Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 00:52:00

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 June 1928, Mrs Calvin Coolidge laid the cornerstone that October, and Mrs Herbert Hoover spoke at the dedication on 19 April 1929. Architect John Russell Pope, who would later design the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art, gave the neoclassical building an auditorium seating 3,702 - 2,208 in the tiers, 1,234 on the orchestra floor and 52 five-seat boxes including a Presidential box - still the largest auditorium in the city, hosting more than half a million patrons a year a block from the White House grounds. Its most consequential moment was a concert that never happened. In 1939 the DAR, whose hall then operated under a white-artists-only policy, denied the great contralto Marian Anderson a booking; Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership in protest, and Anderson instead sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday before 75,000 people and a radio audience of millions - a landmark in the long civil-rights struggle. The DAR invited Anderson to sing a war-relief benefit at the hall in January 1943, ended the restrictive policy in 1953, and in 1964 Anderson chose Constitution Hall to launch her farewell tour. The first musical event played on 2 November 1929, and virtually every kind of act has followed: presidents and symphonies, jazz and comedy, rock, R and B and country tours, graduations and galas. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985 and still belongs to the DAR, whose headquarters complex - including its museum and genealogical library - fills the whole block. For concertgoers it offers something rare in a capital of purpose-built arenas: a 1929 hall with boxes and tiers wrapping the stage, across the street from the Ellipse, where the history in the room is often as heavy as the headliner.