The Starbucks at 1734 L St. NW has shut down, leaving a once-busy downtown retail strip with multiple vacant storefronts and a lone GNC holding on.

The closure, first reported by PoPville on Thursday, Oct. 8, is part of a nationwide wave of 250 Starbucks closures announced in late September. Fox 5 DC confirmed the L Street location was among three D.C.-area stores slated for closure, along with the Pike & Rose store in Rockville and the White Oak Town Center location in Silver Spring.

@popville: "This street, yo. Damn. Apocalyptic. Good luck GNC, good luck man."

Starbucks COO Mike Grams said in a Sept. 24 letter to employees that the targeted stores failed to meet financial performance standards or could not deliver the customer and employee experience the company expects. Starbucks said it would transfer affected workers to other locations where possible or provide severance.

The 250 closures represent about 1% of Starbucks' roughly 18,000 North American locations, according to Yahoo Finance. Starbucks expects about $300 million in restructuring charges, CNBC reported.

It is the second major round of closures under Chairman and CEO Brian Niccol, who joined Starbucks in 2024. The chain shuttered 627 stores across North America and Europe in September 2025.

The L Street block's decline mirrors a broader downtown D.C. problem. Retail vacancy rates in the downtown core hover around 25%, more than double pre-pandemic levels, according to the DowntownDC Business Improvement District's 2025 State of Downtown report released in May. Downtown lost nearly 6,000 jobs in 2025, the first employment decline since 2020, driven largely by federal workforce reductions.

Office attendance downtown reached 48% of pre-pandemic levels in late 2025, up from 44% the year before. More than half the weekday foot traffic that once fed shops and cafes along corridors like L Street has not returned.

A DC Retail Strategic Plan released in May found that residentially anchored corridors are outperforming office-dependent areas hit by reduced daytime foot traffic. Mayor Muriel Bowser launched a $3.875 million Restaurant & Retail Stabilization Grant the same month to support brick-and-mortar businesses.

Yesim Sayin, executive director of the DC Policy Center, said at the DC Chamber of Commerce's State of the District conference on Sept. 25 that the old model of federal expansion driving growth no longer applies. "We can't wait for the growth to come back," Sayin told the Washington Informer. "We have to kind of think about how to recreate it."

Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto, whose district includes the L Street corridor, said at the same conference that she wants to see downtown fully recover and attract new high-growth businesses.

No new tenants have been announced for the block.