Above the underground enclosure of stone and steel is laughter and the sweet-charred scent of half-smokes wafting into the violet sky. Warm air spirals in the cold wind just above the ebon street, watched from the beyond-black windows on the buildings above. The corner of 13th and U Street. Alive again. From the ashes of eviscerated streets and boarded-up buildings.
Granny likes telling stories of how it once was. People — black people — didn’t just want good times, they wanted to forget. To forget themselves, to forget who they sometimes must be. You Street was deep within, yet beyond the Jim Crow city on a hill where doctors — like Gwena’s grandfather — and shot-house proprietors, like my grandfather — mingled. Even white folks came down to hear black music played to a black audience, the way the musicians wanted to play.
Granny likes telling stories about her first date with Grandad. About a place where elegant gentlemen — Grandad in a charcoal-colored three-piece suit — took graceful ladies — Granny in a barely blue chiffon dress — for a night of splendor along the avenue. After all, Black Broadway, U Street’s unofficial name, was where black folk showed out. You had to look like you belonged.
Grandad greeted Granny at the door — back then, no reputable woman would invite a man past the threshold of her home — of 223 Florida Ave. N.W., a three-story ginger-brown stone rowhouse that had been converted into five apartments. Granny’s family lived in apartment B on the building’s west side with a bay window that overlooked the roundabout that gave the Truxton Circle neighborhood its name. The rowhouse is still there, but the circle is long gone along with the neighborhood’s identity, which people now mostly consider the eastern part of Shaw.
Taking Granny by the hand, Grandad started walking west along Florida — which eventually becomes U Street — until she coaxed him into turning east instead and then north on 2nd Street. There 2nd straddles the Bloomington and LeDroit Park neighborhoods. Beautiful as it was, Granny’s powder-blue dress wasn’t warm enough, so Grandad threw his jacket over her shoulders. She smiled and then nestled against his chest as he rested his arm around her shoulder — he was a keeper. The dreaming couple then turned west along T Street and onto Cooper Circle where Granny picked out the single-family Victorian she wanted to live in. Grandad just smiled and told her “some day.” At 6th Street they hopped on to Florida Avenue, and the unofficial beginning of U Street.
Grandad and Granny walked from 7th just south of the Howard Theater and the university itself through the steam rising through vents embedded in the concrete and young people debating politics and philosophy in the close distance. But closer still were the pool-halls and shot-houses where Grandad hustled, sold illegal liquor and ran numbers. They passed by the crack of billiard balls crashing like bumper cars and the beautifully ugly combination of curse words run off in joy and rage and into the sweet screech of horns and machine-gun staccato of drums coming from the restaurants and clubs around 14th where Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Miles Davis played — and later my father too. Thereabouts were black mythic landmarks like the Lincoln Theater, Whitelaw Hotel, 12th Street YMCA, and True Reformers Hall.
Fish caught just a few hours ago from the Chesapeake Bay sizzled in closet-sized kitchens in the backs of restaurants and clubs along the strip. The smell cut through the cold. On U Street, good food was expected, demanded. And that decision often depended as much on the band playing as the food being served. To be catered to, to be sought after in a city where they couldn’t go where or use what they pleased meant something.
Granny, Grandad, even Mom and my father remember not being able to go certain places, talk to, or look certain people in the eye. It wasn’t so long ago. The Civil Rights Act was passed just three years before I was born.
With its own businesses and institutions, black Washingtonians could isolate themselves from white folk and the city’s Jim Crow laws. U Street was the epicenter of black D.C.
Blackness defined its patrons, the way they dressed, the way they moved, the architects who designed its buildings, the people who owned its businesses, invested in those businesses, the musicians who played in its venues, the drunkards who patronized its bars, the brawlers who couldn’t hold their liquor, the lawyers who litigated the impending lawsuits from the brawls, the doctors who healed the brawlers as well as the sick. The blackness was inescapable. A sea to swim in, wade in, drown in.
