BGuthrie Photos: DC Heritage Trails: Village in the City: Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail

DC Heritage Trails: Village in the City: Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail:

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. TRMTP_091129_02.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 1 Fashionable 16th Street Today's 16th Street from the White House to Silver Spring, Maryland is one of the city's key gateways. But through the 1890s it jogged left where Mt. Pleasant Street runs today and then dead-ended at the edge of today's Rock Creek Park. After decades on the city's wish list, in 1903, 16th Street was straightened and extended to Spring Road, several blocks north of here. This improvement, coupled with the arrival of the electric streetcar, made airy Mount Pleasant an attractive location for residential building. Suddenly, it was easy to commute downtown and back. Two decades earlier, Mary Foote Hamilton, socialite developer and wife of Senator John Henderson, had begun working to make 16th Street the city's most fashionable. The couple lived in Henderson Castle (now demolished) at 16th and Florida Avenue. She lured embassies from France, Spain, Mexico Cuba, Lithuania, Italy, and Poland to 16th Street. Henderson also had the street re-named Avenue of the Presidents, but that lasted only one year. When the Kenesaw Apartment House across the park opened in 1906, it led a wave of luxury apartment building here. The Kenesaw housed members of Congress and other prominent Washingtonians. Washington Senators pitcher Walter Johnson and his family lived there in 1915 while their house at 1843 Irving Street was under construction. In 1913 the Kenesaw owners donated today's park land to the city. President Coolidge dedicated this sculpture of Francis Asbury, the first bishop in America in 1924.
2. TRMTP_091129_05.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 2 Upheaval and Activism Beginning in the late 1950s, the community leadership of Mount Pleasant changed from the exclusive Citizens Association to an array of new players. Mount Pleasant Neighbors Association was the first alternative group. It presented festivals and grappled with local poverty. The group brought Barney Neighborhood House – a social services agency – here to 3118 16th Street after urban renewal forced it out of Southwest Washington. Neighbors' Consejo another social services agency, succeeded Barney House in 2000. The efforts of local activists and tenants of the once elegant Kenesaw Apartment House led to a landmark housing law. Facing eviction in the mid-1970s, the tenants decided to buy the run-down building. Their neighbor, DC Councilmember David Clarke, co-sponsored legislation ensuring all tenants the first right to purchase their building when it is offered for sale. Thanks to this 1980 law, renters with limited incomes purchased 3149 Mt. Pleasant Street and 1611 Park Road, among many other buildings. Also at this time, the Wilson Center, now a charter school where 15th Street meets 16th, became a hub of Latino community activism. The center was named for Woodrow Wilson, who worshipped there when it was Central Presbyterian Church. The Latin American Youth Center, formed by young Latino organizers, moved next door on 15th Street. It services range from education to emergency housing. As you proceed to Sign 3, don't miss the small wooden house at 3130 16th Street. From 1927 to 1945 this was the home of John Ernest White, chauffeur to Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
3. TRMTP_091129_12.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 3 Mount Pleasant Library When the Mount Pleasant Library, behind you, opened in 1925, crowds flocked to the Classical style building. Many had campaigned long and hard for this community centerpiece. The Carnegie Corporation, funder of public libraries in Mount Vernon Square, Southeast, and Takoma Park, spent extra on this branch so that it would fit in with the mansions and churches lining 16th Street. The city hired noted New Yorker Edward L. Tilton, architect of Carnegie libraries nationwide and the Ellis Island immigration station. The handsome library continues as a learning and gathering space, especially for immigrant residents enjoying its foreign-language collections. During the Great Depression (1929-1941), local artist Aurelius Battaglia dressed up the children's reading room with "Animal Circus," murals funded by President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Works of Art program. Later Battaglia worked for Walt Disney Studios on Dumbo and Pinocchio and illustrated dozens of children's books. The church at 3146 16th Street opened in 1916 as the modest, brick Mount Pleasant Methodist Episcopal Church, South. A decade later the congregation enlarged the building in the Classical style to match the new library and changed its name to Francis Asbury Methodist Church. After 40 years, the church followed the majority of its members to the Maryland suburbs, and Meridian Hill Baptist Church relocated here from Adams Morgan. In the park across from this sign is a memorial to Guglielmo Marconi, co-winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics for contributions to the invention of wireless telegraphy. Marconi's innovations led to the development of modern radio.
