Where We Live
A Bargain, With Many Repeat Customers
Porches, Prices Endear People To Northeast D.C. Neighborhood
The two sons of Paul and Ingrid Wood have room to grow in their house on 13th Place, which the couple bought for about $150,000 in 1993.
(By Karen Tanner Allen For The Washington Post)
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Saturday, December 8, 2007
When she's looking for company, Roxanne Carter goes around the corner to join neighbors on their porch.
On holidays, "I'll just walk next door and plop into a seat at the table," she said.
Ties to neighbors are one reason so many people stay so long in Michigan Park, a tidy, pre-World War II neighborhood in Northeast Washington, behind Catholic University.
The neighborhood's sturdy brick houses, leafy streets and neat gardens also foster loyalty. So does location: less than five miles to the National Mall and, from the nearby Brookland-Catholic University Metro station, a three-stop ride to Union Station.
Carter, 50, is not unusual in having grown up in the neighborhood and returning as an adult. She now lives in the family rowhouse with her grown son and 4-year-old grandson. Her neighbors are the same ones her parents and grandparents knew.
She owns Roxanne's ARTiques & Gallery a few blocks away in the Brookland neighborhood. On a recent Saturday afternoon, neighbors and friends stopped by to admire new acquisitions or just to visit.
Within the District, where prices in many neighborhoods have soared beyond $650,000 for even a modest house, Michigan Park and some adjacent neighborhoods are "a bargain area," according to real estate broker John Gerrety.
Recent prices have been hovering between $350,000 and $600,000. An attached three-bedroom rowhouse with a finished basement recently listed at $360,000, and a detached four-bedroom Colonial at $459,000.
"It's a very nice, pristine area. The lawns are very well kept. The houses are always very well kept," said Gerrety, who used to live near the neighborhood and has sold properties there since 1985. "The neighbors will keep after anyone who doesn't keep up" their property.
The neighborhood straddles South Dakota and Michigan avenues, surrounding Providence Hospital and St. Anselm's Abbey, a sprawling private boys' school.
It also includes the popular new Turkey Thicket Recreation Center, which has an indoor swimming pool, indoor basketball court, outdoor ballfields and tennis courts, a children's playground and a jogging path. Residents had begged for years to replace the small, dilapidated building that had served as a recreation center since the 1940s.
Michigan Park is frequently conflated with Brookland, the larger community next door and the closest commercial corridor, but is primarily residential and comparatively newer, residents say. The neighborhood was developed mostly in the 1920s and 1930s.
