Shaw is a central neighborhood in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. Shaw and the U Street Corridor historically have been the city's black social, cultural, and economic hub, witness to Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and numerous riots, marches, and protests that fought to achieve racial equality in Shaw and the entirety of America. The District of Columbia has designated much of Shaw as the Shaw Historic District, and Shaw also contains the smaller Blagden Alley-Naylor Court Historic District, listed on the National Register. Name Until the 1960s, what is now Shaw was called Midcity. In 1966, planners used the enrollment boundary of Shaw Junior High School to define the Shaw School Urban Renewal Area covering what are now the Shaw, U Street Corridor and Logan Circle neighborhoods. The school had been named after Robert Gould Shaw, who led the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, one of the first official African American units during the American Civil War. As the area diversified starting in the 1990s, neighborhoods in the north, west and east of what was considered Shaw during the urban renewal era became more frequently referred to by specific names, such as the U Street Corridor (a.k.a. Cardozo/Shaw), Logan Circle, Truxton Circle, and Randolph Square; for the remaining area (7th/9th street corridor north from Convention Center to U Street), "Shaw" remains the unique, unequivocal name. Geography The most generally used definition of Shaw, without Logan Circle and the U Street Corridor, is bounded by: Florida Avenue NW and the U Street Corridor, Ledroit Park and Howard University on the north, M Street NW and Massachusetts Avenue NW, and Mount Vernon Square and Downtown Washington, D.C. on the south, First St. NW and Truxton Circle on the east, and 12th Street NW and the U Street and Logan Circle neighborhoods to the west. Shaw consists of gridded streets lined mainly with small Victorian row houses, but also north of the convention center by urban-renewal-era low-rise apartment complexes and the late 2010s mixed-use development City Market at O. The original commercial hub of the area prior to the redevelopment in the wake of the 1968 riots and Green Line Metrorail construction was along 7th and 9th streets NW, and especially 7th street is still lined by small businesses housed in rowhouse-sized buildings—though with trendy shops and restaurants rather than neighborhood-oriented businesses. Tucked away into the alleys here are former light