Existing comment:
Tour of Duty
Barracks Row Heritage Trail
3 Commerce and Community
The home/music studio of John Esputa, Jr., once occupied the site of 511 Eighth Street (Shakespeare Theatre's rehearsal hall.) Among Esputa's students in 1861 was eight-year-old John Philip Sousa, whose irresistible marches made him one of America's first musical superstars.
The street's small gable-roofed buildings probably pre-date Sousa's era, while the larger buildings were erected during a post-Civil War building boom. In 1877 Adam DeMoll contributed the two- story brick building on the northeast corner of Eighth and E. Here he, and later his son Theodore, operated a drug store. The family lived upstairs.
At 525 Eighth Street is one of a string of pubs built by Albert Carry and designed by Clement Didden. Carry came to Washington from Germany in 1887, helped found the National Capital Bank of Washington (1889), and built the National Capital Brewing Company (1890). When Prohibition became law in 1917, the brewery became an ice cream factory. Eventually Carry sold it to concentrate on real estate and banking. Carry's daughter Marie married Didden's son George, uniting the two entrepreneurial families.
The Harmony Lodge of the International Order of Odd Fellows, dedicated to fraternity and good works, built the street's grandest structure here at 516 Eighth in 1878. The lodge held its meetings upstairs until around 1900, when it merged with a lodge downtown. The elegant Second Empire style building passed through many hands until 1997, when the Shakespeare Theatre purchased the dilapidated building and restored it for office space. |