U Street Corridor: DC's Black Broadway, the 1968 Riots, and the Neighborhood That Rebuilt Itself

1. Black Broadway: How a Segregated City Built Its Own Cultural Capital

Washington DC was a legally segregated city for most of the 20th century. Federal buildings and public accommodations operated under Jim Crow rules. The restaurants, hotels, and theaters that served white Washingtonians were closed to Black residents. In response, the community that had established itself along U Street NW — concentrated especially between 9th Street and 14th Street — built its own parallel city.

By the 1920s and 1930s, the U Street corridor contained over 300 Black-owned businesses, including banks, law firms, insurance companies, pharmacies, and restaurants. The industrial corridor that ran behind the theater district contained printing shops, tailors, and small manufacturers. The professional class — doctors, lawyers, professors from nearby Howard University — lived in the rowhouses on the numbered cross streets and along T Street and V Street.

The entertainment district that grew along U Street's length became famous enough to attract performers and audiences from across the region. The circuit of theaters, clubs, and social halls on this corridor saw Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan perform on the same stages in the same seasons. Singer Pearl Bailey, herself a U Street regular, gave the corridor its lasting nickname: Black Broadway.

The nickname was accurate in a specific sense: U Street was not an imitation of anything. It was its own entertainment ecosystem, developed by and for a community that had been excluded from the national mainstream and built something better than what it had been excluded from.

2. Duke Ellington and the Sound That Came from This Neighborhood

Edward Kennedy 'Duke' Ellington was born in Washington in 1899 and grew up in a series of rowhouses in the U Street corridor. From 1910 to 1914, the Ellington family lived at 1805 13th Street NW, a few blocks from the main commercial strip. He studied piano locally and was drawn into the musical culture that U Street centered.

Ellington played one of his first public concerts at the True Reformer Building, 1200 U Street NW — a four-story structure built in 1903 by the United Order of True Reformers, a Black fraternal organization, that served as a social hall, ballroom, and community anchor for the neighborhood. The building is still standing.

By his late teens, Ellington was leading small bands at dances and social events up and down the U Street corridor. He left for New York in 1923, arrived at the Cotton Club in Harlem six years later, and built the career that would make him one of the most recorded musicians in American history. But the harmonic sensibility, the interest in big ensemble voicing, and the specific blues-and-church synthesis that defines his sound came from what he absorbed on these blocks in his early twenties.

The neighborhood has not forgotten the connection. A mural of Ellington covers the exterior wall of a building at 13th and U Streets NW, and the Metro station's interior artwork incorporates imagery from the jazz era. The scale of what left this neighborhood when Ellington left for New York is easy to underestimate: he was not unique in having developed here. He was the most famous of a generation of musicians that U Street produced.

3. The Lincoln Theatre and the Howard Theatre: Two Stages That Defined an Era

Two performance venues on the U Street corridor defined the neighborhood's cultural peak, and both survive in active use today.

The Lincoln Theatre (1215 U St NW) opened in 1922 as U Street's most elegant first-run movie house, with 1,600 seats. It showed films and hosted live vaudeville, amateur nights, and big band performances. The lobby was decorated in the architectural style of the era — coffered ceilings, marble floors, a grand staircase. The Lincoln Colonnade, a public hall located below and behind the main theater, hosted 'battles of the bands' where local and touring musicians competed before judging audiences that knew exactly what they were listening to.

The roster of performers who appeared at the Lincoln across its peak decades includes essentially every major name in jazz and blues from 1922 through the 1950s. Duke Ellington played here. Ella Fitzgerald performed her early touring dates on this stage. Cab Calloway brought his full orchestra. The Lincoln functioned as both a neighborhood destination and a touring stop on the circuit that connected Black entertainment venues from the Midwest through the East Coast.

The Howard Theatre (620 T St NW, two blocks south of U Street) opened in 1910 — making it one of the oldest Black performance venues in the country — and was rebuilt and expanded significantly in the 1920s. The Howard's amateur nights were famous as proving grounds: an unknown Marvin Gaye performed on the Howard stage early in his career. The theater was also the anchor of an annual talent competition that sent winners to national audiences.

Both theaters declined with the neighborhood after 1968 and have since been restored. The Lincoln reopened in 1994 as a performing arts center. The Howard underwent a full renovation in 2012 and continues to book live performances. Visiting both interiors, even without a performance, gives a specific understanding of what the neighborhood looked and sounded like at its height.

