I’d give that building a brown ribbon.

This is my hood. A few thoughts to share:

The big building you highlight in your main photo is the DuMont. It was built to be two condominium buildings. However the developer basically defaulted on the project. Contract holders got their money back. The buildings are now for sale for $170 million. I’m not a big fan of the building. Mainly because I don’t like how it engages Mass Ave. Two semi-circle driveways for separate entrances? That’s bologna. Both buildings did not need Mass Ave addresses. One should have been put on Fourth or Eye instead (without the ornamental driveway). I also think a project this mammoth (559) units should have more than one retail bay of less than 1000sf.

I don’t think that “Ledos building” will ever serve a pizza. The back wall of the building is chopped off exposing the interior to the elements. I also just don’t see how you can have a restaurant that only has a 3 ft wide walkway to the rear. Restaurants produce too much waste for that to be practical.

The building with the embedded firehouse is 400 Mass. Douglas Developments owns the retail bay – but I haven’t heard any serious rumors since I moved here over a year ago. The building also has a CVS on the ground floor.

It’s nice to have something there other than wasteland, but it’s just one bland concrete canyon down there. The buildings all have that same brown/tan brick, curvy walls, glass bump-outs. The first 1 or 2 buildings down there were creative, but then all the rest had to do the same thing. I think every huge building should have the entire 1st floor retail, right? And the above posters are correct…the broken down house never had Ledo Pizza…the owners put up a big stink about not budging and now look at it. Nice.

The square itself is at the south end of the convention center. The Mt. Vernon Square neighborhood (as defined by the neighborhood association and used by realtors selling homes in the area) is larger and includes Mt. Vernon Triangle.

http://www.mvsna.org/ for a map.

The Ledos and firehouse inserts are equally useless. The developer decided to build around the Ledos place for when its owner eventually comes to his senses and accepts a much lower payment than he could have had several years ago. The firehouse across the street is also horribly incorporated, but the developer treated it like a design element which just makes it looks weird and incongruant. The firehouse used to look really cool on Mass, but now it might have just as well been bulldozed.

This entire corridor totally sucks by the way.

Anyone who remembers what that stretch of Mass was like even as recently as, say, 2001 would not say it “totally sucks,” as Anon 5:11 p.m. wrote. I’m guessing Anon 5:11 p.m. either didn’t live here (or in that neighborhood, as I did) at that time, or is one of the elitist snobs that increasingly populate the POP comment threads.

I’ll take a boulevard of sterile condo/office buildings over a dangerous, drug addict- and prostitute-populated wasteland of parking lots and vacant lots any day of the week.

I live around here. I have been tempted on many occasions to leave little notes in the entrance to the DuMont saying, “Dear Mr. Foreclosure Bank, please let me move in here. Thank you.” If you need any proof that the banking industry is still in a flying panic over how badly they screwed up the real estate bubble, look no further than a giant, finished condo, 3 blocks from the metro, with even the appliances already installed, sitting empty instead of being sold.

In response to post 9:54 that block was filled with old row houses, a remnant can be seen at 457-59 Mass Ave, also known as the House of Ruth, as for the block where the Firehouse is, there were old rowhouses on either side, abandoned since at least 1980.
Notable losses there was the President Monroe apartment a few doors East of the hosue at 435, looked like, for a number of years after its facade was sheared off, bombed out Berlin or Beirut, annd the houses from 439-55 pretty much looked similar to today’s House of Ruth.

No; we shop for groceries at the new Safeway, two blocks away on 5th street.