D.C.'s Black Broadway history gets a lift in vision for U Street development
She had a favorite spot on U Street back in the ’50s when it was still called Black Broadway: Bohemian Caverns, the basement jazz club beneath a Black-owned pharmacy that had been decked out to feel like you were entering a cave. Virginia Ali says her memory isn’t as good as it once was — although it remains a near-encyclopedic map of the famous corridor in its heyday.
The 89-year-old owner of D.C.’s famed Ben’s Chili Bowl, which she opened with her husband Ben Ali on U Street in 1958, remembered the movie houses, the theaters, the nightclubs, the Black-owned salons and drugstores and tailor shops — the universe of arts and enterprise that became D.C.’s hub for Black culture in the era of Jim Crow. It isn’t what it used to be, Ali says now, sitting in a booth at Ben’s — which is why a new development at one of the corridor’s most hulking buildings is giving her some hope.
A half-century after the decline of Black Broadway, a redevelopment plan seeks to reimagine the aging, massive Frank D. Reeves Municipal Building at 14th and U Streets NW — and in doing so, revitalize ties to the corridor’s Black Broadway history. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced last week that the city has selected a bid for the redevelopment, with a vision to offer a mixture of arts venues — dance, jazz, comedy — within the building along with a new headquarters for the NAACP, a hotel and affordable housing.
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“We need whatever we can possibly do to continue to preserve the culture and the history of what Black Broadway used to be,” Ali said, “and that’s certainly one way of doing it, because this was Black Broadway. This was the entertainment center for African Americans.”
Reeves CMC Venture — which includes a number of development and design partner firms — will lead the redevelopment, which grew out of an initiative Bowser launched to advance equitable development projects, called EquityRFP. The 2020 “request for proposals” to redevelop the Reeves center — named for the D.C. civil rights litigator who was part of the legal team in the seminal Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case — specifically called for a vision that could enliven the corridor’s Black history and culture.
Charles King, principal of CSG Urban Partners, said the city’s vision to bring back the Black Broadway culture “is just something that is so personal to all of us” who work on the minority-owned design, architectural and investment firms involved in the project. King credited Bowser and the city for laying the foundation in the RFP — which was reissued in 2022 — and for being able to bring the NAACP headquarters to the space, what he called the “linchpin” of the redevelopment.
“Then we just worked around that with other African American cultural arts and entertainment venues that we thought really would enhance the whole Black Broadway vision,” he said, “and we think that’s exactly what we’re going to bring to this process.”
Reeves CMC Venture’s proposal calls for creating an outdoor public plaza named for Frederick Douglass and a 200-seat outdoor amphitheater named for former mayor Marion Barry Jr., who dedicated the Reeves center in 1986 in an effort to revitalize the area after the 1968 riots. In the latest revamp, retail space is expected to include a Dave Chappelle Comedy Club and a new restaurant concept from Food Network celebrity chef Carla Hall. And inside, along with the NAACP headquarters, the Washington Jazz Arts Institute and a pair of dance schools — the Ailey School and the VIVA School — plan to open studio or training spaces. Christian Tabernacle Child Development Center will also offer family services.
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On the upper floors, 30 percent of the 322 units of mixed-income housing will be set aside for residents making below 50 percent of the area median income, with a smaller portion of those reserved for the lowest-income bracket, those living 30 percent below AMI. “The U Street, 14th Street corridor has gone through such a revitalization, and everyone should share in that,” King said, noting the developers are not seeking a housing subsidy from the city but will explore other private financing options. Construction is slated for 2025, though King said it was too early to give a projected completion date.
Davey Yarborough, founder of the Washington Jazz Arts Institute, said the institute will expand its programs offering free mentorship to students interested in jazz. Being able to do that on the corner of 14th and U was personal for him too, he said: He grew up going to the jazz clubs along U Street in the 196os and on that very block — experiences that led him to want to become a musician himself.
