Md. Street's Soul Hasn't Strayed Far From Roots
As Other Inner Suburbs Stumble, Area Grows Into Nest of Prosperity

By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 19, 2006

Renny Rice is back home on Mason Street, dining at the table where he ate as a kid, living by himself now except for the two cats and the memories of his mother, who died in the back bedroom three years ago.

Harry and Helen Remmers have never left. They moved in a few doors down just after their house was built in 1949 and raised 12 children in a home that expanded with the family, growing from two bedrooms to four.

Mauricio and Ana Salinas were the first Latinos to move in. Now, years later, they have prospered and aged and are getting ready to move away. They will leave behind Lori and Tim McGovern and their new baby. And Vietnam veteran Jim Broeker, who says the street seems to be crawling with a fresh generation of kids, including his three.

The 2500 block of Mason Street, just off Georgia Avenue in Montgomery County's Glenmont neighborhood, is a stretch of 16 small homes built almost five decades ago. Long enveloped by sprawl, Mason Street has aged gracefully, resisting the poverty, crime and neglect that now define many of the nation's inner suburbs.

Helped by proximity to the Metro, immigration and the strong local economy, the solid little houses have maintained their value for an increasingly diverse group of residents.

They have sheltered some from youth to old age. They have served as a refuge for others. They have seen older immigrants arrive and flourish and newer immigrants become first-time homeowners. They have housed natives of Haiti, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Brazil. And, lately, they have seen young couples arrive to begin lives and families, just as other generations did decades ago.

Far from the posh mansions and townhouses of the outer Washington region's development, the homes of Mason Street are, at first glance, unremarkable: wood-frame boxes that suggest the pieces on a board game. They are throwbacks -- products of the desperate post-World War II housing shortage and the idea that the average citizen ought to be able to afford a home. Designed with a living room, two bedrooms and a 60-by-120 foot piece of land, they constituted the American dream house.

In many ways, they still do.

Desperate for a Home

The first time Harry Remmers traveled out along Georgia Avenue to see Mason Street, it was a dirt road. Georgia Avenue was then two lanes. There was an old grammar school nearby and a roadside tavern but little else. It was the boondocks.

A January 1949 newspaper ad described the Mason Street homes as one-story bungalows with two bedrooms and a "full" basement.

"Seemed pretty nice," Remmers said.

Mason Street was part of an early suburban development built on 73 acres just west of Glenmont's old elementary school, a mile north of Wheaton.

The houses numbered among the million single-family homes started nationwide in 1949 to help house 16 million returning servicemen and women. The need was dire. Young families were living with relatives. Others found shelter in trailers, old trolley cars, Quonset huts. A New York City couple moved into a department store window to publicize their need for housing.

The Remmers, both now 81, were desperate for a place to live.

They already had three children in 1949. They were living in a one-bedroom rowhouse near Philadelphia when Harry, a Navy-trained electronics whiz, got a job with the fledgling Washington TV station WOIC. Harry came to find a place here to live.

"I had to do the best I could," he said.

The price in the ad was $9,250. Helen Remmers recalls that they paid $9,850.

It would be their home for five decades. Their family grew from three children to twelve, including twins. Their huge kitchen table seated 16, and Helen made a lot of meatloaf.

In those days, a family of 12 children simply melded into the Mason Street mix. The Humphreys, at the other end of the street, had eight. There were six or seven more in a house across the street. The Duncans, next door, had four, and so did the Rices, up by Grandview Avenue.

"We had 50 at one time on this block," Helen Remmers said. "Just in this one block."

Change All Around

One of those children was Alfred Rice Jr., the second of four children of Alfred "Buster" Rice Sr. and his wife, Marian.

His parents didn't have a lot of money in the mid-1950s. They paid about $12,000 for their house on Mason Street.

Rice played baseball in the street between summer thunderstorms and ate with his whole family at the dinner table every night. The world seemed safe and orderly.

"The way Mason Street was when I was growing up, nothing bad was going on anywhere," said Rice, 54, a computer technician who goes by Renny. He left home in the 1970s, married, was divorced in 1994 and the next year moved back.

"It was nice," he said.

But the street had changed a lot, and Rice realized he now knew few of his neighbors.

