Morgan Care Pharmacy

The corner of 30th and P Streets NW in Georgetown is residential in the way that mid-block stretches rarely are, lined with brick sidewalks and canopy trees that make the intersection feel removed from Wisconsin Avenue traffic two blocks west. Morgan Care Pharmacy occupies that corner in a green-framed glass vestibule, a compact architectural flourish with MORGAN’S lettered across the transom in an old-fashioned serif. The shop is small. You notice the wooden floors and the photographs of the pharmacy from the early twentieth century before you notice the merchandise. The walls hold a quiet argument that this place has been here long enough to know what it is.

Sahar Kassem bought the pharmacy in 2022, at thirty-three years old, and she is exactly the kind of owner a neighborhood pharmacy should have. A 2016 graduate of Howard University’s College of Pharmacy, she traces her interest in the field to caring for her ill grandmother, working through the specifics of medications and drug interactions in a way that stayed with her. She apprenticed at Grubb’s Pharmacy in Southeast D.C. before taking over Morgan’s, and she came to the job with a straightforward intention: keep independent pharmacy care rooted in the community that needs it. Maurice Brown works the register and has been greeting regulars for more than a decade. Between the two of them, the shop operates on the logic that people deserve to be known by name.

The pharmacy fills prescriptions while you wait, handles compounded preparations, and administers vaccines covering influenza, COVID-19, shingles, and others. The front of the store carries homeopathic products, perfumes and colognes, office supplies, and gift items, the kind of selective inventory that a corner drugstore used to stock before the chains squeezed the category out. Morgan’s accepts most prescription insurance plans, participates in InsiderRx discount programs, and is a member of the CARE Pharmacies cooperative. Prescription delivery is available, as is curbside pickup for those in a hurry.

Morgan’s opened in 1912, started by the Malcolm Morgan brothers, who ran a soda fountain alongside the dispensary. According to family lore passed down through the Morgans’ descendants, at least one young woman reportedly married into the family for access to the free ice cream. The pharmacy changed hands several times over the following decades before Barry Deutschman purchased it in 1992. Deutschman ran it for more than twenty-five years, retiring in 2018, and during that stretch it earned a reputation as one of the few remaining independent pharmacies in northwest D.C. that still functioned the way independent pharmacies once did. Kassem inherited that reputation along with the lease.

The pharmacy is open Monday through Friday, 8:30 in the morning until 6 in the evening, and closed on weekends, so it rewards planning ahead. Online prescription refills and vaccine appointments can be booked through morgancarerx.com, and the pharmacy’s booking page at morgans.timetap.com handles scheduling for clinical services. Street parking on this block is tight, as it is throughout the residential core of Georgetown, and the nearest garages cluster along Wisconsin Avenue. For a first visit, bring your prescription insurance card and expect to spend a few minutes; the staff will actually talk to you about your medications, which takes slightly longer than a chain but is generally the point.