Walking down H Street NW in D.C.’s small Chinatown, I don’t give much consideration to the past of the buildings. While surely the few block stretch wasn’t always Chinatown, I didn’t realize that one of the buildings, that now hosts restaurant Wok and Roll, is where John Wilkes Booth conspired to kill Abraham Lincoln.

But that’s exactly what happened at 604 H Street NW. In the 1860s, the three and a half story building was Mary Surratt’s boarding house. After Surratt’s husband died in 1862, she chose to rent her home in Maryland, and moved into the house with her family. Surratt transformed the house, inherited from her husband’s relatives, into a boarding house. As a young widow, she was able make a modest living with the boarding house. The boarding house also served as a meeting place for Surratt, Booth, and other Lincoln assassination conspirators. For her involvement in Lincoln’s assassination, Surratt was the first woman in the United States to be sentenced to death.

The building was constructed in 1843, in a Federal style. In 1925 the building was renovated to accommodate commercial space on the first floor.

The building is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. So next time you stop in at Wok and Roll to have some Chinese, think of all the conspiratorial plans that happened in the building 150 years ago.