10 JANUARY 31, 2021 THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 11
Fentys’ son Adrian would grow up to become mayor of D.C.
In 1973, the Community of Christ, a l ay-led Lutheran group
dedicated to social justice, bought the biggest building on Mount
Pleasant Street and made it available rent-free to peace activists,
pro-immigrant groups and musicians. In the 1980s, the group house
scene flourished. The Embassy was a h ouse associated with the punk
rock band Nation of Ulysses. Hoover house hosted a band of the same
name. “These places were somewhere between boardinghouses and
communes,” says Ian MacKaye, leader of the band Fugazi, now a
homeowner on Irving Street. “People weren’t just looking for cheap
housing. They were friends. They were places full of intention.” The
Lamont Street Collective, a p olitically inclined group house, was as
popular as a private college. When a room came open, dozens of people
would apply to move in.
At the same time, Mount Pleasant was attracting a very different
group of newcomers, starting with a stream of people from a small city
near the Pacific Ocean in El Salvador called Intipucà. Intipequeños, as
the residents are known, had been coming to Washington since the late
1960s, recruited by embassies, hotels and restaurants. But the civil war
that engulfed El Salvador in the 1980s fueled emigration of ever more
people seeking a safer life. The Community of Christ provided sanctuary
to undocumented refugees fleeing the war. The Central American
Refugee Center (CARECEN) helped the newcomers with asylum
applications and immigration issues. By 1990, Mount Pleasant was
27 percent Hispanic, up from less than 1 percent two decades earlier.
It was a volatile mix. Longtime residents, Black and White, were
bewildered by the undocumented newcomers who didn’t speak English.
For the Salvadorans, holding one or two or three jobs was no guarantee
of a good life. Some felt harassed by police officers who couldn’t speak
their language. All of which culminated in the Mount Pleasant riot, a
two-day cataclysm of property violence that traumatized the
neighborhood yet also strengthened it in th e long run.It started on the early evening of May 5, 1991, when two police
officers, both new to the job and neither of whom spoke Spanish,
arrested an inebriated Salvadoran man, Daniel Gomez. In handcuffs, he
struggled to pull a knife from his pocket. One of the officers yelled,
“Freeze,” then shot him once in the chest. Gomez was taken away in
critical condition. Although he survived, many onlookers assumed he
was dead.
The growing crowd shouted that police had killed a man for no
reason. Years of pent-up resentments exploded. Randy Leon, watching
from his father’s shoe repair store, saw rocks and bottles raining down
on police officers standing in the middle of Lamont Street. Jesse Chong,
then 11 years old, was watching the TV news when he saw police in riot
helmets lined up on Irving Street outside his father’s liquor store.
As the police retreated, crowds of young Latinos smashed windows
and looted. “I have covered a lot of stories in this town,” wrote reporter
Hamil Harris in the Washington Afro-American newspaper, “but I havenever seen and experienced the hell which transpired in the Mount
Pleasant community tonight.” (Harris later became a reporter for The
Post.)
The riot galvanized residents and the D.C. government to take
remedial action. “The city started paying attention to the Salvadoran
community,” recalls Catalina Sol, then a staffer at CARECEN, now
director of La Clínica del Pueblo, which has long had offices in Mount
Pleasant. Juan Romagoza, the first director of La Clínica, did trainings
for the D.C. police, which began to hire more Spanish-speaking officers.
The mayor created a L atino Task Force on Civil Rights and bolstered the
Office of Latino Affairs. Under the leadership of Maria Tukeva, a M ount
Pleasant resident, the D.C. public schools expanded Bell Multicultural
High School on 16th Street to educate students who didn’t speak English
as a first language. La Clínica gained funding for health services. The
nonprofit Latin American Youth Center catered to young people
seeking after-school programs and general equivalency degrees. With a
little help from the city, the newcomers gained a stake in the
neighborhood.O
ver the years, the city government also became an asset to the
ne ighborhood in the area of affordable housing — thanks in no
small part to David Clarke, chairman of the D.C. Council who was, not
coincidentally, a r esident of Mount Pleasant. Clarke, one of the flawed
giants who loomed large in D.C. politics in the late 20th century, grew up
in Shaw in the 1950s. He was White, but many of his friends and
neighbors were Black. In church, he absorbed a biblical conviction in
social justice and went on to earn a law degree from Howard University.
He moved into a c lapboard house on 17th Street NW, rode his bicycle to
work and became known for defending poor people. After home rule
came to the District in 1973, Clarke was the first elected council
representative for Ward 1, which includes Mount Pleasant, Adams
Morgan and Columbia Heights. And he believed with a passion in
affordab le housing.
Plenty of people can play a role in resisting gentrification —
immigrant entrepreneurs, cultural creators, community activists,
historical preservationists — b ut no single factor is more important than
affordable housing. In 1980, Clarke co-sponsored a model law to help
low-income D.C. tenants become homeowners. The Rental Housing
Conversion and Sale Act created the legal basis for the Tenant
Opportunity to Purchase Act, known as TOPA. One of the most
progressive housing measures in the country, the law gives tenants in
the District the right to buy their apartment building if it is put up for
sale. TOPA buildings became an anchor for Mount Pleasant, keeping
working-class people in the neighborhood.
The tenants of the historic Kenesaw (now Renaissance) apartments,
a magnificent seven-story limestone and buff brick apartment building
on 16th Street NW, were able to get title to the building with help from
Clarke. Half a block away on Mount Pleasant Street, a 34-unit building
was about to be sold to developers in the mid-1990s when the tenants
decided they wanted to stay. With the help of the Latino Economic
Development Corp., a city-funded agency, the tenants bought the
building as a co-op. The Adelante Mount Pleasant Cooperative is still
going strong two decades later.
In the early 2000s, the Martinez family, living in the St. Dennis
Apartments on Kenyon Street NW, confronted an owner who they
believed was trying to empty the 32-unit building with buyouts and poor
management. Eva Martinez, along with her two adult daught ers —
Anabel and E va Aurora — filed suit, eventually reaching a settlement
that allowed them to buy the property in 2008. The National Housing
Trust, a n onprofit dedicated to preserving affordable housing, helped
the tenants acquire and renovate the building. The St. Dennis reopened
in 2011 with all apartments reserved for households earning no moreClockwise from far top
left: Juan Antonio
Hernandez looks out
the window of his
restaurant, La Bahia,
the newest one on
Mount Pleasant Street.
Hernandez is a native
of El Salvador who
came to the United
States in 1987. In Pak,
left, and Young Pak
own the Best World
store. Randy Leon
outside his family’s
business, Leon’s Shoe
Repair, started by his
father. Mount Pleasant
residents Jan and Phil
Fenty, whose son
Adrian gre w up to
become mayor of D.C.