Temperance Alley Garden Was Supposed to Close Years Ago. It Just Announced Its Fall Lineup.

Walk the alley behind 13th Street NW on a Saturday morning this month and you'll find the same scene that's played out most Saturdays since 2021: a dozen or so neighbors bent over raised beds, someone's toddler examining a caterpillar, buckets of tomatoes and hot peppers waiting to be split between volunteers' kitchens and Martha's Table. A block away on U Street itself, Service Bar's streatery came down in late August, plywood and jersey barriers hauled off in a single afternoon after years of use.

That contrast is the story. The structure built with a permit, real lumber, and city sign-off is gone. The garden that opened with an explicit understanding that it was temporary, that could be shut down with a few months' notice, is heading into its sixth fall season with a full calendar. If you've been reading this stretch of U Street by tallying what opened and what closed, you've been reading the wrong signal.

The lease that keeps not expiring

Temperance Alley Garden sits on Square 274, land with a hard history. Twenty-three alley dwellings once stood there, home to working-class Black families, until the city razed them in 1953 without building replacement housing. For decades afterward the lot sat empty or served as parking. EastBanc bought the property in 2012 with plans for townhouses, later folded into a larger proposal for a mixed-use project sometimes referred to as Temperance Mews.

In October 2020, with the block quiet during the pandemic, U Street Neighborhood Association organizers led by Aaron Lewis negotiated a lease with EastBanc: the association could use the site as a community garden and event space, and EastBanc would put up to $50,000 toward infrastructure and programming over three years. Everyone involved called it temporary from the start. The garden's own branding leaned into it, describing itself as a space that exists "for now."

Here's what "for now" has actually looked like:

That last row is the one worth sitting with. The most recent publicly documented deadline for this garden already came and went eight months ago. Nobody tore it down. Instead, U Street Neighborhood Association is fundraising for fall programming and a new season of workshops, and the garden's calendar looks busier than a lot of permanent institutions.

What's actually growing in the alley this fall

The Saturday volunteer sessions with Farm the District continue through the growing season, open to first-timers and regulars alike, no experience required. A midweek harvest happens every Wednesday evening, with produce split between volunteers and a donation to Martha's Table, a partnership that's been running long enough to have moved nearly 2,000 pounds of food through the garden over a two-year stretch, according to reporting from the Washington Post.

A monthly DC Bike Party ride now stages from the garden before heading out into the neighborhood. The garden recently hosted its first U Street Movie Night in over a decade. U Street Neighborhood Association is also raising money to support 2026 Artist-in-Residence Ananda Leeke's "Thriving Mindfully" series, a set of sessions planned for the garden this season.

None of this reads like an operation winding down. It reads like a group that has learned, through five straight years of near-misses, how to program a space they don't fully control.

The land underneath hasn't stopped moving

The garden's fate was never actually about a lease date. It's tied to a live land use process. In a public statement on the 1250 U Street planned unit development, the same broader project that would eventually replace the garden, U Street Neighborhood Association pushed for more affordable units and more green space than the applicant had proposed, and reminded the review board that the lot has sat undeveloped since 1953 in part because earlier affordable housing plans for the site kept falling through.

In other words: every extension the garden has gotten hasn't been a grant of permanence. It's been a byproduct of a development application that, this many years in, still hasn't broken ground.

Meanwhile, street-level commerce at that same address hasn't waited around. La Pâte Pasta & Pizza Bar opened September 18 at 1250 U Street NW, a fully halal pasta and pizza concept from Imen and Nabil, the same owners behind Emmy French Corner next door. Ten-year leases on that storefront suggest the ground floor will keep operating normally whatever happens with the larger PUD timeline. The block is layered: uncertainty in the back alley, business as usual out front.

As Lewis put it a few years into the garden's run, standing among the raised beds: "You're sitting in somebody's living room in the past, and you're sitting in somebody's living room in the future." The in-between part, it turns out, has lasted a lot longer than anyone expected.

What disappeared instead

The garden's staying power looks even stranger set against what the city did to actual permitted structures this year. DC's streatery program, born during the pandemic, went from roughly 270 approved dining spaces citywide down to about 170 by late 2025, and down to just 39 by late July 2026, according to reporting from City Cast DC. U Street was one of the program's original hubs and now has only a handful of permanent permits left. Businesses that wanted to keep their outdoor seating had to apply for new permits, meet accessibility and drainage standards, and in some cases pay several thousand dollars a year, costs that pushed many owners to simply tear the structures down. Service Bar's teardown, covered by PoPville in early September, was one of the more recent examples on this stretch of U Street.

So this fall, the businesses with real permits and real investment lost their outdoor rooms when the rules changed under them. The volunteer-run garden with no permanent lease at all is still there, running events, raising money for an artist residency.

The rest of the fall calendar

Temperance Alley isn't the only thing keeping U Street busy this season. Kathmandu Tapas & Cocktails, the Nepali craft cocktail bar on U Street owned by Dipesh Acharya, is running a month-long fundraiser through the end of September, donating a portion of sales to Nepal's Prime Minister's Disaster Relief Fund after recent flooding there. On September 30, U Street Neighborhood Association hosts its Fall Social at Spark Social on 14th Street, a casual evening meant to bring neighbors back together after a summer spent apart. Ben's Chili Bowl reopened on U Street this year, still serving the half-smoke that made it a civil rights landmark long before any of this development discussion started.

None of these things depend on each other. But taken together, they describe a neighborhood where the businesses come and go on a normal commercial clock while a scrappy, unpermitted patch of dirt behind 13th Street keeps finding another season.

What this actually tells you

If you're trying to read the health of a neighborhood by counting openings against closures, U Street this fall will confuse you. The most fragile-looking piece of infrastructure on the block, an alley garden held together by volunteer hours and a lease that keeps almost expiring, has now outlasted three separate predicted end dates. The sturdiest-looking pieces, structures with actual city permits and real construction costs behind them, came down in a matter of weeks once the rules shifted.

Go see the garden before the next deadline arrives, whenever that turns out to be. Show up for a Saturday harvest, or the Fall Social on the 30th, or the next movie night. This stretch of U Street rewards paying attention to what's actually happening on the ground, not just what the headlines predicted three years ago.

If you're a longtime U Street owner curious what any of this shifting ground, garden lease, PUD review, and all, actually means for your own address, the team at Jay Barry Group knows this block closely and is happy to walk through a free home valuation whenever you're ready to ask.