If you need a last-minute holiday gift this weekend and through the end of the year, you have lots of options along the Route 1 corridor that don’t involve online rush ordering, circling parking lots, or standing in long lines. Even better, you can support the local artists, craftsmen, and other small business owners that put this area on the map.

A number of small, locally owned shops have things for sale that are perfect for the holidays or just as a thank you when visiting friends and family through the new year.

This year, you can also get a discount at some locally owned businesses to celebrate the completion of an extension of the Rhode Island Avenue Trolley Trail.

Through Jan. 6, stop by some local businesses in South Hyattsville such as Maryland Meadworks and Streetcar 82 Brewing Co. to pick up a punchcard that will get you discounts and a chance to win prizes.

Here’s a quick guide.

Woodridge

Arts Enables, 2204 Rhode Island Ave. NE, D.C.
Nonprofit framed art made by local artists.

Emma’s Torch, 2212 Rhode Island Ave. NE, D.C.
New cafe run by refugees studying culinary arts sells gift items like candles, homemade granola, along with gift cards.

Zeke’s Coffee, 2300 Rhode Island Ave. NE, D.C.
Coffee roastery and shop sells fresh beans, including chocolate covered espresso beans, swag, gift cards and assorted pastries.

Mount Rainier

Era Wine Bar, 3300 Rhode Island Ave.
Wine bar offers gifts cards and wide selection of foreign and domestic wine bottles.

Nisey’s Boutique, 4007 34th St.
Hard to find and one-of-a-kind items.

Quality Hill Coffee, 202-460-5260
Coffee roastery offers fresh beans and gift baskets.

Sew Chic Fabrics and Crafts, 3830 34th St.
Craft shop sells fabric, craft supplies, kits and notions.

Glut Food Co-Op, 4005 34th St.
Grocery co-op sells incense, spices, tea, candles and various kitchen accessories.

Edmonston

Community Forklift, 4671 Tanglewood Dr.
Recycled and upcycled household items, furniture, lamps, etc.

Brentwood

mIXT Food Hall, 3809 Rhode Island Ave.
Gift certificates available to vendors at popular food hall.

Relish Market, 3809 Rhode Island Ave.
Specialty store sells herbal teas, health supplements, herbs and spices

Brentwood Arts Exchange, 3901 Rhode Island Ave.
Arts and crafts from local artisans.

North Brentwood

Material Things, 4531 Rhode Island Ave.
Local studio sells household items made of clay, wood and metal

Hyattsville

Arrow Bicycle, 5108 Baltimore Ave.
Bicycles and cycling gear.

Artists & Craftsman Supply, 4902 43rd Ave.
Arts and crafts supplies for drawing, painting and sculpting plus arts projects for young kids and teens.

Busboys and Poets bookstore, 5331 Baltimore Ave.
Eclectic but broad selection of books with a focus on social justice.

Cheeky’s Vintage, 5132 Baltimore Ave.
Vintage glassware and furniture.

Fleisher’s Jewelers, 5200 Baltimore Ave.
Broad selection of jewelry.

Franklins Brewery and General Store, 5123 Baltimore Ave.
One of D.C.’s best toy and games stores plus fun adult gifts, beer, wine and hot sauce.

Maryland Meadworks, 4700 Rhode Island Ave.
Meadery sells growlers of honey-based alcoholic drink.

My Dead Aunt’s Books, 5132 Baltimore Ave.
Used bookstore with a carefully curated selection.

Nest Proper, 5303 Baltimore Ave.
Home decor items, candles, jewelry, bath and body essentials, stationery, etc.

Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, 4318 Gallatin St.
Greeting cards, posters, calendars and more from local printmakers.

Red Onion Records, 4208 Gallatin St.
Wide selection of vinyl records and other music-related gifts.

Sangfroid Distilling, 5130 Baltimore Ave.
Fruit brandies, Dutch-style gin and rye whiskey from local distillers.

Shortcake Bakery, 4700 Rhode Island Ave.
Bakery sells wide variety of pastries.

Streetcar 82 Brewing Co., 4824 Rhode Island Ave.
Local brewery sells growlers and swag.

Suffragette City, 5132 Baltimore Ave.
Vintage, modern, and retro fashion, vintage and handmade accessories, and new work from local artists.

Sugar Vault Desserts & Bakery, 5606 Baltimore Ave.
Dessert shop specializes in upscale cupcakes.