In a sense, segregation made U Street great. And its adjudicated death with the handing down of Bolling v. Sharpe hurt U Street. Blacks were no longer confined to live and mingle in a few designated places. May 17, 1954, hurt U Street. April 4, 1968, crippled it.
King dead. Crowds gathered. Condolences requested. Justice demanded. Rocks thrown. Glass shattered. Pigs beat. Buildings burned. Bottles tossed. Mobs raged. Bricks flew. Bullets seared. Blood gushed. Bodies piled.
Four days later, everything had changed. For U Street. For Shaw. For H Street. For D.C. For America.
Rome had fallen. And the next 20-plus years were U Street’s Dark Ages, plagued by the exodus of long-time residents out to the promise of P.G. County, the closing of businesses, municipal neglect, and the coming of crack (and the new Jim Crow).
The place Carter G. Woodson, Billie Holliday, the Duke, Langston Hughes, and Mary McLeod Bethune once called home became known for bombed-out buildings, base-head zombies, bullet-scarred brick, armed occupiers, and shell-shocked survivors. The places Granny and Grandad loved had become hangouts for junkies and strongholds for their sellers, prostitutes and pimps. That was the U Street I grew up with.
But the name still meant something to people — old heads, art freaks, and history buffs. A Renaissance was coming. The subway, Metro’s Green Line, would save poor (read: black) D.C. Wanted or not — get the fuck out the way. Despite the desire to stimulate business, the construction often drove the few remaining legitimate enterprises that had survived 1968 away. Ben’s Chili Bowl, Industrial Bank, and the Lee’s Flower & Card Shop were all that were left after the riots, the crack wars, and construction from the Green Line Metro station — not broken, not scared away.
As decrepit and violent as it had become, Gwena still loved it here. She spent time in places I was scared to go. While my brother’s name carried through most of the city, no one there knew my face. But somehow she brought forth that same aura from home, that Cooper Circle magic that seemed to protect its favorite child. She’d listen to the high-pitched shouting of electric addicts, thunder-deep testifying of street-corner philosophers; buy oils from street vendors; sneak into derelict theaters; watch the rambling and carousing, the palm-on-palm signifying. Gwena ventured here in the day (she was a romantic, not a total fool), observing changes great and slight like a squirrel with her nose to the wind and listening to the neighborhood thugs — they looked out for her like a little sister.
Now four years after the opening of the Green Line Metro stop at U Street, there’s a sense that U Street’s appointed patron spirits of Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes have returned, hovering over this place like the incandescent halos lighting up the tight-packed restaurants and bars that again line its storied streets. And many of the old heads are still here in the houses they likely grew up and raised their kids and their grandkids. Many trace their roots to the Carolinas, coming here for work — federal jobs and serving senators in whites-served-only establishments. They are excited about the change.
Even the 9:30 Club’s moving here, around the corner from Howard University. There are condos being built, new businesses, even new residents — mostly gay white men priced out of Dupont who’ve started fixing up the old Victorians. But the old heads are also wary of the new. Wary that the changes are for those the commercial developers would prefer to live here — not them. Wary of how much longer will they be able to live in the new U Street.
A new U Street attempting to relive some of its past. A place where ladies slip on a little black dress to join gentlemen in blazers and jeans for a night of splendor. After all, this is once again where black folk show out. You have to look like you belong.
Many of the after-hours spots and restaurants have modernized the tradition of luring patrons into with downtempo rhythms and hip hop from the Native Tongues collective that inspires camaraderie and contemplation. Places like Café Nema between 13th and 14th in the basement of a converted rowhouse. There’s always music — jazz, mostly from a group of former Howard students or a DJ spinning his heart’s desire. There’s never a cover. Above the red letters of the bar’s name is a girl’s face with flowers in her hair. Nasir first brought took me there. He knows the owner, a Somali guy named Ibrahim.