4. April 1968: Four Days That Changed the Neighborhood for 25 Years

On the evening of April 4, 1968, the news broke that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. Within hours, crowds gathered at the corner of 14th Street and U Street NW — the intersection at the heart of the commercial district. By midnight, the intersection had become the center of one of the most destructive episodes of civil unrest in Washington's history.

The riots lasted four days. Thirteen people died. More than 1,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed — a substantial fraction of the commercial structures that had taken six decades to build. The blocks of 14th Street running north from U Street were nearly wiped out. Grocery stores, pharmacies, and small businesses that had served the neighborhood for a generation were burned or looted.

One place stayed open throughout. Stokely Carmichael, who had organized in the neighborhood and knew its geography, personally escorted Ben Ali — the owner of Ben's Chili Bowl at 1213 U Street — to the local police precinct and obtained special permission to keep the restaurant open past curfew. Ben's became a refuge and a feeding station for firefighters, police officers, and community members working to contain the destruction. In four days of chaos that touched almost every block within a half-mile, Ben's Chili Bowl did not close.

The decade that followed the riots was marked by population loss, business departure, drug markets, and physical decay. A 1982 photograph of 14th Street shows blocks of abandoned storefronts and empty lots where the commercial buildings had stood. As recently as the early 1990s, tour buses passing through the neighborhood would not stop — drivers would point at the historic sites from behind closed windows and keep moving.

The turnaround began slowly in the mid-1980s and accelerated sharply in 1991, when the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority opened the U Street/Cardozo Green Line Metro station. The station's opening gave the neighborhood direct rapid transit access to downtown and to the emerging neighborhoods to the south, and it brought new residents and businesses in numbers that previous redevelopment efforts had failed to attract.

5. Ben's Chili Bowl: What Survives as a Landmark

Ben's Chili Bowl opened on August 22, 1958, in a building that had previously served as Washington's first silent movie house, the Minnehaha (established 1911). Ben Ali — a Trinidadian immigrant of Indian descent who had studied dentistry at Howard University — and his fiancée Virginia Rollins opened the restaurant seven weeks before they got married. The couple ran it together for decades. Ben Ali died in 2009; Virginia Ali continued as the public face of the restaurant; the family still operates it.

The half-smoke is the product Ben's is built around. It is a coarse-ground pork and beef smoked sausage, larger and more flavorful than a standard frankfurter, served in a steamed bun with chili, mustard, and diced onions. The half-smoke has existed in DC for over a century — it is a regional food with roots in the mid-Atlantic sausage-making traditions of the 19th century — but Ben's is the institution most associated with it. The chili that covers it is the restaurant's own recipe, made without beans, heavily spiced, not quite as hot as it looks.

The wall behind the counter at the original U Street location is covered in photographs of the famous people who have eaten here: Barack Obama is the most-photographed (he has come multiple times, and made a point of bringing his daughters), but the wall includes Bono, Bill Cosby, Ella Fitzgerald, and dozens of politicians, athletes, and musicians going back to the 1960s.

Ben's expanded to additional DC locations and a few outposts in airports and stadiums, but the original at 1213 U St NW remains a different kind of experience — it is a functioning neighborhood restaurant that also happens to be a physical record of neighborhood history. The photographs on the walls, the staff who have worked there for decades, and the fact that the building survived when most of the block was burned in 1968 make it something more than a good place to eat. It is why the half-smoke is what you should order.

6. The 9:30 Club and the Current Music Scene

The 9:30 Club takes its name from its original address — 930 F Street NW — where it opened in 1980 as a punk and new wave venue in a building that had been a tavern. The club moved to its current location at 815 V Street NW in 1996, taking over the former WUST Radio Music Hall, a venue that had been a U Street-corridor institution in its own right.

At its current location, the 9:30 Club has a capacity of 1,200, a sound system that serious musicians notice immediately upon arrival, and a booking calendar that has historically pulled touring acts that are too big for smaller DC rooms but not quite large enough for the major arenas. In 2018, Rolling Stone named it one of the ten best live music venues in the United States — a designation that reflects both the quality of the physical space and the accumulated reputation of thirty-plus years of programming.

