Wednesday, 4/9/03: Introduction and Theme

The area of downtown Silver Spring bounded by Georgia Avenue on the west, Colesville Road on the north, Fenton Street on the east and Wayne Avenue on the south is now scarred by gigantic craters. A pedestrian bridge from City Place Mall once led to a parking garage; it now leads to nothing, held up by support beams to no end, as the only remaining signs of the garage are a huge pile of gray slab rubble, twisted rebar, and the occasional semblance of a staircase still standing. Another office building, next to the former garage, has been reduced to angry metal twigs. Fences block off sidewalks around the pits, forcing pedestrians on zigzag routes at the ends of blocks, and sometimes forcing jaywalking in the middle; a few brave or tired souls wade into oncoming traffic. But despite the patches of devastation, there's a lot of traffic still around.

This is the epicenter of redevelopment in what will eventually be the new Silver Spring. Here will be a Borders, a Pier 1, a hotel, a Washington Sports Club, new office space, and four national chain restaurants. Already here is the Fresh Fields and the American Film Institute's newest theater, the AFI Silver. Most significantly, just across Georgia Avenue from all the activity, the new headquarters for the Discovery Channel casts a gigantic shadow on all the proceedings. (It's an awful attractive one, too, according to Benjamin Forgery, the Washington Post's architecture critic. Me, I like it, but it's too much for my naked unaccustomed eyes to take in at once.) But there's other stuff happening other place, too: new apartment buildings next to the train tracks and in the old Canada Dry building, the huge Mayorga Coffee Factory (owned by Christina Nunez's brother-in-law! Spend money there!) just south of the train bridge, even condos on the corner I used to walk past to the Metro every day when I lived with my parents. (Click here for a map; click here for some panel intros and then here for a roundtable discussion with a lot more background.)

You see where this is going. Silver Spring is the city I grew up in. I lived in Detroit as a kid, but we left when I was 5; I never ventured much beyond my front yard, or my neighbors'. Every step I took towards independence I took first in Silver Spring. I first realized how much fun movies could be at AMC City Place. I went out to dinner by myself for the first times at the Thai Derm and the Tastee Diner. I discovered the pleasures of used books from Silver Spring Books, Imagination Books and another bookstore whose name I can't remember; the last two are closed now. My first cautious exposures to indie culture were at Vinyl Ink Records (also now closed, and you can see how well that took, but whatever).

And most of all, I learned what a pleasure it can be to just walk around a city in easy sun, dimming twilight, early night, and late night, the variegated pleasures each time affords, the people who populate the streets and businesses, the way the light slides through and around buildings, the feel of concrete under my feet, and the settling-in of knowing that I wouldn't have to talk for the next however long I wanted to walk and I could just observe. Each detail of Silver Spring that I can remember is dear to me. By design, much of it will be thrown away now, for something new.

In some cases, the new something is clearly better. I have not particularly missed the row of beeper stores along Ellsworth Avenue (here's a poem I wrote about it), or the Rite-Aid that hung on so desperately and so long at the corner of Colesville and Georgia, the Rite-Aid I always referred to as "the drug-dealer Rite-Aid" for its primary population. Or that amazingly dirty McDonald's at Ellsworth and Georgia. But you don't often get to change just the things you don't like in this life.

I worry that the character of Silver Spring will change with all this redevelopment, that we won't be a haven in Montgomery County for people whose incomes don't approach our ridiculous median anymore, that the small shops and restaurants will no longer be able to make rents increased on speculation, that the money coming in will demand safety and homogenization and get it, that so many people will come to Silver Spring thinking they're looking for the urban experience and really wanting a facade of it that we'll eventually give them the facade. I see the changes around me, much larger than me, and feel like an atom caught up in it, like I don't have anything I can say and simply have to settle back and watch even though I want to speak out.

I want to buck that thought and speak out here. This page will be my gentrification diary. I will share memories of Silver Spring past, fears for Silver Spring future, and tales of the changing city of Silver Spring present. Saying whatever I end up saying may not change anything, but I don't want to let it go unsaid, either.

So we embark.

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