Big plans for big business: downtown goes upscale

Steel girders stretch towards the sky as if standing on their tiptoes to be as tall as City Place, which looms to the north. These metal beams are a mere skeleton of one building, and they only hint at what is to come: a Borders book store, the Discovery Communications Inc. Headquarters, American Film Institute headquarters, restaurants, a brand new city hall—and a brand new downtown Silver Spring.

One year since its opening, the Silver Spring Neighborhood Center shopping complex—the first completed step in a $650 million revitalization of the downtown area—has garnered a great deal of positive attention from the once-wary community. And the Center is just the beginning.

The revitalization is currently in its first stage, with construction in full swing for the second, which includes a re-configuration of local mall City Place to make room for restaurants and stores to be placed behind it. Plans are also being made to open the doors of the vacant Hechts building and the historic Silver Theater.

Melvin Tull, Enterprise Zone administrator at the Silver Spring Regional Center, predicts that the meat of the development won't be visible for a while yet. "It'll be probably a year and a half till there are real, tangible signs [of change],” he says. However, he remains confident that when the construction is completed, the community will continue to be as receptive as it has been to the Neighborhood Center so far.

Featuring communication and hardware, eateries and entertainment, the Neighborhood Center has been embraced by Silver Spring residents in the year since its ribbon-cutting, Tull says. The complex is anchored by natural foods supermarket Fresh Fields and boasts Baja Fresh Mexican Grill, Hollywood Video, Strosniders Hardware, Next Day Blinds and the Sprint Store.

Senior Teah Seals, who has worked at Fresh Fields since its opening, calls the Center "a community gathering place” and says that it has attracted a very mixed group of shoppers. She says that the stores ”brought a lot more diverse people, more older, younger, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Indian — everybody!”

Senior Carlos Repreza, who also worked at Fresh Fields, agrees with Seals, and says that part of the store's success could be attributed to its placement. "The location is perfect,” he says. "People don't have to go to Bethesda or Tenleytown, [sites of other Fresh Fields].”

Location is also a factor in the success of Baja Fresh, says Tull. On opening day, high demand even caused the eatery to run out of chicken. ”They are as busy as they can possibly be all the time—they're bandits!” he says.

Tull echoes this sentiment about the rest of the stores in the Center and says that the establishments have had three times more demand than they expected. "The word ‘overwhelmed' comes to mind,” he says.

But though these are overwhelming changes, the construction has somewhat strained the patience of people who live and work downtown, says Tull.

Cristina Gonzalez, a senior who works downtown with the Affiliated Sante Group, says traffic downtown has increased over the time she has worked there. "Every year the Silver Spring area is getting busier and busier,” she says.

Tull asserts that the Neighborhood Center does not share customers right now because a separate parking lot makes it self-contained, but explains that the new stores will draw patrons out into the whole downtown area. This is the idea behind the open-street design, he says.

He also says that there have been some delays with the construction phase that will take place between Georgia Avenue and Fenton Street, which involves a theater and a hotel. He says that the developer is currently "lining up tenancies” so that they can go ahead with the construction.

Recent events have celebrated Silver Spring's progress and its future. MagicalMontgomery, which took place Sept 29, was a celebration of arts and humanities across the county, featuring nearly 100 humanities organizations. "[MagicalMontgomery was] an effective way to raise awareness of the arts district in Silver Spring,” says Greg Finch, a member of the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the group that organized the event.

"Silver Spring is a community with enormous potential,” says the Silver Spring Citizens Advisory Board website. The redevelopment effort is striving step by step to unlock that potential.