Columbia Heights

This guide to Columbia Heights in Washington, D.C. opens on the 1968 riots that gutted the neighborhood's busiest shopping strip after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, when insurers and banks abandoned the block for good. It follows Tony Cibel, who bought Barrel House Liquors the next year and kept the register open through decades when his shop was nearly the only business left standing, including one afternoon when armed robbers walked in. Stand now among the shopfronts and crowds that fill the block Cibel once kept alone.