Mount Pleasant is a neighborhood in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., capital of the United States. The neighborhood is roughly bounded by 16th Street, NW, and the Columbia Heights neighborhood to the east, Rock Creek Park to the north and west, and Harvard Street, NW, and the Adams Morgan neighborhood to the south. Housing about 2% of D.C.'s population, or over twelve thousand people, the area has for a century been a mixed community of both the well-to-do and lesser income workers, with a strong base of immigrants.

History

The neighborhood was originally settled by James Holmead, who in 1727 received a land grant from Charles Calvert, 5th Lord Baltimore, then governor of Maryland Colony. James's son Anthony inherited the land (which included the present-day Mount Pleasant, Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Park View, and Pleasant Plains neighborhoods) in 1750, renaming it Pleasant Plains. After the District of Columbia was created by Congress in 1791, the estate became part of Washington County, the section of the District lying between what is now Florida Avenue and the Maryland border.

The Holmead estate was sold off piece by piece over the years until the family home was finally demolished in the 1890s.(Holmead Place, a short street between Spring Road NW and Park Road NW, was named after the family. It is just west of 13th St, in what is now Columbia Heights.) During the Civil War, a 73-acre parcel of the estate (between 14th and 17th Streets NW) was purchased by a New England native, Samuel P. Brown, who lived on the land during the war and allowed a wartime convalescent hospital to be built there. After the war, Brown began development of the land between 14th and 17th Street NW as Mount Pleasant Village (so named because it was the highest elevation in the original Pleasant Plains estate) and selling off the land to new settlers in his village. (Brown retained the land around his house, now demolished, at 3351 Mount Pleasant Street NW). [1] Most of the original village was populated by farmers, who raised their own food and built wooden frame houses on the tracts that they bought from Brown, although there were a mass of stores and other commercial businesses around what is today the intersection of 14th and Park NW. At the time, the settlers of Mount Pleasant Village opted to lay streets without regard for the adjacent city's Cartesian grid street plan; thus, the streets that were built then — including Mount Pleasant Street, Adams Mill Road, Park Road, and Newton Street — are at severe and occasionally haphazard angles that visibly depart from the rest of Washington's street-grid layout.

In the 1870s, a horse-drawn streetcar began traveling from the 14th and Park intersection to downtown Washington City, essentially creating the first "Streetcar Suburb" in the District of Columbia. However, in 1878 the city's boundaries became coterminous with those of the District, after which Mount Pleasant was no longer either a village or a suburb but a part of the city of Washington.

The Mount Pleasant neighborhood was heavily developed between 1900 and 1925 as one of the District's earliest streetcar suburbs, after the opening of the streetcar line at the turn of the last century. This brought the construction of new houses and apartment buildings and Mount Pleasant was marketed as a middle to upper-middle-class neighborhood. During its heyday, many Washington luminaries including actress Helen Hayes, Washington Senators' pitcher Walter Johnson, and US Senator Robert LaFollette made their homes in Mount Pleasant.

In the 1950s, when Washington was still heavily segregated, some well-to-do white residents left the neighborhood after a Howard University Medical School professor — an African American — moved onto prestigious Park Road. Unfortunately, this white flight outmigration accelerated through the rest of the decade and into the 1960s as integration led white families to abandon Mount Pleasant and many other neighborhoods in the city. By the 1968 riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the neighborhood was in a state of transition.

After decades as a middle and upper class neighborhood, Mount Pleasant suffered from decline in the 1970s, 80s and early 90s due to rising crime, poor city management of the many public housing units in the neighborhood, and the crack epidemic. By the 1990s, Latino (especially Salvadoran) immigrants and young college graduates were helping fuel a revival. This was not without its challenges. In 1991, an incident between a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) officer and a young Latino resident led to riots on Mt. Pleasant Avenue. In the aftermath, the MPD has made some efforts to better communicate with the Latino population.

Population

The population of Mount Pleasant is a mixture of working-class Latinos, some whites, and a declining population of African Americans. There is also a strong gay presence, mostly of middle-aged and older gay couples. Businesses in the neighborhood cater largely to the Latino community, despite an increasingly diverse population. Following the devastating 1968 riots and skyrocketing crime rate of the 1970s and 1980s, the neighborhood experienced a high level of displacement along with the rest of the city.

Physically, there are two contrasting land uses: The western four-fifths of the area is practically a wooded enclave bounded on two sides by Rock Creek Park; this part has about 1200 row-houses, many including one or two apartments. A small number of the original 19th Century wood-frame houses remain, mostly north of Park Road. Recently, the housing cost run-up has these properties selling for prices between $650,000 and $1.2 million, like most Metro-accessible neighborhoods in D.C.

The eastern one-fifth of the land area, especially that bordering Sixteenth Street, or the next street over, Mt Pleasant St, is mostly mid-rise (four to nine story) apartment buildings. This is where over two-thirds of the population lives. There is a four-block commercial corridor with convenience shopping, with a small but growing number of establishments serving the rapidly growing number of higher income residents.

Rents are rapidly rising from about $1000 for a one-bedroom unit towards $2000 and even $3000 a month for a single-family row house. After decades of decay, many of the homes are once again owner-occupied. Many of the apartment buildings are also in the process of going condo. This rapid rise in the cost of living is part of affordable housing crisis facing most American cities. As with every healthy neighborhood in a thriving city, the character of Mt Pleasant is changing. Lingering crime issues, however, remain unresolved. With rising rents, gentrification still creates tensions within the local community.

External links

• Mount Pleasant Main Street, Inc.
• ANC1D, The Mt Pleasant Advisory Neighbohood Commission
• All-Ways Mt Pleasant
• Mount Pleasant Branch Library
• Historic Mount Pleasant
• Mount Pleasant D.C. Dot Org
• Mount Pleasant Yahoo Group
• Mount Pleasant Project, documentary photography

•  • [ e] Neighborhoods of the District of Columbia

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