essay time: the francis s. filbey building

An occasional look at the overlooked artifacts of East County's past and present.

Meadow slowly takes over the parking lot of the abandoned Filbey Building on Columbia Pike.

It all started with a trip to the bank last week. In the drive-through, I saw something I'd never seen before at the edge of the parking lot. There was a building, a one-story box not unlike many other one-story boxes that dot the office parks of East County. It was unremarkable, except that the parking lot was turning to meadow before my eyes. An abandoned building? Here? I didn't believe it. The building looked like a mirage in the midday sun.

I began to explore. Around the front of the building, there were piles of rubble lined up in neat rows over spaces marked "DIRECTOR" or "SECRETARY." Definitely an office building. The sign over the front door said "THE FRANCIS S. FILBEY BUILDING." Next to it, an address: 12345 NE COLUMB A PIKE.

I couldn't find anything about New Columbia Pike, except that the road we call Columbia Pike was completed in 1964 - nearly twenty years before the building was completed - and that no other building along Route 29 uses the "New" designation. Francis Filbey, meanwhile, was a more interesting find.

so much more AFTER THE JUMP . . .

Despite its prominent location at Route 29 and Industrial Parkway, few notice the Francis S. Filbey Building - or that it's been abandoned for years.

A Silver Spring resident, Filbey was a controversial figure, a veteran of the postal union mergers and a victim, it seems, of larger tensions within the new organization. Born in 1917, Francis Stuart Filbey grew up in Baltimore, becoming a postal clerk and quickly rising through the ranks of the National Federation of Post Office Clerks. In 1969, he was appointed president and immediately had to contend with a strike. By publicizing the federal government's role in the "low wages and intolerable conditions" postal clerks had to deal with, Filbey was able to reach a settlement with the Nixon administration that eventually yielded the U.S. Postal Service.

A series of mergers throughout the 1960's and 70's combined five national postal unions into one, the American Postal Workers Union, with over 285,000 members. Politics forbid them from kicking anyone out of a job, so the executive boards of each union were combined into one forty-nine-member mega-board. In a 1977 memo, Filbey - now president of the APWU - compared it to that of a "banana republic," complaining that the leadership was too top-heavy to be effective.

Newer development surrounds the Filbey Building on two sides, making it less conspicuous.

Filbey wasn't popular for his calls of attrition, especially at a time when postal workers' jobs were being threatened. By the time he died of cancer in May 1977, he was considered a "lame-duck president," and the union was in turmoil once again. His successor Emmet Andrews would face potential pay reductions and the possibility of cutting mail service to four days a week. Complaints - or "grievances" from union members were rising, and those in charge would be ill-equipped to address them.

The Francis S. Filbey Building was completed in 1981 as an office for the APWU's Health Plan division, though not long ago it was abandoned in favor of new offices in Glen Burnie. Much like Filbey's career, the building named for him has come to a quiet and ineffective end, less than thirty years old but already abandoned.

Other derelict buildings along Route 29 have already been bulldozed into oblivion; a warehouse directly across Industrial Parkway was razed several years ago with no plans for redevelopment, though the former printing press at Tech Road has been replaced with the WesTech Village Corner shopping center.

But the Filbey Building remains, almost invisible despite its prominent location on the Pike. Assessed at $8.7 million in 2006, it - and the six acres it sits on - would make great candidates for redevelopment, though so long as the APWU still owns it, that seems unlikely. I doubt anyone waiting for the Ride-On bus at 29 and Industrial Parkway even realizes it's abandoned. Perhaps that's the best way; a fake occupied building is better than an real empty one.

Read more!

what's up the pike: giving and taking

The reconstruction of the Silver Spring Metro may not get as much funding as it needs according to a new proposal from County Executive Ike Leggett.

Two years have passed since the fateful flood that gave rise to Just Up The Pike, and I'm proud that I've been able to keep it up, unlike so many of my other grand projects that flame out shortly after getting started. The past two years have been a wild ride, meeting people, traveling the county, making friends and losing a few as well. Here's to another year of writing about the place that I love most - and, to kick it off, here's a look at what's happening around East County:

- It's become clear this week: so shall Ike Leggett giveth, so shall he taketh away. Right after throwing more money at the promoters who'll run the Fillmore music hall in Downtown Silver Spring, County Executive Leggett proposes cutting funds from the Paul Sarbanes Transit Center, a $50 million reconstruction of the existing Silver Spring Metro station. The transit center would expand the capacity of what is currently the state's second-largest transportation hub, bringing local and regional bus service together along with the Purple Line.

Like the Fillmore, the Sarbanes Transit Center is the centerpiece of a large mixed-use development with offices, hotels and possibly residential units. Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson says the cost-cutting threatens "important design elements" of the project, including the location of a police station and transit store.

- As one East County private school embarks on an ambitious expansion, another struggles to pay its monthly rent. The Chelsea School, a facility for learning-disabled students just outside of Downtown, just embarked on a fundraising campaign to build a Daniel Libeskind-designed addition to their campus. Meanwhile, the Newport School, currently located on Tech Road in Calverton, can't even keep their doors open for next year if their landlord doesn't cut rents.

Both schools have a long history in the area, and in recent years, both have also had to change locations frequently. The Newport School lost three-fourths of their enrollment when they moved to their current space in an office park, administrators said, crippling their ability to raise funds.

