The H Street Corridor Guide is an independent editorial resource about H Street NE in Washington, DC — the corridor’s history, its architecture, its arts district, its music, and the street-festival tradition that has run along it for the better part of five decades.
What this site is not
This is the important part, so it goes near the top.
- This is not the official site of any festival. We are not the organisers of any event on H Street NE or anywhere else.
- We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any festival organiser, merchants’ association, main-street organisation, business improvement district, arts venue, city agency or event producer.
- We do not publish event information. No dates, no times, no closures, no line-ups. Those things change and only the organisers can state them authoritatively. Where a page discusses a specific past edition it is written in the past tense and clearly labelled as history.
- We do not sell, sponsor, recruit or solicit anything. There is no sponsorship page, no vendor application, no volunteer sign-up, no ticketing and no advertising. If you are looking to trade at, sponsor or volunteer for an event, you need the organisers, not us.
- We do not represent any business on the corridor. We deliberately do not name, rank or recommend individual businesses.
What it is
A reference guide, written to be useful to three sorts of reader: someone who has come across a mention of the H Street festival and wants to know what it is and where it came from; someone planning to walk the corridor and wanting to understand what they are looking at; and someone interested in how a badly damaged American commercial street was eventually rebuilt, which is a story H Street tells unusually clearly.
How it is sourced
The historical material draws on the corridor’s own documentary record — archived web material from the mid-2000s, published planning documents, and public institutional sources. Where a claim originates with an interested party, such as an organiser’s own attendance or economic-impact figure, we say so and attribute it as a claim rather than a fact.
Where possible we link to primary and institutional sources rather than to secondary coverage: the DC Office of Planning for the corridor’s planning record, the DC Public Library for local history, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution for the wider historical context, and the relevant District agencies for transport and permitting.
On naming people
This guide deliberately does not name the individuals who organised past editions of the corridor’s festival, or the volunteers and officials associated with them. Several are living, most were acting in a private or community capacity, and none of them chose to have their names carried on a site they have nothing to do with. Organisations are referred to in general terms for the same reason. Nothing is lost by it: the history is about a street and an institution, not about a cast list.
On businesses
We describe categories of business rather than naming individual ones. A corridor with this rate of turnover would make any list inaccurate within a year, and naming some businesses and not others is a form of recommendation we are not in a position to make. Where a specific venue is historically load-bearing — the restored cinema that gave the Atlas District its name, for instance — we describe it by what it is rather than by its trading name.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we would rather know. Historical claims about a neighbourhood are easy to get subtly wrong, particularly for a period as poorly documented as this corridor’s 1980s and 1990s, and we would sooner correct a page than defend it.
A closing note
H Street NE has been written about a great deal in the last fifteen years, and a large share of that writing treats the corridor as a case study in something — revitalisation, gentrification, transit-oriented development, whichever argument the writer arrived with. This guide tries to do something smaller and more durable: describe the street accurately, explain how it got here, and leave the argument to the reader. Start with the corridor and its festival tradition.