Reality Checkpoint

Once more than 100 acres of farmland, the area got its name from 19th century speculator James Barry, who had once lived on the Caribbean island, said Patsy Fletcher of the District's Historic Preservation Office.

In the early 1900s, builders constructed homes that still stand today, porch-front rowhouses that drew mostly white working- and middle-class residents, who left for the suburbs in the 1950s and were largely replaced by blacks.

The 1968 riots propelled the area's decline, a gradual process that gathered explosive speed with the onset of the crack epidemic in the mid-1980s. Signs of a revival did not emerge until the early 2000s, drawing new residents including Elise Bernard, 29, a Georgetown University law student, who bought a rowhouse and started a Web site chronicling life in Trinidad and on H Street.

"People didn't know where it was," said Bernard, an advisory neighborhood commissioner, sitting on her Florida Avenue porch.

Clearly, something has changed. Across the street, a sign advertises the near-complete "Capitol Hill Oasis," which includes spacious town homes priced at an almost whiplash-inducing $1.5 million.

Willie Dorn, 67, a retired corrections officer, doesn't need a map to find Trinidad. He bought a Montello Avenue rowhouse in the late 1970s, and was there a decade later when the police erected a roadblock during a crackdown.

Offended that he had to explain his presence in the neighborhood, Dorn soured on the District and moved to Maryland. But he held on to his Trinidad house. Excited by the neighborhood's recent evolution, he renovated the property last year and moved back in -- in time for this year's blockade.

"If I hadn't seen all the changes, I would not have come back," he said, waving to passing friends from his porch on a Friday afternoon. "It's great to be in the city."