Jeepers Creepers!
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #255
Well, we’re back in Rockville, Maryland again, on the Hungerford Drive/Rockville Pike commercial strip, as were were in a couple of recent editions of “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?”, here, and here.
Rockville is interesting because its commercial strips are older—the area really got built up in the 1960s—so there are quite a few workhorse buildings which have gone through a lot of changes and uses over the decades. There’s also a lot of brand new development. It’s a very interesting suburban/quasi-urban place, it shows a lot of the challenges and promises of densifying suburbia, and it illustrates the broad story of land use and urban development in the 20th century. (It also has a lot of good Chinese food.)
Speaking of that, the building we’re looking at today is currently a Great Wall Supermarket, a Chinese supermarket chain with locations in the region and elsewhere. It’s a pretty nice supermarket inside. Oftentimes, international supermarkets will take up spaces vacated by “American”1 chain supermarkets, and reuse the fixtures, so they’ll be a bit rundown inside. That is not the case with this one—because it didn’t used to be a supermarket.
It is a very long and narrow building for a supermarket, which suggests that it’s a reuse of an old building, but there is no real clue today as to what it was. It looks like this on the outside:
It has a kind of segmented look to it, which makes sense. The building dates back to 1963, and has been expanded a couple of times. Here it is on today’s aerial view (from Montgomery County’s GIS aerial imagery service):
And here it was originally, from Historic Aerials’s 1963 imagery:
It was extended just a few years later, and then, about 10 years ago, that white-roofed addition at the far left end was added.
This building’s very first use, as far as I can tell, was as a car dealership/service shop for Volkswagen! (A car dealership would explain the parking lot size, which is relatively cramped for a supermarket.) The Rockville old-timers Facebook group I follow yielded this vintage photograph, which looks like a scan of a grand-opening pamphlet:
I’m not quite sure of the vantage point of this photo, but I am guessing it’s probably standing in the parking lot with Hungerford Drive on the left out of the frame. Kind of where I’m standing in this photo:
At some point a piece of the building was removed from the front, which I think was that glass-enclosure lobby area. I’m thinking that the conspicuous cinderblock wall in the middle of my photo, with the gray band across the top, might be the old service bay opening, which was covered over!
However, in between the car dealership and the supermarket, this building was at least one other thing. From 1997 to 2007, it was Jeepers (“Food, Fun and a Monkey!”), an indoor amusement park chain which had a number of locations throughout the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic (there isn’t much info on it online) but which is now defunct. It looks like the last one, in Michigan, closed in 2019 due to unsafe rides. (Parts of their old website are captured here, linked in this article).
Jeepers is most remembered for an indoor roller coaster and bumper cars, which distinguished it from Chuck E. Cheese. People remember it fondly, as evidenced by the comments on this Reddit thread. But it may not have been the safest or cleanest place.
Some wag in an online thread claimed that the roller coaster was still set up in the stockroom of the Great Wall Supermarket, and that it still runs. I knew that was too good to be true, so I looked up what happened to the roller coaster. A roller coaster website identifies it as having been moved from Rockville—where it was known as the Python Pit—to an Ontario indoor amusement park called Neb’s Funworld, where it’s known as the Sparetime Express.
Another roller coaster website has a bit more on that:
From 1996 to 2007, this coaster operated as Python Pit at a Jeepers Family Entertainment Center in Rockville, Maryland. During that time, it operated with five cars in its train. The lead car had a large snake mounted on it, and the last car had the snake’s tail. Here is what the snake looked like thanks to a picture of an identical Python Pit Roller Coaster.
The coaster opened here as Sparetime Express in 2015. When it started operating in Canada, it had just four cars, and the snake-shaped cars had been replaced by new fiberglass bodies that resemble wooden boxes. I do not know where the coaster was between 2007 and 2015, but since these coasters are so portable, there is a very good chance that it traveled to a variety of locations.
I ended up going down this rabbit hole because, having been in Rockville a lot lately, I was thinking of buildings there that might have interesting backstories, and it occurred to me that the odd shape of the Great Wall building meant it probably used to be something else.
When I went back in time on the Google Maps imagery, I found that it was still Jeepers (barely readable) in the oldest set of imagery, from 2007:
I looked up what that was, found that it was a remembered Montgomery County outpost, and then came across the roller coaster trivia. This is what I mean when I say I don’t really know what will come of spending time “out in the field.” But it sure can be a ride.
Related Reading:
What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #28
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I don’t mean to conflate “American” with “white” or imply that international cuisines aren’t part of “America,” but I don’t know what else to call a mainstream American supermarket (Safeway/Giant/Stop & Shop/ShopRite/Albertsons/Wegmans/etc.).
Obit for the dealership founder, and it was indeed 1963.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1984/11/06/013ce87b-79b1-4c8f-8a8a-68ff91270d78/