Sweet Pea Fiber, 5307 Baltimore Ave.
Patterns, yarn, notions, tools and kits.

Three Little Birds Sewing Co., 5307 Baltimore Ave.
Fabric, patterns, threads, embroidery and quilting materials.

Vigilante Coffee, 4327 Gallatin St.
Coffee beans, coffee paraphernalia, T-shirts and other swag.

Wills Decorating, 5122 Baltimore Ave.
Interior decorating shop has various household items for sale as well.

Riverdale Park

Denizens Brewing Co., 4550 Van Buren St.
Locally produced beer and swag.

Manifest Bread, 6208 Rhode Island Ave.
Pastries and homemade bread packaged in a cute white bakery box.

Town Center Market, 4705 Queensbury Rd.
Huge selection of beer, wine and liquor.

2Fifty BBQ, 4700 Riverdale Rd.
Popular barbecue joint has shirts, hats and even socks

College Park

Board and Brew, 8150 Baltimore Ave.
Broad selection of popular, offbeat and up-and-coming board games.

College Park Bicycles, 7301 Baltimore Ave.
Bicycles and cycling gear.

Proteus Bicycles, 9827 Rhode Island Ave.
Bicycles and cycling gear, coffee and pastries.

Shop Made in MD, 7401 Baltimore Ave.
Home decor, jewelry, art, stationery, bath and beauty and apparel.

Third Eye Comics, 4744 Cherry Hill Rd.
Comic books, graphic novels, action figures and some card-based games.

Berwyn Heights

Smile Herb Shop, 4908 Berwyn Rd.
Herbs, plants and accessories.

Greenbelt

Greenbelt Cinema, 129 Centerway
Gift certificates and memberships for movie theater.

Nonprofits

You can also donate to help support the following local nonprofits doing notable work for the community in the area and beyond:

Anacostia Riverkeeper
Anacostia Watershed Society
CASA de Maryland, Inc.
Central Kenilworth Avenue Revitalization Community Development
Community Forklift
Greater Riverdale Cares & Route One Communities Care
Hyattsville CDC
Lutheran Social Services
Meals on Wheels of College Park
Prince George’s County Parks and Recreation Foundation

Let us know in the comments if we missed anything!

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The newest pizza place on the Route 1 corridor is inside an organic bakery.

Earlier this year, Riverdale Park’s Manifest Bread started serving pizza from 3 to 7 p.m. every Thursday night, with a range of rotating specialty options as well as a build-your-own menu.

The options for each week are typically posted on Manifest’s website before Thursday, and customers can pre-order starting at 8 a.m. either online or at the bakery.

Its specialty 16″ pizzas include marinara pizza with anchovies and arugula, a white pie made with cremini mushrooms and roasted garlic and a capicola pizza with house-cured pork shoulders and heirloom peppers.

“We created pies with a few things in mind: Don’t get too weird, don’t stray too far from tradition, keep the seasonal produce in mind, and make combos we’d personally enjoy eating,” co-owner Rick Cook told the Hyattsville Wire.

Since the bakery is not set up to be a full-time pizza place, ordering ahead of time is recommended as they can only prepare so many at a time.

Cook said that making pizza is much different from their usual breads and pastries, with a faster pace, higher oven temperatures and last-minute additions of toppings.

Aside from pizza and its usual bakery items, Manifest also offers side dishes such as marinated beets, red lentil & mushroom soup, radicchio salad, and tonnato, as well as a Basque-style cheesecake.

The Route 1 corridor has its share of pizza places, ranging from old-school shops like Ledo Pizza in College Park to the upscale Pizzeria Paradiso to the “secret” Ramona’s Pizza Garden, but Manifest is bringing a new element to the pizza scene.

Located at 6208 Rhode Island Ave. in Riverdale Park’s historic town center, Manifest is a full-service organic bakery that began as a cottage bakery selling bread through word-of-mouth, opening its brick-and-mortar shop earlier this year.

Apart from their regular hours, Manifest will be open Sunday, Christmas Eve, from 8 a.m to 1 p.m. for normal service and pickup. The bakery will be closed Christmas Day, and the Tuesday and Wednesday that follow, but will be back open for regular hours and pizza night on Thursday, Dec. 28.

You can learn more about their pizza night and view a sample menu of their options on their website.

