For decades, the District dumped its ills on this Meridian Hill neighborhood in Northwest D.C.
The Pitts Motor Hotel — once a destination for Martin Luther King Jr., Aretha Franklin and Bill Cosby — had fallen apart. Homeless people were bused in for breakfast and left there until after dinner.
Prostitutes and drug dealers sold their wares along the 1400 block of Belmont, drug addicts overdosed inside burned-out row houses and muggers used several co-eds who lived briefly in a boarding home as their personal ATM machine.
“It was madness,” said Uzikee Nelson, an artist who bought the town house across from the Pitts Hotel in 1974.
Today, the1400 block of Belmont Street NW epitomizes the changes going on throughout the District. The drugs are drying up and dollars have been poured in.
For sale signs hang in front of row houses that had remained empty for 15 years.
Life in Meridian Hill started to get better after Mike Smith moved into the house where more than 30 heroin addicts died.
Smith bought the 4,400-square-foot, four-story former heroin house in 2000 for $179,000. It overlooked the city’s monuments.
“It liked the view of the downtown and it was close to everything,” he said.
Soon, condominiums sprouted next to burned-out crack houses. The Pitts was razed and replaced with The Fedora, with condos selling for more than $700,000.
A developer of nine-story condominiums on 14th Street NW invested $1 million into the apartments at 1430 Belmont NW, and tenants will be able to buy their places.
Crime is still an issue, as The Examiner witnessed earlier this month while riding with D.C. Police Officer Daniel Baez.
Ten men in white T-shirts, smoking blunt cigarettes and drinking from green beer bottles, blocked the entrance to an apartment building several houses down from Smith’s.
As Baez scattered the men, a young couple watched from the outdoor, second-story balcony of a newly renovated townhouse, sipping from wine glasses.
“Still, it’s night and day,” Smith said.
History of The Pitts
» Martin Luther King Jr. stayed at the Pitts Motor Hotel several times and was featured in the hotel’s brochure.
» In the early ’80s, Mayor Marion Barry turned The Pitts Hotel into a homeless shelter. An audit later found that city officials were “grossly derelict” in handling a contract with the Pitts.
» Greenbelt-based Bozzuto Homes bought the Pitts and three adjoining lots for $3.4million and have built The Fedora, where condominiums range from $350,000 to $700,000.
