Downtown springs back to life with new urbanist plan

Once the social and economic cen- ter of Montgomery County, the Washington suburb of Silver Spring has steadily declined since the early 1960s, when the migration to new suburbs siphoned housing, offices, and retail away from the urban core. In the last 10 years, developers have launched several proposals for reviving downtown with enclosed mall projects, but those plans were thwarted by economic recession or public opposition. The improving economy has brought new housing, mostly townhomes, to downtown in the past couple of years, but residents have had to drive elsewhere for shopping and entertainment. That is about to change with the building of a compact new downtown for Silver Spring. The project will occupy 20 acres of mostly vacant land purchased by the city. The master plan by RTKL Associates envisions two districts: a neighborhood retail, residential, and civic district to the north, and an entertainment and retail district with a countywide draw to the south. The northern district is centered around the Town Square and park and a community meeting hall. A circular plaza, Silver Circle, is the focus of the southern district. Construction has begun on the first phase of neighborhood retail, which is already generating pedestrian traffic. The 30,000-square-foot Fresh Fields supermarket is a popular destination, as is Strosnider’s, part of a local chain of hardware stores. Fresh Fields includes a cafe with an independent street entrance, but the door is locked from the outside, forcing patrons to use the main entrance to the supermarket. Unfortunately, developer PFA Silver Spring has no specific clause in its lease that demands that Fresh Fields keep the door open. The development company is a joint venture between Foulger- Pratt Development of Rockville, Maryland, The Peterson Companies of Fairfax, Virginia, and Argo Investments. The 225 new apartments in the plan will be located in a low-rise massing of connected buildings covering one block on the northern edge of the project and serve as a transition to the neighboring single-family homes. One of the few existing buildings on the site, the 1930s Silver Theater, will undergo renovation to become home to the first satellite location of the American Film Institute. City Place, a five-story retail mall adjacent to the theater, was built in the 1980s as an extension of an existing department store. The master plan calls for City Place to be “de-malled” with the addition of liner stores and the creation of a new corner entrance. Downtown Silver Spring will include 500,000 square feet of retail and restaurants; 125,000 square feet of movie theaters and nightclubs; 200,000 square feet of office space; and a 200-room hotel. In addition, the project has been a catalyst for other development, most prominently the new headquarters for the Discovery Channel, adjacent to downtown. Access to transit comes with the location. The new downtown already has extensive bus service, and it lies a five minute walk from the busiest station on the Metro Red Line. Downtown Silver Spring, with its well-defined public spaces, its tight massing of buildings, its inclusion of neighborhood retail, and its balancing of automobile and foot traffic, has the potential to set new standards for smart growth revitalization in Maryland. And that the project is being realized in a community that has repeatedly rejected redevelopment schemes is also encouraging. “One of the most important messages in this project is that the developers did not come in with a bias, but were willing to engage community groups and the county in the planning process,” says Jim Leonard, an architect with RTKL. u