Such a feeling
The D.C. Coliseum, where the Beatles played their first U.S. concert, then and now
As I wrote about in a recent edition of No Such Thing As Was, I picked up an original pressing of The Beatles’ Second Album not too long ago—
Gotta hear it again today
—and so I’ve got the Beatles on my mind these days more than usual. The photograph at the top of this post popped up a couple of days ago on my socials, and reminded me of something Beatles-adjacent that took up quite a bit of my imagination years ago. After college, I worked a couple of summers in Washington D.C.. I’d take a Ride-On bus from my house in Wheaton to the Silver Spring Metro. From there, the Red Line train into the District, where I toiled at a tax libraries along the K Street corridor or once or twice the Smithsonian libraries. I was an anonymous temp, and, apart from lunch hour, what I looked forward to the most was the train ride back home on the Red Line when I’d be able to scope the latest Cool “Disco” Dan graffiti tags, and gaze briefly at the fading D.C. Coliseum, just south of New York Avenue.
The Beatles played their first concert in the United States on February 11, 1964 at the Coliseum, then a thriving arena for sports, music, and political events. CBS filmed the performance, which was shown in select movie theaters the following month; the concert was later released on DVD in various iterations, and clips were included in the Anthology documentary. There’s also plenty of documentary footage online. The building had begun to decline well before I’d speed past it on the train in the 1980s, and was now shuttered and vacant; I could see the faded “Coliseum” sign, and imagined what had gone on inside twenty years earlier.
In 2010, on a visit back to the D.C. area to visit family and friends, I hopped off the NoMa-Gallaudet U stop to look around at what was remaining of the Coliseum. It was a bright day in June, and the building’s faded glories were having their moment in the sun. At the time, the city was using the building and site as a holding station and parking facility. Any energy from the venue’s rich history was muted.
The beautiful art deco doors, set back pleasingly behind concrete columns, and the rich green color of the trim were in surprisingly good shape, but the rest of the structure appeared to be teetering. Since that visit, the building has been transformed. The outer shell still remains on what is now called the Uline Arena, featuring thousands of square footage of retail and office space, a four-level parking garage, a brewery; the site’s within walking distance of a Metro stop. The Ice House building remains, where once stood the “original ice manufacturing facility which provided ice for the skating rink within the Arena building.” A Beatles tribute played the Uline on the fiftieth anniversary of the concert. The neighborhood, like many previously blighted, left-for-dead areas in the District, is well toward revival.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, not so much. As I strolled the blocks surrounding the building a decade and a half ago, I felt as if I were on condemned grounds, though I wasn’t trespassing, that I could’ve pushed over the whole building if I tried hard enough. Peering through holes in bombed-out brick edifices, held out by chain link fences, I felt as I often do on the site of crumbling structures that once served a grand purpose, as if I’m inhabiting both the past and the present at once. As I’d shoot past on the train, my glimpses of the “Coliseum” sign felt appropriately fleeting, if in a melancholy way, akin to a jolt of memory that comes and goes, a richly detailed image conjured from the past that fades out quickly. As I stood and looked at a graffitied structure utterly lacking in charisma and beauty, let alone any sense of having played a part in cultural history—that the Beatles played their first U.S. concert there created so much cognitive dissonance in me that I felt as if I were audibly rattling.
So, the photo from the night of the Beatles concert above, taking before the show—the glamorous bright lights, the spiffy facade, the palpable sense of something thrilling about to happen in a sold-out venue brimming with energy—was a nice tonic for my bleak memories. On the left of the image there appears to be a temporary structure hosted by WWDC, the local radio station that was the first in the country to play “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The thick snow, the winter coats, the rush of anticipation, it all feels so romantic. It’s important to avoid sentimentality here, and to be on guard against what some filmmakers and photographers call “retroactive foreshadowing” —the writer Michael André Bernstein referred to it as “backshadowing”—the idea that, when we look at a photo from the past, we unconsciously assume that those in the image possessed a knowledge of what we know occurred in their future, when, of course, they couldn’t have. Who might’ve predicted in the early winter of ‘64 what was coming on the pop horizon? No one, least of all the Beatles themselves.
In D.C. Monuments, a B&W-photocopied fanzine, Robert W. Embrey, Jr reported, via local radio charts and newspaper ads, that even D.C. strip dubs tried to cash in on the Beatles’ phenomenon. The night was certainly buzzing. And the show kicked ass, even if the lads did have to turn their collective gear around periodically throughout the show to ensure that they’d face each segment of the in-the-round audience.
Here’s Paul McCartney, interviewed the year that I skulked around the Coliseum grounds, on the requisite screaming during those Beatles concerts in the United States: “It was terrific. We'd been used to it in smaller doses. But in our minds, it’s only right that it should get bigger. And where better for it than America, where everything is bigger? It was very exciting, just having that many people—predominantly girls, all screaming.”
I’ll admit that, when I gazed at the deteriorating Coliseum building, I imagined those screams, too, as loud and as piercing as ever.
“The Beatles British Rock and Roll group putting on their show at the Wash. Coliseum” photographs (Coliseum front, audience one, and audience two) via Library of Congress Public Domain Archive
All other photographs ©Joe Bonomo
Thanks.
My cousin was at that show. She lived in Springfield, Va. Some how she was able to make the trek from there to the Coliseum. She was 14.
From Springfield to DC for a young teenager was akin to a trip to the moon.
Her parents would never have allowed it, but somehow she pulled it off.
She showed me the ticket stub about 20 years ago.
I have a couple of bootlegs of the Coliseum show, one which is pretty good quality, purportedly the unreleased live album that Capital shelved.