Stand in the checkout line at the Safeway on Corcoran Street on a Tuesday evening and you'll understand a nickname that has outlived three decades of gentrification, two celebrity sightings, and one very public fight over beer and wine. Neighbors have called it the Soviet Safeway since at least the 1990s, a jab at the empty shelves and lines that used to stretch from the registers back to the refrigerated cases. Rex Tillerson shopped there in 2017, weeks before his Senate confirmation as Secretary of State, and DC Twitter noticed before anyone noticed the milk in his cart. The name stuck because the store never really changed. It got a paint job, a beer and wine license after a bruising 2017 community fight, and decades of neighbors joking that Whole Foods, four blocks away on P Street, was where you went for anything you actually wanted to cook.
Here's what almost nobody in that checkout line has stopped to ask: why has a neighborhood this dense, this affluent, sitting on top of one of the busiest Metro stations in the WMATA system, never landed a full-size grocery store that isn't a punchline?
The answer showed up in a City Cast DC report earlier this month, and it isn't about demand. It's about square footage, and the number is smaller than you'd think.
The 2,000-Square-Foot Ceiling
Patrick Kain, chair of the Dupont Circle Business Improvement District and a longtime owner and manager of buildings on Connecticut Avenue, put it plainly to City Cast DC: national grocery chains want tens of thousands of square feet. Most available retail space along Connecticut Avenue runs about 2,000 square feet, a fraction of what a modern store needs to stock produce, meat, seafood, and everything else that makes a grocery store worth the walk instead of the DoorDash order.
That gap is the real story behind every grocery rumor Dupont has chased for twenty years. It's not that Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, or anyone else decided the neighborhood wasn't worth it. The buildings simply weren't built to hold them. Dupont's commercial stock is old rowhouse-scale retail, the kind of footprint that fits a wine shop or a pharmacy but not a full grocery format. Even Amazon ran into the same wall. When the company opened a store at 1350 Connecticut Avenue NW near the Metro's south entrance in 2022, the available space was small enough that the location launched as a compact Amazon Fresh or Amazon Go format rather than a full-scale store, built around "Just Walk Out" checkout technology instead of aisles you can actually push a cart through.
So the neighborhood got a grocery store, technically. It just wasn't the one anyone was asking for.
Why This Rumor Is Different
Now there's a building on Connecticut Avenue with a footprint that breaks the 2,000-square-foot ceiling for the first time.
The Geneva, a $750 million office-to-residential conversion spanning 1825 and 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW, is being built with more than 500 apartments, including 60 designated as affordable housing, and a 26,000-square-foot retail space on its ground floor. That's not an incremental upgrade over the old storefronts nearby. It's an order of magnitude larger than anything the corridor has offered a grocery chain before, which is exactly why Kain told City Cast DC that Post Brothers, the Philadelphia developer behind the project, has already talked to Trader Joe's about the space.
Trader Joe's response, when City Cast DC asked directly, was the company's standard answer for a location that isn't locked in: no confirmed site in Dupont Circle, and an ongoing search across hundreds of neighborhoods nationally. That's not a no. It's also not a yes. Trader Joe's has a well-documented reputation for moving slowly and weighing site density, traffic patterns, and proximity to its other stores before committing, so a noncommittal statement this early in a lease negotiation tells you less than the fact that the conversation is happening at all in a space finally big enough to hold the answer.
Kain mentioned other chains that could fit the profile too, from Whole Foods' smaller-format Daily Shop to Sprouts, Aldi, and Lidl. Nothing is signed. But for the first time in the neighborhood's recent memory, the physical constraint that killed every previous rumor is gone.
Two Anchors, One Street
The Geneva isn't landing on Connecticut Avenue in isolation. A few blocks away, the District is nearing completion on a $37.8 million project to build a deck over the Connecticut Avenue underpass, turning what's currently a sunken traffic corridor into new public space the BID plans to activate for events.
Kain and BID executive director Bill McLeod are treating the two projects as bookends on the same stretch of Connecticut Avenue, one at each end of the block that's struggled with foot traffic since the pandemic thinned out office workers who used to fill the sidewalks during lunch hours. The idea, as Kain described it, is that residents heading down to events at the new deckover park and shoppers heading up toward whatever lands in the Geneva's retail space start using the same sidewalk for both trips, filling in the stretch of Connecticut Avenue that's felt quiet for years.
Whether that plays out depends on who signs a lease in a space that, as of this month, is still empty. But the mechanics of the plan track with what's already visible on the ground. The Geneva is expected to bring the kind of resident volume that makes national retailers pay attention, and the deckover gives that volume somewhere to walk toward.
What Actually Happens Next
If you've lived in Dupont long enough to have an opinion about the Soviet Safeway, here's what's worth watching over the next several months. No lease has been signed as of the City Cast DC report. Trader Joe's hasn't confirmed anything. The retail space at 1825 and 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW is still being marketed, and the deckover project is still under construction.
What's changed is the constraint that made every previous conversation theoretical. For the first time, there's a footprint on Connecticut Avenue built to the scale a real grocery chain actually needs, not the scale the neighborhood's older buildings happened to have available. That's the detail that separates this round of speculation from the last twenty years of it.
The Soviet Safeway will probably keep its nickname regardless of what happens at the Geneva. Some things outlast their own explanation. But the reason Dupont has spent two decades joking about a grocery store it never quite got isn't a mystery anymore, and neither is why this particular building, on this particular block, is the one worth watching.
Dupont Circle's retail corridor has always rewarded people who pay attention to what's actually being built, not just what's being rumored. Infinity Group works this neighborhood block by block, and if you're weighing a move here or watching how a corner like Connecticut and Florida is likely to change, a conversation with our team costs nothing and comes with the kind of on-the-ground context that doesn't show up in a listing description. Request a Private Market Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