4. TRMTP_091129_17.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 4 Sacred Heart Academy Set back from the Street at 1621 Park Road, to your left, is an elegant old house, once the all-girls Sacred Heart Academy. The Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters of Wisconsin founded the Academy in 1905 and went on to operate it with Sacred Heart parish, adding a co-ed grade school in 1930. Lay educators took over in the 1990s. In addition, the school housed GALA Hispanic Theatre from 1985 to 2000. While the school always served Mount Pleasant's diverse nationalities, African Americans were excluded until 1951. Washington's Catholic schools actually began desegregating in 1949, five years before DC Public Schools. The Park Monroe Apartments, straight ahead, occupy a site where between 1913 and 1921 the family of Wisconsin Progressive Senator Robert F. La Follette lived. The senator and his wife Belle Case La Follette, worked together for world peace and human equality. Just across 16th at 3321 was the home of movie theater mogul Harry M. Crandall. Tragedy struck Crandall in 1922, when the roof of his Knickerbocker Theater at 18th and Columbia Road collapsed during a blizzard, killing 98 and injuring scores. At the time, Crandall was about to build another theater at 14th and Park Road using the Knickerbocker's architect. In shock, he hired another designer, an the Tivoli opened in 1924. Mary Henderson and architect George O. Totten built the mansion on the corner in 1920. From 1939 until 1969 it housed Capital Radio Engineering Institute, teaching radio and TV electronics. CREI later became Maryland's Capitol College.
5. TRMTP_091129_20.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 5 Avenue of Churches To Your Left is Canaan Baptist Church. Its relocation here from Georgia Avenue in 1963 was the fulfillment of pastor Rev. M. Cecil Mills's dream to preside over the first African American church on this avenue of churches. The congregation paraded from their old church to the new and celebrated for an entire month. Canaan Baptist replaced Gunton-Temple Memorial Presbyterian Church, whose white congregation had moved to Bethesda, Maryland. Like many white Washingtonians in the period following World War II, they left because of school desegregation and also because the suburbs offered newer housing. Just across 16th Street is St. Stephen and the Incarnation, known as the first racially integrated Episcopal Church in the city. During the controversial tenure of Father William Wendt (1960-1978), St. Stephen's also became, known for its political activism. Father Wendt came under fire in 1967 for inviting civil rights activist H. Rap Brown to speak in the church. In 1974 he was censured by Episcopal Church leaders for permitting a woman to celebrate the Eucharist before the practice was accepted. During the riots following the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968, St. Stephen's distributed emergency food and supplies. The Northbrook Apartments across Newton Street were built in 1916 by prolific developer Harry Wardman, known for his blocks of substantial rowhouses and grand apartment buildings. As you walk to Sign 6, be sure to notice two of Mount Pleasant's original wood frame houses: 1626 and 1640 Newton Street.
6. TRMTP_091129_24.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 6 Village Life This was the western edge of Samuel P. Brown's Mount Pleasant Village. Across the street and a few steps ahead at 3423 Oakwood Terrace is "Oakwood," an original village house built in 1871 for city politician J.W. Buker. Brown reserved the land to your left for his family, and sold lots to your right, from 17th Street to today's 14th Street. You can recognize Brown's earliest streets on the trail map on the other side of this sign by the way they angle off 17th Street. Brown's settlement attracted Civil War veterans and government employees, mostly New Englanders. They found these breezy hills healthier than the congested lowlands of the City of Washington (bounded on the north by Florida Avenue). Villagers organized the Mount Pleasant Assembly, which ran a horse-drawn coach from 14th Street and Park Road to the Treasury Department downtown. It also built Union Hall for meetings and worship services, and a school on Hiatt Place. In 1883 Samuel Brown's son Chapin began subdividing the family estate. You'll see the subdivision's first house -- 1701 Newton Street -- as you walk to Sign 7. Even before Rock Creek Park was set aside in 1890, the wild woodlands bordering the village were a happy part of daily life. The young sons of developer Luther Fristoe and his wife Caroline, who moved here in 1887, often played at the creek and the zoo. Others came from farther away: Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, rode horseback, hiked, and even skinny-dipped in Rock Creek Park. He arrived so often via 17th Street, one street over, that Washingtonians dubbed it the Roosevelt Entrance.
