Silver Spring Double Feature

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #259

I am back, once again, in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, where I’ve written about a few interesting old buildings recently (here, here, and here). I had thought, from the amount of NIMBY energy that comes out of Silver Spring, that perhaps it now had a dearth of historic structures. But that’s not true, and newer developments have made excellent use of old, outmoded buildings in the old downtown.

In that vein, how do you think this building began life?

If you’d asked me before I read this excellent piece on early suburban retail in Montgomery County, Maryland, I would have assumed it was always a theater. If you’d told me it wasn’t, I’d probably guess that it had once been a grand bank.

But it was neither of those things back then. When it was built and opened in 1948, it was this, which it remained until 1988:

While the interior has been completely reworked, the facade is almost unchanged; the asymmetrical open-grate feature on the right of the building and the old Penney’s sign remain, as do the basic window and door placements.

A little bit on the old Penney’s:

Prominent architect Clifton Bryan White, of Silver Spring, received a diploma of merit for its “superior architecture” from the American Institute of Architects Maryland Division. An immediate hit with shoppers from the day it opened, the store’s size doubled to nearly 40,000 sq. ft. in 1956. Expanded facilities included one of the largest men’s wear departments in Penny’s chain, and an entire floor devoted to women’s fashion. An outside patio displaying outdoor furniture, picnic equipment, and garden tools was a new feature. This store operated until 1988.

The second building I want to show you, just a couple of blocks away, is this one:

I had always assumed this was an art deco revival building to serve as a shell for what is now an indoor mall (as I also had assumed of this strip plaza, also quite close by). But this too is an old structure, dating to 1947! And it began life like this:

Hecht’s was, as it appears to be in the pictures, the larger of these two department stores:

The new stand-alone suburban Hecht’s opened in 1947, on the corner of Fenton St. and Ellsworth Dr. in Silver Spring, one block over from the main thoroughfare (which was Georgia Avenue/Colesville Road). Designed and built by the New York firm Abbott, Merkt & Co., the building had a sleek, modern facade, boasting 160,000 square feet on four floors, with 116 departments staffed by 300 employees in a comfortable air-conditioned atmosphere, plus free off-street parking. The new store was an immediate runaway success, leading to a two-story expansion in 1950 and another extension in 1955, adding another 100,000 square feet to the building.

Hecht’s survived to 1987; its demise obviously didn’t float J.C. Penney for much longer.

This is really interesting. 1987 or 1988 seem rather late for an old downtown department store in a small city. Maybe not, though. It’s always curious to me when you see these pieces of evidence that a lot of America’s smaller historic downtowns weren’t always just suburban communities or lifestyle amenities; they really were, and functioned as, cities. They were little miniature versions of the big cities.

The evolutionary tree of American cities is like the inverse of the evolutionary tree of dinosaurs. When the dinosaurs went extinct, it was only the very smallest ones that survived: birds. When American cities met their extinction-level event with the mass ownership of the automobile, suburban expansion, and urban renewal, only the large ones survived. The small ones mostly survived physically intact, but lost their true urban economies and lifestyles.

Yet on the other hand, all of this is really not that long ago. Silver Spring itself began life as a largely car-oriented suburb, despite the area retaining and growing along a lot of old-fashioned urban design principles. And, unlike many suburbs, Silver Spring has become more urban over the years, and has really grown into itself.

So it’s quite a story of the evolution of a place that unfolded here, in really not that much time.

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Related Reading:

A Small Town With a Big Department Store

Plainfield And Fancy

Apartment Store

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