"Had my first date with my girl at that Burger King. Will be sad to see it go."
That comment ran under a Forest Hills Connection post announcing the Van Ness Burger King's closure, and it captures something true about that stretch of Connecticut Avenue: people notice this corner. For 35 years, the rock and roll, movie-themed Burger King at 4422 Connecticut was a fixture, the kind of place that outlives its food in people's memories. It closed at the end of 2022, and everything that has happened to that lot since has been watched, debated, and covered more closely than almost anything else on the avenue.
Which makes it the wrong place to look if you want to understand what actually changed in Van Ness this year. While that one corner has stayed an empty lot through 2026, the rest of the block moved through an entire cycle of openings, a rebrand, and the tail end of a four-year infrastructure project. The lot everyone watches is the one place that hasn't kept up with its own neighborhood.
What Actually Happened To The Burger King Deal
The story looked settled a year ago. At ANC 3F's November 18, 2025 meeting, developer Colin Dean of Highcrest told the commission his firm had three Van Ness properties under contract: the former Burger King site, the parking lot behind it, and the Days Inn parking structure at 3415 Yuma Street. The plan was 110 apartments split across two of the lots, including a 65-unit building on the Yuma Street site, which meant Highcrest also needed a zoning map amendment to build on ground currently zoned for single-family detached homes.
The demolition crews showed up first. By the morning of February 9, 2026, the old Burger King building was well into teardown. It looked like confirmation that the deal was moving forward on schedule.
It wasn't. Around that same time, all three lots were listed for sale again. The Highcrest contract, signed but never closed, had fallen apart, and for months nobody outside the deal knew why. It took until late September for an answer to surface: Forest Hills Connection reported this month that the Washington Business Journal traced the collapse to a title issue on the property, one that turned out to be, in the outlet's words, more of a red herring than a red flag. The sale never closed, and Highcrest's plans for the site did not move forward.
So as of this month, the most photographed and most speculated-about parcel in Van Ness is an empty, demolished lot with no buyer under contract. Anyone who assumed apartments were already on the way there is working from an announcement that came apart eight months ago.
Two Doors Down, The Avenue Kept Moving
While that corner sat in limbo, the storefronts around it went through more turnover in the past year than the Burger King saga has seen in four.
- 4465 Connecticut, the former Rosedale space, became Malabar in January 2026. Restaurateur Ashok Bajaj brought in Vikram Sunderam, the James Beard-winning chef from Rasika, to run a menu built around India's southwestern coast, including a seafood bouillabaisse alongside more familiar dishes like butter chicken.
- 4340 Connecticut finally opened as Dog Haus Biergarten on February 18, 2026, after a lease that had been reported since June 2023. It's the chain's second DC-area location and its fifth in the region, run locally by franchisee Faizan Khan.
- The tea shop at that same address underwent its own change of identity. The Whale Tea signage is still on the door, but the business inside is now ZaoAn Cafe, run by owner Teresa Jiang, who has added cocktails and a "tipsy donut" to the boba menu while she waits on the city to approve new signage.
- 4461 Connecticut, right next to Malabar, is where Hydralive Therapy, an IV hydration spa, is filling the last vacant retail space at Park Van Ness.
- MOM's Organic Market, which took its 4250 Connecticut lease back in 2021, has been open since April 2025 and is now just part of the regular grocery rotation alongside the Giant across the street.
Even the neighborhood's longer-running spots picked up new local texture this year. Bread Furst, at 4434 Connecticut, has been cooking with basil supplied by UDC's own research farms, part of the university's soilless agriculture work at its Van Ness campus. And down at 5014 Connecticut, I'm Eddie Cano is running a pasta eating challenge called la sfida on Thursday nights: eat all ten servings of Roman pasta and get your $49 deposit back plus a $200 gift card, or fail and get billed another $150. It's limited to two people each night.
Each of these changes arrived one storefront at a time, while the lot at 4422 Connecticut stayed as it was in February.
The Trail That Took Four Years, Not A Few Months
Soapstone Valley Park offers the clearest comparison to the Burger King timeline, because it's a project that actually did take a long time and actually did finish.
DC Water closed the park in March 2022 for a sewer rehabilitation and stream restoration project that was originally expected to last about a year and a half. Most of the trail reopened in stages, with the bulk of it accessible again roughly two and a half years later, in the late summer of 2024, though full completion of the underlying sewer and stream work took about four years from the original closure.
The trail hasn't stopped needing attention since. Earlier this year, a runner named Doug Rosenthal noticed a wobbly, often-submerged rock at the first stream crossing and flagged it to two volunteer trail maintainers from the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, Mitch Baer and Kenny Carter, who fixed the crossing and rerouted stormwater away from the trail surface. It's a small fix, but it's the kind of maintenance that only happens once a project is actually finished and people are back to using the space regularly.
Four years is a long time to wait for a trail. But it ended in a finished project, new signage at the Broad Branch Road and Windom Place entrances, and volunteers doing detail work on stream crossings. The Burger King lot, by comparison, went from signed contract to demolished building to no buyer at all in about a year, and it isn't clear what happens to it next.
What's Still On The Calendar This Fall
The rest of the neighborhood's schedule hasn't paused for any of this. Van Ness Main Street's Art All Night event ran on September 12, with live music in Forest Hills Park from 3:30 to 6:30 in the afternoon. A week later, on September 19, the organization held its rescheduled Artisan Pop-Up Market, originally planned for July and pushed back due to weather, alongside a line dancing session in the park.
Two more events are on the books for late October. On the 24th, the Good Clean Fun initiative runs its next park and playground cleanup from 10 a.m. to noon, followed that afternoon by Music in the Park featuring the World Music Collective. The next day, October 25, brings the return of SPOOKTACULAR, the family Halloween celebration in Forest Hills Park with games, activities, and trick-or-treating along Connecticut Avenue afterward.
None of that programming waited on the Burger King lot to resolve itself, and none of it will. The corner everyone keeps checking on is currently the only part of the avenue standing still.
If you're weighing what a stretch of Connecticut Avenue like this actually feels like day to day, from the storefronts that turn over quickly to the ones that take years, that's a conversation worth having. Reach out to District Property Group and let's talk about what's actually happening on the ground in Forest Hills and Van Ness.