7. TRMTP_091129_31.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 7 Twenty-Seven Little Flags Just like Mount Pleasant, Bancroft School is known for its ethnic and racial diversity. "at one of the spring fairs in the early 1970s, we asked people to bring native dishes, and I bought 27 little flags to mark the food," parent Gloria Mitchell remembered. The original eight-room Bancroft Elementary School was built on this corner in 1924, after a building boom added hundreds of rowhouses to Mount Pleasant. On the day it opened, Bancroft was already too small. Nine years later a new 17-room wing stretched downtown Newton Street, soon followed by an auditorium and main entry. The school honors George Bancroft (1800-1891), a historian, former secretary of the Navy, and founder of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In the late 1960s, Mount Pleasant Neighbors Association launched a neighborhood festival on the Bancroft playground, and dozens of other community events have enjoyed the school's accommodations. In the summer of 1962, R&B star Bo Diddley lived with his wife Kay and baby Terri in an apartment at 1724 Newton Street, across from Bancroft School. The neighborhood's central location, affordable rents, and nearby music clubs on Mt. Pleasant and 14th streets all attracted artists and rising performers. Diddley connected with some neighborhood teenagers whom he'd heard "singing on the corner -- at least we thought we were singing," recalled former area resident Arthur Wong. "He encouraged us" and invited the boys to talk music and occasionally ride in his convertible. It was an experience they never forgot.
8. TRMTP_091129_34.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 8 The Oldest House
9. TRMTP_091129_38.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 9 Czech Row Like the Latino immigrants of recent times, Europeans left the political and economic hardships of home for a better life in the United States. Following the 1948 communist coup of Czechoslovakia a "Czech Row" or "Prague Road" enclave developed in the 2000 block of Park Road. Among its exiles were a four-star general and a former ambassador to Turkey. American Sokol, an offshoot of a Czech fitness movement, offered activities for all neighborhood children. Sokol had particular meaning for Czech expatriates as it was banned in Czechoslovakia during both the Nazi and communist eras. Czech Row's residents reveled in their tall trees and lush views of the park, recalled Dagmar Hasalova White, the general's daughter. Other European newcomers found a touch of home in this setting. Former residents Mike Najarian and Bill Katopothis recalled how their mothers made stuffed grape leaves from vines in the alley behind nearby Irving Street. For Ruby Pelecanos, living on Irving Street in the 1940s, the neighborhood included a number of Greek families who attended "Greek School" at St. Sophia's Greek Orthodox Church. Ruby's father immigrated to Washington in 1908 and operated a number of small restaurants downtown and in Chevy Chase. Her son George grew up to write thrillers set in Washington. During the 1960s, Mount Pleasant, like Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan, offered affordable housing that appealed to political activists, artists, and unconventional family groups. Blue Skies, a group housed devoted to anti-war work and social justice, owned and occupied 1910 Park Road in the early 1970s.
10. TRMTP_091129_41.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 10 Voices at Vespers This secluded building on the edge of Rock Creek Park was built in 1911 as the House of Mercy. It provided, as its founders wrote "a refuge and reformatory for outcast and fallen women," especially unwed mothers and girls entangled in prostitution. This home, a mission of St. John's Episcopal Church, trained the young women in domestic skills to prepare them to earn an honest living. Once their babies were born, mothers could keep them or offer them for adoption. Neighbors remembered seeing groups of expectant mothers taking walks in the neighborhood. "At 4pm every afternoon, the girls would sing at vespers," recalled Honora Thompson, who grew up nearby. "Their voices were lovely." By 1972 the maternity home had closed, and the facility became the bilingual Rosemount Center/El Centro Rosemount, offering early childhood education and family support. The new name honors the old "Rosemount" estate. Its manor house, once located in the trees beyond Rosemount Center, was demolished around 1890 as Rock Creek Park was created. Leading into Rock Creek Park, along Klingle Road, is Canto a la Esperanza ("A Song for Hope"), a mural designed by Jorge Somarriba and painted by members of the Latin American Youth Center in 1988. The mural, featuring, regions of the world and hopes for world peace, covered a wall of graffiti. Until recently, the remnants of an old ford were visible in the creek just south of Klingle Road. Drivers remember the pleasures of splashing through the water on this paved roadway. It was removed to help fish navigate the creek more freely.
