Greater U Street Neighborhood Visitor Center

About this audio guide

This guide to the Greater U Street Neighborhood Visitor Center in Washington, D.C. starts with a shattered drugstore window on the night Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968, and the fires that followed on the street where you're standing. It digs into conflicting official tallies of the damage, and into what this block was before that night: Black Broadway, a self-made city within a city built because segregation shut its residents out everywhere else, where Duke Ellington learned piano a few blocks away. Ben's Chili Bowl, just downstairs, is part of that same story.