Blagden Alley Northwest

This guide to Blagden Alley in Washington's Shaw neighborhood traces a hidden corner with two very different lives: the 1880s stables and cramped rowhouses where freed Black families crowded in near the home of Senator Blanche Bruce, and the alley's reputation a century later as a place police avoided after dark. You'll hear about the blind, H-shaped layout that let trouble hide, and about the reformers, Eleanor Roosevelt among them, who fought to condemn alley housing altogether. Listen for how a name from a nineteenth-century lumber merchant still marks the spot.