11. TRMTP_091129_45.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 11 Defying the Restrictive Covenants In 1948 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that covenants prohibiting the sale of houses to individuals of certain races could not be enforced. Two years later, Dr. Robert Deane became the first African American to purchase a house in Mount Pleasant that carried the old covenant. But it wasn't easy. The Deanes bought 1841 Park Road from Lillian Kraemer Curry. Curry had inherited the house, built in 1909, from her father Charles Kraemer, a German immigrant wine and spirits merchant. In the 1920s the all-white Mount Pleasant Citizens Associations began circulating a covenant binding homeowners never to sell their houses to "negroes." Kraemer and most of his neighbors signed it. Even though the Supreme Court had outlawed this practice, when Kraemer's daughter sold the hose to the prominent black gynecologist in 1950, a small group of neighbors sued to stop the sale based on the old covenant. The neighbors lost in court, and Dr. Deane owned the house until his death in 2001. Although 1841 remained a single-family home, beginning in the 1930s housing shortages and tight budgets led some families to take in boarders. During the 1950s, Malvina Brown's Armenian-born parents rented rooms in their Park Road home to newcomers from Greece, Mexico, Turkey, and Venezuela. As you continue to Sign 12, notice the stone walls in front of 1833 and 1827 Park Road. The wall at 1833 is made of Kensington tonalite, and 1827 has a wall of Potomac bluestone. Both locally quarried stones are found throughout the city.
12. TRMTP_091129_49.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 12 Changing Fashions Around 1900 this successful suburb attracted successful business leaders, who set a grand standard for home building. Printer Byron S. Adams commissioned architect Frederick Pyle to design 1801 Park Road in the Colonial Revival style. Pyle also contributed 3303 18th Street. Developer Lewis Breuninger built 1770 Park Road for his family, as well as rowhouses along Park Road. Completing the luxurious landscape was the large house at 1802 Park Road (since demolished for rowhouses). This enclave was short-lived however. During the Great Depression of 1929-1941, the houses at 1801 and 1802 Park Road became homes for the elderly. In the 1950s, 3303 18th Street became a rooming house. Twenty years later, social service providers operated from dozens of Mount Pleasant's houses, large and small. More recently these well-built, convenient buildings have gone back to single-family use by people of means returning to in-town living. After World War II, Mount Pleasant enjoyed a brief heyday as a "hillbilly" (now country) music destination. Singer (and later sausage salesman) Jimmy Dean found fame hosting a local TV show, Town and Country Time, but Mount Pleasant knew him first as Jimmy Dean and the Texas Wildcats, the Starlite Restaurant's house band. Dean roomed at 3303 18th Street, where neighbor Fred Hays delivered the Washington Daily News: "I'd walk through the unlocked front door, up the stairs and throw one over the railing. That's where Jimmy Dean lived." Charlie Waller, founder of the Country Gentlemen bluegrass band, grew up in his mothers rooming house at 1747 Park Road. When country gave way to rock 'n' roll in the 1960s, local clubs followed suit.
