Wednesday, August 26, 2009

what's up the pike: walk, don't run

Silver Spring Blues Festival
- The Magical Montgomery festival next month does its own take on National Park(ing) Day, letting people have free reign over parking spaces on Ellsworth Drive. "What can happen in a park(ing) spot? You name it— it has probably been done . . . the rules are that it all has to fit within a parking space and be open and free to the public," says the event website. For more info, check out the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County's website. (Thanks to Richard Layman for the heads-up.)

- Park Hills resident and civic activist Alan Bowser posted photos of last weekend's Peace Walk, hosted by the youth group Mixed Unity in response to increased violence against young people in Silver Spring. The march led from the corner of Piney Branch Road and Arliss Street, where fourteen-year-old Tai Lam was murdered last fall, to Pyramid Atlantic's arts center on Georgia Avenue.

- Learn about the proposed Third District police station tonight at a meeting hosted by the North White Oak Civic Association and County Councilmember Nancy Navarro. Representatives from the Police Department and Housing and Community Affairs will be there to speak with residents about plans to build a new station along with a mix of market-rate and affordable housing on the twelve-acre site near New Hampshire Avenue and Columbia Pike. The meeting's at 7:30pm Tonight in the White Oak Library at New Hampshire and Heartfields Drive.

- The State Highway Administration wants to keep you posted about the InterCounty Connector's environmental impacts. Next Saturday, they'll be having an open house to talk about the Environmental Stewardship/Compensatory Mitigation program, which includes everything from cleaning streams to moving box turtles affected by the highway construction. The meeting's from 9am to 12pm at the National Capital Trolley Museum on Bonifant Road. (It's still there: the original building was razed to make room for the highway, but a new museum has been built behind it. Read more at Maryland Politics Watch because the ICC's website either doesn't have the info or I'm not looking hard enough.

1 comment:

WashingtonGardener said...

The point of National Park(ing) Day is to transform asphalt into a green park space to show in much the same way the Turf did) our disparate need for green space in our dense, urban areas. I've been tryingto get a DC group together for doing this in a visible parking spot in downotwn DC but so far no takers - will look into the MoCo version.