- An Aspen Hill-based church seeking to build a new 140,000 square-foot facility on the Montgomery/Frederick County line has raised the ire of local residents who complain it'll be a burden on local roads. The Korea-based Global Mission Church (their website is almost entirely in Korean), currently located at Georgia and Hewitt avenues, has over eleven hundred members. It won't be the first time a local congregation's expansion plans in Frederick County have been stymied: last spring, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community claimed religious discrimination when a local planning board refused to let them build a retreat center there.
- On Tuesday, the National Building Museum hosts a FREE lecture called "The Purple Line: A Rail Solution?" discussing the controversial transitway's potential benefits for the region are worth "[bulldozing] 17 acres of mature forest," as Post columnist Robert McCartney clumsily puts it. The talk is at 6:30pm at the museum, located next to the Judiciary Square Metro station in the District.
- Richard Layman at Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space unearths some really old bus and streetcar maps from the 1960's. They're of the District, but you can see a little corner of Silver Spring in there, bus routes and all. I was surprised to see that the Metrobus Z routes have been running for nearly half a century, although instead of all following Colesville Road north they fan out through downtown, on Wayne Avenue, Bonifant Street and Sligo Avenue.
- Jon Lourie, chairman of the Silver Spring Urban District Advisory Board, told the Gazette that proposed designs for the new library on Wayne Avenue are "not architecture, it just doesn't work." Thankfully, he's an architect, so he can say that, as it was said to me all throughout architecture school. (And his harsh criticism made me nostalgic for those days, all of two months ago.)
2 comments:
Dan, the D.C. Transit "Z"
bus routes that you see on
the 1960's-era maps are
quite different from
the Metrobus Z routes of
today. About the only thing
they have in common is that
some of them ran along
U.S. 29. Most of those old "Z"
routes are now served by
Ride-On.
These Z bus routes all had
their southern terminal at
the Silver Spring bus station
at Wayne Avenue and Fenton
Street were (from memory)
like this:
Z1 - Olney via White Oak
Z2 - Wheaton Plaza via Holy Cross,
South Four Corners, Northwood HS and Arcola Avenue
Z3 - Olney via Georgia Avenue
Z4 - White Oak via Colesville Road and Lockwood Drive
Z4/ - Four Corners
Z6 - "Northwood" (Lombardy Road and Lockridge Drive) via Franklin Avenue
Z8 - Franklin Avenue & University Boulevard via Piney Branch Road
Then there were express routes that provided one-seat rides into D.C. in the morning and back in the afternoon, including these:
K7 - White Oak (roughly followed
route K6 in Montgomery County)
S7 - Wheaton (roughly followed
the Z2 north of Silver Spring
S9 - Four Corners (north on 29
as far as University Boulevard,
then west to Dennis and north to
the "triangle" at Edgewood Avenue)
Leaving all other matters out of the discussion over Global Mission Church, one has to wonder what would become of their really quite large extant facility.
If they were to sell it, one would hope that it would be to the County or a comparable entity.
It's already centrally located on -- and provides the only local parking lot with access to -- the Matthew Henson Hiker-Biker Trail.
It's in a community which is extremely under-served in terms of community centers, recreational facilities, and perhaps ultimately the most important, theater/public-meeting space.
I'm not in any way suggesting that the practically-isolated and definitely rural area they seek to establish their new embassy and base-of-operations should be approved, I'm just proposing that the local community will almost certainly benefit from their extant facilities once they're gone.
Post a Comment