For most of the last century, North Capitol Street was the line that kept Eckington and Bloomingdale from behaving like one place. Bloomingdale had the Northwest address, the designated historic district, and the Victorian rowhouses. Eckington, one of the city's oldest neighborhoods, had the rail yards and the quieter streets. The two blocks looked at each other across six lanes of arterial traffic and mostly kept to their own restaurants, their own markets, their own weekends.
The eight-mile Metropolitan Branch Trail running from Union Station to Silver Spring has done what decades of planning documents could not. It has given the two neighborhoods a shared spine, a north-south street they can actually walk, and a summer calendar that finally reads as one calendar instead of two. If you already live here, this is the season to notice that.
The trail did what North Capitol never could
Walk the MBT on a Saturday in July and you can see the geography rewriting itself. The trail delivers you from the north edge of NoMa up through Eckington and into Brookland without ever forcing you across North Capitol at grade. Along the way, the corridor now strings together a large lawn, playground, dog park, bioremediation meadow, a performance area, and a cafe structure at Alethia Tanner Park, plus the beer garden at Metrobar and the food hall at Bryant Street Market a few minutes further north.
The practical effect is that a Bloomingdale resident on First Street NW and an Eckington resident on Quincy Place NE now share the same weekend infrastructure. That was not true five years ago.
Alethia Tanner Park is the summer living room
The 2.5-acre space at 227 Harry Thomas Way NE has become the closest thing this stretch of the city has to a genuine commons. During summer months, the lawn hosts outdoor movie screenings and concerts, plus a weekly farmers market every Thursday offering fresh produce and artisanal goods. A steel gantry serves as a stage for summer films and events, and a massive street art wall hosts an annual mural festival.
What makes the park work as a summer anchor is less the programming and more the plumbing. It sits directly on the MBT, so people arrive by bike from Brookland, on foot from Bloomingdale, or off the trail from NoMa without ever getting in a car. The site was originally a rail yard serving both the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and DC's first electric streetcar line, and the park reflects that history through graphics and signage derived from old railroad schedule signage. The bones of the corridor are the same bones the trail is built on.
If you want to help keep it running, Eckington Parks & Arts and the Eckington Civic Association host monthly neighborhood cleanups on the third Saturday of every month, meeting at Yang Market at 10 AM.
Bryant Street's weekly grid
The other pole of the summer axis is the redeveloped block a mile north. The nine-screen Alamo Drafthouse Cinema that opened in November 2021 anchors the retail, alongside Metrobar and Kraken Kourts. Kraken Courts at 514 Rhode Island Avenue NE offers 70,000 square feet of indoor space with themed rollerskating nights, pickleball courts, table tennis, and a retro-chic bar serving burgers, giant pretzels, beer, and canned cocktails from rinkside cabanas. Metrobar itself has seating for almost 400 people around its 5000-series Metrorail car.
What residents figure out after a summer of walking over is that the value is in the recurring weekly programming, not the marquee events. The rhythm looks something like this:
| Day | What's on |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | Trivia at The Bevy Lounge inside Bryant Street Market |
| Wednesday | All-day happy hour at Metrobar from 4 to 11 PM, plus a weekly jazz night |
| Friday | Live music at Metrobar |
| Saturday | DJs on the train at Metrobar starting at 7 PM |
| First Saturday of the month | Dreamers Collective vintage and food pop-up, 9 AM to 2 PM |
| Thursday | Farmers market at Alethia Tanner Park |
| Sunday | Bloomingdale Farmers Market |
| Third Saturday | EP&A neighborhood cleanup, meet at Yang Market, 10 AM |
The weekly programming is drawn from Bryant Street NE's own calendar.
What's arriving on the corridor this year
The corridor is still filling in. A few pieces landing over the course of this year materially change the weekend map:
- The first DC location of the climbing gym Brooklyn Boulders and a new outpost of the food-business incubator Union Kitchen at the Eckington Yards development along the trail
- A Union Kitchen grocery and cafe slated to arrive later this year
- A new flagship for the DC florist She Loves Me, twice as large as the original Petworth location, with room for work tables, a bar just for dried florals, and space to host in-store workshops
- A third Right Proper Brewing Company location in Eckington by the end of the year, with a full kitchen serving fried-chicken sandwiches and beer-battered cheese curds, plus a five-barrel brew system
Layered on top, the 2026 Metropolitan Beer Trail Passport is back through NoMa BID, turning the trail itself into a scavenger hunt with discounts at twelve stops.
Dinner is still a Bloomingdale question
The retail energy of the last three years has been on the Eckington side of North Capitol, and it is easy to read that as a shift in gravity. On a weeknight it isn't. Dinner in this pocket of the city still lives largely on First Street NW and Rhode Island Avenue NW.
The Red Hen at 1822 First Street NW remains the reservation-first anchor, known for pastas and small plates. Boundary Stone at 116 Rhode Island Avenue NW is back in the rotation after its pandemic-era closing scare. O'Kabul joined Bloomingdale's fast-casual scene last summer with lamb and beef kebab, feta-and-parsley phyllo pastry, doner, and dessert options including baklava, caramelized baked rice pudding, and knafeh. Add Big Bear Cafe, Unconventional Diner, The Pub & The People, Etabli, DCity Smokehouse, Jam Doung Style, and PhoXotic and you have a walkable dinner circuit that Eckington's retail wing does not yet replicate.
Two odder rooms worth knowing about if you haven't been in a while. Side Door, the 1970s-basement speakeasy under The Pub and the People, seats twenty-five in wood-paneled booths with vinyl-packed shelves and a pay phone, so reservations are recommended. And Glassey at 1625 First Street NW sits above the family-run Bloomingdale liquor store Sunset Wine & Spirits, a mother-daughter operation that opened during the shutdown and is still there.
The through-line: if you want the room, cross west. If you want the lawn, the trail, and the programming, cross east. Both are ten minutes on foot from the other.
Why this reads as one neighborhood now
The Bloomingdale Farmers Market has been the connective tissue for almost twenty years. In fall 2007, Bloomingdale residents roasted a pig over a homemade pit and dished it up to neighbors, and that gathering helped turn the Bloomingdale Farmers Market into a community institution. For most of that run, the market was a Bloomingdale institution that Eckington residents visited. What has changed is that the Thursday market at Tanner Park now gives the two sides symmetrical claims to the same weekly ritual on opposite sides of North Capitol, four days apart.
Add the trail, the Beer Trail Passport, the pop-up market at Bryant Street on first Saturdays, the cleanup at Yang Market on third Saturdays, and a resident of either neighborhood can build a summer that never once requires driving. That is the quiet fact of the season. The two sides of North Capitol have finally started keeping the same calendar.
If you own on either side of North Capitol and have been thinking about what your rowhouse or condo is worth in a corridor that reads very differently on foot than it did in 2019, the Hagen Bergstrom Team is happy to walk it with you. Book an appointment when you're ready.
