America's most decorated nightclub started with 199 legal capacity and a rat problem. The 9:30 Club opened on 31 May 1980 in the Atlantic Building at 930 F Street NW - name and opening hour both taken from the address - and spent fifteen years breaking acts like Nirvana, R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fugazi, Bad Brains and Public Enemy in a cramped, oddly shaped room as famous for its stench as its bookings. In January 1996 owners Seth Hurwitz and Rich Heinecke moved the operation to the former.....

The theatre that pioneered American regional drama built itself a glass crown on the Potomac. Arena Stage, founded in 1950 by Zelda Fichandler as one of the nation's first resident theatres - the first to transfer a production to Broadway, the first integrated theatre in Washington, and the launching pad for The Great White Hope - anchors the Southwest Waterfront at 1101 6th Street SW inside the Mead Center for American Theater, the 135-million-dollar Bing Thom-designed complex that opened in Oc.....

Washington's indie rock headquarters was bankrolled in part by a Nirvana drummer. The Black Cat opened on 11 September 1993 at 1831 14th Street NW, founded by former Gray Matter drummer Dante Ferrando with a group of mostly musician investors that famously included D.C. native Dave Grohl. Named after a Greenwich Village joint Ferrando's great-grandfather ran in the 1920s, the 400-capacity room was built to fill the void left by the shuttered d.c. space and to give the 9:30 Club a neighbour rathe.....

America's oldest continuing jazz supper club hides down a Georgetown alley. Blues Alley opened in 1965 in an eighteenth-century red brick carriage house off Wisconsin Avenue below M Street in Washington, founded by clarinetist Tommy Gwaltney as a room where concert-hall artists could play the way the 1920s and 30s clubs heard them - close, unamplified by distance, over dinner. The 124-seat room earned the nickname "the house that Dizzy built" for Dizzy Gillespie's decades of patronage, and the r.....

At the heart of downtown Washington, Capital One Arena is the city's premier indoor sports and entertainment venue, anchoring the bustling Penn Quarter and Chinatown district. Opened in 1997, the arena was a catalyst for the regeneration of a once-neglected part of the capital, drawing crowds back downtown and spurring a wave of new restaurants, shops and nightlife around it. The arena holds around twenty thousand spectators and is home to a remarkable concentration of professional teams, inclu.....

In the heart of Washington at the eastern end of the National Mall, Capitol Hill is the historic neighbourhood surrounding the United States Capitol building and one of the most heavily visited destinations in the federal capital district. The neighbourhood takes its name from the gently sloping rise on which the iconic Capitol building stands, with the rise itself named by the urban planner Pierre Charles L'Enfant in his original 1791 master plan for the new federal city in homage to the Capito.....

The smallest stadium in Division I football took twenty-six years and a fifty-million-dollar gift to finish. Cooper Field sits in the heart of the Georgetown University campus in Washington, DC, bordered by W Road NW above the Potomac, and began life in 1994 as Harbin Field, a modest grass soccer ground. When safety concerns closed the old Kehoe Field in 2002, Hoyas football moved in, and a 22-million-dollar conversion designed by Hughes Group Architects broke ground in April 2005 under the plac.....

The cornerstone was laid with the same trowel George Washington used at the Capitol in 1793, and the hall it anchors became both Washington's largest concert stage and the backdrop to one of the defining civil-rights stories in American music. DAR Constitution Hall at 1776 D Street NW - a street number no one believes is a coincidence - was built by the Daughters of the American Revolution to house their annual convention after delegations outgrew Memorial Continental Hall. Ground broke on 22 Ju.....

A Cordon Bleu-trained chef from Corsica opened a basement tavern here in 1957, and the room he dug out went on to hold what was often cited as the largest beer list on earth. The DC Comedy Loft and Bier Baron Tavern at 1523 22nd Street NW, in the Baron Hotel building near Dupont Circle, began as the Brickskeller - Felix Coja's clever twist on rathskeller, the German word for a below-street tavern - opened with his wife Marie in the hotel they ran as the Marifex. The building itself dates to 1912.....

The opening bill in July 1992 read Ellen DeGeneres, Dave Chappelle and Brian Regan - three careers in one night, on a stage that has been Washington's comedy headquarters ever since. The DC Improv at 1140 Connecticut Avenue NW, two blocks from Farragut North station, was founded by the late Mark Anderson, a club owner with rooms in California, Arizona and Texas who judged the capital badly served by part-time comedy venues. He converted the former Christini's restaurant space - once a disco - in.....