Dear reader: thanks for reading! We hope you'll keep coming back again and again. You are why Just Up The Pike has kept going strong. Read more!

money, idealism spent at this year's silverdocs festival

This week marks the start of Silverdocs, the yearly documentary film festival hosted by the American Film Institute and held at our very own AFI Silver Theatre downtown. Actually going to see a movie at Silverdocs has long been a goal here at Just Up The Pike. I'm still smarting from the scars earned two years ago from waiting in line to see The Great Happiness Space only to be turned away just twenty minutes before it started.

Over the next week (the festival has been extended from its usual six days; it runs from yesterday through June 22) you can expect to see a flood of snooty film types downtown, throwing around five-dollar words, ten-dollar tips and probably making snide comments about how "contrived" Ellsworth Drive is.

At least, for the first day or two. Events like Silverdocs are good publicity for the area, both nationally and on a local scale as well. Long stereotyped as either a derelict city or an unenlightened suburb, Silver Spring has the opportunity this week to show the world - from Brussels to Bethesda - that it's a thriving, sophisticated sort of place, with lovely shops and its own Metro stop and all sorts of foreign foods you can't pronounce.

Hopefully, our visitors will return home with stories not just about the movies they saw but about the people they met and the times they had right here. That's probably a ridiculously hopeful thing to hope for, but it's summer, and youthful idealism is the only thing that keeps one from wilting in the unforgiving sun like a hothouse flower.

As for me, I'll try once again to see a movie at Silverdocs - I'm gunning for Bird's Nest, Bi The Way, or Chevolution - in the hopes that overwhelming interest does not lock this humble blogger out of a showing. We'll see how that goes. (So much for youthful idealism, right?)

Read more!

what's not to like about a blog?

WHAT'S UP THE PIKE: Gazette and Maryland Politics Watch speculate on Fennel's ability to win special election; Burtonsville demands funds, attention for revitalization; Planning gives 814 Thayer condo project the go-ahead.

Ever since the 2006 elections, Montgomery County's politicos have been all over the burgeoning community of bloggers that's developed over the past couple of years. From County Executive Ike Leggett holding a special "blogger briefing" on the Fillmore to Council President Mike Knapp writing about the most mundane details of his daily life online, it's clear that Your Elected Officials have taken to blogs as a way to speak out but also listen to what their constituents have to say.

Which brings me back to Don Praisner's ice cream fundraiser at Seibel's last Saturday, where I found myself talking to Dale Tibbitts, Councilmember Marc Elrich's chief of staff, and former Planning Board Chairman Derick Berlage, both of whom had come out to support his bid for County Council. Berlage could not understand what Just Up The Pike was, and he fiddled with the business card I'd given him with a puzzled look on his face. "Columbia Pike?" Berlage says, frowning. "What is this? Is it supposed to be online?"

"It's a blog. A lot of people read blogs now," I say, attempting not to sound boastful. I turn to Tibbitts, who I first met trying to nail down an interview with his boss last spring. "You read blogs, right?" I ask.

Tibbitts is a large man with a commanding presence, and when he sighs, the whole room feels it. "No, actually, I don't," he replies. "There are a lot of things on Just Up The Pike I don't really agree with, so I don't read it. I don't read any blogs, not Maryland Politics Watch, nothing. Their beliefs are not in line with what I believe."

Now, I'm not going to complain that Marc Elrich's chief of staff doesn't read my blog, as he can choose to read or not read whatever he wants and, besides, I'm just a kid with an Internet connection. But I'm nervous that someone, particularly someone who works in government, would be so unwilling to hear opinions that differ from their own. (Note that when I interviewed him last year, Elrich went out of his way to say he does "read blogs" and back in 2006 he even kept one for a little while.) After all, aren't our elected officials - and the people they hire as aides - obligated to serve all of their constituents, not just the ones who voted them in?

Maybe you can pull that on the national level. President Bush's approval rating may be the lowest in recorded history but he's still satisfying a hundred million people. But here in Montgomery County - activist-driven, blogger-boosted, paralysis-by-analysis Montgomery County - you can't turn a deaf ear to anyone without them screaming even louder until you pay attention.

I'm especially curious about what Tibbitts finds so objectionable here at JUTP or Maryland Politics Watch. We strive for at least an impression of objectivity here, and God help me, if I've ever expressed an opinion here, I'll try never to do so again. Read more!

east county in review: inbox edition

WHAT'S UP THE PIKE: Proposed condo on Thayer Avenue goes before Planning Board this Thursday; Prospective developers interviewed for bioscience park in Calverton; Police bust daytime booze bash with bevy of East County pre-teens.

The Planning Board has approved Washington Adventist Hospital's proposal to build a new facility in Calverton.

Here at Just Up The Pike, we get a lot of e-mails about events happening in East County. In a foolhardy attempt to inform You, The Reader about what's going on, here's a look at some of the news that's landed in our in-box this week:

- Last week, the Planning Board approved Washington Adventist Hospital's bid to build a new facility off of Cherry Hill Road in Calverton. Currently located in Takoma Park, the hospital has encountered both community opposition to expansion on its cramped site. The new facility will have over 700,000 square feet of space, 290 private rooms, and an interfaith meeting center. While the hospital has been well-received Up The Pike as it could create 2,000 new jobs, Downcounty residents are concerned about increased traffic at Holy Cross Hospital in Forest Glen, according to Maryland Politics Watch.

- Retirement homes and senior centers throughout East County have been hopping with Nintendo Wii, the video game system that actually makes you get up and take part in physical activity. Citing the console's offering of "stress-free exercise and a fun social atmosphere," Montgomery County's holding a Wii Tournament this May and June. The first event will take place Thursday at the Margaret Schweinhaut Senior Center in Forest Glen, with additional tournaments to follow in Wheaton, Long Branch and Damascus.