13. TRMTP_091129_62.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 13 War and Peace The mansion of Samuel P. Brown, Mount Pleasant's founder once stood in the middle of the block to your left. During the Civil War, Brown bought 73 acres here for a song from William Selden, a former U.S. treasurer. Selden believed the Confederacy would win the war, so he sold his holdings and retreated home to Virginia. Brown planned to sell Selden's land as building lots once peace arrived. As the war raged (1861-1865), Union camps and hospitals filled these hilltops. Brown regularly hosted wounded soldiers from Maine, where he had been a state legislator. The Union's wartime occupation of Washington left the city in terrible shape. Congress debated moving the nation's capital to St. Louis or another heartland location. Fortunately, after Alexander "Boss" Shepherd's Board of Public Works rebuilt and improved the city, the government decided to stay. Well-connected land speculators such as Brown, who was also a member of the Board of Public Works, profited as a result. In 1906 a group of neighbors purchased this triangle in order to stop commercial construction here. The group then sold the property to the city for use as a public park. In the process they also revived the Mount Pleasant Citizens Association to bring community concerns to the three presidentially appointed commissioners then governing Washington, DC. During the early 1960s, the triangle park was a favorite hangout for area teenagers. "You could always find your friends there or at the Argyle drug store," recalled Bob Sciandra, a former resident.
14. TRMTP_091129_66.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 14 Main Street In 1903 a street car line arrived on Mt. Pleasant Street and so did new businesses. In this block were Sophia Weiss's notions shop, Domenico Pappalardo's shoe shop, and Lee Sing's laundry. The block's first commercial building (3215) was completed in 1906, designed by the prominent African American firm J.A. Lankford & Brother. There has been a family-run bakery here since 1922, beginning with Bohemian immigrant Frank Novotny's shop at 3215 Mt. Pleasant. German immigrant Paul Riedel owned it next. Then in the early 1930s, brothers August and Ludwig Heller, who had learned the family trade near Frankfurt, Germany, acquired the business. About 1940, Heller's moved to 3221, where some family members lived upstairs. Everybody in the extended Heller family worked in the bakery. Even the children assembled white cake boxes or cracked eggs. Soon Heller's drew customers from all over. As Heller's outlets sprouted around the city, all the baking was still done here. According to Greg Heller, at its height in the mid-1950s, Heller's operated 24 hours a day with a multinational workforce of 50. By 1960 many of the neighborhood's European immigrants had moved on, including the Hellers. But the family continued to bake here until they sold Heller's in 1983. Subsequent owners have retained the name and many original recipes. Mt. Pleasant Street's businesses included nightclubs. In the 1960s, the Fox Lounge at 3253, with its discreetly covered-up windows, quietly catered to Washington's gay community. The Crosstown Lounge at 3102 and the Oasis at 3171 drew citywide audiences for rock 'n' roll.
15. TRMTP_091129_69.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 16 The First Bodega The 1960s saw this neighborhood develop a Latino presence, and this became its Main Street. The storefront at 3161 Mt. Pleasant Street once housed Casa Dilon�, the first bodega (grocery) here. From 1962 until 1998, Casa Dilon� sold products familiar to immigrants and embassy staffers from Latin America and the Caribbean who lived in the area. It was a social center for Washington's Spanish-speakers and attracted other Latino-oriented businesses. Francisca Marrero Dilon� and F�lix Dilon� lived above the store with their six children, who also worked there. Customers eventually moved on, but many returned for holiday lech�n asado (roast suckling pig) and Puerto Rican pasteles (ground root vegetables steamed in banana leaves), hand-made by Francisca and daughter Carmen. Washington's Latino community was still small in the 1940s when Francisca immigrated from Puerto Rico and F�lix from the Dominican Republic. The late 1950s brought Cubans, followed by Central and South Americans in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the recent arrivals fled war, economic disruptions, or other political turmoil, By the 1980s, Mount Pleasant was known for its Salvadoran community. In fact, campaigning for Salvadoran elections became a regular event here. In 1990 Salvadoran �migr�s Haydee and Mario Alas operated Trolley's Restaurant where, 20 years earlier, customers had lined up out the door for the Loop Restaurant. In 1974 the activist, ecumenical Community of Christ church moved to 3166 Mt. Pleasant Street from Dupont Circle. Many congregants, dedicated to a simpler and more communal existence, moved here as well. The group's La Casa provided space for community activities and the Life Skills Center, founded by a church member.
16. TRMTP_091129_73.JPG: Village in the City Mount Pleasant Heritage Trail 17 The Urban Village
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