Taking Preservation Into Their Own Hands
Readers: This week marks the two-year anniversary of this newsletter! For just this week, I’m offering an anniversary discount for new yearly subscribers, in case you’ve been on the fence about upgrading to a paid subscription. Your support—whether reading, sharing, or subscribing—keeps this thing going. Here’s to another year of The Deleted Scenes! There’s a building that’s always stood out to me on U.S. 1 in College Park, Maryland. Not because I lived right behind it—though I did—but because it’s one of those roadside fossils, a little piece of evidence that tells you just how much it’s all changed, in a rather short time. Recently we met some friends along here, at a Chinese hotpot restaurant in the ground level of a student apartment building. That’s what much of the U.S. 1 corridor is here now. Some people lament that too much bland housing is replacing a distinctive old landscape. I’m happy to see all this construction; it is a college town after all, and I remember thinking, when I was at UMD College Park, how little the surrounding landscape seemed to reflect that. But I was fascinated by this little cinderblock hut with a vintage neon sign, which obviously, somehow, resisted the development onslaught and now sat surrounded by the towering student buildings. When I lived here, this was an old-school liquor store. This new coffee shop took over the building not too long after I moved out, and they stripped off the worn-out neon and had the old sign refurbished and remade in their name. New and old. There is still an old-school bar across the street (probably, though I’m not a bar expert, a place kind of like this one.) As you travel north or south of the UMD campus, the mix of buildings begins to trend back towards more of these early roadside structures and fewer newer apartment buildings. In Laurel, there’s a motel with a sign that looks hand-painted, depicting a racehorse jockey. There’s a liquor store in Beltsville whose mascot is a WWII vet with glowing green lightbulb eyes (unfortunately, the neon was capped over with plastic a few years ago.) The linked photo’s description is also fascinating:
A lot has been written about the transformation of this landscape, from rural outpost to streetcar suburb and D.C. approach to aging first-generation roadside suburbia to the university-driven explosion of modern mixed-use development. Here’s a piece on the corridor’s old motels. Here’s a Washington Post profile on a water bed store in College Park. It’s from the year 2000, and already the landscape is very different. But this coffee shop. It’s hip and trendy; the inside is a mix of warm wood and industrial chic. The music is a turntable hooked up to a vintage Pioneer stereo receiver. The restored neon sign is its visual centerpiece, if only because there’s nothing much else to see. I have not actually had the coffee at this location, but I’ve had it several times at the company’s other location, not too far south in Hyattsville. It’s a little pricey, and very good. Here are a couple more views: Here’s one I heavily edited and ended up liking. The fact that you can mostly desaturate a picture like this and still have the neon color coming through is sort of symbolic, isn’t it? As I’ve observed before, these little roadside structures sometimes predate “suburban sprawl”; they’re from the generation of development that was already aging by the time highway beautification became a cause cause célèbre, in the mid-1960s. However, this one in particular, as far as I can tell, is from the late 1960s or early 1970s (its property record is not available online, so I’m going by aerial imagery.) The history of the site is fascinating too, if you like this sort of thing. Take a look at the 1998 imagery, for example. The site has looked like this for maybe 20 years at this point. I’ve added a red dot to show you where the liquor store/coffee shop building is. It’s a freestanding building today; so what the heck are those adjoining buildings behind it and to its right? I don’t know. But that’s not as strange as it gets. Previously, the spot where the current building is was still parking, but the other two buildings were there. In other words, the current structure appears to be an addition to a building(s) that no longer exists! And here’s the set of more recent images, from throughout the 2000s and 2010s, showing the transformation of this little area: It really is kind of amazing that a single-story commercial building with a parking lot takes up the same amount of land as an apartment building housing hundreds of people (and frequently with even more retail space on the bottom level.) I think it’s a sign of health and vitality to see things growing up: figuratively, and literally. But I’m also happy the neon still shines, like a historical marker, not for a dead plaque but a little living enterprise. Related Reading: A Piece of New Jersey We’ll Never Build Again Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter, discounted just this week! You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 600 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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Older messages
Roses Are Red, Walmarts Are Blue
Tuesday, April 4, 2023
A close look at what discount-store consolidation took from us
America's Urban Heritage: Culpeper, Virginia Edition
Monday, April 3, 2023
The kind of place we should keep building
Nature Walking
Saturday, April 1, 2023
Taking a breath
New and Old #103
Friday, March 31, 2023
Friday roundup and commentary
Not Crowded Enough, Nobody Goes There
Thursday, March 30, 2023
And some like it that way
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