Walk past DC USA on any given evening and the building looks the same as it has for years. Target, Best Buy, and Marshalls fill out the retail floors, with Lidl tucked in diagonal from the Giant across the street. It's the kind of big-box anchor every commercial strip in an American city has, the one you stop noticing once you've lived here long enough. Then you hear that a 38,000-square-foot climbing gym is moving into that same building, and the building stops being background noise.
That's the headline most people will see: Bouldering Project, the climbing chain that opened DC's first bouldering-only gym in Eckington in 2021, has signed a lease for a second Washington location at 3100 14th Street NW, inside DC USA Mall. But the headline undersells the more interesting fact sitting one block away. The team behind Chercher, the Ethiopian restaurant that's been serving 14th Street since 2023, just filed paperwork for a bar next door. Neither of these is a company arriving in Columbia Heights for the first time. Both are companies already here, betting that the smarter move is to grow sideways rather than somewhere new.
The Gym Inside the Mall You Already Know
The Columbia Heights location will be Bouldering Project's second in the District, joining the Eckington gym near Union Market, which opened in 2021 and built its reputation around a 55-foot overhang wall nicknamed The Beast across roughly 34,700 square feet of climbing and fitness space. The new DC USA space, at close to 38,000 square feet, is set to include a youth climbing area, a training center with adjustable boards, a sauna, and co-working space alongside the bouldering terrain itself, according to the company's own announcement and reporting from Climbing Business Journal.
What the gym will include, based on what's been announced:
- Expansive bouldering terrain designed and built in-house, the same approach the company uses at its Eckington location
- A dedicated youth climbing space separate from the main floor
- A training center with adjustable boards for advanced climbers
- A sauna for post-session recovery
- Flexible co-working areas, a detail that signals the company expects people to treat the gym as a place to spend hours, not just log a workout
Construction planning was underway as of this past May, but the company had not announced an opening date at that point. If you're the kind of resident who tracks these things by walking past the storefront, the honest answer right now is that there's no confirmed timeline yet, only a signed lease and a location.
What is confirmed is that a Bouldering Project membership already grants access to both DC gyms once Columbia Heights opens, meaning the company is explicitly designing for one shared base of climbers moving between two neighborhoods rather than building an entirely separate customer pool. That's worth sitting with for a second, because it tells you something about how the company reads this market.
Why Add a Second Gym in the Same City Instead of a New One
Climbing gyms are not a crowded category. Most cities that get one bouldering-only gym don't get a second inside five years. Bouldering Project runs locations from Seattle to Austin to Brooklyn, part of a roughly thirteen-gym national footprint, and when it decided where to put its next one, it chose to double down on Washington rather than plant a flag in an untapped market.
That decision reads as a bet on density, not novelty. A company opening its first gym in a new city is making a bet on whether climbing culture exists there at all. A company opening its second gym in a city it already operates in is making a narrower, more confident bet: that the demand it's already seeing at Eckington has outgrown one building, and that Columbia Heights specifically, with Metro access at the Green and Yellow lines and a dense residential population within walking distance, is where that overflow lives.
The company has also scheduled Boulderfest 2026, its annual community climbing competition, for October 2 and 3 this year, with a new Grand Finale event added for the first time, sending top local finishers to a national round in St. Paul. That the company is investing in a bigger, higher-stakes version of its DC community event in the same season it's building out a second local gym is not a coincidence. It's a company that thinks its Washington audience is ready for more, not just more of the same thing in a different city.
Next Door to Chercher, a Different Kind of Expansion
The second story is smaller in square footage but tells the same version of the same argument. Chercher, the Ethiopian restaurant that first opened in Shaw in 2012 and earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2016 before adding locations in Bethesda and, eventually, Columbia Heights at 3608 14th Street NW, has filed a liquor license application for a new bar concept called Deluxe Bar, set to open right next door at 3606 14th Street.
The filing, reported by WhatNow DC, lays out a concept with room for both indoor and sidewalk seating:
- Interior seating for up to 55 customers with a full occupancy load of 70
- A sidewalk café accommodating 15 patrons with an occupancy load of 20
- An entertainment endorsement that covers a cover charge and dancing both inside and on the sidewalk café
That last detail matters more than it looks. A standard restaurant liquor license doesn't need an entertainment endorsement. Applying for one, on top of the seating numbers, suggests Deluxe Bar isn't positioning itself as a quiet nightcap spot attached to a dinner reservation. It's building for later hours and a different crowd than the one that comes in for injera and doro wat at 7pm.
Details about the concept itself remain thin, which is typical at the liquor-license stage. What isn't thin is the logic behind the location. Chercher didn't need to open a fourth restaurant somewhere else in the region to grow. It opened a bar on the same block as its existing restaurant, betting that the foot traffic already coming to 14th Street for dinner is foot traffic worth capturing again, later in the evening, without asking anyone to drive anywhere.
The Pattern Underneath Both Stories
Put the two together and you get a version of Columbia Heights that's easy to miss if you're only counting new storefronts. A national climbing chain is choosing to open its second location in the same city as its first rather than spreading into a new one. A restaurant group is choosing to open a bar next door to its own restaurant rather than opening a fourth restaurant somewhere with less competition. Neither company is discovering Columbia Heights for the first time. Both are already here, and both decided the smartest use of their next investment was growing in place.
That's a different kind of neighborhood signal than a splashy new development or an outside developer parachuting in with a big announcement. It's businesses that already know the foot traffic, the Metro access, the rhythm of a Saturday on 14th Street, deciding the math still works for doing more of it rather than less. For anyone who already lives here, it means the block you already walk gets more useful this fall, not the one three neighborhoods over.
What to Watch This Fall
Boulderfest 2026 runs October 2 and 3, presumably at the company's Eckington gym since that's the only DC location currently open, and it's the clearest near-term marker of how seriously Bouldering Project is investing in its DC audience before the Columbia Heights gym has even opened. Keep an eye on the DC USA storefront for construction signage, since the company hasn't announced a firm opening date. Deluxe Bar is at an earlier stage still, with the liquor license application filed but no confirmed opening. If you're the type who notices when the plywood comes off a storefront window, that's the signal worth watching on the 3600 block of 14th Street.
None of this changes what Columbia Heights was yesterday. It changes what the same three blocks will offer by the time the weather turns cold again, without asking you to go looking for it anywhere else.
If you're curious what a neighborhood like this looks like from the inside of a listing, not just a storefront window, Ethan Carson has spent years tracking how blocks like this one turn over. Explore the Portfolio to see what that looks like in practice.
