Game Over

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #252

This, just off Rockville Pike in Rockville, Maryland, looks like a typical 1970s-vintage office building:

But not quite….because that tunnel going through the middle—really, a little archway between two distinct buildings—is kind of unusual. And even more unusual, because it is a shopping arcade!

It is, however, game over for this arcade:

I’m cheating a little there, because that’s a wide-angle shot, so it looks longer and more liminal. This is the regular shot:

Empty storefronts line both sides. Only a couple of places, one down the tunnel and one on the side of the building, are leased.

Here’s the entrance to the upper office floors, in the middle of the arcade:

Here’s the site from the Google Map 3D satellite view. The building (two buildings) on the left is the one we’re looking at here; the one on the right is separate but almost identical to the right-hand portion of the arcade-connected building. (Sichuan Jin River is the restaurant around the corner from the arcade.)

The building left of the arcade/tunnel is retail, while the one on the right has bottom-level retail and offices above. The separate office building is offices only; it’s actually lifted, and the first floor is a surface parking lot under the building.

And here they both are, from Rockville Pike:

This complex is now in the middle of waves of new development (at the right, just left of the Walgreens name):

For comparison, here is the area before the Rockville Town Center and related mixed-use projects went in (but long after an urban renewal project that leveled the old downtown Rockville):

It’s a very interesting transitional landscape nowadays. Some of the more interesting places are actually located in the older buildings—I’ve long thought that the phenomenon of commercial gentrification is somewhat under-discussed, and I think you see some of that here.

And speaking of that, this is all slated for redevelopment (a redevelopment application, for an apartment building, was approved in late 2024, and a member of the Rockville planning board I met at a recent event told me it was going to be torn down. When exactly that will happen, I don’t know).

This is from a document submitted as part of the application:

The subject property is an assemblage of two lots, Lot 8, City Center per Plat 9079 and Lot 12, City Center per Plat 9506 totaling approximately 146,507 square feet (3.36 ac) of land (“Property”). The Property is improved with: i) an office building with retail annex with addresses of 414 and 392-412 Hungerford Drive, respectively, and ii) a second office building with address of 416 Hungerford Drive. The Property is zoned MXCD – Mixed Use Corridor District and lies within the Town Center Performance District overlay zone….

The two office buildings and the retail annex on the Property, built in the early 1970s and operated continuously since, are intended to be demolished as part of the redevelopment under this site plan.

Here is the landing page for this project with a timeline and documents, at the city of Rockville’s official website. If these detailed documents are interesting to you, check it all out.

What’s most interesting to me, though, is that the building there now is an early example of “mixed use.” It’s not that rare, actually, to see 1970s-era office low-rise office buildings with some storefronts in the bottom. It is pretty rare, though, to see a shopping arcade, specifically.

It’s always interesting to me to find examples of quasi-urbanity like this, especially in settings where it at first looks or feels out of place. And they’re glimpses of how what we call “suburbia” could have developed in subtly different, and better and more vibrant, ways than it typically did.

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Related Reading:

The Fascination Of Old Suburbia: Glenmont, MD Edition

Continuity And Change In Silver Spring, Maryland

Baby Baby Jim

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