council committee reviews leggett's proposed curfew tomorrow

County Executive Leggett says teens need to stay home so we can keep downtown Silver Spring safe.

Tomorrow, the County Council's Public Safety committee reviews County Executive Leggett's proposed youth curfew, which would bar teens under 18 from being out after 11pm during the week and midnight on weekends. Over the past two months, curfew opponents (myself included) have offered many reasons why this is a bad idea:

There isn't enough for teens to do. We don't expect midnight basketball to prevent youth-related crime, but having activities for young people will give them an alternative to causing trouble. The "youth cafes" Councilmember Nancy Navarro started at the East County Community Center are a good start, as are long-standing plans to open a teen center in downtown Silver Spring. In Richmond, organizers of a "First Fridays" art walk set up an art gallery for teens to give youth a venue of their own.

There are also "private sector" solutions. The D.C. area's had a long tradition of "punk houses" that host shows, providing youth a forum for expression and a sense of community. We know of two in East County: Scumbag Nation in Colesville and the Corpse Fortress in Fenton Village, which was recently condemned by county building inspectors.

There are more effective solutions. Our friends Abigail Burman and Leah Muskin-Pierret at Stand Up to the Montgomery County Curfew have uncovered plenty of studies showing how curfews don't work. Baltimore's had a curfew for decades, and even they admit it hasn't done much. And Lt. Robert Carter of the police department's 3rd District, which includes Silver Spring, says a curfew would eliminate only a "quarter" of area crime, and offered a list of additional crime-fighting tools, ranging from harsher penalties to more funding for gang prevention programs. Lt. Carter noted that there are just six cops assigned to downtown Silver Spring, compared to 28 in the 1990's. A larger police presence, particularly on foot and bikes, would have a huge impact on crime.

Silver Spring resident Jim Zepp, who's spent twenty years researching criminal justice for the Justice Research and Statistics Association, says there's a need to look at the entire "nighttime economy" in downtown Silver Spring as a means to reducing crime. He points to Nighttime Economy Management studies, like this one from San Jose, as a way to understand and fight the root causes of youth crime.

Fear has seized the discussion. In the face of considerable evidence against a curfew's effectiveness, County Executive Leggett says he could "debunk" any study he doesn't agree with. Even the police department's own statistics that show crime, and especially youth-related crime, has been falling in MoCo for years. On his new blog Maryland Juice, political consultant David Moon suggests that Leggett has drawn attention to the "flash mob robbery" in Germantown last month as proof we need a curfew, despite the fact that most of the kids involved were first-time offenders. These are isolated incidents. Downtown Silver Spring is safe, and as it grows, they'll be even safer because there's more people out to provide "eyes on the street." In my opinion, Silver Spring's reputation has been harmed more by the County Executive's eagerness to highlight the July 2nd stabbing than by the public's actual perception of crime.

Councilmember Phil Andrews of Rockville, a strong opponent of the curfew proposal, happens to chair the Public Safety committee, The other two members are Councilmember Roger Berliner of Bethesda, who seems skeptical of the curfew, and at-large Councilmember Marc Elrich, who tentatively supports it. Though Leggett tells the Post that he's confident the curfew will pass when it goes before a vote this November, we hope it'll face serious examination during tomorrow's committee meeting.

punks like to have a yard, too

It's old news that the arts - whether in the form of a dance studio, a painter's workshop or a punk house - usually move to crumbling urban neighborhoods where lots of cheap, unused space is available. But even in D.C.'s darkest days, these kinds of spaces - which usually means old warehouses - were often scarce or prohibitively expensive. As a result, the suburbs became the place where much of D.C.'s art gets made.

The Lost Tourists (from Frederick) play at Scumbag Nation in Colesville. I'm not sure who took this photo.

This is from an old-ish (December 2009) City Paper article, "The Orange Line Revolution," about punk houses in Arlington:

Every burgeoning arts scene needs a safe, cheap, and relatively carefree place in which to set up shop. Baltimore had its bottle cap factories. Brooklyn had its loft spaces. D.C. had the close-in ’burbs.

The ’80s and ’90s were a golden era for the D.C. music and arts community. But many of those artists lived in places like Arlington and Silver Spring. Because they were cheaper. Because you were less likely to get your face punched in. Because you could play loud music all night.

(It's funny because, ten years before, the City Paper still bought into the idea of Montgomery County as "a wasteland inside a cul-de-sac of a hellhole of suburban ennui." The sooner that kind of smug ignorance dies, the better.)

Anyway: I wasn't aware of the punk houses in Arlington, but there were and still are several in Silver Spring, including the Death Star at Cedar Street and Ellsworth Drive, which closed in 2006 after the property's owner wanted to converted it into offices, which never happened. Shortly after, the Corpse Fortress opened a few blocks away at Philadelphia Avenue and Fenton Street. And in Colesville, there's Scumbag Nation, located in a sprawling ranch house on a big, wooded property off of New Hampshire Avenue.