The venue's design is intentional: a wheeled stage mounted on rails can be pushed back or forward to make the room feel packed with a smaller audience or to open it fully for sold-out shows. The sightlines from every position on the floor are good. The balcony, which runs along three walls, provides an elevated view of the stage that remains close enough to feel like a concert rather than watching from a distance.

What the 9:30 Club's current location means for U Street is that the neighborhood's live music tradition — which ran from the Lincoln Theatre's vaudeville nights through the jazz clubs of the 1940s and 1950s — continues in a form recognizable to anyone who has heard what the corridor used to be. The instrument has changed. The fact of the music hasn't.

For broader DC context, the neighborhoods that surround U Street — Adams Morgan to the northwest and Dupont Circle to the south — connect easily by foot or bike and make a natural combination for a full day.

7. Where to Eat and Drink on U Street

The restaurant and bar scene that has settled along U Street and the parallel stretch of 14th Street NW reflects the neighborhood's layered identity — there are institutions that survived from before the riots, restaurants that arrived with the 1990s and 2000s revival, and newer kitchens that came as the neighborhood's reputation grew.

Ben's Chili Bowl (1213 U St NW) is the place to start, for both the food and the history. Open since 1958. Order the half-smoke.

Florida Avenue Grill (1100 Florida Ave NW) has been open since 1944 — making it one of the oldest continuously operating soul food restaurants in the country. The pork chops, grits, and fried fish are the backbone of the menu. It opens at 6 a.m. on weekdays; the breakfast crowd that starts arriving before 7 a.m. skews heavily toward people who have been eating here for decades.

Maydan (1346 Florida Ave NW) is the neighborhood's most acclaimed current kitchen — a wood-fire Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean restaurant that has been drawing visitors from across the city since it opened. The open kitchen centers on a large wood-burning hearth from which nearly everything emerges. The lamb flatbreads, wood-roasted whole fish, and the mezze spread are the standouts. Reservations on Resy are strongly advised for weekend dinners.

Busboys and Poets (2021 14th St NW) is a bookstore, restaurant, and events space that has been a neighborhood anchor since 2005. Its combination of strong coffee, a full food menu, an independent bookshop, and a calendar of readings, poetry slams, and community events makes it less a restaurant than a public institution. It is the right place for a long afternoon or a pre-show dinner.

Marvin (2007 14th St NW) is named for Marvin Gaye, who recorded several of his most celebrated albums in Belgium. The restaurant and rooftop bar reflects that transatlantic connection — Belgian-influenced menu, strong cocktail list, a rooftop that fills to capacity on warm evenings. Open until 2 a.m. most nights.

8. Practical FAQ: What to Know Before You Go

How does U Street relate to the rest of DC? U Street sits north of Dupont Circle and Logan Circle, roughly 1.5 miles from the National Mall. Adams Morgan is a 15-minute walk northwest. Howard University's main campus (2400 6th St NW) is about a mile north. The neighborhood makes a natural combination with Georgetown for a day that covers both pre-Civil War DC history and 20th-century Black cultural history.

When is the best time to visit? Late September through November is the corridor at its most comfortable — temperatures are in the 60s, the summer bar-crowd density has thinned, and both the 9:30 Club and the Lincoln Theatre are deep into their fall booking calendars. Summer evenings are lively but can be very hot; U Street is not an air-conditioned shopping mall experience.

Is parking available? Street parking exists but is contested on weekend evenings. The U Street Metro station is the practical answer for evening visits. The station connects to the Green and Yellow Lines. From Union Station or downtown hotels on the Red Line, transfer at Gallery Place-Chinatown to the Green or Yellow.

Is this a safe neighborhood? Yes. The blocks along U Street from 9th to 16th Street NW are active and well-trafficked day and night. The corridor is busy enough that the standard urban caution — watch your phone, stay on lit streets — applies as a baseline. The neighborhood's eastern edges, approaching 9th Street and below Florida Avenue, are more mixed after midnight.

What happened to the neighborhood between 1968 and 1991? It deteriorated badly. Drug markets moved into the vacant storefronts. Population dropped sharply. Federal disinvestment accelerated the process. The 1991 Metro opening was the first major infrastructure investment in the neighborhood since the riots and is credited with beginning the recovery. The tension that has accompanied that recovery — rising rents, displacement of long-term residents, the conversion of what were once community-serving businesses into bars and restaurants aimed at a wealthier demographic — is ongoing and worth understanding before you arrive.