The Big Chair still marks the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and V Street SE the way it has since 1959, a nineteen-foot mahogany-look landmark that started life as a furniture store's advertisement and outlasted the store by decades. Two blocks north, Honfleur Gallery spent the back half of September counting down to the last week of a graffiti retrospective before the show closed for good. A couple weeks before that, the corridor had its other big draw, a single night in September when the whole stretch of Good Hope Road and MLK Jr. Avenue turned into an open-air art walk. Both already happened, both were dated, and neither is scheduled to repeat next weekend.
Anacostia's fall cultural calendar featured major offerings from long-running institutions on specific dates, alongside the river and activities organized around it.
Art All Night on September 11
Art All Night returned to Historic Anacostia on September 11 under the theme "Good Trouble. Louder!," organized by the Anacostia Business Improvement District. The BID describes its broader work as pairing economic development with arts, culture, and creative placemaking along the neighborhood's commercial corridors, and Art All Night is the clearest single expression of that mission: one evening, one date, the whole corridor programmed at once rather than a rotating monthly series.
Beyond Art All Night, the BID's other named initiatives are ongoing institutional efforts rather than weekly public events: the Small Business Preservation Program, the Ward 8 Commemorative Work Project, and the ASLA Legacy Project.
A Gallery That's Been Here Since 2007, Closing A Show After Six Weeks
Honfleur Gallery, at 1241 Marion Barry Avenue SE, has been part of the neighborhood since it opened in January 2007 as a project of ARCH Development Corporation, the Ward 8 nonprofit that has spent close to two decades using the arts as a tool for local revitalization. Its most recent exhibition, OUT OF CHAOS, traced the careers of artists whose work began in graffiti and street art before moving into more traditional gallery spaces. It opened August 15 and closed September 26, following a free opening reception on August 22.
The show's subject doubled as a fitting parallel for the building it's in. Honfleur exists because a nonprofit decided, in 2007, that Ward 8 needed formal gallery space that hadn't existed before. OUT OF CHAOS was about art that started informally and later found its way into exactly that kind of formal room. Both reflect infrastructure built deliberately. Now that the show has closed, whatever comes next at Honfleur hasn't been announced publicly yet.
The Corridor's Cultural And Commercial Milestones
Honfleur isn't the only arts anchor here. A few blocks away, the Anacostia Arts Center opened in 2013 as a shared community space housing the Black Box Theater, Vivid Solutions Gallery, and rotating boutique and pop-up shops. Like Honfleur, it was a deliberate community project.
A milestone outside the arts world was Big Chair Coffee 'N Grill, on MLK Jr. Avenue, which opened as what the Washington City Paper reported was Ward 7 and 8's first stand-alone, sit-down coffee shop that anyone could remember. Owner Ayehubizu Yimenu had paid rent on the storefront for two and a half years before opening, after years working as a school nurse further up the same avenue. The shop's early customer base leaned on the institutional offices nearby, the DC Taxicab Commission, the Family Court branch of DC Superior Court, and the Department of Housing and Community Development, all clustered close enough to provide steady daytime foot traffic before the coffee shop had built any evening or weekend following of its own.
Together, these examples highlight three distinct arts and commercial milestones along the corridor: a gallery, a community arts center, and a coffee shop. Each brought a different offering to Anacostia.
The One Thing That Doesn't Wait For A Date
Not everything in the neighborhood runs on this concentrated, dated rhythm. The Anacostia Community Boathouse, a grassroots effort now approaching a quarter century, sits along the river and keeps its rowing and paddling programs running as an ongoing season rather than a one-night event. It's organized as a coalition of member groups, including college and university crew teams, high school crews, and local rowing clubs, and first practice sessions are free for newcomers who want to try it without committing to membership. Unlike Art All Night or a gallery show with a closing date, the boathouse doesn't require checking a calendar. It's simply open through the fall rowing season, the same way it's been open through most of the last two decades, offering a version of neighborhood access to the water that predates and outlasts any single cultural event on the calendar.
Anacostia's September calendar included two dated offerings: Art All Night on September 11 and the final week before OUT OF CHAOS closed at Honfleur on September 26. The Anacostia Community Boathouse's rowing and paddling programs, meanwhile, run as an ongoing season.
The dated events and the ongoing river programs reflect different rhythms in Anacostia, a contrast visible from the same corner where the Big Chair has stood since 1959.
If you're already part of this stretch of MLK Jr. Avenue and want to talk through what else is changing along it, DCARealtors has been paying attention to this corridor for a long time and is glad to keep comparing notes.
