The only parking lot on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue in Glover Park is up for sale again. The lot consists of 18 uncovered parking spaces for Pearson's liquor store two storefronts up from the lot and has been a popular (possibly illegal) cut-through for cars seeking to get from Wisconsin Avenue to 37th Street. It's also a popular parking area for those seeking temporary "free" parking to shop elsewhere, when the Pearson's parking attendant isn't watching.
The lot, which has a legal address of 2430 Wisconsin Avenue, is owned by the same people who owned the Pearson's building at 2436 Wisconsin Avenue in until 2015. Virginia business people Myung Kim and Mi Kim purchased the Pearson's building and the parking lot together in 2009 for $4,000,000 under the SJ Kim LLC. The seller was the Sarah Eisenberg Trust, managed partly by her family members. Sarah and her pharmacist husband Samuel purchased the building in 1946 (originally deeded in Sarah's name only) after selling Pearson's Pharmacy elsewhere in the neighborhood. They started the business as a liquor store in the new location at 2436 Wisconsin. Mrs. Eisenberg passed away in 1989 yet the family continued to own and operate the business and the real estate until the sale to the Kim's in 2009, upon which management of the Pearson's business was taken over by David and Helen Choi.
The Kim's originally borrowed $4 million in purchase money from the seller's trustees in 2009 then sold the building separate from the parking lot in 2015 for $3,090,000 to Phil Kang and family, who have been managing the liquor store business since the sale. The Kang's borrowed approximately $3.7 million from EagleBank and a private source. The Kim's now are seeking to sell the parking lot they held onto (which was deeded together with the building in the 2009 sale) and are asking a whopping $5.3 million just for the lot! The lot is zoned commercial mixed-use, so in theory someone could build retail/residential space wall-to-wall with the neighboring buildings and eliminate the only pass-through to 37th Street entirely. Frankly, the parking lot always has seemed like a big waste of valuable commercial space and isn't allowed to generate revenue as a parking lot, though the cut-through was convenient....
