Fashionable 16th Street 16th and mt. pleasant streets nw
Sixteenth Street, from the White House to Silver Spring, Maryland, is one of the city’s key gateways. But through the 1890s, it jogged left where Mt. Pleasant Street runs today and then dead- ended at the edge of today’s Rock Creek Park. After decades on the city’s wish list, 16th Street finally was straightened in 1903 and extended northward to Spring Road. This improvement, coupled with the arrival of the electric streetcar, made airy Mount Pleasant an attractive location for residential building. Suddenly it was easy to commute downtown and back. Two decades earlier, Mary Foote Henderson, socialite developer and wife of Missouri Senator John Henderson, had begun working to make 16th Street the city’s most fashionable. The couple lived in Henderson Castle (now demolished) at 16th and Florida Avenue. Mary Henderson lured embassies from France, Spain, Mexico, Cuba, Lithuania, Italy, and Poland to 16th Street. In 1913 she also had the street re-named Avenue of the Presidents, but that lasted only one year. When the Kenesaw Apartment House across Asbury Park opened in 1906, it led a wave of luxury apartment building here. The Kenesaw housed members of Congress and other promi- nent Washingtonians. Legendary Washington Senators pitcher Walter Johnson and his family lived there in 1916, while their house at 1843 Irving Street was under construction. In 1913 the Kenesaw owners donated land next to the building for a city park. President Coolidge dedicated the sculpture of Francis Asbury, the first Methodist bishop in America, in 1924.
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