Silver Spring is an urbanized, unincorprated area in Montgomery County,MD. After Baltimore and Columbia , Silver Spring is the third most populous place in Maryland. The urbanized, oldest, and southernmost part of Silver Spring is a major business hub that lies at the north apex of Washington, D.C. The community has recently undergone a significant renaissance, with the addition of major retail, residential, and office developments.
Silver Spring takes its name from a mica-flecked spring discovered there in 1840 by Francis Preston Blair, who subsequently bought much of the surrounding land. Acorn Park, tucked away in an area of south Silver Spring away from the main downtown area, is believed to be the site of the original spring.
Parks and recreation
Rock Creek Park passes along the west side of Silver Spring, and offers hiking trails, picnic grounds, and bicycling on weekends, when its main road, Beach Drive, is mostly closed to motor vehicles.
Sligo Creek Park follows Sligo Creek through Silver Spring; it offers hiking trails, tennis courts, playgrounds and bicycling. The latter is facilitated on weekends, when parts of Sligo Creek Parkway are closed to autos. The bike trails are winding and slower than most in the region. Recently, rocks have been spread along either side of the road, providing a hazardous bike ride, or skating leisure.
Acorn Park in the downtown area of Silver Spring is believed to be the site of the eponymous "silver spring".
The 14.5-acre (59,000 m2) Jesup Blair Park was recently renovated and has a soccer field, tennis courts, basketball courts, and picnic area.[1]
Brookside Gardens is a 50 acre (20,000 m²) park within Wheaton Regional Park, in "greater" Silver Spring. It is located on the original site of Stadler Nursery (now in Laytonsville, Maryland).
History
Nineteenth century
The Blair and Lee families, two politically active families of the time, are irrefutably tied to Silver Spring's history. In 1840, Francis Preston Blair, who later helped organize the modern American Republican Party, along with his daughter Elizabeth discovered a spring flowing with chips of mica (the now-dry spring is still visible at Acorn Park). Two years later, he completed a twenty-room mansion he dubbed Silver Spring on a 250 acre (one-square-kilometer) country homestead situated just outside of Washington, D.C. (The house stood until 1954.[6]) By 1854, Blair's son, Montgomery Blair, who became Postmaster General under Abraham Lincoln and represented Dred Scott before the United States Supreme Court, built the Falkland house in the area. By the end of the decade, Elizabeth Blair married Samuel Phillips Lee, third cousin of future Confederate leader Robert E. Lee, and gave birth to a boy, Francis Preston Blair Lee. The child would eventually become the first popularly elected Senator in United States history.
During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln visited the Silver Spring mansion multiple times. During some of the visits he relaxed by playing town ball with Francis P. Blair's grandchildren.[7] In 1864, Confederate Army General Jubal Early occupied Silver Spring prior to the Battle of Fort Stevens. After the engagement, fleeing Confederate soldiers razed Montgomery Blair's Falkland residence. By the end of the nineteenth century, the region began to develop into a town of decent size and importance. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad's Metropolitan Branch was completed in 1873 and ran from Washington, D.C. to Point of Rocks, Maryland through Silver Spring. The first suburban development appeared in 1887 when Selina Wilson divided part of her farm on current-day Colesville Road (U.S. Route 29) and Brookeville Road into five- and ten-acre (20,000- and 40,000 m²) plots. In 1893, Francis Preston Blair Lee and his wife, Anne Brooke Lee, gave birth to E. Brooke Lee, who is known as the father of modern Silver Spring for his visionary attitude toward developing the region[citation needed].
Twentieth century
The early twentieth century set the pace for downtown Silver Spring's growth. E. Brooke Lee and his brother, Blair Lee I, founded the Lee Development Company, whose Colesville Road office building remains a downtown fixture. Dale Drive, a winding roadway, was built to provide vehicular access to much of the family's substantial real estate holdings. Suburban development continued in 1922 when Woodside Development Corporation created Woodside Park, with 1 acre (4,000 m²) plot home sites. In 1924, Washington trolley service on Georgia Avenue (present-day Maryland Route 97) across B&O's Metropolitan Branch was temporarily suspended so that an underpass could be built. The underpass was completed two years later, but trolley service never resumed. It would be rebuilt again in 1948 with additional lanes for automobile traffic, opening the areas to the north for readily accessible suburban development.
