In the spring of 2019, the District budgeted $798,745 for a renovation project at Walter Pierce Park that included a new restroom at the Adams Mill Road entrance. The project was supposed to wrap by April 2020. It didn't open until this year, roughly six years past its own deadline, a delay confirmed by a March 2026 PoPville post whose headline said simply that the wait was finally over.
A few blocks away, inside Kalorama Park, volunteers transformed a stretch of ground above the basketball courts into terraced beds of black-eyed Susans and coneflowers.
Walk this corridor of Adams Morgan and Kalorama's edge this fall and you'll encounter parks and gardens with different histories, forms of stewardship, and schedules. Understanding those differences changes how you read the place.
Kalorama Park's two garden projects
Kalorama Park sits on the north side of Columbia Road between Kalorama Road and Mintwood Place, a three-acre wooded slope that the Kalorama Citizens Association spent decades lobbying to get dedicated in the first place. It finally opened in 1949. Inside its boundaries today, you'll find two garden projects that could not run more differently.
The first is the 19-plot community garden the DC Department of Parks and Recreation manages at Kalorama and Columbia Roads. It works on a lottery: interested residents enter, and if selected, they hold the plot for years as long as they stay in the area. It's a city-managed program.
The second is the Mariposa Garden, which sits just above those same basketball courts and is tended by its own volunteers. Every fence post, every woodchip path, every seedling is funded by donations rather than agency budget lines, and the group that tends it explicitly doesn't allow outside events on the grounds. The two gardens share the same park but operate in different ways.
The triangle a neighbor designed himself
Keep walking toward 20th and Biltmore streets and you'll hit the smallest public green space the Kalorama Citizens Association claims: the Biltmore Triangle Garden, a roughly ten-plot planting of roses, irises, and tulips tucked into a traffic island most people drive past without noticing. It was designed in 1981 by Gordon Riggle, a landscape architect who lived in the neighborhood himself, and it still runs today on the same footing as it did then: neighborhood volunteers doing the tending, and KCA collecting tax-deductible donations to keep it going.
Walter Pierce Park and its history
Walter Pierce Community Park adds another layer of history to the walk. Tucked behind the rowhouses on the north side of Calvert Street between Biltmore Street and Adams Mill Road, right up against the National Zoo and Rock Creek Park, the park carries a weight most visitors don't clock at first glance: it sits atop two historic cemeteries, one African American and one Quaker, documented to hold more than 8,400 people. The National Park Service named it part of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom in 2008, and it's also listed on DC's African American Heritage Trail.
None of that recognition arrived quickly either. The push to document and protect the burial grounds traces back to 2005, when community members and Howard University archaeologists organized to stop earth-moving work at the site once its history became clear. The Ancestors Pavilion, a set of interpretive signs meant to list the names and stories connected to those burials, has been in development for years as part of that same long effort, run in large part by longtime volunteer Mary Belcher and the group behind the Walter Pierce Park Archaeology Project.
The 2019 project scope for Walter Pierce Park's Phase II covered both the new signage and the restroom installation. The restroom opened roughly six years after its scheduled date. The Ancestors Pavilion, the historical-memory work, has been in development for close to two decades and remains ongoing.
What a fall walk through here actually shows you
If you want to see the contrast for yourself before the leaves are down, the loop works best in this order:
- Start at Kalorama Park's oval, where the grassy center marks the old footprint of a 19th-century manor house and farm, then climb toward the Mariposa Garden above the courts to see what a fully volunteer-funded planting looks like in September bloom.
- Walk past the DPR community garden plots along Columbia Road and notice the DPR plots' grid layout alongside Mariposa's terraces.
- Cut over to the Biltmore Triangle at 20th and Biltmore, easy to miss if you're not looking for it, and see forty-five years of a single resident's landscape design still holding its shape.
- Finish at Walter Pierce Park, where the new restroom near the Adams Mill Road entrance is a recent addition and the historic burial ground itself still isn't publicly accessible.
None of these stops require an agenda. They're simply what's here right now, in the specific state this particular September finds them.
Gardens and park history along the route
Kalorama Park's history includes the Kalorama Citizens Association's decades-long effort to have it dedicated in 1949. The Ancestors Pavilion project and donations for the Biltmore Triangle Garden are continuing examples of neighborhood involvement.
This stretch brings together the recently opened restroom at Walter Pierce Park, historic parkland, DPR community garden plots, and volunteer-maintained gardens.
If you're spending time in this part of town and want a longer conversation about how a specific block, building, or park actually works day to day, not just what the listing photos show, the Hagen Bergstrom Team has spent decades paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across Kalorama and the neighborhoods around it.
This article is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Consult a qualified professional about your situation.
