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:

The right of way was originally Route 82 of the streetcar system of Washington, DC. The section used by the trail was built by the City and Suburban Railway in 1899. The full line stretched from New York Avenue and 15th St NW in Washington, DC to Berwyn at Greenbelt Road, where a turn table was built and was extended to Laurel, Maryland in 1902. City and Suburban operated cars on the line until 1926 when it was absorbed by the Washington Railway and Electric Company which in 1933 became part of Capital Transit and in 1955 DC Transit. During that time the line was shortened, running only to Beltsville by 1948 and only to Berwyn by 1956. In 1956, Congress decided to replace the streetcars with buses and on September 7, 1958 the last streetcar ran the route.

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:

I’ve often been struck by how narrow the rights of way for these vehicles were, when I see trolley tracks converted into walking or biking paths. The infrastructure looks so unobtrusive. I felt that even more actually riding a trolley through the forest. It’s just so cool. It’s something we could have kept, and could do again.

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:

Inhabiting Old Ghosts

A Great Everyday Neighborhood

Have You Ever Lived in a Strip Mall?

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