Pleasant Plains (Washington, D.C.)
neighborhood in central Washington, D.C.
Pleasant Plains is a neighborhood in central Washington, D.C. largely occupied by Howard University. For this reason it is also sometimes referred to as Howard Town or, less frequently, Howard Village.
It is situated in the Northwest quadrant of the city and bordered by 2nd Street, and McMillan Reservoir to the east; Florida Avenue and Barry Place to the south; Sherman Avenue to the west; and Harvard Street to the north. It is flanked on the eastern side by the Washington Veteran Affairs Medical Center and Washington Hospital Center, and by the Columbia Heights and Park View neighborhoods on the west and north sides.
Pleasant Plains, Howard University notwithstanding, is a residential neighborhood. A large portion of its residents are Howard affiliates, either students or employees. One of its major community anchors is the Banneker Recreation Center on Georgia Avenue, which reopened in July 2007 after a year of renovations. The adjacent Benjamin Banneker Academic High School has ranked among the 100 best public schools in the United States.
Pleasant Plains is in Ward 1.
History
The neighborhood is a small portion of a large colonial estate named "Pleasant Plains," owned by the Holmead family.
“Pleasant Plains (Washington, D.C.)” enters the record as neighborhood in central Washington, D.C. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pleasant, Plains and Washington can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7203917. VIAF identifies the subject as 135064124. The Library of Congress control number is n2002073196. Authority coordinates are 38.931, -77.030. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2007.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pleasant Plains (Washington, D.C.)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.