In February I accompanied a friend into a place I hadn’t seen in over a year. It’s just a couple blocks from my house and normally a go-to when I need familiar faces behind a bar and interesting strangers lining it, which I admit is often. I also use it as exercise for my related obsession, nightlife and street photography. I shoot as an creative outlet, for music blogs or for music venues themselves. But during the pandemic, the ability to explore the city after sundown virtually disappeared. All the nocturnal friends, strangers and chance encounters I love were gone, and there were no more doors I could step through to lose myself in a musical spectacle. For the first time in a year I was standing in a blues bar, my blues bar, and it was closed. But it looked different than closed.

Madam's Organ is an unlikely escape in a town like DC, and yet, as locals know, also not an unlikely one at all. On a typical Wednesday there’s a country band onstage, foreign diplomats and White House staffers yelling requests and owner Bill Duggan, wine in hand, holding court in the corner. Its walls are dense with taxidermy, burlesque paintings and the right kind of dust. Instruments and bicycles hang from the ceiling. Above the "suggestion box" stands a three-foot plaster middle finger. If there are textures to late-night, Madam's is coarse.

The room looked interrupted. Like everyone was raptured mid-drink; staff included. Bottles remained on the bar, instruments on the stage and stools arrayed for a better view. Of nothing.

When shut-down was mandated, Madam’s Organ closed completely instead of attempting to limp along as a take-out place. Owner Bill Duggan says the place is about live music, so until he can host that to a real crowd he’d rather stay closed. He has been a vocal advocate for speeding vaccination rollout in the city, and worked hard to locate excess doses to make sure his staff could get their shots. Bill is also an advocate for vaccine passports. “There need to be incentives for reluctant people to get the shots. If the city lets us open to vaccinated people first, that’s a powerful one.”

I wondered: if this place was frozen in an unexpected look during shut-down, what would I see in our other spaces? Like survivors in a liferaft before any rescue was sighted, would each familiar venue have had a different reaction to the possibility of doom?

I set out to see.

The Dead Kennedys played 9:30 Club on March 11, 2020. It would be the club's last show before lockdown.

The venue has been at the center of DC's music scene since 1980. When locals talk about a show they saw there, that fact is always in the first sentence. "I saw them at 9:30".

Both the employees I contacted and the club's spokesperson, Audrey Schaefer, related that night with lumps in their throats. I remember that last dance feeling too, as I was there. I bought a single ticket to that show as soon as I heard lock-down would begin at the stroke of midnight. Looking back, knowing what I now know about Covid it doesn't make as much sense, but it wouldn't have mattered who was playing; I just wanted to be at a sold-out 9:30 Club. I suspect many others felt the same way.

The Dead Kennedys perform at 9:30 Club on March 11, 2020, one day before lockdown.

When weeks turned into months of closure, I.M.P., its name a nod to the 1963 hit ‘It’s My Party’, and the collective that includes 9:30 Club, Anthem and several others, went from a workforce of nearly 2,000 to a handful. One of the things they did to help their furloughed employees was set up a pantry on the club floor so that donated meals could be picked up there. Its been active for over a year now.

Then came the George Floyd protests, and 9:30 welcomed marchers and other participants into the club to pick up water, charge phones or use their facilities throughout the summer and fall. The room became a safe place in the neighborhood during a turbulent time. Closed, but not.

Bill Spieler was the General Manager of the 15 Minute Club, a smaller venue now alive only in local music lore. With its demise in 1997 and nearby 9:30 Club’s transformation into a full-sized venue, live-music booster Bill felt ‘90s DC was suddenly low on spaces where new bands could find exposure. He set about filling that gap and opened DC9 in 2004 with a 220-patron capacity. Since then the city has seen a renaissance of venue variety in Bill’s eyes. “To anyone who complains that there’s a lack of live music options in the city, I say that Washington has never had so many. In fact there so many spaces that talent have real local competition, and that’s a good thing for everyone”.

Bill kept DC9’s outdoor spaces going for the first few months of the pandemic, closed briefly during the coldest winter months but has reopened outdoor and roof seating per the city’s guidelines.

