The Howard Theatre

This guide to the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C. opens in 2009, when architects arrived at a squat, stucco-patched shell and had to figure out what remained of the grand 1910 theatre, the nation's first major playhouse built for Black performers, hidden beneath decades of renovations. It follows how the restoration team pulled old photographs from local archives and scraped test patches into the plaster to trace the ghost lines of cornices and windows underneath. You'll also hear about Duke Ellington, the Washington native who first played this stage in 1931.