For 45 years, the loudest room in Georgetown sat underneath the Whitehurst Freeway. The Bayou opened at 3135 K Street NW in September 1953 and played its last show on New Year’s Eve 1998, and in between it went from Dixieland jazz to burlesque to some of the biggest names in rock.
U2 played its second American show there. Foreigner played some of its very first shows there. Talking Heads, R.E.M., Guns N’ Roses and Phish all came through on the way up, and Billy Joel recorded part of a live album on its stage.
And the building had a reputation long before anyone called it the Bayou. In 1939 it was a pirate nightclub with a working brig. In 1951 a gambler was shot dead at the top of its stairs while two policemen sat in the room below.
Before the Bayou: a working waterfront
Long before anyone played a guitar at 3135 K Street, the block was industrial. In the late 1800s the Georgetown waterfront was a working port, with a cement works, the Washington Flour mill and a rendering plant that gave the strip its notorious smell.
Right across the street, at 3142 K Street, the Capital Traction Company powerhouse made the electricity for the city’s streetcars from 1911 to 1943. B&O Railroad tracks ran along Water Street to bring coal to its boilers, and the American Ice Company and Brennan Construction worked the same stretch, according to the Friends of Georgetown Waterfront Park.
By the 1930s the strip was fading. The Aqueduct Bridge came down in 1933, and most of the factories either folded or moved to the suburbs. The powerhouse ran until 1943, sat empty for years, and was finally torn down in 1968.
The biggest change came on October 8th, 1949, when the Whitehurst Freeway opened to traffic. The Evening Star called it “Washington’s first elevated motorway.” The war had stalled the project for years, and the route took out the old Francis Scott Key house along the way.
The engineers behind it were Archie Alexander and Maurice Repass. From then on, everything that happened at 3135 K Street happened in the freeway’s shadow, with its noise and exhaust overhead.
1939: Capt. Don Dickerman’s Pirates’ Den
The building itself went up around 1910, according to the Washington Post, and spent its early decades as a warehouse. Then, in the winter of 1939, Capt. Don Dickerman sailed in.
Dickerman was a New York showman who had already run pirate-themed nightclubs in Greenwich Village and Miami. His ad in the Evening Star on February 2nd, 1939, was not subtle:
AHOY!!! WASHINGTON GIVE US the CITY! WE’LL TAKE IT ANYWAY!!! CAPT. DON DICKERMAN AND HIS 40 PHANTOM PIRATES, FROM the PIRATES’ CASTLE! MIAMI And ye PIRATES’ DEN! OLD “GREENWICH VILLAGE” OPENING SOON!!! 3135 “K” ST., N.W. “GEORGETOWN”
The Pirates’ Den opened on Tuesday night, February 7th, 1939, and Hollywood came to Georgetown. According to the Washington Daily News, the stars on hand included Errol Flynn, his wife Lili Damita, and Madeleine Carroll.
The club had a bottle-throwing gallery, where customers hurled beer bottles at steel pirates, and a working brig. Here’s how the Evening Star remembered it in 1963:
Among its other memorable features was a genuine brig, iron bars and all, off to one side of the bandstand. If your wife or date became too argumentative all you had to do was signal the head waiter.
Waiters dressed as pirates would then “take her by the elbows and haul her away for a cooling-off period behind those bars.” Dickerman insisted to the Star that “no gal gets locked in the brig unless her escort desires it.”
The Pirates’ Den lasted less than a year. It closed for the summer in June, and the Daily News reported in December 1939 that the Pirates’ Den had “made its final bow to the night life of the city.” Dickerman went on to open another one in Hollywood in 1940, with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby among his investors.
A decade of clubs, slot machines and raids
Over the next dozen years, 3135 K Street burned through a string of nightclubs: the Flagship, the Veterans Club, the Viking, Club Louisiana, the Culinary Arts Club and the Town and Country. In 1943, the man running Club Louisiana told the Daily News about the clubs that came before his, the Pirates’ Den, the Viking and the Veterans Club, “none of which were paying propositions.”
Club Louisiana still pulled in a big name. On August 18th, 1944, it opened its new season with Earl Hines and his 21-piece orchestra.
By 1945 it was the Culinary Arts Club, a membership club boasting “the largest dance floor in town.” Bob Hope took out a lifetime membership. “I don’t mind getting black and blue chasing balls around the Chevy Chase Country Club,” he told the Evening Star, “but I’ll be darned if I’ll have anyone casting aspersions on my rumba.”