His father, who was a service manager at a car dealership, had died in 1993. He stayed on after his mother's death in 2003 and said it's been quiet in the house since then. "But it was quiet when she was here," he said. "We got along really good, because she didn't need me and I didn't need her, but we liked each other."

For him, the house, which was paid off years ago, has been the same, comfortable place he knew as a child.

"I don't like change," he said, sitting one recent evening in his dining room. "This is the furniture that I grew up with. I've always eaten off this dining room table. . . . It was very easy for me to stay here and not want for a whole lot more."

Perhaps, he said, it was too easy: "This was a comfort level that I never had to fight my way out of. . . . I don't know what it says for me still being here."

Diversity Moves In

Mauricio and Ana Salinas found Mason Street one day while looking for a safer place to raise their children. They felt that their old neighborhood, elsewhere in Montgomery, was dangerous. Mason Street looked quiet and secure.

They visited the street at night to make sure. They came by during the day. They came by at all hours. It was always clean and quiet and seemed perfect.

They became the first Latinos on Mason Street when they moved in with their two sons, Edwin, then 12, and David, then 8, in the summer of 1989.

They were among the tens of thousands of immigrant families who had begun transforming the demographic landscapes of inner suburbs around Washington and across the country.

Mason Street met them with chilly stares.

"When [the neighbors] saw us moving in, they looked at us like, 'Oh, man, something wrong is going to happen here,' " Mauricio said.

Not only was his family Latino, but Salinas and his wife were also bringing children to a block at a time when there were none.

The entire length of the block, Mauricio said -- "no kids."

The children of the 1950s were gone. The young postwar couples had aged and retired. Now, here came immigrants.

The Salinases had arrived in the United States from El Salvador more than a decade earlier. Ana came for a visit and soon found she made more money baby-sitting in Washington than she had as a secretary back home. Mauricio followed seven months later, finding work as a waiter. Thirty years later, he still has the seven one-dollar bills the restaurant owner tipped him his first night on the job.

"It's very important to me, the first money I made in this country," he said.

On Mason Street, the reception was slow to thaw. The Salinases were particularly hurt when a next-door neighbor died and it was months before anyone told them. And Mauricio described one former resident as "a very nice person, a couple years late."

Now Mauricio Salinas is 61; Ana Salinas is 57. They're very much at ease on a block that is home to immigrants from, among other places, Brazil, Ecuador and Nicaragua. But they feel it is time to go, and in a few weeks they are moving to a retirement community in Laurel.

They will leave reluctantly: In this house, Ana sprinkled holy water when they moved in. Here, the children grew up, and Mauricio fixed up the basement. Here, 10 years ago, Ana recovered from breast cancer, and the compassion of their neighbors finally emerged.

It will be hard to leave, they said, but the house will stay in the family. Their youngest son, David, 25, is moving in. He can keep an eye on things, his parents joked, and they'll still be close enough to keep an eye on him.

Air of Youthfulness

The newest resident of Mason Street arrived on a cold, windy night last month. It was snowing lightly when her father's Honda stopped outside the house with the statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard.

Myriam McGovern had been born the night before in Holy Cross Hospital, and now her father, Tim, carried her across the lawn, while her mother, Lori, ushered her sister Therese, 2, up the front steps.

Tim McGovern, 27, information systems manager at the Heritage Foundation, and wife Lori, 26, are among Mason Street's latest arrivals.

They moved in about two years ago, paying $300,000 for a home that first sold for just under $10,000.

For them, Mason Street was "more affordable . . . by a stretch" than Arlington, where they had been renting, Lori said.

Their arrival has helped bring the street full circle.

Next door, a family from Brazil has two sons. Across the street, a couple from Ecuador has a young daughter. And next door to them, Jim Broeker and his wife, Jacqueline, have three children.

Broeker, who moved to the block by himself in 1985, said he has seen a big change. Back then, it was like a retirement community, he said. "There were no kids around."

"Now, all at once, it's exactly the opposite," he said.

Although their faces aren't all the same color, as before, "kids are everywhere again."

Probably, he said, it's a lot like Mason Street was when it was new.

Staff writers Michael T. Shepard and Lena H. Sun contributed to this report.