Qualla: Shaw (Wikivoyage)

Shaw (Wikivoyage): Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Shaw (Wikivoyage): Why It Is Called Shaw

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Shaw (Wikivoyage): U Street and Black Broadway

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Shaw (Wikivoyage): April 1968

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 alo...

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Shaw (Wikivoyage): The Whole Foods Threshold

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Shaw (Wikivoyage): Little Ethiopia and Blagden Alley

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Washingt...

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