DC Music Lovers by Metro

Eighteen years before Harlem's Apollo launched its famous amateur night, the Howard was already running one — this is where the format was born, not uptown Manhattan. Duke Ellington stepped onto this stage as a teenager, and decades later they put him back out front: there's a bronze of him out here, seated at a piano, the bench deliberately left half-empty so you can sit down beside him. Go ahead. Nobody will stop you. Inside, the restored lobby holds photographs of nearly everyone — Ella, Armstrong, Nat King Cole, a young James Brown, Marvin Gaye when he still lived a few blocks away. In its prime this place ran six nights a week to 1,500 people who dressed like the music demanded something of them, because it did. The whole Shaw district around you once held more Black-owned businesses per square mile than anywhere in America. It went dark in 1970, burned, rotted, and came back in 2012. One tip: the box office posts show tickets, but the gospel brunch on Sundays sells out first and gets you inside without a concert.