Another glorious, chaotic, LOUD, amazing and downright homey H Street Festival is in the books and, as with every year, I find myself deeply grateful that I live within walking distance of one of the festivals that contains the distilled essence of the District of Columbia. And what is that essence? I will try to write a few thoughts but I hope that my photos can help tell the story better than I can.
At its core, the H Street Festival is a block party that got big. Now, block parties are not solely the domain of DC––as it turns out, these outdoor celebrations are not even a quintessentially American thing, although they very much are. A summary search of the history of block parties tells me that they started around World War I, as celebrations for men who were going off to war. Not unsurprisingly, people were not fond of unregulated joy ––even joy that would be swiftly followed by the ineffable pain of losing a husband, a child, a father, a brother–– thus confirming that joy-hating neighbors always walk amongst us. Britons love their street parties. The Polish have held this kind of outdoor celebration as a defiance of social strictures: partying as a form of protest, which is an incredibly punk way of harnessing joy.
But I digress. Block parties in their current iteration trace their lineage to New York City: Perhaps you know that Hip-Hop got its start from one famous party in 1973, which started in a rec room and got so big it spilled into the street. This brought communities together that were torn asunder by the construction of the Cross Bronx Freeway. Perhaps you’re familiar with the destruction of Black neighborhoods in the 1950s, erasing homes and a cohesive sense of identity. Perhaps you’re familiar with the destruction of Black neighborhoods in DC in the 1960s, and in the 1950s and even farther back.
Did you know that there was a Black neighborhood called Reno City near Fort Reno park? Did you know the neighborhood where Marvin Gaye was born, Simple City in Southwest, was razed for “urban revival”? Did you know that the apartment where his family relocated after that neighborhood was bulldozed was *also* destroyed in 2003 to make way for… a parking lot? Maybe you’ve heard of Swampoodle, the working-class Irish neighborhood that was swallowed by Union Station, the very place where most of its inhabitants worked, building it: An ouroboros of urban destruction and cultural annihilation.
Okay. Sorry to be a bummer, but basically a block party is the glue that holds communities together. Especially displaced communities. Especially communities that have been traumatized repeatedly in the name of progress. After all, the ouroboros eats itself but it also regenerates, bringing along joy, new sounds and new experiences.
A block party is the analog answer to our digital communities: A place where to see and be seen. A place where we realize that we all have a lot more in common than we think we do–– starting with appreciating good food and a space to be silly and to dance a little dance and get hugged by a stranger, or to witness greatness and beauty while you dig into some fragrant immigrant food that also reminds you that the world is a small place and that thinking that only some people belong in our communities is cutting ourselves off from joy. It’s like severing an artery because the arm feels foreign. It’s like razing row after row of homes to build a highway that separates instead of connecting and isolates instead of integrating.
It’s also a gathering of humanity. It’s a gathering of love and you could feel the love at Saturday’s H Street Festival, which started twenty-one years ago as a humble neighborhood gathering and now encompasses twelve city blocks of a street that has seen so much and keeps coming back, wild, untamed, unbending and refusing to be steamrolled in the name of progress. A street that has been done dirty over and over by its own government, ridiculed for its “stub” of a streetcar that was always meant to connect the whole city but was suffocated to death. A neighborhood written off as a strange place that doesn’t want to comply into being a sanitized area that’s been scrubbed clean of its identity.
Long live H Street, the happiest, most haphazard street in all of DC. Long live the block party. Long live the H Street Festival.
P.S. If you hated the Streetcar, a BRT is just a bus that takes over the middle lane whatever street it’s plopped down on. I’m betting you’ll be seeing less parking on H, for one.
P.P.S. Want to throw your own block party? Start here.
All photos by Maria Helena Carey, taken on September 19, 2026.