Mount Pleasant Library 16th and lamont streets nw
When the Mount Pleasant Library opened in 1925, crowds flocked to the Classical style building. Many had campaigned long and hard for this community centerpiece. The Carnegie Corporation, funder of DC public libraries in Mount Vernon Square, Southeast, and Takoma Park, spent extra on this branch so that it would fit in with the mansions and churches lining 16th Street. The city hired noted New Yorker Edward L. Tilton, architect of Carnegie libraries nation- wide and the Ellis Island immigration station. The library continues as a learning and gathering space, especially for immigrant residents enjoying its foreign-language collections. During the Great Depression (1929–1941), local artist Aurelius Battaglia dressed up the children’s reading room with “Animal Circus,” murals funded by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Public Works of Art program. Later Battaglia worked for Walt Disney Studios on Dumbo and Pinocchio. The church at 3146 16th Street opened in 1916 as the modest brick Mount Pleasant Methodist Episcopal Church, South. A decade later the congregation enlarged the building in the Classical style to match the new library and renamed it Francis Asbury Methodist Church. After 40 years, the church followed the majority of its members to the Maryland suburbs, and Meridian Hill Baptist Church relocated here from Adams Morgan. In the park across from the library is a memorial to Guglielmo Marconi, co-winner of the 1909 Nobel Prize in physics for his important contri- butions to the invention of wireless telegraphy. Marconi’s innovations led to the development of modern radio.
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker