Wednesday, September 16, 2009

what's up the pike: everybody's changing

New AFI Marquee
- The AFI Silver changed its marquee recently, ditching the sorta-traditional scroller for one with color images and showtimes. If you look at a close-up of the photo you can see that the new display boxes don't nearly cover the marquee, leaving all these rough, sloppy patches in between. I'm not sure why this was necessary, because it's not like I'm gonna be driving by and suddenly decide to see a movie here just because there's a 2:10 showing of Julie and Julia.

- It's a first for District 4: newly-elected Councilmember Nancy Navarro has started a blog, giving constituents and up-close and personal look into . . . well, meetings and stuff, but I'm not going to knock the efforts of the office down the hall from mine. (Better check out that disclaimer at the bottom of the page.) Navarro is the fourth councilmember to keep a blog, following Nancy Floreen, Mike Knapp and Duchy Trachtenberg.

- From the listservs: advocates of re-opening the Stickley Auditorium on Wayne Avenue, which served Blair High School before they moved to Four Corners in 1998, installed a mural there last weekend. The paintings were created by students of Sligo Creek Elementary School and Silver Spring International Middle School, which now occupy the original Blair campus.

- Flickr user obz3rv3r has posted more photos of the ongoing Silver Spring Transit Center construction, which will create a consolidated terminal for dozens of local and regional bus routes, commuter rail, and the Red and Purple lines. Even better, he made a time-lapse video of the construction, taken from an office in one of the NOAA buildings on East-West Highway. The project, still at the "moving dirt around" stage, should be completed sometime next year.

- Don't forget: Bethesda Magazine is holding a "Best of Bethesda" survey, asking readers to pick their favorite things in Bethesda, for these purposes defined as "all of Montgomery County." We're asking that you help the local economy by entering "Silver Spring" for all of the "Favorite Neighborhood in [Bethesda/Chevy Chase/Whatever]" categories. For "Favorite Neighborhood in Silver Spring," just give an honest answer.

5 comments:

Tom A. said...

The scrolls probably won't last long. It'll create all sorts of traffic issues when some guy in a BMW thinks he can just stop in the road to see the times the movies are playing.

Did they need to get zoning permission to change the sign?

Andrea said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andrea said...

AFI is in a county building, FYI. So I assume zoning is a non-issue since they had to jump through hoops just to get the sign.

Also, the marquee is not completed. It'll line up and look pretty someday...

Unknown said...

FYI,I actuall work at the company who furnished and installed the LED boards for AFI. We have indeed worked long and hard with the county to change the marquee, and it is indeed incomplete. The corner sections that were shipped over to us had an incorrect radius, so entire new corner sections had to be fabricated and shipped. AFI wanted the existing pieces lit to curb any loss in revenue due to a missing marquee. Just like any illuminated sign, this marquee is not tageting motorist, rather the thousands of pedestrians that commute in and around downtown Silver Spring. Crazy, right?

Unknown said...

The remaining LED borads have been installed, thus completing the job. I was on site personally from 10:00 PM to 10:00 AM last Tuesday.