- With $4 gas on the horizon, the County's Department of Environmental Protection is betting you'll want to find ways to lower your energy costs. Together with the MoCo chapter of the Sierra Club, they'll be talking about the Maryland Home Performance program May 6 at the Eastern County Regional Services Center on Briggs Chaney Road. The Home Performance program "helps residents identify home improvements . . . that will help to improve the energy efficiency of the home and ultimately reduce energy costs," according to Susan Kirby from the DEP.

- Also on Thursday, State Delegate Heather Mizeur (D-Dist. 20) will be in College Park to tout the recently passed Family Coverage Expansion Act, which extends family health insurance plans to high school and college graduates through the age of 25. Currently, dependent children lost coverage soon after they finished school, and many go without health insurance because of the increasing cost. The press conference will be at 1 p.m. in the University of Maryland's Stamp Student Union.

IF YOU HAVE AN ANNOUNCEMENT, don't raise your hand and wait for me to call on you. E-mail me today at danreed at umd dot edu and you might see your announcement right here.

Read more!

whatever happened to wheaton?

WHAT'S UP THE PIKE: Our "District 4 Head-to-Head Tour" commences later this week as we talk to candidates Mark D. Fennel and Nancy Navarro.

A sign in Downtown Wheaton. Photo by IntangibleArts.

Thayer Avenue pointed us to news that the Arlington Cinema 'N' Drafthouse will be taking over the Loews Cineplex 11 in Westfield Wheaton (also known as Wheaton Plaza) later this summer. The newly re-named Montgomery Cinema 'N' Drafthouse will have six screens playing a mix of first-run, second-run and independent movies, along with some stand-up comedy. There will also be table service, as is currently the practice at Arlington and the former Bethesda Cinema 'N' Drafthouse, now a live theatre. And it won't the first time that art-house films are playing in Wheaton, as the Loews Cineplex 11 tried to compete with the AFI by showing indie movies a year or two ago.

The Drafthouse folks are particularly giddy about their new location, as seen by the venue's new website (emphasis added):

The centrally located new 6-Theater Entertainment Complex, located in Silver Spring in Montgomery County is a very short distance from Potomac, Rockville, Bethesda, North Bethesda, Kensington, Chevy Chase, Olney, Beltsville, Laurel, Burtonsville, College Park, NW Washington DC and Downtown Washington DC.

Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't find a way to name this venue "Far, Far, Really Far Northeast Bethesda Cinema 'N' Drafthouse." Not only do they slap "Montgomery" on the name, ignoring the community it happens to be located in, but they don't seem to know what community that is, either. Real nice. I suppose all of those people coming from Northwest D.C. and Potomac just wouldn't feel right spending their evening in Wheaton, and even the idea of going to Silver Spring makes their skin crawl just a little.

One could say that the Drafthouse folks merely typed their new address into Google Maps and it spat out Silver Spring. But, I mean, as vague as the boundaries of Wheaton and Silver Spring are - both being unincorporated - you could ask anyone where the center of Wheaton is, the place where Wheaton is at its Wheatonest, and they would point to Wheaton Plaza. (But if there is any justice in the world, they will actually point to El Pollo Rico.)

Oh, well. At least I can have beer at the movies now. Read more!

center court (part two)

Part TWO of "Center Court: A Half-Century of Trends Meet At The Mall," a paper I wrote last spring about one of my great loves - the shopping mall. Look for cameos from some of your favorite East County palaces of commerce!

Urban renewal projects like the Inner Harbor in Baltimore was considered a way for mall developers like James Rouse to expand into under-served markets when traditional malls were no longer viable.

By 1978, Time magazine declared there was “a pall over the suburban mall” as over twenty years of mall development quickly came to a halt. That year, only twenty malls were completed nationwide; by 1980, there would only be nine. The energy crisis a few years earlier had made developers reconsider the ridiculously high heating and air-conditioning bills demanded by an enclosed mall; meanwhile, customers, already discouraged from shopping by inflation and high unemployment, were increasingly unwilling to drive long distances to regional shopping malls. Plummeting birth rates meant closed schools, deserted cul-de-sacs and, most importantly of all – empty mall food courts. White flight from inner suburbs to outer suburbs sent many older malls into decline, and as population growth caught up with mall expansion, newer centers were threatened as well. As a result, many communities became increasingly wary of shopping malls. Burlington, Vermont, a small city near the Canadian border, caused a national stir when it fought tooth-and-nail to keep developer Pyramid Companies from building a mall in neighboring Williston. Pyramid, which had almost single-handedly saturated the retail market in New York, was forced to drop their plans when a Vermont environmental commission argued that the proposed mall would affect “the entire social fabric” of the region.

Meanwhile, in cities still reeling from the race riots a decade earlier and hemorrhaging population, the mall seemed like a last-chance opportunity to lure people downtown again. James Rouse – who had first pioneered the enclosed mall with Harundale – was at the forefront of the movement to build urban malls. The Rouse Company’s biggest success was Harborplace, located in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore and considered the catalyst for the city’s revitalization upon its opening in 1980. Harborplace fulfilled Rouse’s ideal that "the only legitimate purpose of a city is to provide for the life and growth of its people." In 1981, he appeared on a Time magazine cover next to the phrase “Cities Are Fun!”, which succinctly explained his personal sentiment, but the nation as a whole was still moving away from the city and towards something new.

so much more AFTER THE JUMP . . .

