Washington, DC neighborhoods and buildings that aren’t there anymore. Murder Bay, the old Center Market, brownstones erased for federal office blocks.
The Big Hunt opened in 1992 inside a 1928 storefront at 1345 Connecticut Avenue NW and closed for good in 2020. Inside Dupont Circle’s three-story dive bar with the safari kitsch, the hidden patio, and the Hell’s Kitchen basement.
Before Blockbuster, the DC area had Erol’s Video Club. Turkish immigrant Erol Onaran arrived in 1960 with $16, opened a Georgetown TV shop in 1963, started renting tapes in 1980, and built the largest privately owned video chain in America before selling to Blockbuster for $40 million in 1990.
For most of the 1990s, Arlington was the favorite to land the Montreal Expos. There was an HKS rendering on the Potomac, a governor in support, and three candidate sites in Pentagon City. Then in eighteen months it all collapsed, and the rejected block eventually became Amazon HQ2.
The Hechinger hardware empire began in 1911 as a Southwest DC wrecking crew. The story of Sidney Hechinger, the navy-blue H, and the bankruptcy that ended it in 1999.
Forty-five years of Georgetown’s loudest room. The Bayou opened in 1953, closed in 1998, and put U2, Dave Matthews, and a whole DC scene through its doors.
Inside the 1888 Atlantic Building at 930 F Street: the cast-iron columns Bad Brains leaned against and the eighth floor that founded the National Zoo.
In 1966 a teenager from Chevy Chase reached through the window of a Rolling Stones equipment van behind Washington Coliseum and walked off with Brian Jones’s custom electric dulcimer. The recovery involved a letter to the Evening Star, a Bentley from the British Embassy, and a follow-up Beatles caper. The same barrel-vaulted shed had hosted the Beatles’ first American concert two years earlier.
How a German-immigrant friend of Karl Marx designed the country’s largest market hall on Pennsylvania Avenue in 1872, why it ran for 59 years with 666 stalls and a refrigeration plant, and why the federal government tore it down in 1931 to build the National Archives.
A rough, all-Irish neighborhood called Swampoodle once stood where Union Station is now. The railroad cleared it, and DC forgot.
