Then & Now: Where Lincoln assassination conspirators met

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In 1864-65, John Wilkes Booth and his cohorts allegedly cooked up plots to assassinate Abraham Lincoln at this Washington house. Today, the old boarding house once owned by Booth confidant Mary Surratt is used for another kind of cooking — it's an Asian restaurant called Wok & Roll that serves dynamite roll for $15.25, Cantonese roast duck for $41.95, Mai Tais for $10.50 and large glasses of warm sake for $13.95. (Here's their full menu.)

Mary Surratt

Alterations have significantly changed the 3 1/2-story building at 604 H Street NW since the 19th century. What was a doorway during the Civil War is now a second-floor window and a first-floor window is now an entrance. Of course, Mrs. Surratt probably wouldn't recognize the interior, which features a karaoke lounge with a touch-screen search monitor that can play more than 150,000 songs.

Despite her family's hope that she be spared by President Andrew Johnson, the United States hanged Surratt on July 7, 1865, for her role in the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln. Johnson famously called the boarding house "the nest in which the egg was hatched." Surratt, 42, became the first woman executed by the U.S. government.

"Woman as she was, she knew her business well; sick as she was, she had strength sufficient for her fearful purpose, and stern as the sentence was, its justice was absolute, its execution certain," the New York Times reported the day the U.S. hanged Surratt. "We have heard many express the desire that the woman's life might be spared and its weary hours passed in the quiet of the prison, but no one who knew the President and his unmoveable nature supposed for an instant that the sentence would be changed in jot or tittle."

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