Walk into the Everlane store at 3259 M Street NW today, all blond wood and folded denim, and you are standing in what used to be the rowdiest room in Georgetown.
For about a quarter of a century, this three-story building was the Crazy Horse, a beer-and-boogie nightclub the neighborhood spent years trying to shut down.
It announced itself in December 1964 with a full-page horse joke, and it slipped away quietly at the end of the 1980s. In between, it was the bad boy of an otherwise genteel block.
Before the Music: Auto Row on M Street
The 3200 block of M Street was not always boutiques. In the early 1960s it was part of Georgetown’s car row.
A Washington Post used-car classified from June 24, 1961 lists Stohlman Chevrolet a few doors up at 3289 M Street NW, phone FE 3-6408, moving 1958 and 1959 Chevys to anyone with a small down payment and good credit. Showrooms, lots, and service bays filled the strip.
That is the Georgetown the Crazy Horse landed in. A working commercial block, not yet the shopping destination it would become.
“Move Over, Kelso”: The Crazy Horse Opens, December 1964
On December 20, 1964, the Post ran a tall, cheeky ad. The words “MOVE OVER, KELSO” stacked over a drawing of a crowned racehorse lounging in a chair.
Kelso was the most famous animal in America at the time, Horse of the Year five seasons running from 1960 through 1964. The new club was telling the champion to make room.
The joke landed close to home. Just weeks earlier, in November 1964, Kelso had won the Washington, D.C. International at Laurel Park in Maryland, setting an American turf record a short drive from the District. Naming a new Georgetown club after him was a local wink everyone would get.
Another winner’s on the way! THE CRAZY HORSE. Opening this week with a 400 sq. ft. dance floor, surfing movies, and plenty of joie de vivre. Come in and make some memories! 3259 M Street, N.W., Georgetown.
A dance floor and surfing movies. This was a 1964 discotheque built for the young crowd, opening right as M Street filled up with go-go bars and top-40 rooms.
By the late 1960s, clubs like the Keg and the French Quarter dotted M Street and Wisconsin Avenue, and bar bands cranked out one more version of “Proud Mary” every night.
The Bad Boy of Genteel Georgetown
Georgetown did not love its new neighbor. Almost from opening night, the Crazy Horse and the rest of the M Street strip drew the ire of the Georgetown Citizens Association, which fought the clubs’ liquor and dance licenses for years.
The Post tracked the fight in headline after headline. “Old Georgetown Is Full of Young Sprouts: Honkytonk Thunder” ran in July 1965. “M Street Night Spot Defended by Police” followed in December 1966, after a club summoned ten District policemen to a hearing to defend it against the citizens’ group.
The neighborhood kept losing. “Protest Fails, Go-Go Spot Relicensed” ran on December 30, 1967. Two weeks later, in January 1968, the residents took it to court under the headline “Georgetowners Sue On Liquor License.”
The clubs stayed. The reputation stuck.
Beer, Boogie, and 300 Cases a Week
By 1985 the place was running as J&B’s Crazy Horse, and the Post’s Tim Warren described it with real affection in a piece headlined “Still ‘Crazy’ After All These Years.”
It was a long, narrow club with low ceilings, the bandstand tucked behind the main bar on the left as you walked in. Beaten wooden floors and exposed beams gave it a rough homeyness under the Budweiser neon.
The dance floor was tiny and, in Warren’s words, “oppressively hot,” jammed so tight that the slightest move meant bumping into someone. A Saturday night there, he wrote, was the closest thing in the area to standing next to the track while a train roared past.
The bar went through more than 300 cases of beer a week. Wet T-shirt nights and hard rock had earned it a rough crowd, and by the mid-1980s management was working to clean up the image with a collared-shirt dress code, off-duty D.C. police, and eight bouncers on weekends.
The only other M Street room with live music nearby was the Paul Mall, two doors down at 3235 M Street, which pulled a more suit-and-tie crowd.
The Crazy Horse ran in the same Georgetown nightlife orbit as Jack Boyle and Sam L’Hommedieu Jr., the partners behind the Cellar Door and, later, the Bayou under the Whitehurst Freeway. For a stretch, one set of operators ran much of the soundtrack of Georgetown’s M Street.
Last Call: The Drinking Age and the End
What kept the Crazy Horse packed was simple. In the District, an 18-year-old could legally buy a beer.
On weekend nights the line ran down M Street, and a May 1985 Post story on the drinking age described the crowd spilling out in front of the Crazy Horse along with the rest of the strip.
That floor fell out fast. Under federal pressure from the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, the District raised its drinking age to 21, phased in over 1986 and 1987.
Overnight, the beer-and-boogie clubs lost the teenagers who filled them. The Crazy Horse faded out by the end of the decade, after roughly 25 years on M Street.
From Coach to Everlane: 3259 M Street Today
The building did what most of Georgetown’s old clubs did. It went retail.
For years 3259 M Street was the Georgetown flagship of Coach, the leather-goods brand. In August 2018 the Canadian outfitter Roots took over with a 3,550-square-foot “Roots Cabin” store, complete with a workshop for personalizing leather bags.
Roots pulled out of the U.S. market within a couple of years. In November 2021, the San Francisco brand Everlane signed a five-year lease with landlord EastBanc and opened its first Washington store here, spread over two floors with nine fitting rooms.
So the dance floor is gone and the beams are probably hidden behind clean white drywall. The loudest thing in the room now is the playlist over the speakers. But for 25 years, 3259 M Street was where Georgetown came to misbehave.