About this page. This URL belonged to the promotional site for the 2007 edition of the H Street street festival, and it is still cited as a source in reference works. The original page is long gone. What follows is an independent retrospective account of that edition, written from the archived record. Everything on this page is history. Nothing here is an announcement, and this site has no connection to the event, its organisers or its successors.
What the 2007 edition was
The autumn 2007 festival on H Street NE was billed as a music festival and bazaar. It was scheduled for a Saturday in mid-September, ran from midday until early evening, and occupied the roadway across the corridor’s central retail blocks. Two independent event planners had been engaged to produce it on behalf of the corridor’s main-street organisation, and the promotional site they built — the site this URL belonged to — was the first time the festival had a dedicated web presence of its own.
By the standards of the corridor’s later editions it was a small event. By the standards of H Street in 2007 it was ambitious. The organisers described the plan in some detail: multiple music stages carrying a deliberately wide range of programming, from rock through rhythm and blues; a DJ booth; and two separate performing-arts stages given over to theatre, dance, poetry and the spoken word. The bazaar element — craft and merchandise vendors alongside food — was carried in the event’s name, which was itself a change from earlier years.
Why it was framed around the arts
The 2007 programme was not arts-heavy by accident. The eastern end of the corridor had recently been designated an arts and entertainment district, and the festival was explicitly repositioned to draw attention to it. A shuttered 1930s cinema on the eastern blocks was in the final stage of a long restoration into a performing-arts centre with resident theatre companies; a small playhouse a few doors along had been running well-received productions for several years; and an independent arts venue on the same stretch was staging irregular events of its own.
The organisers’ stated purpose was to put the visual and performing arts, neighbourhood history, and — in their phrase — the art of ideas, music, design and food at the foundation of the day. In practice that meant the festival spent 2007 arguing that the corridor had become an arts destination slightly before most of the city had noticed. Our page on the Atlas District covers how that identity developed.
The claims made for the 2006 edition
Much of the surviving 2007 material is actually about the year before, because the organisers used the 2006 edition as their pitch. Their recap claimed the 2006 festival drew over six and a half thousand people; that it passed without incident according to the city’s police department; that it attracted both corporate and neighbourhood sponsorship; that it drew formal recognition from the mayor’s office and from members of the DC Council; and that at least one restaurant on the festival footprint reported a thirty per cent increase in business on the day.
These are the organisers’ own figures, published to attract sponsors, and they should be read as such. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel: the event was growing, it was being taken seriously by the city, and the corridor’s merchants were beginning to treat it as a commercial event rather than a community obligation. Set against recent editions, which are counted in the hundreds of thousands, the 2006 and 2007 numbers are a useful measure of how early in the corridor’s recovery this moment was.
The neighbourhood the 2007 site described
The promotional copy is worth reading as a period document. It listed the corridor’s selling points as diversity, culture, history, architecture, transportation, convenience, beauty and community — which is a fairly standard placemaking list, except that in 2007 several of those items were still aspirations. It described the festival as one component of a wider revitalisation programme covering economic development, streetscape improvements, education and job opportunities. And, in a detail that dates it precisely, it made a point of the neighbourhood’s online presence and encouraged visitors to join its blog communities.
That last item was not padding. The H Street corridor in the mid-2000s had an unusually strong neighbourhood blog culture, and those blogs — rather than any official channel — are the reason a good deal of the corridor’s recent history is documented at all. They are also, incidentally, the reason this domain accumulated links.
What the record does and does not show
The 2007 site went stale after that September and was never updated again. The festival continued without it, under changing stewardship, and grew by more than an order of magnitude. So the archived pages capture a genuine hinge point: the last edition organised before the corridor’s transformation became obvious to outsiders, and the first one with a website.
One curiosity, for the record. Two pages of the 2007 site still carried the page title of an entirely different and much larger American music festival, and linked out to it — the template had plainly been copied and never fully rewritten. It is a small thing, but it says something honest about the resources a neighbourhood festival had to work with at the time.
Further reading
For the longer arc, see a history of the H Street festival and 1968 and the corridor’s long rebuilding. For the street as it stands, see walking the H Street corridor. Documentary sources on the neighbourhood are held by the DC Public Library, and the District’s planning history for the corridor is available through the DC Office of Planning.