Walk the Quincy Lane woonerf on a Saturday morning and you can watch the neighborhood work in real time. Someone cuts over from the Metropolitan Branch Trail with a dog on a leash. A woman leaves Union Kitchen with a coffee and a sandwich in one hand. A stroller gets angled toward the flower buckets outside She Loves Me. Then you reach the glass storefront across from Bouldering Project, the one that has said "coming soon" through three different seasons, and you remember that this was supposed to be the first thing to open.
That storefront belongs to Right Proper Brewing Company, and its slow arrival tells you more about how Eckington actually works right now than any press release did when this project was announced.
The Grocery and the Florist Got Here First
When developers JBG Smith, LCOR, and Grosvenor broke ground on what became Eckington Yards, next to Alethia Tanner Park, the retail podium was supposed to bring nearly 70,000 square feet of ground-floor space to a stretch of Eckington that had mostly been rowhouses and old industrial buildings. Union Kitchen, the local food-business incubator, was part of that plan from early on. So was a flagship for She Loves Me, and so was a climbing gym.
All three are open now. Union Kitchen's Eckington location, its sixth in the city, opened along Quincy Lane in mid-August 2026 as a full grocery and cafe hybrid, seven days a week from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. She Loves Me relocated its flagship here after outgrowing its original Petworth storefront, and the new space is twice the size, with room for the floral-arranging workshops the shop is known for. Bouldering Project sits directly across the woonerf, giving the block its rainy-day option.
None of that was the headline act. The brewpub was.
What Right Proper Actually Promised, Year by Year
Right Proper announced its third location for 1625 Eckington Place NE back in December 2023, with a 180-seat restaurant, a 7-barrel brewhouse, and a target opening of October 2024. Here is how that target has moved since:
| When | What Right Proper Was Saying | Target Opening |
|---|---|---|
| Dec 2023 | Lease signed for a 180-seat brewpub, third location | October 2024 |
| Jan 2024 | Construction slated to begin in March | Fall 2024 |
| June 2025 | "Coming soon" signage goes up on the windows | No date given |
| Feb 2026 | Original Shaw brewpub announced closing March 1 | "Summer," unconfirmed |
| Mar 2026 | Company says it's "much-delayed" | Summer 2026 |
| Sept 2026 | Brewery's own site, checked today | Fall 2026 |
That is two full years of slippage from the original target, and counting. The site is still fogged glass on a street where the grocery, the florist, and the gym have already been open for months.
The Part That Doesn't Show Up in the Press Releases
Here is the detail that changes how you should read all of this. On March 1, 2026, Right Proper closed its original Shaw brewpub, the one that had operated since December 2013 next to the Howard Theatre. The company described the closure as a transition, with plans to bring the Shaw team back online in a different space elsewhere in the city. Either way, Eckington was always pitched as the expansion, a third location layered on top of two that were already running. Instead, for months after the Shaw closure, the Eckington space remained unopened, which meant the neighborhood's promised "expansion" was, for a while, standing in for a flagship that had just shut its doors rather than adding to one that was still open.
If you have been assuming "the brewery is expanding into Eckington" describes where things stand today, it is worth knowing that the more accurate read, as of this fall, is "the brewery has been down its original flagship for months, and Eckington is the location everyone is waiting on to make up the difference."
The Saturday Market Never Waited for Any of This
While the brewpub timeline slipped, the neighborhood kept its own rhythm going on the same block. Eckington Hall runs its Saturday flea market along that same Quincy Lane woonerf, an eclectic lineup that has featured vendors like Pasta Flour, a family pasta business out of Silver Spring, live sets from local acts, and pop-ups from area makers. Two of Union Kitchen's own incubated food businesses, Sweet Almond Macarons and Gelat-Oh!, opened their first brick-and-mortar storefront together a few doors down, a partnership that grew directly out of the incubator program housed in the same building as the grocery.
None of that depended on when the brewpub opened. It is the part of Eckington that has been running on its own schedule the whole time, regardless of what the developer's leasing office promised.
What This Actually Means for Your Week
If you live in Eckington right now, here is what that timeline translates to in practical terms.
For coffee, groceries, or a sandwich any day of the week, Union Kitchen is open and keeping regular hours. For flowers, a workshop, or a last-minute gift, She Loves Me's new flagship has the space its old Petworth location never had. For a rainy Saturday with kids who need to burn energy, Bouldering Project is already running across the woonerf. For the Saturday market itself, Eckington Hall's flea is worth checking for that week's vendor lineup before you plan around it.
For a beer and a game on the projector at the brewpub, hold off on setting your Saturday night around it. The current target is fall 2026, but this project has missed four target windows already, and there is no reason to assume the fifth one holds. When it does open, it will sit about a four-minute walk from the Metropolitan Branch Trail and close to Alethia Tanner Park, which is the same trail and park that already anchor everything else on this block. If you want an active weekend option in the meantime, Edgewood's Kraken Kourts, with its indoor pickleball courts and roller rink, is a short ride away and has been running leagues for a while now.
The broader lesson for anyone watching a mixed-use project fill in near them: the order things get announced in is rarely the order they get delivered in. Grocery and retail tenants tend to move faster than food-and-beverage buildouts, which carry more permitting, more kitchen infrastructure, and more of the kind of construction delay that turns an eighteen-month timeline into a three-year one. Eckington's version of that pattern happens to be unusually well documented, timeline and all, which makes it a useful case study for anyone trying to figure out how much weight to put on a "coming soon" sign anywhere else in the city.
For now, the woonerf works fine without the beer. The coffee, the flowers, and the climbing wall got there first, and they're the ones keeping the block busy while the rest of the story finishes writing itself.
If you're weighing a move to a block like this one, where a neighborhood's daily rhythm and its development timeline don't always match, Shepherd Homes Group can walk you through what's actually open, what's still in progress, and what that means for your own timeline. Contact us anytime you want a local read before you make a decision.