These houses are all quite old (The Death Star and Corpse Fortress probably date to the 1920s, while Scumbag Nation was probably built in the 1960s) and in somewhat marginal locations. (It wasn't that long ago that the Death Star was in a marginal area as well, but having a Whole Foods move in across the street can do that to you.) They've become obsolete as newer homes and newer neighborhoods were built farther out, and suffered from the same cycle of disinvestment that hurt inner-city areas. As a result, they became cheap and accessible to a few kids wanting to put on a show.

On the outside - and, I guess, on the inside too - a punk house can look dirty, smell awful and sound terrible. (The last one depends on your musical tastes.) But they play many important roles. They give kids something to do, and in the D.C. area where straight-edge started, it's often something without drugs or alcohol. They help form communities in places where one may not exist. (It's both an intensely local community, based around a house, a school or a neighborhood, and a regional one - bands from Frederick came to play in Silver Spring, and vice-versa.) And they're just one of the venues where a local arts scene is built.

The Death Star was a punk house in downtown Silver Spring before closing in 2006.

Note that some of the nation's largest suburban music scenes, in Orange County, California, Northern New Jersey, and Long Island, are outside of cities that are ridiculously expensive to live in. Similarly, we have (or had?) a substantial music scene in suburban Washington. And we'll continue to as long as D.C. remains expensive.

Last week, the Post talked about performing arts centers locating outside of the city, like Strathmore Hall in North Bethesda. To me, that's not too different from having punk houses in Arlington. People like to make art or music wherever they live, and when nine-tenths of Greater Washington's six million residents live outside of Washington, the city can't have them all.

This isn't a bad thing. While we should work to create more affordable housing in the District so that artists can continue to live there, it's good to nurture the creation of culture in the suburbs as well. In doing so, we'll create stronger communities with a greater sense of place, and better music to boot.

we hold these truths to be self-evident

1) That Mayorga Coffee Roasters was a community institution, providing caffeine, comfy chairs and occasionally live music to those who lived in or passed through South Silver Spring,

South Silver Spring, shown here in 2002, needs destinations to draw people who already go Downtown.

2) That, with several thousand square feet of space (like many buildings in South Silver Spring, it was a factory), it was an unusually large space for a coffeeshop and difficult to make profitable,

3) That it was a long walk from stuff people wanted to do and therefore had trouble attracting "accidental" customers,

4) And, with limited short-term parking, the location may be a poor fit for other retail uses as customers who arrive by car find they can't just run in and grab a cup of coffee,

5) But, despite all of these things, the strength of South Silver Spring as a community and as a destination hinges on there being something in this large, prominently located space.

A club might be a good way to activate Arts Alley, which runs behind the space, on evenings and weekends.

That's why I propose that the former Mayorga Coffee Roasters become a music hall. It would have to serve food, because the liquor laws require it and there's already a kitchen, so why not. But put in a stage and maybe some seats (or maybe not, you know, I go to the seat-less 9:30 Club and it's perfectly fine) and have live music there.

You have something to activate Arts Alley, which runs behind the space, and an anchor for South Silver Spring - something to draw people to other stores in the area during the day and after dark, depending on when shows are scheduled. As a destination where people will stay for hours at a time, you don't need to worry about providing short-term parking. Not to mention that you're in a neighborhood with lots of young people living in apartments who likely will not complain about the noise.

The former Mayorga space is similar in size to local music venues like the 9:30 Club in D.C.

That's not to say that we shouldn't have the Fillmore, because it's coming anyway and it'll be an awesome asset to the area. (Michael Bolton? Yes, please!) But there's also a local music scene in Silver Spring that could use venues of its own, and this site may be able to offer one.

Punk bands live and play at houses like the Corpse Fortress in Fenton Village or Scumbag Nation in Colesville. Positive Youth Fest, an "annual celebration of Do-It-Yourself culture, music and activism," held its last festival at the Electric Maid Takoma. Nationally touring folk artists perform at the Dawson house in Glenmont.

Meanwhile, East County is home to a famous jazz guitarist who played with Bo Diddley, a folk revivalist who appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, and a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter.

These are communities that would benefit from having a nice, centrally-located performance space, larger and more versatile than a house but more accessible and intimate than the Fillmore will be. Yes, there are some considerable problems to setting one up in the former Mayorga site - namely, money. But if an investor came along with a few bills and a desire to make something out of this diamond in the rough, turning it into a music hall might be a smart way to turn a profit.

