Dear PoP – What’s Going on with the Building at 17th and Kenyon St, NW?

“Dear PoP,

I live in Mt. Pleasant on Kenyon and every day walk past this decaying building at 17th and Kenyon (the SE corner). I wonder if you or your readers know anything about it…?”

Sounds like this could be a potential horse’s ass award nominee but the story is a sad one. Turns out the Washington Post wrote an article on the building back in April ’08.

Seventy-three-year-old Eva Martinez and her two 30-something daughters have a contract to buy their apartment building in Northwest Washington. All they need is $3.4 million, and they need it by July 31 [2008].

Theirs is an unusual tale of tenant tenacity. For years, they fought illegal rent increases and landlords who let their four-story apartment building deteriorate into a hulk of crumbling bricks, loose windows, leaky ceilings, broken furnaces and rats.

And after every other tenant had left the St. Dennis, at 1636 Kenyon St. NW, the three women spent 2 1/2 years living there alone, the last holdouts amid boarded-up windows, unlit corridors, broken doors and gang graffiti.

You can read the full article here.

Perhaps there will be a happy ending after all. In an email inquiry, Council Member Jim Graham writes,

“Its funded, owned by tenants and moving forward to rehab. Bests Jim”