Bygone DC

“Scan all the annals of Washington base ball as you will – go back to the very inception of the national game – there will be found no day so altogether glorious no paean of victory changed by rooters and fanatics half so sweet as that witnessed yesterday in honor of the opening of the season on 1910.” So read the Washington Post the morning after the Washington Nationals’ 3-0 season-opening victory over the Philadelphia Athletics.

The account may have been a bit rhetorical, but D.C. had reason to be excited, beyond the normal good cheer of baseball’s opening day and the happy result of the game. On April 14, 1910, the city had made history by inaugurating a now-famous tradition: the Presidential first pitch.

In June 1960, a biracial contingent of college students from the Non‑Violent Action Group staged sit‑ins at Arlington lunch counters—facing taunts, arrests, and even a counter‑demonstration by American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell. Their persistence forced local stores to integrate within days and marked a major victory in the local civil rights movement.

Elvis Presley made headlines when he showed up at the White House unannounced and offered his services to President Nixon to fight the war on drugs in 1970. It was an odd event, which led to an even odder photo. But the Elvis-Nixon meeting was memorable for another reason: It was one of only four public appearances that Elvis made in the Washington, D.C. area.

After their first American concert at the Washington Coliseum on February 11, 1964, the Beatles rushed to a British Embassy charity ball. There, they found chaos — snatched hair, desperate autograph seekers, and a night they would never forget.

On February 11, 1964 the Beatles played their first U.S. concert at the Washington Coliseum to a screaming crowd of 8,000. Cavernous noise, jellied beans and a shaky sound system turned a historic debut into organized chaos — and changed Rock 'n' Roll forever.

It's hard to imagine that anyone would think the Beatles might not be a big enough concert draw. But when Harry G. Lynn, owner of the old Washington Coliseum at 3rd and M streets NE, was approached by local radio station WWDC in late 1963 about the possibility of booking the then-nascent British pop music sensations for their debut U.S. concert on Feb. 11, 1964,  he wasn't convinced that he would be able to sell the 8,000-plus tickets that it would take to fill his arena.

The American Masters documentary "Jimi Hendrix: Hear My Train A Comin," includes never-before-aired film footage of a live Hendrix performance at the 1968 Miami Pop Festival, as well as a poignant clip of his final performance in Germany in September 1970, just 12 days before his death at age 27. Unlike the Miami show, rock music archivists have yet to discover any film record of the legendary guitarist's three performances in the Washington, D.C. area in 1967 and 1968, but those shows have become the stuff of local legend.

From Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington to the Beatles’ riotous 1964 U.S. debut—when fans pelted the band with jellybeans—the Uline Arena hosted decades of musical milestones.

On July 23, 1942, Washingtonians packed Griffith Stadium to the gills for a special “Battle of Music” between African American jazz legend Louis Armstrong and white saxophonist Charlie Barnet. In segregated Washington of the 1940s, such an organized interracial competition was a big event and few people — especially in the black community that surrounded the stadium — wanted to miss the “musical fisticuffs.”