“This was a conversational bar�not a gay bar,” explains Dandridge.
Founder James Jones had seen a business opportunity in the lack of a black gay bar in D.C., but he also reached out to Columbia Heights’ then-burgeoning middle class to build a greater client base in the closeted ’50s. Though a 1991 Washington Blade story says Nob Hill opened at the otherwise quiet corner of 11th and Kenyon Streets NW in 1957, Dandridge says that the bar opened in the late ’40s as a formal dinner club. Dandridge’s unwillingness to label the Hill, as patrons call it, is characteristic of an establishment that has always defied easy demographic categorization.