By the 1980’s, the “edge city” had overtaken downtown in both job and retail growth. There were two hundred edge cities in the United States by the end of the decade, and each one was larger than downtown Memphis. Twenty of these were in the Washington-Baltimore area alone. Success was likely, but not guaranteed for malls that located or were already located in an edge city. These were places that businesses had chosen to set up shop in because of their easy access to existing residential areas in addition to airports, other job centers, and downtown itself. These are the places where malls were usually very popular, had large, dedicated consumer bases – a quarter-million people within a fifteen-minute drive was the ideal – and where malls would have to start expanding in order to take advantage and stay relevant.

Smaller shopping centers, like Virginia Center Commons outside Richmond, Virginia, were drained of shoppers and business by larger, more extravagant malls that could draw from a regional consumer base.

The enclosed shopping mall, which used up obscene amounts of energy, occupied hundreds of acres of land, and was occupied by the branches of nationwide chain stores, was now only useful on a level more befitting its scale: as a regional destination. Smaller malls like Harundale – still trapped in its 1950’s state – failed, lacking enough attractions to serve a large area and without any room to expand. In 1997, it was finally torn down and replaced with Harundale Plaza, a strip mall. Even larger malls like Tysons Corner Center, now twenty years old, had to adapt to changing times and changing mall tastes. In 1988, Tysons added a Nordstrom department store and a second level; with over two million square feet of retail space, it was now nearly double the size of nearby malls, putting it in a exclusive group of new, “super-regional malls” like South Coast Plaza and King of Prussia Mall. Across the street, a strip shopping center that formerly had a K-Mart was transformed into a “luxurious, mixed-use complex” with new tenants including Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. It was called Tysons Galleria, or Tysons II to locals. Between the two malls, there were now well over three million square feet of retail space in the same location, vaulting Tysons Corner over downtown Washington, D.C. as the shopping hub not only for the metropolitan area but for the entire Mid-Atlantic region.

This store at Tysons Corner Center in Northern Virginia is set up to look like the outside of a Greenwich Village apartment.

In order to serve hundreds and thousands of shoppers – the population of a decent-sized city – the mall now had to become as diverse as a city, responding to the splintering of mainstream culture by providing stores for any number of different tastes. “The mall, like the city, is capacious,” writes Paco Underwood in Call of the Mall. It “serves any number of subcultures and even sub-subcultures simultaneously." Like a city street, the corridors of the mall were becoming lined with increasingly varied façades, reflecting the different images a store would try to sell its audience. With such a large consumer shed, malls were guaranteed that a store modeled after a California beach bungalow, a Greenwich Village apartment, or an Adirondacks sporting goods store would all be successful. In fact, all three chains are owned by the same company – Abercrombie and Fitch – and appear together in a number of malls, including Tysons Corner Center. One of the first stores to take advantage of this branding technique was Pacific Sunwear, which opened in 1981 and traffics in the California surf and skate scene. Seven years later, it was joined by Hot Topic, the “much maligned yet hugely influential (and ageless)” store aimed at fans of everything from punk rock to Japanese anime. It is perhaps best known for its exposed-brick-and-red-neon décor, calling to mind an underground city club. The main clientele of all of these stores are teenagers, the very same who, a few decades earlier, had nowhere to go and, more importantly, a ruthlessly conformist suburban culture that gave youth “an emotional emptiness” and “stunted creativity." While all of these stores, particularly Hot Topic, have their detractors, they – and the malls that allowed them to open – gave suburban youth an entrée into a world outside of the cul-de-sac.

The ubiquitous Hot Topic, shown here at the Coastal Grand Mall in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, creates the feel of an underground city club.

Meanwhile, affluent, time-starved consumers were finding trips to the mall for minor purchases inconvenient. It was no longer practical for a shopper to fight traffic to drive to the mall, find a parking space, and go down a corridor past several stores he or she does not want to visit to reach the store they want, regardless of Taubman’s or any other developer’s intentions to make them stay. At the same time, the sense of civic pride that had once existed in the small towns and large cities of America had all but eroded with forty years of explosive suburban growth. Malls, many of which did have public meeting spaces and held community events, were still privately owned and were not always willing to accommodate patrons who were not, after all, there to buy something. Only a handful of enclosed malls were built during the 21st century; in 2006, just one mall opened – Jordan Creek Town Center, located in West Des Moines, Iowa. The mall as we know it had split, going into three different directions to serve the different needs of modern suburban consumers.

With "big-box" stores like Target, Staples and Petsmart, Orchard Center in Silver Spring, Maryland is considered to be a "power center."

The super-regional mall was one example of the mall’s split, giving consumers a place to go when they actually wanted to shop and had a day or at least an afternoon for it. At the other extreme, serving shoppers who had little time to purchase things, there was the power center, or “big-box” center, the first example of which is 280 Metro Center in Colma, California, located in an edge city just outside of San Francisco. It is contained almost solely of anchors, so-called “category killers” such as Home Depot and Best Buy that deal exclusively in one department, dominating it and threatening their mom-and-pop counterparts, lined up in a row. These complexes often rival regional malls both in floor space and in land acreage. Each store has its own parking directly in front, allowing shoppers to drive up, get what they need, and leave. The only aesthetic difference between it and a normal strip mall is the scale, but their effect on existing retail is huge. “In the face of the big boxes’ aggressive expansion,” writes Dolores Hayden, “local drugstores, stationary stores, clothing stores and hardware stores have disappeared by the tens of thousands,” permanently altering the communities they locate in. Providing a wide variety of goods at low prices, power centers have become the preferred main shopping destination for many suburbanites.