Takoma-Silver Spring High School, built in 1924, was the first high school for Silver Spring. The community's rapid growth led to the need for a larger school. In 1935, when a new high school was built at Wayne Avenue and Sligo Creek Parkway, it was renamed Montgomery Blair High School. (The school remained at that location for over six decades, until 1998, when it was moved to a new, larger facility at the corner of U.S. Route 29 (Colesville Road) and Maryland Route 193 (University Boulevard). The former high school building became a combined middle school and elementary school.) The Silver Spring Shopping Center and Silver Theatre (designed by noted theatre architect John Eberson) were completed in 1938, at the request of developer William Alexander Julian. The shopping center was unique because it was one of the nation's first retail spaces that featured a street-front parking lot. Conventional wisdom held that merchandise should be in windows closest to the street so that people could see it; the shopping center broke those rules.
By the 1950s, Silver Spring was the second busiest retail market between Baltimore and Richmond, with the Hecht Company, J.C. Penney, Sears, Roebuck and Company, and a number of other retailers. In 1954, after standing for over a century, the Blair mansion "Silver Spring" was razed and replaced with the Blair Station Post office. In 1960, Wheaton Plaza (later known as Westfield Wheaton), a shopping center several miles north of downtown Silver Spring opened, and captured much of the town's business. The downtown area soon started a long period of decline.
In December 1961, a short segment of the Capital Beltway (I-495) was opened to traffic between Georgia Avenue (Md. 97) and University Boulevard East (Md. 193).[8] On Monday, August 17, 1964, the final segment of the 64-mile (103 km) Beltway was opened to traffic,[9] and a ribboncutting ceremony was held near the New Hampshire Avenue interchange, with a speech by then-Gov. J. Millard Tawes.[10]
Washington Metro rail service into Washington, D.C., helped breathe life into the region starting in 1978 with the opening of Silver Spring station. The Metro line was built on the median of the old B&O Metropolitan Branch right of way, and went downtown, parallel to Georgia Avenue (U.S. Route 29) before descending into Union Station. By the mid-1990s, the Red Line continued north from the downtown Silver Spring core, mostly underground to three more locations in northern Silver Spring, with the opening of Forest Glen, Wheaton and Glenmont stations.
Nevertheless, the decline continued in the 1980s, as the Hecht Company, downtown's last remaining department store, closed and opened a new store at Wheaton Plaza. Furthermore, Hecht's added a covenant forbidding another department store from renting its old spot. City Place, a multi-level mall, was established in the old Hecht Company building in 1992, but it had trouble attracting quality anchor stores and gained a reputation as a budget mall, anchored by Burlington Coat Factory, Gold's Gym, Marshalls, AMC Theaters (now closed) and a short-lived Nordstrom Rack. In the mid-1990s, developers considered building a mega-mall and entertainment complex called the American Dream (similar to the Mall of America) in downtown Silver Spring, but the revitalization plan fell through before any construction began because the developers were unable to secure funding.
Another notable occurrence in Silver Spring during the 1990s was a 1996 train collision on the Silver Spring section of the Metropolitan line. On February 16 of that year, during the Friday-evening rush hour, a MARC commuter train bound for Washington Union Station collided with an outgoing Amtrak train and erupted in flames on a snow-swept stretch of track in Silver Spring, leaving eleven people dead.
The Maryland State Highway Administration started studies of improvements to the Capital Beltway in 1993,[11] and have continued, off and on, examining a number of alternatives (including HOV lanes and Express Toll Lanes, since then.
