"My late grandfather used to come into this place, so there's a lot of history and connection for me," Eamoni Collier said this June, standing in the same brick-walled room on T Street where her grandfather once played saxophone decades before she poured her first beer there.
That grandfather, Joe Tate, worked the Howard Theatre's house band in the 1960s, played with The Blendells, and helped shape the early sound of the Soul Searchers while Chuck Brown was inventing go-go a few blocks away. Collier didn't inherit the building from him. She inherited it, in a sense, from Right Proper Brewing Company, the brewpub that occupied 624 T Street NW for more than twelve years before closing its doors on March 1. What happened between those two facts is the most useful story Shaw has produced this year, and it isn't really about beer.
The Room on T Street Didn't Sit Empty
Right Proper's co-founders, Leah and Thor Cheston, opened the brewpub in December 2013 and built it into one of Shaw's anchor businesses, a place locals point to when they explain what happened to the neighborhood after the 1968 riots hollowed it out. When the Chestons announced the Shaw location would close, they made one detail public immediately: the brewing equipment was staying put.
That detail mattered because Eamoni Collier needed it. Her brewery, Urban Garden Brewing, had spent months trying to open near the Fort Totten Metro station. In December 2025, that plan collapsed. Collier cited design delays, funding trouble, and what she called the broader economic climate in a statement announcing the lease had fallen through. Two months later, keys changed hands on T Street. Urban Garden soft-opened in the former Right Proper space in late May and held its grand opening on June 19, Juneteenth, with a ribbon cutting and live go-go music.
The building itself has its own layered history. It once served as a neighborhood pool house before it was a brewpub, and now it holds a listening lounge dedicated to Collier's grandfather, a vinyl player stocked with his old records, and a shelf of African American history books alongside furniture Collier describes as her godmother's and grandmother's. The equipment inside is the same. Almost everything poured out of it is not.
| Right Proper Brewing Co. | Urban Garden Brewing | |
|---|---|---|
| Opened | December 2013 | Soft opened May 2026; grand opening June 19, 2026 |
| Signature style | Farmhouse ales, saisons, Belgian-influenced brews | Floral craft beers inspired by ancient Egyptian brewing practices |
| Notable pours | Belgian-style tripels and sours | Chamolite Garden Ale (chamomile and honey), Roses Aren't Dead (rose petals), Lotus Flower Bomb (lavender and rose IPA) |
| Food | Locavore small plates and cheese pairings | Smash burgers, wings by the pound, potato wedges, funnel cake with strawberry compote |
| Ownership | Founded by Leah and Thor Cheston | DC's first Black-woman-owned brewery, founded by Eamoni Collier |
The Chestons haven't left the neighborhood's food scene either. They're opening a Right Proper restaurant elsewhere in the city, and a long-delayed Eckington location is one they still hope to open this summer.
The Neighborhood's Discovery Engine Is Still Running
This kind of handoff isn't an isolated event on one block. It's close to how Shaw Main Streets, the nonprofit that has overseen the corridor since 2003, designed its whole marketing calendar around.
On April 30, the organization held its annual Eat.Drink.Shaw showcase at the Howard Theatre, drawing roughly 300 people for two and a half hours of tastings from more than twenty restaurants and bars. The lineup read like a cross-section of the neighborhood's current character: 801 Restaurant & Bar, All Purpose Shaw, Ambar Shaw, Baan Mae, Chercher Ethiopian Restaurant, Dolci Gelati, Fossette Focacceria, Gogi Yogi, Minya's Pizza, Nina May, Shaw's Tavern, Silk Lounge, SOST, and Unconventional Diner all poured alongside two names that weren't open yet: Urban Garden Brewing and a Pho Viet location still under construction.
Executive Director Alexander Padro used the event to make a point about how the showcase actually functions for residents. One attendee told him she discovered Unconventional Diner at a previous year's Eat.Drink.Shaw and has eaten there at least twenty times since. Padro also shared a figure that reframes how to read all this turnover: based on mobile phone usage data, Shaw was the most-visited Main Street corridor in the District in 2025, and it ranked second most-visited Main Street in the entire country, with an estimated 5.3 million visitors for the year.
A neighborhood losing its identity does not post numbers like that. A neighborhood mid-handoff, where businesses are trading owners rather than trading occupancy for vacancy, can.
Two Kinds of Quiet Change
Not every handoff looks like a Juneteenth grand opening with a ribbon cutting. Some are barely visible from the sidewalk.
Prescription Chicken spent six years running a small storefront kitchen in Shaw before announcing in early June that it had relocated to Ivy City, at 2000 5th Street NE. Because the business was already built around delivery through Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub, the move changes almost nothing for the customer experience. Anyone who orders soup still gets the same matzah balls and Old Bay chicken salad sliders. What changes is that Shaw no longer has that kiosk on its blocks, even though nothing about daily routines for regulars actually shifted.
Compare that to what's happening a few blocks away at 11th and Rhode Island. News broke in mid-June that a Pho Viet location is coming to 1521 11th Street NW, in the former Roasted Boon space, right next door to an incoming Mexican concept called La Loca. The name will be a familiar one to regulars of the well-regarded Pho Viet on 14th Street in Columbia Heights, and either way, a storefront that would otherwise have sat empty is filling instead.
Read together, these two moves say something a simple restaurant roundup wouldn't catch. Shaw's food scene is absorbing closures and departures without producing empty storefronts, because the businesses leaving are being replaced by businesses moving in, sometimes literally next door.
What's Already on the Calendar
Residents who want to see the pattern in person don't have to wait long. Shaw Main Streets already held its Shaw Open House in June, and Art All Night Shaw returns in September, part of a citywide arts festival that drew an estimated 250,000 people last year across all its neighborhoods.
There's also a newer, quieter addition to how the neighborhood presents its own history. On April 16, DC Emancipation Day, Shaw Main Streets launched 51 Steps of Freedom, an augmented-reality walking trail that threads storytelling through landmarks across greater Shaw, including the African American Civil War Memorial Museum, the Carter G. Woodson Home, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters office building, the Howard Theatre, Lee's Flower Shop, the Addison Scurlock Studio, Chuck Brown Way, and the site of the former Bohemian Caverns nightclub. It's a trail built for people who already live near these corners and have walked past them without knowing what they're passing.
That's really the throughline of everything on T Street, 11th Street, and Rhode Island Avenue this year. The businesses changing hands in Shaw aren't disappearing into vacancy. They're moving into each other's spaces, sometimes taking the equipment with them, sometimes taking the name, and often carrying forward a piece of the neighborhood's own history along with the lease.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property you own in Shaw, or you're curious how a neighborhood with this kind of foot traffic and turnover translates into value, The Martin & Jeff Group is glad to talk it through. Contact us for a confidential consultation about your home or search.