The Downtown Silver Spring complex, located in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, exemplifies the current "lifestyle center" trend.

On a completely different plane from the mall and the power center is the “lifestyle center,” which sought to bring back the “town” back into the “town square” that malls had reputedly become. The first lifestyle center, the Shops at Saddle Creek, opened in Germantown, Tennessee in 1987. It, like most lifestyle centers, was “designed especially with the upper-income shopper in mind, ample sidewalks, parking adjacent to stores, entertainment facilities, and upscale restaurants and shops” according to a study on lifestyle centers from the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. While Saddle Creek was little more than a few small strips arranged next to each other, the lifestyle center would evolve into a “mini-downtown” for suburban areas, both in form and use. As of 2005, there were 132 lifestyle centers in the United States. Downtown Silver Spring, a complex one mile from the Washington, D.C. line in Maryland, exemplifies the lifestyle center standard: shops front onto actual streets, albeit privately-owned ones; parking is easily accessed but tucked away in parking garages, or behind shops; plazas and squares are located throughout for lounging and people-watching; and entertainment facilities, such as movie theatres and bookstores, are a standard feature. At 450,000 square feet, it is less than half the size of a typical enclosed mall. Yet looking at the massive crowds that appear on a Friday night, it’s clear that Downtown Silver Spring is thriving, even as the corridors of neighboring City Place Mall, a relic from the urban mall movement, remain empty.

A half-century after Southdale and Harundale, the enclosed shopping mall lives on, yet in a wildly different context. After supplanting downtowns forty years ago, today’s shopping malls are becoming downtowns in their own right. In Tysons Corner, there is a plan to turn the business district, now larger than Atlanta’s, into a real city with tree-lined boulevards, thirty-story towers, and four stops on the Washington Metro subway. It sits at the center of the nation’s third-wealthiest county and next to its first-wealthiest, between two international airports and, of course, it is just a short drive away from the capital of the free world. Of all of the malls built in all of the towns over the past half-century, Tysons Corner has become an unparalleled success as it has grown and adapted to changing times and tastes.

Meanwhile, fifty miles away in Glen Burnie, a shopping cart still waits by the entrance of Harundale Plaza, a shopping center that, while given a new lease at life, will never inspire happiness the way its predecessor had. Harundale was a time capsule, a look at the history of the shopping mall, a history so important only because the constantly-evolving mall cannot let its shoppers know one exists. While not original to America, the shopping mall has become an American institution, one as diverse as our society and varied from place to place. As long as the mall, in whatever form, remains our “town center,” it may become the only place to sample local flavor, if only to see what indoor springtime feels like during a Minnesota winter or Arizona summer. Read more!

center court: a half-century of trends meet at the mall

First in a special series on shopping malls adapted from research I did last year. Happy Spring Break!

Harundale Plaza, in Glen Burnie, was built in 1958 as Harundale Mall, the East Coast's first enclosed shopping mall.

Harundale Plaza isn’t as busy as it used to be on a Saturday afternoon. A shopping cart sits in front of the giant sign at the entrance, waiting patiently for someone to come along and claim it. There are still more cars in front of the Value City than there are in front of the Glen Burnie public library, across the street, but not many. At the center of Harundale Plaza, beneath a fake clock tower, is what appears to be a rock but, upon closer inspection, is merely sculpted concrete, sanded down on four sides. There’s an inscription on each side: “Harundale Mall, Opened: October 1, 1958.” “National Association of Builders Neighborhood Development Merit Award.” If you close your eyes, you can imagine the bustling shopping mall that once surrounded that rock, a trendsetter for a time that has long since passed.

“Harundale Mall shoppers will enjoy perpetual springtime,” boasted the original promotional literature. Patrons were able to enjoy lushly landscaped plazas, a fountain, a cage with exotic birds and a sidewalk café – all under one climate-controlled roof. It was the first center of its kind on the East Coast and only the third nationwide. “No one in this part of the country had seen one” before, said architect Frank Taliaferro. Developer James Rouse, who would go on to revitalize Baltimore City while building entire cities of his own, was so excited about the concept of an enclosed shopping center that he originally proposed calling it Harundale HASS, for Heated, Air-Conditioned Shopping Street. It was every bit as groundbreaking as anticipated, attracting huge crowds and dominating the Baltimore market for decades. Yet, through its decline – and the rise and fall of hundreds of other American malls – we can follow the shifts in American society over the past half-century.

so much more AFTER THE JUMP . . .

The founding rock at Harundale Plaza, originally located in the center court of Harundale Mall.

The enclosed, self-contained shopping mall, while seen as a uniquely American invention, had a brief heyday in Paris during the nineteenth century. Over 150 fully enclosed, gas-lit “shopping arcades” were built throughout the city, offering an “industrial luxury” and “a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need,” according to travel guides. Often just narrow streets covered (at the collective expense of the shop owners’) with a glass roof, the Parisian shopping arcade was a far cry from the sleek, wide corridors of their future American counterparts. The arcades were not successful for long, quickly eclipsed by larger, more-convenient department stores, and became the territory of flaneurs, or as an American mall manager would call them, loiterers. Today, only twenty of the original arcades remain, some of which are open and restored to their original grandeur.

