Two nights ago, I went to a dinner for contributors to
Greater Greater Washington, which I've written for intermittently since last spring. Each of us had to introduce ourselves and where we lived. When it was my turn, I said I lived in "what I'll call Silver Spring," figuring that most of the people there weren't from Montgomery County and wouldn't know Calverton from California. "Would you really call where you live 'Silver Spring'?" asked David Alpert. Yes, I said, and this is why.
I embrace Silver Spring's lack of defined boundaries. Purists will argue that Silver Spring consists of Downtown and immediately surrounding neighborhoods. The
Singular likes to call places that are not within this area "
SSINO," or Silver Spring In Name Only. Silver Spring is not a municipality like Rockville or Gaithersburg. It means we don't have a mayor, but it also means the place can be as big or as small as we want.
To explore this relationship, I looked up the three hundred most recent rental listings in Silver Spring on
Craigslist, tossing out commercial ads and keeping the ones that gave at least a nearby intersection as a reference point. This left seventy-five listings, the locations of which I recorded on a map. The result is a rough, unscientific survey of where Silver Spring really is.
View "silver spring in name only" in a larger mapWhat did I find?- Of 75 listings, more than half (44) claimed to be in "Silver Spring," followed by "Silver Spring/Wheaton" (7), "Silver Spring/Takoma Park" (6), and "Downtown Silver Spring" (6). Six listings also mentioned other neighboring communities, including Rockville and Kensington. Only six ads referred to specific parts of Silver Spring.
- Of those listings that mentioned Downtown Silver Spring, only two of them were actually located in the central business district. The other four were all within a mile of the CBD, the furthest being on Dale Drive.
- Listings on Flower Avenue in the Long Branch area were said to be in "Takoma Park," despite being several blocks north of the
Takoma Park city limits.
- Some listings were misplaced entirely. One rental at Randolph and New Hampshire - generally called Colesville - claimed to be in "Ashton," nearly six miles away. Another was physically inside the town of Kensington. Three listings mentioned places outside of Montgomery County, including Laurel, Columbia, and Beltsville.
- No listings mentioned Langley Park, Aspen Hill or Briggs Chaney, which may suggest that landlords were worried about any stigma associated with those neighborhoods. Also, some listings in Downtown Wheaton - including one across the street from Wheaton Plaza - were simply called "Silver Spring."
- The northernmost references to just "Silver Spring" appeared in Leisure World, which is surprising because that community would be familiar to people throughout MoCo and the region. An unscrupulous landlord might purposely leave the name off to prevent Leisure World's age restrictions from limiting their potential pool of renters.
- While I didn't include them in the final sample, I noticed that many of the commercial ads associated Silver Spring with other areas. Listings for the Bennington on East-West Highway referred to it as being "
In Silver Spring near Shepard [sic] Park" and "
In Silver Springs [sic] near Chevy Chase," seeking to place the building near ritzier neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the Monterey at Randolph Road and Rockville Pike claimed to be in "
North Bethesda near Silver Spring," a surprising association for a building already in an upscale area.
Conclusions?I'm not sure if my opinion changed very much. If anything, I realized that people may identify even less with individual neighborhoods than with Silver Spring as a whole. This may be because of the revitalized downtown, which serves not only as a regional anchor but as the preferred place to hang out. It would also explain why the most distant listings mentioned Rockville or Columbia - because people who live there might spend more time in Rockville Town Center or at the Mall in Columbia.
Regional identity is significant. Downtown Silver Spring becomes all the more relevant when people who live ten miles away associate themselves with it. At the same time, a lack of local identity makes "Silver Spring" becomes a pejorative term, a way to quickly and cheaply collect a bunch of places that are no longer worth individual names. This may or may not be an issue depending on who you ask and how they see their community. (Someone who lives in the once-prestigious
Burnt Mills Hills neighborhood probably wouldn't say they live in "White Oak.")
The census
defines Silver Spring as basically everything below the Beltway and Four Corners, with a population of 76,540 in 2000. But the U.S. Postal Service gives eight zip codes (20901,2,3,4,5,6,10 and 12) to Silver Spring, an area containing over 200,000 people. As a result, someone living on a farm at
Ednor Road and the Patuxent River has the same address as someone in a high-rise at
Colesville and Georgia. Can farms and high-rises happily co-exist in Silver Spring, or can communities that historically had their own identity as rural villages (places like Norbeck, Colesville and Fairland) reclaim them from the suburban quilt? I doubt we'll find the answer on Craigslist.