Or, at the very least, it'd be a cool thing to have in the neighborhood and a most spectacular way for said investor to spend his entire life savings.

the wonder years were set in white oak, sort of

White Oak Shopping Center, once home to the largest Sears in America.

I went to Scumbag Nation again last Saturday night (the 28th) and spoke to Davey Rogner (who we interviewed last fall). Whenever I bring my college friends back home I have to point out the landmarks: this is where I went to church, this is the street where Lewis Black lived, this is where my old house was, this is where I went to middle school with Lonely are the Brave a long, long time ago. "The funny thing about White Oak," Davey tells us, "is that apparently - someone told me this - that The Wonder Years is based on it."

You remember The Wonder Years, right? Fred Savage (or is it Ben?) as Kevin, a kid growing up in the 1960's in some generic all-American suburb with flat, treeless yards and a negligible amount of diversity (though his friend Paul was Jewish, right?) This happened in the same White Oak where today the roads haven't been paved in seventeen years, homeless men and hoodrats alike wander around the shopping center late at night and raucous punk bands take over rented houses just a couple of miles away?

Apparently, yes. Carol Black, who created The Wonder Years with Neal Martens, grew up in Silver Spring and graduated from Springbrook High School. Her experiences, merged with Martens' childhood on Long Island, were combined to create the setting for the show. But the inspiration for the fictional Robert F. Kennedy Junior High was in fact Key Middle School, not White Oak Middle School (though they did share a mascot, the Wildcats, with White Oak). Carol Black's depiction of the area at the time (from a Post article on the show published just two days after I was born) goes like this:

Her own junior high school, which has since closed, was Silver Spring's Francis Scott Key. "The notable thing about our little area was that for a time we had the largest Sears in America," Black says, and breaks up. It was suburb pure and plain, she says, and it suited her just fine. "There at the intersection of New Hampshire and Colesville Road ... It was just little quarter-acre lots, completely bare of trees when it was first built. And gradually they grew up, as we did."

I wonder if she ever comes back to the area and marvels at how it's changed, how the split-levels of her youth were either super-sized into McMansions or replaced with chockablock garden apartments, how they put up fences down the middle of New Hampshire because too many people were jaywalking. I wonder what would happen if Kevin were to come back to his town on the show, and if it would look the same as well. Forty years is a pretty long time, after all.

from the file of "things my roommate says"

AS ALWAYS: Check out my weekly column in the Diamondback, U-Md.'s independent student newspaper.

Suburban kids, taking a hike through Orchard Center in Calverton.

At a late dinner Saturday night, my roommate (with whom I did the Purple Line Diaries with last summer) explains he lived in Montgomery Village until elementary school. We had just come from seeing another show at Scumbag Nation in Colesville. "You know, Silver Spring reminds me a lot of the Village," he says.

I scrunch up my face. Montgomery Village is a big planned community, like Columbia or Reston but on a smaller scale. Silver Spring has grown in fits and starts for nearly two hundred years, not unlike an actual city. "How so?" I inquire.

"Well, Montgomery Village is very big," he replies, "and it's near a city, Rockville."

What? I was willing to humor the idea that Montgomery Village is "big" (big compared to where my roommate's family eventually moved to, though its 38,000 residents don't compare to the quarter-million people who have Silver Spring addresses), but do people Upcounty really consider Rockville and its strip malls to be "the City"? How does that work?

I never lived in D.C., but I grew up there, visiting family, eating out, going to West Potomac Park. When I was very young, my mother and I delivered food to Martha's Table, the homeless shelter on 14th Street, about once a week. As a result, the District became (and continues to be) the center of the world in my head. It makes me very curious how these kinds of experiences - urban versus suburban, and so on - shape a person's thinking as they grow up.

Having spent a lot of time in the city, I've become more inclined to use public transportation; my roommate, who didn't have those experiences, can joke that "white people don't ride the bus." The flip side, of course, is that he can pitch a tent because he did Boy Scouts, and my outdoor experiences were generally limited to the playground in Woodside Park.

It's a trade-off. Neither kid is worse off, I think, but they have very different sets of tools for perceiving/dealing with the world. The comments from Cavan's recent post on Greater Greater Washington about kids and cities sets up this dichotomy pretty well.

what's up the pike: cheap food, expensive mistakes

Don't really know what the actual temperature was yesterday, but it felt pretty warm, and I saw people out walking around, lining up at bus stops, kids skateboarding in the parking lot of the McDonald's in White Oak. Figures that cheap food and skaters would go together. (Perhaps McDonald's should consider creating an older version of the "PlayPlace.") Anyhoo:

- The Post's John Kelly says that Led Zeppelin, a band that parents/kids who probably do not skate in front of the White Oak McDonald's listen to, may have played their first local show at a teen center in Wheaton forty years ago last Tuesday (the evening, in fact, of Nixon's inauguration), but nobody has any real proof of this actually happening, and it's a relic of a lost time when kids actually went outside to do things, and blah blah blah y'all are Really Old.