But the club’s concert spaces remains dormant. Wood, construction materials, paint and tools all occupy the space designed for a crowd. The “green room”, for artists pre-and-post-show, is now liquor storage for the roof bar. The bathrooms — also now storage — all retain posters for the 2020 concert season that never was. The only space still being used, sort-of, for music is a corner of the stage set up for streaming events.

Spieler told me that to his great chagrin 2020 was a time he devoted to everything EXCEPT hosting live music, the club’s whole reason for being. It’s easy to hear the frustration in his voice that comes with trying to move the earth to survive in a time without concerts.

“Our venue has become a multi-functional space for everything but concerts themselves.”

Dante Ferrando in The Black Cat in March 2021

Dante Ferrando, the Black Cat's owner, greeted me at the club's door on 14th street. He showed me around the main room, and to the construction underway downstairs in what used to be the "Red Room", a separate bar dedicated to, well, being a bar.

Founded in 1993,"The Cat" as it's known by regulars, is one of the last bits of visible grit left on the stretch of 14th between U and R streets. Bands playing there tend to the punk or hardcore end of the spectrum, and the size of the room ensures you'll know them well by the end of the show.

The club is clean. Cleaner than I've ever seen it. My expectation of chaos was undoubtedly colored by so many nights helping dirty it, but as it turns out Dante is a bit of a neat freak, so he saw the shut-down as an opportunity to get the place truly cleaned up and some upgrades — like brand new bathrooms, completed. I was taken aback. The shiny checked floor and order to its emptiness made Black Cat look much bigger than it did in my memory. Like a roller rink, which the main room has actually become if you’re lucky enough to be Dante and his wife Catherine’s kids.

Lindsay, one of Dante’s partners, told me about how the owners and staff have been having date nights in the club. About their new band, made up of longtime bartenders and Dante himself. Of getting married during the pandemic and seeing her boss and his wife’s goofy closeness as an aspiration. In all that I heard joy, and I came away smiling.

The Wharf opened in 2017 as DC’s shiny new development in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood; a place previously known largely for its fish market and threadbare marinas. Longtime District residents admit to the economic benefit of the new retail and dining zone, and appreciate most of the effects it’s having on the neighborhood, but still look down their noses at it like they do the suburbs. The Wharf hasn’t been broken in yet.

The Anthem and its six thousand seat capacity anchors The Wharf. Three times the size of 9:30 club, it’s big enough to bring acts that would otherwise need to play outside the city right into the heart of Washington, but small enough to retain a little intimacy between act and audience.

Though the venue has held outdoor community events since the closure, the concert hall has been fully shuttered, its digital marquee frozen on “WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS” the main floor still lined with seats in anticipation of a Nathaniel Ratliff show that didn’t happen.

I walked the darkened balconies in the kind of silence you can hear. My hosts had left me to the main hall while they checked on backstage areas. With only auxiliary lighting washing over skeletons of beam work and neat rows of chairs I was able to appreciate just the room. In absence of an act to draw my eye to the stage, Anthem was a geometric feast. I found myself just gazing — star struck by an empty space.

A day after visiting Anthem dark, IMP called again to ask if I wanted to witness it being repurposed as a COVID-19 vaccination site for the neighborhood. I headed back.

In stark contrast to the dramatically-closed room I’d just visited, Anthem felt downright homey. There were people. The lights were up.

This pilot event focused on getting shots to those working at The Wharf and in its surrounding, often-underserved neighborhoods. I watched as a line of construction workers filed into the room. Still helmeted, they conferred with nurses, got their shot, then sat down in socially-distanced seats for the vaccine 15-minute “adverse-reaction” safety period. Fresh from walking Anthem empty, I saw previously-lonely chairs occupied, listened to a low murmur of conversation between nurses and patients, and watched a line of masked faces flashing eye-smiles on their way out the door.

I can hear the music, DC. Rescue is coming.

—

All photographs for this project were shot in available light, rooms as I found them, using a single Leica “Monochom” black-and-white-only camera. The spaces were not cleaned or manipulated, and I asked that most house lights be left off, as they have been for the duration of the pandemic.