Origins of H Street – A festival at the crossroads of culture and change

By:  Nailah Williams

Every September, twelve blocks of H Street corridor are shut down to cars and open to everything else — performances and DJ booths, fry bread and fashion racks, kids breakdancing next to grandmothers selling incense. It’s easy to mistake it for just a party. But this stretch of Northeast Washington was once a stretch of boarded-up storefronts, gutted by the 1968 riots for the better part of three decades. The festival that now draws 160,000 people a year didn’t start as a celebration, it started as a refusal to let the block disappear.

What began as a handful of neighbors and shop owners organizing under the Community-Business Action Coalition in the wake of the riots has grown into one of D.C.’s largest single-day festivals, expanding from a 500-person block party into a twelve-block, fifteen-stage production, now draws 160,000 people each year. The H Street festival was created by seeing a need and filling it. Anwar Saleem is a native Washingtonian, grew up at 8th and H Street NE saw that need and made a plan that 21 years later is still impacting the H street community. The motivation to transform the corridor began when Saleem witnessed the aftermath of the 1968 riots as a child. 

Yet 50 years later, 75% building vacancy and fire damage are still visible inr a corridor  people avoided unless they “knew somebody.” So Saleem turned to community meetings, then the H Street Community Development Corporation, then the district government pushing for an actual revitalization plan. Anwar became Executive Director of H Street and Main Street Inc. after creating the H Street festival to bring more awareness and advocate for African American businesses and City services for H street years after the riots. 

After working with some government officials like Anthony Williams and Marrion Barry, there was a turning point for H street. Then the block party started to expand and now the festival is the entire H street corridor.  When talking with Anwar Saleem, he expressed how H street became the Mecca for African Americans to really shop. Because for him and other community members say the festival is the experience of growing up in DC.

“My experience in fashion, my experience dealing with hair, my experience in dance, my experience in so many different things and music and all. And that’s why people say the H Street Festival is authentically DC., Saleem explained. 

The different experiences also make H street festival an enjoyable atmosphere for both families, couples and kids of all ages. From the food to the vendors to music and the creative performances, it captives the culture and community of H Street and DC. The festival’s pull runs deeper than any single stage or vendor row. Alona Wartofsky, a first time attendee sees the same instinct at work that drives D.C.’s home-grown go-go scene. “H Street Festival is all about the community, and go-go is all about the community, and both of them really show the power of community in Washington,” she said.  

That same thread runs through Eddie Van’s connection to the corridor. Van’s family has been part of H Street’s business row since 1985, when his father and uncle launched Universal Madness, believed to be D.C.’s first Black-owned streetwear brand. For Van, the festival is where that legacy meets the present: “It’s beautiful to see we connected with the people through the music, and the culture just is dope.”

That sense of connection extends from the vendors and legacy business owners to the crowd itself. Makaylen Smith, DC resident said she’s drawn to how openly people show up as themselves. “So, you can tell a lot of people are definitely branding themselves to bring themselves out here and show up. I just like that everybody comes out and makes a community out of this,” she said. Nearly six decades after the riots that first devastated the corridor, and more than two decades after Saleem’s first 500-person block party, the H Street Festival has become exactly what he set out to build: proof that a neighborhood once left for dead can still call its own people home.