Which makes me think two things: 1) With his inexplicable knowledge of Wheaton's seedy/super-cool past, one Thomas Hardman might know the real answer, and 2) really? like East County isn't currently brimming with house shows that kids actually leave their computers to attend in places with names like The Corpse Fortress and Scumbag Nation? Seeing as I couldn't tell you where the nearest teen center is, I figure our local network of punk houses/skate spots/the Hot Topic in Wheaton Plaza has at least partially filled that void.

- County Executive Ike Leggett joins the ranks of those supporting light rail for the Purple Line, suggesting that the Town of Chevy Chase really did waste their money on studying alternatives that would've put the transitway out of their backyard and into someone else's. Stay tuned as the County Council has their say on the Purple Line at a hearing next Thursday.

- The Texas-themed LongHorn Steakhouse will be opening up in the WesTech Village Corner (at right) at Route 29 and Tech Road, bringing a new dimension of dining to East County's burger-and-chicken-dominated culinary landscape. LongHorn's current menu specials include the usual ridiculously-named chain-restaurant fare like the Raspberry Mochatini and the White Cheddar & Bacon Stuffed Filet. If you wanna try any of them, you'd better head to existing locations in Columbia and Laurel, because the empty restaurant pad where we assume LongHorn is going probably won't be yielding steaks for a few months.

what's up the pike: two questions

While Just Up The Pike hopes to make an appearance at (and write a subsequent post about) the Purple Line hearings this week, it'll be tough to maintain the regular posting schedule over the next few days. So, in the meantime: I'll give you a topic. Or two. Discuss:

- Now that "gadfly in the ointment" Robin Ficker's thirty-four-year anti-tax campaign has finally been vindicated, will I ever wake up early enough to run up the stairs of Cole Field House with him before I graduate?

- While talking about Scumbag Nation tonight, my roommate (who you may remember from the Purple Line diaries in August) and I had an argument this evening about where the real "Montgomery County" is. According to him, places like Bethesda, Silver Spring and even Colesville (where Scumbag Nation is located) are functionally part of D.C., while upcounty locales like Gaithersburg and Germantown are independent of The City and can be considered "just plain MoCo."

What do you think? Where do you think D.C. stops and MoCo begins, if not at the city line? Can we say such a boundary really exists?

See you later this week!

what's up the pike: dueling scumbags and drafts

As I wrote in the D'Back on Wednesday, we're gearing up for mid-semester reviews at the School of Architecture, so JUTP might be a little quiet through the start of the coming week. In the meantime:

- The Going Out Gurus give us a preview of the Montgomery Cinema 'N' Drafthouse, opening next month in the former P&G Theatres at Wheaton Plaza. From the looks of their new marquee, the Drafthouse is definitely gonna class up Downtown Wheaton, and they definitely could use it.

- The Gazette writes about Dawson House Concerts, which feature nationally-touring folk artists at a house in Glenmont. Last weekend, I went a show at a house called Scumbag Nation in Colesville, but it was less folk and more hardcore/emo in a way you can only find in D.C.. There were no fewer than fifty kids packed into a small basement, singing, screaming and moshing, beneath a lone, naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and it was sublime.

East County's always had a strong, locally-grown music scene, with house shows like the Dawsons', the now-gone Death Star and its replacement, The Corpse Fortress as its foundation. I'd say that, when it comes to ambiance, they'd give a Fillmore a real run for its money.

- A ten-year-old Washington City Paper article, "Loco in MoCo," might have coined the term "Silver Sprung," but in a slightly different way than we're used to:

Now, however, just as the county smugly basks in its wealth and power, in its political dominance of Maryland, and in its cultural dominance over metropolitan Washington, bad things are roosting in paradise. . . . The land of Silver Spring has apparently sprung: Edge City has become Edgy City.

The story talks about Montgomery's surprisingly seedy underbelly, from big celebrity scandals to what the then-very-ironic author calls "the Dueling MoCo Theory":

At the Book Alcove in Rockville, a kid behind the counter named Jared leans in close to tell me secrets revealed neither by Montgomery County's maps nor by its streetscape . . . "On this side of the pike [Rockville Pike, which is the side where you are likely sitting right now if you're reading this blog], it's juveniles and punks," he says, looking as if he's spent some time in that category. "Over there, it's the celebrities."

Hello, Scumbag Nation. (Remember when people saw "Silver Sprung" and thought it was a typo?)

NEXT WEEK: You will read a story about a musical about the Purple Line. It is coming sooner than ever.