The good times caught up with the club. In 1946 the government said it owed $55,000 in back cabaret taxes, and on June 9th, 1948, the IRS auctioned off its contents right at 3135 K Street. The lot included 36 fifths of whiskey, rum and wine, 50 oak chairs, “3 slot machines” and “2 pin ball machines.”
Next came the Town and Country Club, an after-hours bottle club. Police raided it early on September 16th, 1949, in a party led by Capt. Beverly Beach and Lt. Roy Blick, the head of the vice squad.
1951: The killing at the Hide-Away Club
Around 1950, a retired Arlington supermarket owner named Joseph Horowitz took over the room and called it the Hide-Away Club. On January 10th, 1951, it made the front page of the Evening Star.
Eleven men and six women were in the club before dawn, listening to the juke box. Two policemen, Lt. Karl McCormick and Sgt. Arthur Gernhofer, had dropped in “on a routine check.”
At about 4:50 a.m., a gambler named Joseph Nesline went upstairs to the men’s room. George P. Harding, 39, described by the Star as a “gambler and underworld ‘finger man,'” followed him. They met at the head of the stairway, and Harding was shot dead.
Harding was no stranger to the police. He had been convicted of manslaughter in the 1933 killing of Harry “Doc” Davis, the brother of a police inspector, and was later pardoned under President Truman’s postwar amnesty.
Nesline walked down and handed his .45 to Lt. McCormick. “I just had to do it,” he told him. McCormick admitted to the Star, “I didn’t see the gun until he handed it to me.”
It got stranger that same morning. Just before noon, a man’s body was found in the Potomac near the club, “frozen to an old piling.” Police said the two cases didn’t appear to be connected.
The next morning the club stayed open in defiance of a police order to close. “The juke box blared and the dim lights glowed before dawn today in the Hide-Away Club,” the Star reported. Horowitz insisted, “We were very particular who we let in.”
Nesline went on trial in April 1951. On April 18th, Judge Alexander Holtzoff told the jurors he wanted the case in their hands that afternoon: “Undoubtedly some of you will want to attend the MacArthur celebration tomorrow.”
The jury was out only 80 minutes and took one ballot. It acquitted Nesline of murder but convicted him of carrying a loaded weapon, and Holtzoff gave him the maximum, a year in jail and a $1,000 fine. The judge didn’t hide his opinion:
The after-hours clubs are headquarters for ex-convicts, racketeers, gamblers and gunmen.
He added that Nesline should have been found guilty of manslaughter and was “very fortunate that the jury was so charitable.” Nesline later became one of Washington’s best-known gambling figures.
1953: The Bayou opens
The building didn’t sit empty after the killing. By 1952 it was a Dixieland club called Jazzland, and it was struggling. That November the liquor board suspended its license for a week for serving beer to a boy under 18.
Jazzland’s popular house band had quit after coming to blows with the owner, and a member of the band let it be known the musicians would come back once that owner was gone. That opened the door for two brothers from Virginia, Vincent Tramonte, a lawyer, and Tony Tramonte, a dentist.
With a partner named Mike Munley, they took over the club and put up roughly $15,000 between them. Munley was still listed as a co-owner in 1955.
They named it the Bayou. Their ad in the Evening Star on September 11th, 1953, leaned into the New Orleans name, with Dixieland jazz, spaghetti and steaks.
Two months later, on November 7th, 1953, the new club caught fire during a snowstorm. A Star photographer shot the scene from the Whitehurst Freeway overhead.
The Bayou reopened, and it reflected the city around it. A want ad the club placed in the Evening Star on August 13th, 1954, asked for “WAITRESSES, white.” In 1950s Washington, the classifieds were as segregated as the nightclubs.
The room had a main floor with a stage and a balcony running around it. Capacity was about 500 people, though the Post once called it a “450-seat venue.” Out back was the alley that became home to Blues Alley, the jazz club that opened in 1965.
The Dixieland and burlesque years
“Wild” Bill Whelan was the Bayou’s first star, and the Star was still calling him “Wild Bill Whelan from the local Bayou Club” in 1955. Cornetist Wild Bill Davison played there too, and so did Count Basie.
Dancing arrived in 1957, along with Joe Rinaldi’s band. A 1957 recording of Rinaldi at the Bayou playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” ended up in the National Archives.
By 1963 the Bayou had added strippers. “The new attraction at the Bayou, or one of them, is Julie Gibson,” the Evening Star reported on March 21st, 1963. She was an “exotic,” which “means here, as elsewhere in night club circles, that she is a stripper.” Her signature number was the “Dance of the Bashful Bride.”
