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Historic U Street Basks in the Glow of National Attention

  • January 21st 2009

by Will Smith

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Amidst all the national attention that DC has garnered during this inaugural week, particular attention seems to have been paid to U Street. As the nation welcomes its first African-American president, the neighborhood’s legacy as the Black Broadway has made it a fitting subject for the flurry of recently published articles that explored the “real DC”. The fact that Obama himself dropped in on neighborhood landmark Ben’s Chili Bowl last week didn’t hurt either.

The Wall Street Journal profiled U Street in the article “A Neighborhood to Explore”. The piece borrows its opening line from the name of a recommended weekly walking tour, Before Harlem, There Was U Street, put on by Washington Walks.

The article’s lede pretty much says it all:

Before there was Harlem, there was U Street — the nerve center of Washington’s black community, alive with music, theater and African-American-owned businesses, churches and social institutions. Until Harlem surpassed it in the 1920s, U Street was the largest African-American community in the U.S. Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and especially Duke Ellington made regular stops.

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/historic_u_street_basks_in_the_glow_of_national_attention/461.

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