Washington in the 1980s served as the backdrop for the emergence of hardcore punk and the straight edge movement. Fed up with what they believed was a culture of excess that had incorporated itself into the punk subculture of the 1970s, a small group of teenage Washingtonians decided to take matters into their own hands. The goal? "Renouncing the unattainable rock & roll myth, making music relevant for real people."
The 1995 rumors were true. The famed 9:30 Club was gearing up to move from its downtown F Street location, to its new home at 815 V St. NW, formerly known as the WUST Radio Music Hall. While the club was known as a destination for alternative music in the 1980s, it had just as strong a reputation for being cramped and dirty. Owners Seth Hurwitz and Rich Heinecke, hoped to create a larger and cleaner space, while keeping all of the 9:30’s atmosphere and character. And on January 5, 1996, the reborn 9:30 Club opened with a concert from the Smashing Pumpkins.
Nirvana's frenetic and sweaty performance at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. on Oct. 2, 1991 occurred just a few weeks before they exploded into megastardom.
When the Atlantic building at 930 F Street NW was completed in 1888, it was on the cutting edge. Designed by James Hill Green, the supervising architect of the U.S. Treasury Department, its eight stories made it the biggest commercial structure in the District and one of the first to feature a passenger elevator. Inside, the Atlantic Building had two big assembly rooms, which made it the location of many important public meetings, including one in 1889 at which the National Zoo was founded. In 1890, the top floor served as the headquarters for President Benjamin Harrison's inaugural committee. The Washington Post hailed it as a "handsome" building.
In the decades that followed, the Atlantic — one of the last tall structures in the city to be built with only masonry walls, rather than a steel inner frame — gradually was overshadowed by newer, flashier modern buildings, and it became a largely-forgotten bit of the District's architectural history. That is, until the 1980s, when the building achieved a different sort of notoriety as the epicenter of the District's alternative music scene.