The cover was a $1 entertainment charge and a $2 minimum. Rinaldi and his Foggy Bottom Six still played, and the Star noted that Rinaldi sometimes took a night off to play the Mozart clarinet concerto with the symphony.
By May, Gibson “came by a movie offer and took off for Hollywood,” and the new headliner was Gloria Hudson. The Star noted she was Miss Harrisburg of 1962, Miss Sports Car of 1962, and before that, Miss Iron of 1960.
The switch to rock
By the mid-1960s, the Tramontes traded Dixieland for rock. The Telstars, a band out of Falls Church, replaced the old jazz combo as house band and played “the top tunes of the English bands.” Georgetown University students walked down the hill, and for a while the Bayou was the largest rock club in the city.
National acts started showing up in the 1970s, years before the Tramontes sold the club. Concert listings put Kiss there on March 25th, 1974, and Talking Heads on November 20th, 1977. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band played in 1978, and 1979 brought Dire Straits, Peter Tosh, the Police, Squeeze and Yellow Magic Orchestra.
The biggest story of the decade was Foreigner. In April 1977, the brand-new band played a free concert at American University and two shows at the Bayou. Those were the band’s first shows anywhere. As guitarist Mick Jones told the Washington Post that June, “We hadn’t ever played together in front of an audience.”
Then there’s the bouncer lore. A young Ian MacKaye, later of Minor Threat and Fugazi, used a fake ID to get into a show by the Damned, with Bad Brains opening, in June 1979. Mickey Mantle, meanwhile, was turned away at the door for refusing to put on a tie.
Legend also says a young Mr. T worked the door. Bobby Tramonte, Vincent’s son, doubts it and thinks patrons mistook longtime floor manager Wilbur Slaughter for him.
1980: Cellar Door takes over
In January 1980, the Tramontes sold the Bayou to Jack Boyle and Dave Williams of Cellar Door Productions for a reported $500,000. The concert company had grown out of Georgetown’s old Cellar Door club, and Boyle’s crews also had a hand in the Crazy Horse up on M Street.
Cellar Door brought connections to the major labels and national booking agents. When Williams died, the Post said he had “helped create one of the largest concert and entertainment operations in the United States.” Cellar Door was sold to SFX in 1998 for $106 million, a line that ends in today’s Live Nation.
The new calendar filled fast. The Cure played the Bayou on April 14th, 1980, on its first American tour. On July 23rd, 1980, Billy Joel recorded three songs there, “Summer, Highland Falls,” “Everybody Loves You Now” and “You’re My Home,” for his 1981 live album Songs in the Attic. The original album credits misspell the club as the “Bijou.”
U2’s second show in America
On December 7th, 1980, four young Irishmen named Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. played the Bayou, opening for the Slickee Boys, a homegrown DC punk band. It was U2’s second show in the United States, the night after their American debut at the Ritz in New York.
They played two sets that night, at 8 and 11 p.m., and about 200 people saw the first one. The next night U2 played Buffalo, the same night John Lennon was shot outside the Dakota in New York.
U2 came back on March 3rd, 1981, and played two more sets, again with the Slickee Boys on the bill.
The breaking-acts era
This is the stretch the Bayou is best remembered for. Bands on the verge of breaking nationally stopped there on East Coast tours, often with a local act opening, and the stage was close enough to touch.
R.E.M. played on June 21st, 1981, opening for Gang of Four, two weeks before their first single, “Radio Free Europe,” came out. A recording dated August 6th, 1981 captures Bruce Springsteen sitting in with his old bandmate Robbin Thompson. Duran Duran played that September.
In July 1983, Stevie Ray Vaughan made his DC debut at the Bayou before moving on to bigger rooms. Bon Jovi played in 1984, and Eddie Murphy even did a stand-up set.
Guns N’ Roses played on November 1st, 1987, three months after Appetite for Destruction came out. It was the last show of that leg before they went out on tour opening for Motley Crue. The Replacements had played that July.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers played four times, in November 1987 and in March and May 1988. The shows on May 1st and 2nd, 1988, were their last in DC with founding members Hillel Slovak and Jack Irons. Slovak died of a heroin overdose that June 25th. Basia played that June, on her first American tour.
On January 18th, 1990, Soundgarden and Faith No More both opened for the Canadian metal band Voivod. Pantera came through that September.
Not every star enjoyed the room. Robert Plant got thrown out during a scuffle at closing time at a Stray Cats show. Todd Rundgren hated playing there and reportedly asked, “Isn’t there ANOTHER place in DC to play?”
