Barracks Row Main Street

This guide to Barracks Row Main Street in Washington, D.C. opens with a thirteen-year-old John Philip Sousa caught trying to run off with a traveling circus band in 1868, and his father marching him straight into the Marine Barracks instead. It follows the neighborhood built around guarding the Navy Yard and the Marines, its oyster houses and markets, and the seven years young Sousa spent drilling and learning instruments on this stretch of Eighth Street. Listen for how a freeway and later unrest reshaped the corridor his father once dragged him down.