A Colorful Haven for Artists and Activists

Six years ago, Amber Gallup, 33, moved to Mount Pleasant with her boyfriend. The two were drawn to the Northwest Washington neighborhood by its low rents, Gallup said, but she soon found that Mount Pleasant offered much more than affordability.

Along Mount Pleasant Street, a six-block commercial strip on the east side of the neighborhood, Gallup discovered stores stocked with Peruvian hot peppers, homemade injera (Ethiopian bread) and thick corn tortillas. She tried restaurants specializing in Salvadoran pupusas -- fried corn cakes filled with meat or cheese -- and passed women selling fresh cut mangos.

"I love being able to speak Spanish on the street," said Gallup, who has lived in Mexico and Uruguay.

Although Mount Pleasant has many fine qualities, including stately rowhouses on tree-lined streets, parks and good public transportation, residents are perhaps most proud of their neighborhood's culture. In a city often derided for drab suits and gray buildings, Mount Pleasant is a colorful haven for activists, artists and musicians who hail from a variety of countries and social backgrounds, said Claudia Schlosberg, a three-decade resident.

"It has always been an ethnically and economically diverse neighborhood, and it's one of the reasons why a lot of people have been attracted and wanted to live in Mount Pleasant," she said.

Latinos have made up a major part of Mount Pleasant's mix since the 1940s, when many Central American embassies set up on nearby 16th Street and Massachusetts Avenue, said Olivia Cadaval, a historian and longtime resident of the neighborhood. Peruvians, Chileans, Mexicans, Cubans and others all came to Mount Pleasant, and many stayed in the neighborhood even after ambassadors changed. In the 1980s, Salvadorans fleeing civil war became a large part of the population.

"Mount Pleasant has always been the heart of the pan-Latino community in D.C.," Cadaval said.

That influence is clear today. Many of the neighborhood's murals were painted by Chilean artists, Cadaval said, and Spanish is commonly spoken on Mount Pleasant Street. However, Mount Pleasant's ethnic diversity is increasingly skin-deep. Rising rents have driven less affluent Salvadorans, in particular, out of the neighborhood, Cadaval said. Some have headed east toward more affordable housing, or to suburbs in Maryland and Virginia.

"I don't know how many Latinos really live here anymore," she said.

Blacks accounted for about a quarter of Mount Pleasant's population in the 2000 census. However, Elizabeth Trout, who has lived in her purple rowhouse for about three decades, has seen many fellow black residents move to suburbs in the past few years -- an unfortunate trend, she said.

"It'd be very boring in this world if we all had the same faces," she said.

Also losing their foothold in Mount Pleasant are group-house residents, said Louise Meyer, a 20-year resident of the neighborhood. Her block used to be mostly group houses, where generally young, single people split the rent and live together. Many of her neighbors worked for nonprofit agencies or had just returned from the Peace Corps, so they couldn't afford much rent. As property values rose, group houses migrated east to Columbia Heights, Meyer said.