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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 manager of this liquor store was as curious about the history of this sign as I was. It's gone through some changes over the last couple decades, but he said that when recent restorations were made after a severe storm, they discovered a picture of a black woman similar to Aunt Jemima underneath. He had no idea what this place was before it was a liquor store though. I seem to remember a pointing arrow on the side as well, but it still creeps me out to see those glowing eyes staring at me as I pass by on Route 1.

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

The Sun Sets on Harvest Moon

The Chester Houses

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