A century later and across the Atlantic, American cities were failing as their suburbs experienced a population boom. The newly relocated children and housewives of these suburbs were suddenly isolated from the central cities that, for the time being, they were still reliant on for shopping and entertainment. The developer-funded streetcar lines that had connected earlier suburbs to the city had been bought up by large corporations like General Motors and dismantled altogether, while the Federal Highway Act had yet to be passed, which didn’t matter so long as most suburban households still had only one car, currently in the hands of the breadwinner at work. To William H. White, who wrote The Organization Man in 1956, the suburbs were merely “sororities with kids,” leaving housewives stranded. In the new super-subdivisions like the Levittowns, shopping centers were few and far between, and those that existed were not easily accessible by foot. For retail developers, an entire market had just formed.

It was a wildly idealistic architect named Victor Gruen who would resurrect the idea of the enclosed shopping corridor upon emigrating to America at the onset of World War II, right as the Nazis has invaded his native Austria. Gruen was inspired by the Ringstraße, the grand mall in Vienna where “Viennese of all backgrounds could mingle freely,” and Central Park in New York, his adopted home, which both provided “entertainment for all comers." Gruen sought to bring the positive features of those urban environments to the suburbs, attempting to do so with Southdale Mall, his first enclosed mall, built in Edina, Minnesota (outside Minneapolis) in 1956. With “artificial lights, giant show windows, and fancy façades for his stores” in Gruen was able to effectively recreate downtown within a safe, enclosed space, and people welcomed it as an antidote to the filth and crime of the city . Garden State Plaza, another Gruen mall built a year later in New Jersey, included “movie theaters, bowling alleys, skating rinks, playgrounds, and meeting rooms for community organizations,” baiting patrons to shop after their other events were over. Young people, who had previously complained that “if you don’t have a car, there are fewer places to go than in town” now had somewhere to go, and they went in droves, creating what would eventually be called the “mallrat” culture. Teenagers were the first to make the mall a “town square,” and while they weren’t always welcomed, they remain “the ones whose love for the mall is pure and constant and unshadowed by doubt or ambivalence,” writes Paco Underwood. He notes that their eagerness to buy caused retailers to take notice.

As the baby boom came to a close, population growth peaked in the Washington, D.C. area, and throughout the nation . Mall growth continued unabated, as more and more suburbs were built, highways were built and extended, and land on the fringe of town became more and more accessible. The 1960’s saw the first regional malls, aimed at serving larger populations than neighborhood malls like Harundale, which had less than half a million square feet of retail space. Regional malls had at least a million square feet of space. They included the King of Prussia Mall in Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania, built in 1963; South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, California, built in 1967; and Tysons Corner Center in Tysons Corner, Virginia, built in 1968, the largest single-story shopping center at the time and a regional attraction from the time it opened. When a delegation from Peking, China visited Washington, D.C. in the 1970’s, they “wanted a stiff dose of America,” according to Joel Garreau, leading them not to the monuments but to “Broomie’s,” or the Bloomingdale’s in Tysons Corner Center.

Center court at Tysons Corner Center in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

The proliferation of malls, both big and small, meant that the design process became both more varied and more standardized, as regional markets grew more crowded and shoppers more discerning. Malls of the 1950’s were nothing more than a single corridor lined with stores and “anchors,” usually department stores, at either end. Décor usually consisted of fluorescent lights, white walls, and either carpeted or tile floors. In the 1960’s, mall design became more sophisticated, but to lower prices, “prototype” designs were created. Alfred Taubman was the largest developer to use a prototype, building nearly two dozen malls from 1967 to 1990 with the same basic interior layout and fittings . The owner of what is “widely considered one of the finest collections of shopping malls in the world,” Taubman had mall design down to a science, reflecting how suburban consumers had quickly become just another marketing segment . “For a suburbanite . . . experience comes filtered and pre-ordered. The range of experience has been pre-selected and highly narrowed,” said Dr. Dorothy Lee, an anthropologist at Harvard, in 1960. “In the suburb, no less than in the city, the individual is viewed and dealt with as a representative of a category, rather than as a person in his own right."

Taubman's Marley Station Mall, located in Glen Burnie, Maryland, features his trademark concept of "adjacencies," or placing similar stores near each other to maximize sales.

It was that approach that made Taubman’s malls so successful. In “Terrazzo Jungle,” an article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell states, “if Victor Gruen invented the mall, Alfred Taubman perfected it.” He used the timing and placement of lights to mimic daylight even after the sun went down; organized stores around triangular or diamond-shaped plazas to maximize views and make the corridor less monotonous; and graded every mall site with a slope so that the majority of parking spaces and mall entrances were on the second floor. “People flow like water,” Taubman said. “They go down much easier than they go up,” meaning that they are more likely to see the entire mall if they have go down stairs. He also pioneered the concept of “adjacencies,” or placing stores that would attract similar customers near each other. Standing in the atrium of his Marley Station Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland, built in 1987, a consumer today can see American Eagle Outfitters and Aeropostale, two clothing stores catering to teenagers, on the upper level, in front of an elevator; below them, there is a Forever 21, another clothing store for teen girls, and a For Your Entertainment, a record store. If a shopper decides to go into one store, there’s a higher chance that they’ll go into one of the other stores if they’re next to each other. This meant higher profits for the stores and higher revenues for the mall developer, which meant even more malls.