Phish, Dave Matthews and the jam-band years
Phish played the Bayou six times, from February 24th, 1990, to November 16th, 1991. On October 8th, 1990, John Popper of Blues Traveler sat in on harmonica for “Don’t Get Me Wrong.”
The rest of that jam-band wave came through too. Blues Traveler played five times, Widespread Panic six and the Spin Doctors five, all between 1990 and 1993.
The Dave Matthews Band played the Bayou 16 times between May 1992 and February 1994, roughly once a month. Tickets for the last one were $12.50, and 679 people came. Later that year the band put out Under the Table and Dreaming and went national.
The regulars
The Bayou was also home base for the regional bar-band circuit. By the setlist.fm count, the Maryland band KIX played there 46 times, more than anyone else. The Nighthawks, the DC blues band fronted by Mark Wenner, logged 35 shows, and the Richmond band Agents of Good Roots had 25.
The Ramones played the Bayou at least 21 times, nearly all of them between 1983 and 1991. The Radiators played 20 times, Warren Zevon 14 and Nils Lofgren 12.
Touring punk bands played the Bayou, but it wasn’t the hometown punk scene’s favorite room. For DC’s alternative and indie crowd, the home base was the 9:30 Club, which opened in 1980 at 930 F Street downtown. For touring bands on the way up, the Bayou ruled.
Eva Cassidy’s last song, September 1996
One Bayou night carries a different weight. On September 17th, 1996, friends held a tribute concert for the DC singer Eva Cassidy, and she came on stage to sing. It was her last public performance.
That summer, she had learned that the melanoma she’d had removed years earlier had spread. She sang “Red Top” with Chuck Brown, then closed with “What a Wonderful World.” She died on November 2nd, 1996, at 33.
Cassidy was barely known outside DC when she died. Her recordings, especially a live set from January 1996 at Blues Alley around the corner, made her a worldwide star in the years that followed.
Last call: 1998
The end came from real estate. On September 25th, 1998, the Washington Post reported that the Bayou was being sold to developers Millennium Partners and Eastbanc as part of a deal for the whole block:
Their $100 million plan for the site includes a 100-room luxury hotel, a 3,000-seat movie theater complex, retail shops and upscale apartments.
The club itself only leased its space. John Boyle, Jack Boyle’s son and the club’s owner by then, told CNN that the developers bought out that lease.
I have my own Bayou memory from that last summer. In 1998, a few weeks before Phish played Merriweather Post Pavilion in August, I went to see a Grateful Dead cover band at the Bayou. By New Year’s Day, the club was gone.
The final season still had a few surprises. On November 19th, 1998, the Rock Bottom Remainders, the band of authors including Stephen King, Dave Barry and Amy Tan, played a $75-a-ticket benefit there for D.C. SCORES.
On December 30th, 1998, the Washington Post called the Bayou “Washington’s longest-lived nightclub.” The next night, the band Everything, best known for “Hooch,” the song in Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy, played the last show. The setlist included “Who Do You Love” and a cover of Bob Marley’s “Stir It Up.”
The wrecking crews came in 1999. Early plans talked about keeping the building’s shell inside the new project, but in the end the whole thing came down.
What’s there now
Walk to 3135 K Street NW today and you’re standing under the same Whitehurst Freeway, but the room is gone. The Loews Georgetown, a 14-screen theater at 3111 K Street, opened on November 29th, 2002, and it has been an AMC since 2006. The Bayou’s old footprint is roughly under the theater’s loading dock.
There is a marker, though. The Georgetown Heritage Trail sign “Let the Good Times Roll,” at 33rd and Prospect Streets, names the Bayou among the neighborhood’s lost nightspots. The club also lives on in a 2013 Maryland Public Television documentary, The Bayou: D.C.’s Killer Joint.
The rest of the waterfront has changed even more. Arthur Cotton Moore’s Washington Harbour opened just east of the Bayou’s block in 1986, on the site of an abandoned cement plant. The House of Sweden opened in 2006 at 30th and K.
Georgetown Waterfront Park opened in stages between 2008 and 2011, on land the city once used to park trash trucks and store road salt. It had been held for an inner-loop freeway that was never built.
In one century, this block went from a working waterfront to a pirate club, a string of gambling joints, a Dixieland room, the loudest rock club in Washington, and finally a multiplex. Through everything since 1949, the freeway overhead is the one thing that stayed the same.
The Bayou is the club everyone our age claims to have seen a band at before they got big. A surprising number of them are telling the truth.
We dug this one up with help from AI and checked it against the original records below. Here’s how we use AI.