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The newest vendor at the Le Fantome Food Hall in Riverdale Park specializes in croque monsieur, a decadent hot sandwich popularized in French brasseries in the early 1900s.

Born in Gabon, French-Gabonese owner and author Serge Pambo worked as a chef in France for many years before starting the Holy Croque, initially as a food truck in 2021. The pop-up recently held its grand opening at Le Fantome. 

Along with the traditional croque monsieur, made with grilled ham and cheese, Pambo serves variations based on African, Asian and American flavors, including a pork belly croque, a French dip croque, a croque burger and a whiskey-braised pulled pork croque. There are also breakfast options like a bacon croque.

Traditionally, croque monsieur comes with a fried egg on top, which is optional at Holy Croque. The sandwiches are made with béchamel sauce and cheese, but there is a vegan option with coconut béchamel and vegan cheese.

Side dishes include yucca fries, zucchini fries, plantains and pomegranate onion Brussels sprouts, while drinks include Bissap, an African hibiscus tea; and a pineapple ginger drink.

He told the Wire he hopes to run the Holy Croque pop-up at Le Fantome for a few months and then move into a more permanent space in the D.C. area.

Pambo, who is also owner of Pure Kitchen Culinary Concept, a D.C. area catering company, has made several appearances on the Food Network, attended Domaine du Gue à Tresmes, a top culinary school in Paris, and has worked for many notable chefs both in the U.S. and France.

He is author of the book “Take the heat & Stay in the Kitchen: Becoming A Successful Chef.”

You can order from the Holy Croque on Le Fantome’s website or on DoorDash.

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A new group of DJs on the Route 1 corridor have joined forces to recreate the house music scene of their youths and bring back the beat.

Calling themselves the Hy-Fi Groove Society, the collective held an informal gathering with friends in February and soon after, Maryland Meadworks owner Ken Carter suggested they hold a dance party at the meadery in July.

Since then, the group has played at Hyattsville PorchFest, the creĀDDive solo art show, Sangfroid Distilling Co., Green Owl Design and an end-of-summer barbecue jam in Takoma Park.

Member Randelle “Ray” Ripton told the Hyattsville Wire that the group is mostly focused on “crafting a great scene” with hip hop, house and techno music with other members like Tag Gieselman, who was a semi-professional DJ a decade ago, but said he now does it for the love of the music.

“It’s more fun to do it because it’s a passion, and not for a paycheck,” he told the Wire.

Apart from Gieselman and Ripton, who reside in Hyattsville, the main members of the group include Robert Porter, Chelsea Champlin and Colin Eustis, also of Hyattsville; Kristen Gardner and Everett Newton of Cheverly; and Nick Van Brunt, Adam Straus and Nicole Entwistle from Takoma Park.

But Ripton said that the group is open to collaboration with other DJs and artists and others who aren’t DJs but just want to contribute ideas.

The Hy-Fi Groove Society will be playing from 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 30, at Streetcar 82 Brewing Co. in Hyattsville for its “Rockin’ New Year’s Eve Eve Party!” and is also planning another event at the Lustine Center in Hyattsville’s Arts District.

“Partiers have loved the vibe, which has led to increased interest and opportunity,” Ripton told the Wire. “It’s really great to see how Hyattsville comes out to support people who live in our community.”

For bookings and inquiries, you can contact the Hy-Fi Groove Society on their Instagram page.

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As we wind down 2023 and get ready to welcome a new year, we wanted to take a moment to pause and say we might be reaching the end of the Hyattsville Wire — or it may be a new beginning.

Earlier this year, we marked our 11th anniversary of covering life on the Route 1 corridor. We ran the numbers and that equates to us publishing a story about the area once every other day for more than a decade, making us the longest continuously running online lifestyle news source for the area.

But to continue our coverage, we need more support from the community. We just can’t keep going as we have.

The Hyattsville Wire started as a small community blog back in the spring of 2012, but we have grown exponentially into a major news source for the Route 1 corridor and surrounding areas, helping local businesses, startups, artists and authors, and community groups get the word out.

We’ve made such an impression on the area that the Wire is even featured in the 8-foot-by-20-foot mural by local artist Curtis Woody that hangs in the new Hyattsville public library, as shown in the photo above.

The corridor has changed a lot in over a decade since we started the Wire and we’ve been right there alongside it, sharing everything you need to know — from restaurant openings to new housing and shops to highlighting local artists and business owners, along with new library openings. We’ve even helped share untold stories of the fascinating history of the area.

