the velveteen giraffe: a happy ending?

Last August, a pair of townhouses on Featherwood Street in Fairland caught fire, injuring three firefighters. It also left two families homeless. Two weeks after the fire, their belongings still sat in the yard, including a three-foot-tall toy giraffe.

Eight months later, however, this story finally has a happy ending. Stopping by Featherwood Street last weekend, I noticed both houses had been completely renovated. They now appear as if nothing had happened. I'm glad that their owners can go home again.

I don't see the giraffe, though.

daily snapshot: wheaton commuter faces the new reality

"The Commuter" is a bronze statue of a briefcase-wielding man on roller skates, made by Marcia Billig and placed outside the Wheaton Metro station's Veirs Mill Road entrance in 1994. Apparently, someone saw the trash can placed in front of "The Commuter" many years later and decided to do something about it.

Photographer and friend of JUTP Chip Py sent us this photo of the vandalized statue, suggesting it might be a commentary about our shitty economy:

Someone has placed a lid from a nearby garbage can onto the head of Marcia Billig's Wheaton Commuter Statue that has greeted commuters since the station opened in 1990. I wonder if this is just a sophomoric prank or if it symbolizes the anxiety that many commuters feel these days. Commuting on the aging Metro to their jobs that they are glad to have but are uncertain that they will be there in the future, sharing a common workplace anxiety that their hope and dreams will be "trashed" in this economy.

Where could "The Commuter" be going with those roller skates? He sure as hell isn't taking the Red Line to hit up a skatepark in Downtown Silver Spring.

daily snapshot: storecat

The Pla-Za Art at Georgia and Sligo might be the only store I know of with resident cats. My studio supplies come cheaper at the Pearl in Rockville, but here the hairballs are always free.

daily snapshot: dead street sign

Yield couldn't take it anymore. Nobody listened to him, especially after they gave him the "No Left Turn" sign. What was scary about a traffic command that was so vague? I mean, who even knew what "Yield" meant, anyway? Now, Stop - people were scared of him. Stop was tough. He'd come down hard on you if you didn't pay attention.

When Yield got cut down in battle with an errant driver, he didn't cry. He took it like a man, lying in the middle of the street, waiting for death to come.

I saw Yield on the ground and blasted down Ellsworth Drive because no one told me I couldn't make a left there. It's a nice neighborhood back there, but I'd never seen it before. Hopefully I won't get caught the next time I cut through it, either.

This is on Ellsworth Drive near Cedar Street, behind the Silver Spring Library.

daily snapshot(s): dragonfly

Once the dragonfly fell to earth, it didn't have a chance. There was a sale at DSW Shoe Warehouse and the high heels were the first to go, clomping loudly and emphatically down Ellsworth. At least it'll be a quick death, he thought.

daily snapshot: apostrophe's

One little-known fact about Chick-Fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy (or, as he wrote it, 'S. Truett Cathy) is that he is an apostrophe fanatic, much to the chagrin of his friends, family and English teachers. The fast-food chain he started over sixty years ago was very nearly dubbed Chick'Fil'A, but market surveys revealed that the name's pronunciation was already foreign enough to people who weren't from the South.

Cathy tries to use apostrophe's in as many word's as he can, including day's of the week, except for Sunday, the Lords day. (He feels punctuation is a kind of work, making it an affront to God on the Sabbath.)

This sign is, of course, across from the only Chick-Fil-A in Silver Spring (for now!!!), at Fenton Street and Ellsworth Drive.

daily snapshot: don't get mad . . .

. . . put a sign defaming your ex-love on top of your car and drive around for all to see and judge him/her accordingly. This sign, spotted waiting at the light at Flower Avenue and Piney Branch Road, reads "STEPHANIE DORAN APPROPRIATES OTHER PEOPLE'S PROPERTY & DESTROYS OTHER PEOPLE'S BELONGINGS." The fellow inside looked happy as a clam because, indeed, revenge is best served on four wheels.

daily snapshot: houseboat

The first thing you do when you buy a house is see if it will fit on your boat. (This is if you have made the correct choice to buy a boat first.) The second thing is to make sure your house is seaworthy.

This is on Veirs Mill Road near Randolph Road.

daily snapshot: perrywood drive

The roundabout at Old Columbia Pike and Perrywood Drive in Burtonsville, outside Banneker Middle School, was completed about four years ago, but the hand-made street sign remains. I'm not sure who put it up - if it was a temporary measure from the county Department of Transportation, or if some enterprising resident did it themselves.

daily snapshot: a. bird

Birds usually don't like me. After I hit one with my car (Damn thing flew into my windshield. It wasn't my fault!) I guess they all decided to give me hell. But this one let me take a photo. I appreciated that. Thanks, bird!

This is at Ellsworth and Cedar, next to the Town Square Garage.

daily snapshot: tree museum

"Took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum/
And charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em."

