The corner of Pennsylvania and Branch Avenue SE doesn't look like a neighborhood in crisis. Chipotle still has a line at lunch. Planet Fitness parking lot fills up before 6 a.m. Highland's Cafe still runs its Saturday brunch crowd out onto the sidewalk. But walk past the standalone building at 3250 Pennsylvania Avenue SE and you'll notice the thing that isn't there anymore: the pharmacy counter where a good chunk of Ward 7 east of the Anacostia used to fill prescriptions on the way home from work.
CVS Store #1335 closed on July 9, 2025. More than a year later, the closure is still the fact that reorganized how people in Penn Branch move through their own neighborhood, and it did something the CVS itself never managed in nearly two decades on that corner: it pushed the community's center of gravity off the shopping center entirely.
The Anchor That Left
CVS framed the closure the way corporations frame most closures, citing store performance and telling WUSA9 that all prescriptions would move to the CVS at 2724 Good Hope Road SE, a location the company described as less than a mile away. For a resident with a car, a mile is nothing. For the many seniors who leaned on Store #1335 specifically because it was walkable, a mile without transit is a different errand entirely.
The pushback was organized and specific. The Penn Branch Community Association helped launch a Change.org petition that gathered more than 1,200 signatures, and ANC 7B held a press event outside the store on July 2, 2025, with speakers including longtime advocate Barbara Morgan, then-councilmember Wendell Felder's Ward 7 constituents, and PBCA president Paul Grant, who made the point that big-box "anchors" cut both ways: they can lift a corridor or they can hollow it out fast when they leave. The petition itself put a number on what was at stake, describing a corridor serving roughly 40,000 to 50,000 residents across Fairlawn, Fairfax Village, Fort Davis, Fort Dupont, Dupont Park, Hillcrest, Penn Branch, Twining and Randle Highlands, all of whom had exactly one full-service pharmacy within walking distance.
None of that changed CVS's decision. What it did change was how residents now talk about the shopping center itself.
The Center Everyone Already Adjusted To
Here's the part that a quick drive-by search engine result won't tell you: the same shopping center that lost its pharmacy anchor still has a functioning restaurant and fitness core that took over a decade to build, and that core absorbed the loss without going dark.
Highland's Cafe, tucked in the rear of the center, opened as a second location for a cafe that had run on 14th Street NW since 2008. Getting a true sit-down restaurant into Penn Branch was a stated goal of the property's redevelopment for years before it finally happened, and locals now describe it less as a coffee shop and more as, in one Nextdoor review's phrasing, a Ward 7 gem with a proper bar setup, not a Denny's. Granny's Kitchen, a Southern-cuisine food truck built around the promise of fresh ingredients daily, has become the other name residents mention when they talk about what's good to grab on-site. Planet Fitness, which opened here as the first full-service retail gym east of the river, still pulls people from well outside Penn Branch's own boundaries.
None of that is new information if you already live here. What's worth naming out loud is that the food and fitness side of the center held while the pharmacy side didn't, and that split tells you something about which businesses actually depend on daily foot traffic versus which ones need something closer to destination visits.
The Parade Moved Off the Parking Lot
The clearest sign that Penn Branch's center of gravity has shifted isn't retail at all. It's where the neighborhood chooses to hold its biggest public event of the year.
In 2025, the Ward 7 Juneteenth Parade started in the rear parking lot of the Penn Branch Shopping Center, proceeded north on Branch Avenue to Randle Circle, and ended in Fort Dupont Park. It made sense as a route: the shopping center was still the visible, central landmark people used to give directions.
By 2026, that had changed. According to WTOP's Juneteenth coverage, the parade returned with an expanded route, additional participants and new community programming, this time starting at Washington Heights Baptist Church on Branch Avenue SE rather than the shopping center. Organizers didn't frame it as a statement about retail. But the practical effect is that the neighborhood's signature civic event no longer treats the shopping center as its anchor point. The center's gravitational pull, once assumed, isn't automatic anymore.
The Rest of the Calendar Runs Through Church Halls and Volunteers
If you track what the Penn Branch Community Association actually does month to month, you'll notice the same pattern repeating. General body meetings happen at Harvey Hall, inside Pennsylvania Avenue Baptist Church, not at any commercial storefront. The annual holiday gathering took place there again on December 9, 2025, where PBCA gave out its "Penn Branch Neighbors of the Year" award to Kyle Murphy and Stefanie Clyburn for running what the association called its largest membership drive in years, the Penn Branch Cares Campaign, which funded sympathy gift baskets and discounted water park tickets for families hit by federal job losses. The same evening, longtime historian and tour guide Jim Byers was recognized for leading the Hillcrest and Penn Branch walking tour for 29 consecutive years.
The neighborhood also lost one of the people most responsible for holding that civic structure together. Alberta Paul, who served as PBCA president and chaired its Public Works Committee for a quarter century, died on September 27, 2025, two days before what would have been her 75th birthday. She'd retired from DDOT the fall before, and her three decades of work included getting the city to pass emergency legislation to preserve the O Street retaining wall in 1997 and years of fundraising for the 9/11 Memorial Gateway Park at the neighborhood's entrance, the same small park residents have organized volunteer cleanups around in the past. Her funeral was held at Pennsylvania Avenue Baptist Church, the same building where PBCA now meets.
None of this runs through a shopping center. It runs through a church, a handful of named volunteers, and a walking tour that's older than most of the retail tenants currently leasing space on Pennsylvania Avenue.
What Actually Changed Here
The city's broader planning apparatus has been circling this corridor for years. The DC Council unanimously approved the Pennsylvania Avenue East Small Area Plan back in February 2023, laying out a framework for more retail and infill development along the corridor, and the Pennsylvania Avenue East Main Street organization released a fresh retail market analysis for the corridor in January 2026. Those are the kinds of documents that shape what gets built here over the next decade. They are not, on their own, what tells you how the neighborhood actually functions today.
What tells you that is simpler: a pharmacy left, a cafe and a food truck held their ground, and the parade that used to start in that parking lot now starts three blocks away at a church. Penn Branch didn't lose its center. It just proved the center was never really the shopping center to begin with. It was always the people who show up at Harvey Hall on the second Tuesday of the month, the walking tour that's run three decades without interruption, and the trail through Fort Circle Park that residents have kept clean themselves.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific block or a specific decision about property here, that's the conversation worth having directly. Chuck Burger has spent two decades tracking exactly this kind of shift along DC's Ward 7 and Ward 8 corridors, and is glad to talk through what it actually means for your corner of Penn Branch.
