan said. After the chain’s store in Union Station closed in 2013 and its downtown location was shuttered two years later, only university-affiliated Barnes & Noble outlets remained in D.C., despite the region’s bookish population.
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However, the company has changed the way it does business since being acquired by a hedge fund in 2019 and shuttering hundreds of locations, according to Flanigan. The Georgetown resurrection is part of a larger expansion nationwide, with 60 other stores opening this year.
These stores will be different, Flanigan said. The Barnes & Noble of the 2010s made space for toys and games, getting away from its core business of selling books and facilitating social connections. That proved to be a mistake.
“We got away from being that gathering place — and we’re starting to do that all over again,” Flanigan said.
On a recent sunny day, people strolled by Barnes & Noble’s still-vacant past-and-future home beside other national chains sprinkled among quaint local businesses on Georgetown’s charming main street.
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David Dochter, a principal at Dochter & Alexander Retail Advisors who brokered the store’s new lease, said fears of a hollowed-out downtown do not apply to Georgetown, where demand is high.
“It’s the best, most active street in this region,” he said. “The sky is not falling on retail.”
Joseph Sternlieb, president of the Georgetown Business Improvement District, said the neighborhood was “over-the-moon happy” about Barnes & Noble’s decision to return. While retailers have sought smaller spaces in recent years, he said, the bookstore’s decision to move back into a large storefront helps make it a great “third place” — a space to commune with friends and neighbors that isn’t home and isn’t work.
“It’s a great anchor,” he said. “People will travel a couple of miles to go to bookstore. … It adds to the vitality of street life.”
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Some rival bookstore owners in the region did not seem concerned about the competition — or even consider Barnes & Noble competition in the first place.
Bradley Graham, a co-owner of Politics and Prose, said that dire, long-standing predictions of the demise of printed books and the stores that sell them have not come to pass.
While profit margins are low and competition from Amazon is fierce, people still want a bookstore in their neighborhood, he said. In fact, Politics and Prose expanded to three locations in the past decade. Meanwhile, Amazon’s brick-and-mortar Georgetown bookstore, which opened in 2018, closed in 2022. (Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
“We are pretty bullish on this market and think that it certainly ought to be able to support another bookstore,” said Graham, a former Washington Post reporter and editor.
Rod Smith, manager of Georgetown’s Bridge Street Books for more than 30 years, said in an email that he was “not particularly concerned” about a national book behemoth moving in less than two blocks away.
“Bridge Street has been here since 1980 — we’ve seen them come, we’ve seen them go,” he said.
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