Between 1964 and 1972, the number of shopping centers nationwide doubled to over 13,000. In the Washington-Baltimore area, mall construction continued unabated during the 1970’s, as eighteen malls were built in the region. Four of those malls were in wealthy Montgomery County, Maryland, evenly spaced every couple of miles along Rockville Pike, the county’s main “shopping street,” from the D.C. line to Gaithersburg, twenty miles away. Meanwhile, women had been entering the workforce in droves since the early 1960’s, a trend which fully took hold a decade later. Joel Garreau calls it “an article of faith” that couples will choose to live closer to “the job of the spouse who does the evening cooking”; as a result, office developers and corporations chose to locate in the suburbs, near where families were already living. The suburban “hot spots” solely devoted to shopping changed once again: now, they were places to shop and work, and the “edge city” was born. Households now had two income earners, meaning that mothers no longer served as chauffeurs, but rush hour traffic increased dramatically. The time for weekly family trips to the mall had all but vanished, and it was becoming clear that the heyday of the enclosed mall may soon pass. Read more!

leaving town for a few days . . .

WHAT'S UP THE PIKE: Students fear Takoma Park college moving away from liberal arts; Downcounty residents less angry over higher cost of parking; Blake High's yearly Jazz Swing Night (so good!) happens tonight.

County Executive Ike Leggett explores the economic and social consequences of turtle-stacking while reading Yertle the Turtle to second-graders at Fairland Elementary. (Photo from the MoCo website.)

While most college kids are heading south next week, I'll be heading up north to Montreal for some good ol' fashioned Spring Break debauchery, Canada-style. Back in high school, I dreamed about studying architecture at McGill University in Montreal because of their awesome affordable housing program - only to discover that not only was it only for grad students, but I'd probably have to learn some French before going up there. Parlez-vous Français? Non.

While I'm soaking up the heavy snowfall and sub-freezing temperatures, Just Up The Pike will run a series about the development of shopping malls, with a focus on the D.C. area. But if you need some blog action - other than reading my fellow Silver Spring bloggers, of course - you'll definitely want to check out these events coming up next week:

On Tuesday, discuss the future of Wheaton at a redevelopment forum hosted by Park and Planning and featuring a panel of "urban planning experts" and County officials eager to play a part in the revitalization of the business district, which was shaken up last month by the tragic destruction of local institution El Pollo Rico.

Then, on Thursday, County Executive Ike Leggett comes home to Burtonsville for his first Town Hall Meeting in the area. Come speak your piece before our native son at Briggs Chaney Middle School, which is actually located in Cloverly.

And, the rest of the time, you'll want to keep by your computer for the latest updates from Councilwoman Nancy Floreen's new blog, which came on line earlier this month. Floreen, who talked to us here last spring, will be joining such local luminaries as Council President Mike Knapp and former County Exec candidate Chuck Floyd.

Have a stellar break! We'll see you in two weeks.

Read more!

essay time: vote and die

WHAT'S UP THE PIKE: Donna Edwards thumps Al Wynn in District 4; Icy roads shut down parts of Route 29; former Blake parent Phil Kauffman wins school board at-large seat.

Paint Branch High, my polling place, was surprisingly empty at 3pm the afternoon of Election Day.

You know what voting yesterday earned me? Two near-crashes, one on Cherry Hill Road driving back to College Park, and another on campus, harriedly trying to make my way back to the parking garage and to the relative safety of our slick sidewalks. I was no longer surprised at how quiet Paint Branch High School in Burtonsville was when I went a couple of hours earlier to take part in the democratic process.

The parking lot was empty save for a few cars, some people handing out flyers, and a woman bopping around with a "Hillary" sign. "Would you like a flyer?" a gentleman says, holding out a sheet that looks like it was done up on Microsoft Word ten minutes earlier. "Vote Vincent Martorano for Congressman," is what I think it says. (Martorano, whose Post profile is completely blank, ran as a Republican.) "I won't take my hands out of my pockets," I reply.

A woman approaches, holding some soggy flyers for Donna Edwards. "Sir, I'd like you to consider that Al Wynn -" she begins. "No," I say, cutting her off as I go inside.

there's so much more AFTER THE JUMP . . .

I feel bad about brushing them off. I don't like taking flyers that I'm just going to throw away, and I don't want to be told who to vote for. (Perhaps it is ironic that I, a blogger, would say this.) So when I came back outside, I decided to apologize. On my way out the door, I'm accosted by the woman waving a Hillary sign. "Are you old enough to vote?" she says to me. "Um, yes," I reply, rather put off, and keep walking. "Well, I'm a lot older than you are," she continues. "How old are you?"

"Nineteen, almost twenty," I say. "Wow! It's so good to see you young people out here!" she says. "Normally, I see so many old people!"

One of the election judges walks over to her. "Ma'am, you are too close to the polling place with your sign," he barks, and she shuffles away, chagrined.

"Your flyers are getting soggy," I say to the woman who supports Donna Edwards. "Yeah, I've been out here since 6:30," she replies.

"6:30?" I say, dumbfounded. "Did you eat?"

"Yes, I've gone inside a couple of times to warm up, and they brought me food."

"And you," I say to the Republican, "How long have you been out here?

"They've been sending me to different polling places today," he replies, "and I went home to warm up and take a nap.

Donna Edwards [or her proxy] scoffs. "You got to warm up at home." Read more!

frequently asked questions

A long-overdue list of questions and invitations to the bar I've received since beginning this blog two years ago. Feel free to submit more if you have any.

1) What is this called? Up The Pike?

2) What do you . . . do?

3) How did you get started?

4) Say, we should have a drink sometime!

5) Are you on Facebook? Flickr? MySpace?

6) What do you do for a living?