Twenty-first century
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, downtown Silver Spring began to see the results of redevelopment. Several city blocks near City Place Mall were completely reconstructed to accommodate a new outdoor shopping plaza. New shops included national retail chains such as Whole Foods Market, Borders Books & Music, a 20-screen Regal Theatres, Men's Wearhouse, Ann Taylor Loft, DSW Shoe Warehouse, Office Depot, and Pier 1 Imports, as well as many restaurants, including Romano's Macaroni Grill, Panera Bread, Red Lobster, Coldstone Creamery, Fuddruckers, Potbelly Sandwich Works, Baja Fresh, and Chick-fil-a. In addition to these chains, Downtown Silver Spring is home to a wide variety of family-owned restaurants representing its vast ethnic diversity. In 2003, Discovery Communications completed the construction of its headquarters and relocated to downtown Silver Spring from nearby Bethesda. The same year also brought the reopening of the Silver Theatre, as AFI Silver, under the auspices of the American Film Institute. Development continues with the opening of new office buildings, condos, stores, and restaurants, although City Place Mall continues to struggle to fill its vacancies despite the explosive growth around it. The restoration of the old Silver Spring Train Station was undertaken between 2000 and 2002, as recorded in the documentary film Next Stop: Silver Spring.[12][13]
Beginning in 2004, the downtown redevelopment was marketed locally with the "silver sprung" advertising campaign, which declared on buses and in print ads that Silver Spring had "sprung" and was ready for business.[14] In June 2007, the New York Times noted that downtown was "enjoying a renaissance, a result of public involvement and private investment that is turning it into an arts and entertainment center".[15]
In 2007, the downtown Silver Spring area gained attention when an amateur photographer was prohibited from taking photographs in what appeared to be a public street. The land, leased to a developer for $1, was technically private property. The citizens argued that the development, partially built with public money, was still public property. After a protest on July 4, 2007, the developer relented and allowed photography on their property under limited conditions. The developer also claimed that they could revoke these rights at any time. They further stated that other activities permitted in public spaces, such as organizing protests or distributing campaign literature, were still prohibited.[16] In response, Montgomery County Attorney Leon Rodriguez said that the street in question, Ellsworth Drive, "constitutes a public forum" and that the First Amendment's protection of free speech applies there. In an eight page letter, Rodriguez wrote, "Although the courts have not definitively resolved the issue of whether the taking, as opposed to the display, of photographs is a protected expressive act, we think it is likely that a court would consider the taking of the photograph to be part of the continuum of action that leads to the display of the photograph and thus also protected by the First Amendment." [17] The incident was part of a trend in the United States regarding the blurring of public and private spaces in developments built with both public and private funds.
In 2008, construction of the long-planned Inter-county connector (ICC) got under way
Culture
Downtown Silver Spring hosts several entertainment, musical, and ethnic festivals, the most notable of which are the Silverdocs documentary film festival held each June and hosted by Discovery Communications and the American Film Institute, as well as the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade (Saturday before Thanksgiving) for Montgomery County. The Silver Spring Jazz Festival has become the biggest event of the year drawing 20,000 people to the free festival held on the second Saturday in September. Featuring local jazz artist and a battle of high school bands, the Silver Spring Jazz Festival has featured such jazz greats as Wynton Marsalis and Arturo Sandoval.
Dining in Silver Spring is also extremely varied, including American, African, Burmese, Ethiopian, Moroccan, Italian, Mexican, Salvadoran, Jamaican, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and fusion restaurants, as well as many national and regional chains.
Silver Spring serves as the primary urban area in Montgomery County and its revitalization has ushered in an eclectic mix of people and ideas, evident in the fact that the flagship high school (Montgomery Blair High School) has no majority group with each major racial and ethnic group claiming a significant percentage.
Silver Spring hosts the American Film Institute Silver Theatre and Culture Center, on Colesville Road. The theatre showcases American and foreign films. Discovery Communications, a cable and satellite programming company, has its headquarters in downtown, as well. Gandhi Brigade, a youth development media project, began in Silver Spring out of the Long Branch neighborhood. Silver Spring Stage [2], an all-volunteer community theater, performs in Woodmoor, approximately 3 miles (4.8 km) north up Colesville Road from the downtown area. Downtown Silver Spring is also home to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a branch of the United States Department of Commerce incorporating the National Weather Service; the American Nurses Association; and numerous real estate development, biotechnology, and media and communications companies.
Education
Silver Spring is served by a county-wide public school system, Montgomery County Public Schools. Public high schools that serve the region include Montgomery Blair High School, Albert Einstein High School, Wheaton High School, James Hubert Blake High School, Northwood High School, Paint Branch High School, John F. Kennedy High School, Springbrook High School, and Bethesda Chevy Chase High School. Of the public high schools in the region, Montgomery Blair High School is the only one within the Census Designation Place of Silver Spring. It is known nationwide for its Communication Arts Program and its Math, Science, and Computer Science Magnet Program, the latter of which perennially produces a large number of finalists and semi-finalists in such academic competitions as the Intel Science Talent Search. Notable private schools in the region include The Siena School, Yeshiva of Greater Washington, Torah School of Greater Washington, and The Barrie School.
A portion of the Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring campus is located within the Silver Spring boundary, with the rest of the campus located in Takoma Park. The community college is Montgomery County's main institute of higher education. (The main campus is in the county seat of Rockville.) Adjacent to the White Oak neighborhood in the outer reaches of Silver Spring is the campus of the National Labor College. Howard University also has its School of Continuing Education in Silver Spring (its main campus is located nearby in Washington, D.C.).