The road to heaven begins at the White House.
No, that isn't the first line of some bad political joke. An actual D.C. road, 16th Street NW, runs 6.5 miles from the White House up to the Maryland border. It's home to nearly 50 — 50! — houses of worship.
"It's a very strong visual. You see them one after another, and there are so many different religions represented," said WAMU listener Nira Desai. She used to drive the street regularly and would wonder about the array of churches, synagogues, shrines and temples there.
Desai submitted a question about the "highway to heaven" and its history to WAMU's What's With Washington, as did listeners Xochitl Halaby and Ashley Wood.
Article continues belowHere's the story of how 16th Street became D.C.'s holiest road.
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Part 1: The Best Address In Town
The street got its first house of worship in 1816. St. John's Episcopal Church is a yellow, colonial-style building on Lafayette Square that still offers regular services today.
Soon, other churches began to follow. "Sixteenth Street always had a kind of prestige about it," says John DiFerrari, a local historian who is working on a book about 16th Street's history. He says Pierre L'Enfant designed the street as a European-style boulevard featuring a grand vista to the White House.
If you wanted to build a national branch of your church, 16th Street was the place to do it.
Part 2: An Heiress Takes Charge
Known as "The Empress of 16th Street," Mary Foote Henderson and her husband (a Missouri senator) lived in a huge brownstone mansion at the southwestern corner of Meridian Hill Park. She was obsessed with developing Washington's newly extended northern border.
In the late 1800s, Henderson bought blocks of real estate along 16th Street and selectively sold it off to people who wanted to build mansions, embassies and churches.
Near the end of her life in the 1920s, she sold two major tracts of land to the Mormons and the Unitarians. The churches they built at the corner of 16th Street and Columbia Road both still stand today.
The construction was part of a wider church-building boom: About 10 new churches were built on 16th Street in the 1920s.
Part 3: Movin' On Up (To The Suburbs)
Around the same time, the city started implementing zoning laws and banned commercial business from 16th Street.
As the suburbs around Washington grew, some congregations sold their buildings and moved out of the city too, where parking was plenty.
The Mormons, for example, built a new white-and-gold temple in Kensington, Maryland in 1974 and sold their 16th Street building to the Unification Church, a Christian movement known for its mass weddings. The new tenant "promptly hoisted its gold-painted aluminum symbol of the 12 human personalities and the 12 ways to the Kingdom of God high above the entrance," according to a 1978 Washington Post article.
The move out to the suburbs was so pronounced that a new "highway to heaven" developed on New Hampshire Avenue between the Beltway and Sandy Spring Road.
Part 4: The Future
The city's changed a lot in the 200 years since that first church was built near the White House.
Some houses of worship are no longer churches at all, though developers usually have to keep the original facades intact due to strict historic preservation's laws. Central Presbyterian is now Next Step Public Charter School, and Meridian Hill Baptist is a luxury apartment complex called The Vintage.
Despite the city's population growth and constant push for more housing, John DiFerrari still feels pretty confident that the houses of worship will last another century.
"Sixteenth is unique in that it's survived through a lot of development and change in the city," he says. "I think 16th Street as the 'avenue of the churches' is here to stay."
As the saying goes — from his lips to God's ears.
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