7) Architecture and english? That's a weird combination.

8) Where do you live?

9) Can't anyone start a blog?

1) What is this called? Up The Pike?

One day, I will think of a less confusing name. In the meantime, this is Just Up The Pike. I live "up the pike" - meaning Columbia Pike, or Route 29 - from Downtown Silver Spring, but not too far up, if you will. Thus, "Just Up The Pike."

2) What do you . . . do?

I write. About our elected officials. About development and traffic. About our schools. About local arts and music, and occasionally food. Anything and everything affecting East County.

Are you having a community meeting? An open house? Are you running for office? Starting a business? Do you have any tips or story ideas? Would you like to write guest posts? Let me know. I'm open to anything. E-mail me at danreed at umd dot edu.

Just Up The Pike is updated three times a week. I am a college student, however, so that schedule might occasionally give way to schoolwork, a social life and, of course, sleep.

3) How did you get started?

Blogs beget other blogs. I started by reading The Silver Spring Scene and Silver Spring, Singular in early 2006. Honestly, back then I thought the idea of a Silver Spring blog was kind of silly. I was working at an architecture firm in Bethesda that summer with a lengthy, two-bus commute. When the bridge on Route 29 flooded that June, I found myself without a way to work. That's when I started thinking about all of the missed connections in East County - not just the roads, but mentally. How often do you hear about the east side? Not much, and the things you hear are rarely good. Suddenly, a Silver Spring blog didn't seem so silly after all. You know the rest . . .

4) Say, we should have a drink sometime!

Not until next April, my friend, but in the meantime, I will gladly have a soda at the bar while you imbibe.

5) Are you on Facebook? Flickr? MySpace?

Facebook: Yes. Become a fan! Put a link to JUTP on your profile! Flickr: Ditto! MySpace: Too creepy.

6) What do you do for a living?

I'm a junior at the University of Maryland-College Park, earning a double degree in Architecture and English. I also work at an ice cream store in Rockville.

7) Architecture and english? That's a weird combination.

Well, you have a weird face. But really, I've always wanted to be an architect, and I've always wanted to be a writer. And here, I can write about architecture, among other topics. It works.

8) Where do you live?

I've lived in the D.C. area my entire life. Until 1998, I lived in Downtown Silver Spring; currently, my family resides near Calverton, two blocks from The Pike. (In bed late at night, I can hear the cars roaring past, and it lulls me to sleep.) During the school year, I live on-campus in College Park.

9) Can't anyone start a blog?

Yes. And I invite you to start your own by creating an account at www.blogger.com.

Anyone can write a blog. That means I can - we can - write about issues and places that aren't being noticed by local newspapers, TV stations, and so on. And we can elaborate on what local news outlets are covering without worrying about space or time limits. And I could be anyone. I'm not an elected official or a developer. I'm just someone living in your community writing about what's happening here. Read more!

essay time: the "car corral"

WHAT'S UP THE PIKE: Sandy Spring residents take road dispute to elected officials' homes; Chevy Chase resurrects "Purple Line Loop"; Glenmont redevelopment goes back to drawing board; D.C. bar owner calls for Fillmore boycott in e-mail.

Cars back up onto Old Columbia Pike at the Fairland Center, currently housing my brother's elementary school.

The most exciting part about Winter Break at home has been picking my little brother up from elementary school. His school is being "modernized" this year - MCPS has always felt that "renovation" was not grandiose enough a term - and they have taken up the Fairland Center on Old Columbia Pike until May.

Built in the 1930's and expanded in the 1960's, the Fairland Center looks like a sort of Franken-school, the child of Old Blair High and a ranch house. Since it closed almost thirty years ago, it's served as a "holding center" for schools under renovation, and each year a new crop of parents will raise fears that their kids will wander off the playground and to their deaths in the path of an eighteen-wheeler on The Pike. In response, a tall chain-link fence was wrapped around the playground to prevent this from happening.

At 3:20, ten minutes before school lets out, the playground becomes a sort of "car corral" for all the parents too lazy to get out and walk their kids to the parking lot. As it remains chained-up during the day, opening the corral is always a big production. A sign in a window facing the playground, perhaps left over from the school that was here before, ominously calls it the "Parent Reunification Site," as if this was a work camp. Cars back up onto Old Columbia Pike - sometimes in both directions, though left turns are forbidden - waiting for some administrator to appear, set down a series of little orange cones to guide the cattle through the turn-around. Unceremoniously, she opens the gate, and the S.U.V.s and minivans file through eagerly.

so much more AFTER THE JUMP . . .

The daily parade of S.U.V.s and minivans through the car corral after school.

I am one of a handful of people who actually parks my vehicle and walks over to the school to collect a kid. This happened a lot more at the old school, and my mother would socialize with the other parents and grandparents in the lobby while waiting for their kids to be released. One elderly gentleman had a habit of going to use the girls' bathroom while waiting for his grandson; until the move, no amount of complaints from the other parents and the administration would stop him. (Apparently, he would feign not being able to speak English to get away with it.) Today, he waits with me outside the school, and I am glad to have the company.

At 3:30, class is dismissed, and the future of America bounds out of the school. A woman in a beret stops each kid before running into the corral. "Which car is yours?" she asks. "The brown one," the child will say, and he is allowed to reunite with his parent, guardian or babysitter. The kids all look the same to me - black, white, brown, whatever. I guess that means I'm colorblind. I have to catch myself a couple of times before moving towards the door, expecting to see my brother shuffling across the p