“The U Street Corridor has been a part of my life ever since I started, in early high school, because there were venues that I ended up performing in,” Yarborough said. “It was just, you know, the culture of being in music — the rhythm and blues and the jazz were the things that brought me down to places like the Howard Theatre. … So to watch the [1968] riots tear it down — the difference between what happened before the riots and after the riots is huge. It’s been a struggle to bring it back.”
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The cultural destination for Black D.C. residents — once known as a “city within a city” in the early to mid-20th century — was borne of segregation.
“We couldn’t go downtown to the theater or to the dinner, or buy a house uptown or put a law office downtown, because we were Black,” Ali said. “But we didn’t need to — because we had it right here. It was a real proud, classy, self-sufficient community.”
Some of the nation’s most prominent African American creators and performers, from jazz great Duke Ellington to world-class opera singer Madame Lillian Evanti, frequented the strip. More than 300 Black-owned businesses populated the area, lined with Black churches and community centers, as well as Black banks where residents could get a loan without fear of discrimination, according to the book “Black Broadway in Washington D.C.” by local journalist and author Briana A. Thomas.
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“Everybody knew each other on a first-name basis,” said Richard Lee, whose parents founded Lee’s Flower Shop on U Street in 1945, now run by his daughters. “We had a lot of Black churches, and people came down there on Sunday dressed up, and it was like a real community spirit at that time. Of course, that’s gone now. You have a lot of people walking around, milling around and whatnot, but, you know, they don’t really know each other.”
Yarborough, who founded the jazz studies program at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in 1984, said he remembered going to shows and playing at clubs like the Casbah and Bohemian Caverns, too — one of his favorites as well.
But everything changed after the 1968 riots, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Five years earlier King was sitting in Ben’s Chili Bowl next to Ali, describing his plans for the March on Washington, she remembered. Now the city within a city was burning. “People were openly showing their sadness, sobbing openly,” she remembered. “But then the sadness turned to frustration, frustration gets turned to anger. And an uprising began that was destructive.”
Businesses shut down and never reopened. Drugs moved in, depressing the once vibrant community for years. In the late 1980s the construction of the Metro’s Green line underneath U Street ripped up the road, further hurting business, and then came a period of growing pains, through gentrification, and, ultimately, to the trendy restaurants and bar patios dotting the strip today.
Of the hundreds of Black-owned businesses from the Black Broadway era, only three have endured in the same hands, according to Thomas’s book: Ben’s Chili Bowl, Lee’s Flower Shop and Industrial Bank.
Shellée M. Haynesworth, who created the Black Broadway on U project as a way to preserve the history through videos and storytelling, said it’s a testament to the strength of those three businesses — but also a sad commentary on how the evolution of the neighborhood pushed out so many others. “When you’re talking about a community that in the early 1920s had over 300 Black-owned businesses and now we’re down to, you know, just a few,” Haynesworth said, “it just speaks to our struggle in creating space or maintaining space or building just that economic wealth, you know, that cycle of wealth in our community.”
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She started digging into the history about a decade ago. She was driving down U Street with her grandmother in 2013 when her grandmother looked around, amazed at how much the corridor had changed. Her grandmother started to tell her stories: where she went waltzing, the shows she saw at Howard Theatre, the shop where she worked as a part-time barber.
“It was an aha moment for me, because it just sort of reinforced the importance of us African Americans sitting down with our elders to hear about this history, our own family histories and just learning about, you know, the significance of these communities,” Haynesworth said. “If we tapped into it more as a community, we would understand more the importance of us playing a more active role in preserving this history and benefiting from it and basically using it as a road map to revitalize our own ecosystem.”
She said that’s the hope she has for the new Reeves building development.
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Lee, who supported the Reeves CMC Venture bid, said that while he wanted to see Black Broadway return to its heyday, he also recognized that the community feel, where everyone knew everyone, may be one piece that won’t come back.
But the redevelopment could attract new people, Ali said, who get to discover the culture for themselves. “Maybe they will hear something in that building, or see something in that building, that will make them wonder, ‘Why? What is this all about?’” she said, before going back to work.
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