When we initially started the Wire in 2012, we chose not to add a paywall. We wanted everyone in the community to be able to read our stories, and we wanted other news outlets in the greater D.C. area to read our coverage too, and write their own versions, helping give a news voice to an area that has been underrepresented in the D.C. media.

Our work has been an incredible success. We are now at 2.8 million page views, with more than 19,000 followers on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter with a large email subscribers list. And this winter will be our seventh year running the Best of Route 1 reader survey to help showcase your favorite people and spots on the corridor.

Local businesses tell us that they get a flood of customers after we write about them. We’ve boosted a number of GoFundMe initiatives for local charities and struggling businesses. And we’ve become a recognized news source for the D.C. area, having been featured everywhere from Greater Greater Washington, Eater DC, and UrbanTurf, to DCist, the Washington Post and Politico. We literally wrote the Washingtonian guide to the area that hit newsstands just before the pandemic.

Several readers from outside the area have even written in saying they wish there was a hyperlocal news site like the Wire covering their neighborhood as we tirelessly write about the Route 1 corridor.

But all this growth has led to a bandwidth we can no longer sustain without more community support. Among other things, the increase in traffic and popularity has led to internal challenges that need revamping, including rebuilding our website in order accommodate all this growth now and in the future and updating our community-supported events calendar, among other new features.

Local news matters, but it’s harder than ever to find. Hyperlocal news is even more rare.

A recent report found that 2.5 local newspapers are shuttering each week — a rate that’s accelerating — for a total of 2,900 lost since 2005. More than half of U.S. counties have no local news source or just one remaining outlet.

We don’t want the Hyattsville Wire to join that list, so we are launching an end-of-year fundraiser to help us make some upgrades and give us a boost to keep going strong.

Here are seven ways you can help support us:

1-Become a monthly subscriber

2-Make a one-time donation

3-Advertise your local business

4-Submit a sponsored post

5-Follow us and share our stories on Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter

6-Send us a news tip

7-Take a reader survey

From scratch, we’ve handmade the Hyattsville Wire 1.0 that you’ve grown to love. Now we need to create a version 2.0 of the site to match our current status as an official news source for the area.

Thanks for your support and look forward to continuing our coverage of life on the Route 1 corridor and beyond.

Mount Rainier received a $75,000 grant to improve more facades.

The city announced Thursday that it will receive the money next year from a state Department of Economic Development revitalization program.

The grants will be used to fix up the exteriors of historic buildings on 34th Street, which stretches from the circle with the bus stop up to Joe’s Movement Emporium.

“As part of Mount Rainier Economic Development’s strategy and commitment to revitalize our downtown core, 34th Street will be transformed into a more vibrant and welcoming business district for everyone—residents and visitors alike!” the city wrote.

In recent years, Mount Rainier has revamped the exteriors of businesses along Rhode Island Avenue, while Hyattsville has run a similar program.

The improvements help keep some of the Route 1 corridor’s historic architecture in top shape, spurring more customers to come to shops and keeping the retro design that gives the corridor a distinctive look.

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Taqueria Habanero on Route 1 is now running out of a taco truck in College Park.

The popular Mexican eatery, which was named Best Latin American Restaurant in the Hyattsville Wire readers poll in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, was forced to shut down on Sept. 30 by the new owners of the strip mall where it was located. It’s also regularly makes lists of top Mexican eateries in D.C. media.

But the owners recently brought in a taco truck earlier this month which is now parked in the space in front of its former location at 8145 Baltimore Ave., along with some outdoor seating. You can order from the same menu, including tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas and fajitas.

While the owners of the taqueria did not say how long the truck will be able to stay in the spot, their hours for now are from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily. You can also order from the taco truck through DoorDash, Uber Eats and Toast.

The owners of Campus Village Shoppes shopping center recently notified tenants that they had to vacate as the area will be cleared to make way for another large student housing complex.

You can also check out Taqueria Habanero’s new location at the Bryant Street Market at 670 Rhode Island Ave NE in Northeast D.C., just south of Woodridge in NE D.C., which opened earlier this year.

The Habanero food truck shows how important it was that the county reduced barriers to them in 2020, as they are not only a key first step for many entrepreneurs but can also serve as a bridge for a restaurant like Taqueria Habanero that has to close its current location while finding a new one.

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