Joni Mitchell/Counting Crows (for the younger set), "Big Yellow Taxi"

This is on Wayne Avenue at Dixon, near the bus queues for the Silver Spring Metro.

daily snapshot: hold on to the feeling

This is spray-painted on all the stop signs around the parking lot of Paint Branch High School in Burtonsville. I don't know what it refers to, but I'm just going to say it was an homage to the Journey song. It's so corny, but still so inspiring. ("Eye of the Tiger" is also helpful, but less adaptable to a street sign.)

daily snapshot(s): barbed wire

Barbed wire and chain-link fences surround the future site of Studio Plaza, a mixed-use development in the block bounded by Georgia, Thayer, Fenton and Silver Spring. Most of the site is currently Public Parking Lot 3, but it also displaced several businesses along Thayer Avenue, including Roadhouse Oldies, which moved a couple of blocks away.

daily snapshot: argent sculpture

This is a new sculpture in the plaza outside of the Argent, a brand-new condo at 410 and Blair Mill Road. It's pretty cool to think that nothing in this picture - save for the NOAA office building in the background - existed as recently as five years ago. This is the same spot a year and a half ago, looking head-on at the Argent, which hadn't even topped out yet.

Looking the other way towards Newell Street, you can see something else that pre-dates everything around it: the Acorn in Acorn Park, home to Silver Spring's namesake and erected in the mid-19th century. I don't really know what to think of the sculpture (is it memorable? is it provocative? at the very least, is it pretty?) but I do enjoy how the forms frame Francis Preston Blair's little garden folly.

Kinda want them to rip out this little fence around the sculpture, though. You're not going to keep anyone out with that, though with additional "pocket parks" across the street at the Veridian and the yet-to-be-completed 1200 East-West, you probably won't have that many visitors anyway.

daily snapshot: happy october 6th, y'all

Don't have much to say about this photo (other than that you can find this scene at the intersection of East-West Highway and Blair Mill Road right around 7pm).

Though I should announce the winner (and only entrant) of yesterday's "Guess That Quote" contest: It's Cilla, who correctly guessed that Confederate General Robert E. Lee said "Let the tent be struck." Lee is (if I'm not mistaken) great-great-great-uncle to local developer/conservative columnist Blair Lee. I didn't have an agenda behind the quote, other than that it went well with a photo of a tent. So much for contests, y'all. Maybe my clue was too obvious.

daily snapshot: the birds

Posting's a little light today, as my house, uh, "lost power."
They might look like they're flying south for the winter. But from the way they all landed en masse on some guy's roof, it seems like they've got some unfinished business to take care of before heading to Daytona. This is Cornet Court, near the intersection of Route 29 and Fairland Road.

daily snapshot: dementia care

Our subdivision is adjacent to Arden Courts, a retirement home specializing in, well, dementia care. It seemed harmless at first. And Arden Courts was generally a quiet neighbor until we heard the helicopters over our house. Everyone comes out into the cul-de-sac. I heard it was the police, someone says. One of the old people escaped. The kids stifle laughs, newly aware that the best jokes are those you're not supposed to laugh at. Phones ring inside, and on the other end, a voice instructs us to look out for an elderly woman in a pink sweater. It's Alzheimer's. She doesn't know where she is. If you find her, give us a call.

We never found her on our street, though someone else probably did and everyone lived happily ever after. It is true that cul-de-sacs discourage through traffic, if people who are lost and disoriented can't even find us.

daily snapshot: by the pound

They also offer tailoring by the yard, tuxedo rental by the square foot, and a free oil change with every gallon of detergent you buy. How's that for one-stop shopping?

This is in the shopping center at Piney Branch Road and Flower Avenue (you know, the one with Veronica's Bakery).

daily snapshot(s): come sail away

There was this big red jungle gym at Woodside Park shaped like a boat, and I spent many a summer evening climbing all over it. I loved that thing, as I did the train, the bouncy duck thing, the stone pavilion. (That served as my play-house, which I would emerge from each play-morning to go to play-work on the boat.)

But progress is as cruel as it is relentless, and much as I saw the apartment building of my youth given over to sushi-clad women, I would be pained to see Woodside Park shed its old skin as well. The boat, so to say, hit an iceberg and sunk. Shame I never bothered to take a real photo of it.

I think I just saw my childhood carted away.

That's not to say, of course, that the play equipment at Woodside Park looks a lot more ragged than it did fifteen years ago, and that people aren't dropping three grand a month on an apartment here to send their kids to play on a plywood-covered jungle gym.

And I figure kids probably don't even like boats anymore (Pirates of the Caribbean notwithstanding), because there aren't any screens or buttons or WiFi connections on them.

daily snapshot: friends don't let friends . . .

Have you ever walked down the street and said "I went to college with the kid on that sticker!" That seems to happen too often for me. I don't mean "I know kids who resemble the stereotypical emo kid on the sticker"; no, that could apply to anyone who spent time on Ellsworth Drive around 2005 (or talks to the bartenders at the Quarry House - ah, Ellsworth's finest, all grown up!) I mean, I went to architecture school with Mason Summers and, yes, he did have hair like that.

Small world, right? This sticker made my day before I began to wonder if my entire world is contracting around me, until one day everyone I have ever known from preschool to the present-day will live within a few blocks from me (like some nightmarish small town in Western Maryland) and I will run screaming to the nearest airport, taking me away to New York or California or somewhere that I do not recognize the people I see on street signs.