The Deleted Scenes - Step One
What would you call this? A small town? A tiny city? A neighborhood? Maybe it’s all of those things. It’s an old streetcar neighborhood within the city of College Park, Maryland, resembling a city in miniature: a church in a sort of town square, detached houses, attached houses, and a tiny commercial block. The walking/biking path in the photo above is the old streetcar right of way. Here’s the Wikipedia page on the trail:
Berwyn was incorporated into College Park in the 1940s. I can’t figure out if there was a stop right here, or if the Greenbelt Road stop, a little bit north, was the only Berwyn stop. In either case, the streetcar suburb DNA—which is really just modified classical-urbanism DNA—is obvious. If you ever come across a little piece of what looks like classic urban fabric amid suburban sprawl, you can be almost certain it’s a remnant whose origin is no longer obvious. Many of these streetcar suburbs were originally seen as the starting point for more intense urban development. But for a variety of reasons, that didn’t happen for many of them. We’re sort of looking at a baby city frozen in time. Here’s a Washington Post profile of the Berwyn neighborhood. And here’s a neat interactive map of the area. Back to those photos of the streetcar line/trail. It reminds me of a piece I wrote about a trolley museum in Silver Spring, Maryland:
Look at what the trolley track in the forest—set up around the museum’s property, not an original line—looks like: That’s so cool. And so is this almost perfectly preserved bit of streetcar suburbia amid all too much of the typical modern variety. Related Reading: Have You Ever Lived in a Strip Mall? Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. 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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