Edward Kennedy Ellington was born at 2129 Ward Place NW on April 29, 1899, the son of a butler and a teacher who saw to it that he had piano lessons starting at age seven. His parents called him Edward; his schoolmates at Armstrong High School started calling him Duke for the elegant manners his mother had drilled into him. By 1917 he was playing pickup gigs at house parties in Shaw and at the Howard Theatre on T Street. By 1923 he had moved to New York. The neighborhood Ellington left behind was the center of African American cultural life in America at the moment - a stretch of U Street known as Black Broadway, more nightclubs and theaters and Black-owned businesses per block than any other neighborhood in the country, including Harlem. The street is still there. The neighborhood that surrounds it has burned, emptied, and come back to life. Black Broadway has a different soundtrack now. The blocks where Ellington learned music are now the most expensive rowhouses in central Washington.
The name comes from Robert Gould Shaw - the 25-year-old white Massachusetts colonel who in May 1863 took command of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first official African American unit raised in the North during the Civil War. Shaw was killed leading his men in the unsuccessful July 18, 1863 assault on Fort Wagner outside Charleston. Confederate troops buried him in a mass grave with his men. His father wrote: 'We can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies, among his brave and devoted followers.' Shaw Junior High School in the District was named for him in 1902. When urban planners in 1966 redrew the area's boundaries for federal renewal purposes, they used the school's enrollment zone to define what they called the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area. The neighborhood took its name from the area. The Civil War colonel whose death helped establish Black soldiers' legitimacy in American military service had become, posthumously and by historical coincidence, the namesake of one of the most consequential Black neighborhoods in the United States.
By 1910 U Street was the country's preeminent Black entertainment district. The Howard Theatre opened that year at 620 T Street; the Lincoln Theatre followed in 1921 at 1215 U Street; the Bohemian Caverns jazz club opened in 1926 at 11th and U. Duke Ellington played them all. So did Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne, Marvin Gaye, Roberta Flack, Sarah Vaughan, Sammy Davis Jr., and James Brown - though most of the bookings came after Ellington had himself become a national figure with his Cotton Club residency in Harlem. The corridor was Black Broadway because it had to be - segregation barred Black performers from most downtown Washington venues and Black audiences from most downtown Washington seats. U Street became one of the only American entertainment districts where major Black acts played for Black audiences in Black-owned venues. Ben's Chili Bowl opened in 1958 at 1213 U Street next door to the Lincoln Theatre, in a building that had previously been the Minnehaha silent-film house and then a pool hall before Ben Ali converted it into a restaurant. Ben's became the late-night refuge of musicians and the only restaurant open during the 1968 riots that followed it.
On the evening of April 4, 1968, news of Martin Luther King's assassination in Memphis reached Washington. Within hours, crowds had gathered at the intersection of 14th and U Streets. The first windows broke around 9:30 p.m. By midnight, fires had been set in dozens of stores along 14th, 7th, and U Streets. The riots continued for three days. President Lyndon Johnson eventually ordered the 82nd Airborne Division into the city; soldiers patrolled blocks they had defended in Korea and Vietnam. When the smoke cleared, more than 1,200 buildings had been damaged, thirteen people were dead, more than a thousand had been injured, and over seven thousand had been arrested. Insurance redlining ensured that most of the burned-out commercial property could not be rebuilt. Stokely Carmichael called the riots the unsurprising response of a Black community whose patience had finally run out. The neighborhood's commercial life took three decades to begin to recover. Crack cocaine arrived in the mid-1980s and made the recovery harder. Through the late 1990s, U Street remained, in the local euphemism, sketchy.
The reversal began in 1986, when the Reeves Center municipal office building opened at 14th and U, bringing about 2,000 government employees to the corner every weekday. The Shaw-Howard University Metro station opened in 1991. In 2000 a Whole Foods supermarket opened at 14th and P Streets and quickly became one of the chain's highest-grossing stores - a clear signal that the demographic shift had reached a critical mass. Between 2000 and 2002, Harrison Square - the first large-scale residential development the area had seen since the riots - was constructed. The townhouses sold for around 200,000 dollars at the time. The same houses sold for over 900,000 dollars by 2015. Today they trade for 1.5 to 2 million. The U Street historic district has more bars per block than any neighborhood in the city. Logan Circle, the residential area immediately south, has restored its Victorian rowhouses and become one of the most expensive residential corners in Washington. Many of the Black families who had owned property in Shaw since the early twentieth century have sold and moved further east, or to the suburbs, or out of the metropolitan area entirely. The displacement is real and ongoing.
Two distinct sub-neighborhoods now anchor Shaw. Little Ethiopia, centered on 9th Street just south of U Street, holds the densest concentration of Ethiopian restaurants in any American city - a legacy of the post-1974 Ethiopian diaspora that sent thousands of refugees to Washington after the Marxist Derg's overthrow of Haile Selassie. Restaurants like Dukem, Etete, and Habesha serve injera (the spongy sourdough flatbread that doubles as plate and utensil), doro wat (chicken stew), tibs (sauteed beef), and yebeg alicha (lamb in turmeric). Blagden Alley and the adjacent Naylor Court, a few blocks south near the Washington Convention Center, are the District's hottest concentration of chef-driven restaurants. The Dabney - chef Jeremiah Langhorne's Michelin-starred restaurant cooking on a hearth oven that uses only Mid-Atlantic ingredients - anchors a district that includes Tail Up Goat (Mediterranean), Quill, Calico, and a half-dozen others. Twenty years ago Blagden Alley was a service alley behind nineteenth-century stables, mostly empty and used by skateboarders. The transformation is one of the small civic miracles of recent Washington.
Shaw is bounded roughly by 15th Street NW on the west, Florida Avenue on the north, North Capitol Street on the east, and M Street NW on the south, centered near 38.9145 degrees N, 77.0250 degrees W. From the air the neighborhood is a tight grid of late-nineteenth-century brick rowhouses interrupted by the modernist mass of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to the south and Howard University's campus to the north. Best viewed at 1,500 to 3,000 feet AGL; the entire site lies within the Washington FRZ. Nearest airports are Ronald Reagan Washington National (KDCA) 4 nm south, College Park (KCGS) 5 nm northeast, and Washington Dulles (KIAD) 23 nm west.