What's Behind Each Door on Pennsylvania Avenue SE Now: A Year of Capitol Hill Handoffs

Walk Pennsylvania Avenue SE from the 200 block to 8th Street and count the storefronts that changed since January. You get a sandwich chain, a dessert shop, a 24/7 convenience store, a games store with a planned change of owner, a restaurant space that is dark again after a short test, and leases signed for a smoothie café and a tattoo studio. Almost none of these is a new business arriving from outside on a long lease. Most of the avenue's 2026 changes came from three sources: owners testing a concept in space they already control, a business set to pass to someone who already worked there, and storefronts filled in the gap a departing chain left behind. That is why the avenue changes in small steps, and why an empty window here often means something other than "for lease."

The 300 block ran a test, and the test ended

The clearest example is 303 Pennsylvania Avenue SE. Good Stuff Eatery's original location closed there in early February after 18 years. On March 14, Sunnyside Restaurant Group, the company behind Good Stuff, Santa Rosa Taqueria and We The Pizza, opened Bumblebirds in the same space with Carla Hall. Washingtonian reported the fried chicken and cocktail concept would be "in test mode for the first six months, with the goal of making it permanent if it's successful." Sunnyside CEO Micheline Mendelsohn told the magazine the block needed "something light and joyful."

Capitol Hill Corner reported that Bumblebirds closed "as planned at the end of June." That was about three and a half months after opening. The Bumblebirds site signed off with "It's not good bye, it's 'See you Later!'" The same report identified Spike Mendelsohn's Sunnyside Restaurant Group as the owner of the 303 space and said the group was "being mum" about what comes next. In its September Capitol Cuisine column, Hill Rag wrote that it would miss the fried chicken sandwiches and homemade biscuits.

The ownership detail matters. A restaurant group that controls its own corner can open a pop-up, close it on its own schedule and keep the lights off while it decides. A landlord chasing rent would behave differently. The dark windows at 303 this fall reflect that kind of choice.

The 600 block filled the gap a chain left

Two blocks east, the change ran the other way. Capitol Hill Corner's September 13 roundup noted that a new convenience store had opened at 637 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, the space 7-Eleven used to hold. Five days later, in a report on 24/7 stores around the Starburst intersection, the outlet named it as a Grab N Go 24/7 store. It also tied the trend to independents and local chains moving "to fill the gap created by the closure of so many 7/11s in October of 2024," and called it "a business model that is self-replicating."

The same thing is happening more slowly on Barracks Row. That 7-Eleven closed in August 2024. By October 2025, it was reported to be on track to reopen as a gift shop. Buildout had started by late September 2026, with no opening date announced. It has been two years from chain closure to a new tenant, and the replacement in each case is a smaller, local operator.

Here is the stretch from 200 to 800, in walking order:

Jersey Mike's is the one arrival that came straight from a national chain. Hill Rag reported that the opening handed out sandwiches for a $3 donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. DOUX followed a different path. Capitol Hill Corner first reported it in March as a Belgian chocolate and Mediterranean dessert shop going into the former Pasha Castle space, and it was open by late May. That was one storefront turned over directly to the next, with no long vacancy in between.

Labyrinth planned its handoff from the inside

At 645, the change on the block is one you can't see from the sidewalk. In December 2025, Capitol Hill Corner reported that founder Kathleen Donahue planned to hand Labyrinth Games & Puzzles to longtime general manager Melissa Campbell at the end of January 2026. On Pennsylvania Avenue, a handoff to the person already running the floor is the mirror image of the 7-Eleven story. The plan keeps the business and its manager in place.

September 17 was harder to miss. Labyrinth's release of Pokémon cards for the 30th anniversary drew a line that started at the store's D Street entrance in the back and ran down the block toward CVS. A photo caption in Capitol Hill Corner's September 20 roundup put the crowd there at 8 a.m. The store's event calendar listed it as the kickoff location for the District Hunt on October 17, alongside its regular in-store game nights.

Next door, a window that has waited since 2014

Labyrinth's neighbor at 655 is the clearest case of an owner willing to wait. Li'l Pub served its last night on January 6, 2014, and the bar's owner told PoPville at the time that the building had been sold to CVS next door. No new tenant ever moved in. In December 2021, PoPville reported that the curatorial group Triple Candie was turning the bar's shallow front into a 22-square-foot gallery with monthly "pocket-exhibitions." The first was titled "United and Untied, Simultaneously."

Triple Candie is run by art historians Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett. Capitol Hill Corner describes it as a research-oriented curatorial agency interested in alternative ways of exhibiting art. The window was still rotating in September 2026, when Capitol Hill Corner called that month's piece a "curious installation." That makes nearly five years of monthly shows in a storefront that has had no retail tenant for more than a decade. If you have been passing it without stopping, the show changes every month.

What arrives next, in roughly the order it should

The pipeline follows the same pattern of small, local operators taking spaces one at a time.

1. Cleopatra Ink Global Tattoo & Piercing, 801, at the corner where Pennsylvania meets 8th Street. Buildout was underway by mid-September, but no opening date has been announced.
2. The Barracks Row gift shop in the former 7-Eleven. Buildout has started, and its opening date is still uncertain.
3. South Block, 700, an offshoot of a Virginia-based chain serving smoothies, açaí bowls, fresh juices and toasts. Hill Rag placed it around the corner from Eastern Market, next to Little Engine, and both Hill Rag and WhatNow point to early 2027. Little Engine Chicken itself sits at 250 7th Street SE, according to the Capitol Hill BID directory.
4. 303, whenever Sunnyside Restaurant Group decides. Bumblebirds' "See you Later!" leaves open a return somewhere, and the company hasn't said where.

One more change is coming at the avenue's far end, at the traffic circle where Pennsylvania meets Potomac Avenue. In July, Capitol Hill Corner reported that ANC 6B announced the results of a community ranked-choice vote to name the circle. Roberta Flack won with 682 votes to Catlett's 321, out of 1,003 cast, and the commission voted to send the result to Councilmember Charles Allen and the rest of the DC Council.

On Pennsylvania Avenue SE this year, who owned a space and how long they could wait shaped each storefront more than any single opening did. I've been watching this avenue since 1978, and I'm always glad to compare notes on what's going into the next empty window. If you want to talk about the blocks around Eastern Market, Donald Denton is a short walk away. Let's Connect.