Prominent Pasts, Fragile Futures, Preservationists Identify 11 Local 'Gifts' at Risk

by By Brigid Schulte

Oringinally published in The Washington Post, July 3, 2003, Page GZ16

Jerry McCoy stuck his tape measure into the ground, pulled it up to the tip of a well-worn nub of stone hidden away in an overgrown, mosquito-ravaged drainage ditch off East West Highway and snorted in disgust.

"Eight inches," he said. "That's all that's left. It was originally three feet tall. The rest of it is buried underground."

The nub is actually a sandstone monument and one of the oldest historic structures in Montgomery County, dating to 1792. It is the northern boundary stone, requested by George Washington and surveyed by Andrew Ellicott, that marks the top of the diamond that was to become the District of Columbia.

Now, it sits just below twin concrete pipes that carry storm-water runoff from a nearby condominium development and funnel it directly over the stone. Through the years, the silt, mud and debris have slowly been burying the stone, despite its being one of 40 (38 still standing) boundary stones listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The monument is surrounded by a small, circular, wrought-iron fence. Out came McCoy's tape measure. Two and one-half feet. The fence -- put up in 1916 by the Daughters of the American Revolution and the last improvement made at the site -- used to be six feet tall.

"This," said Wayne Goldstein, president of Montgomery Preservation Inc., as he carefully ducked under a vine of poison ivy, "is demolition by neglect."

The stone is one of 11 historically important sites that local preservationists such as Goldstein and McCoy, who heads the Silver Spring Historical Society, put on their "most endangered" list, released earlier this week.

The idea is to make people aware of the history in their midst.

"We try to show people that history is everywhere," said McCoy, of Silver Spring. "It isn't necessarily the dry string of places and dates that we all read about in high school. It can be right outside your front door, in your own community."

In addition, the list is designed to evoke enough passion at the thought of losing structures that define community identity and give a sense of place that people will be moved to find ways to save, restore and revitalize them.

"These are buildings we consider a gift. Their architectural styles and materials and history enrich and enliven the surrounding community," McCoy said. "Let's face it, things going up today are just cookie-cutter. They look like everything else."

To heighten the sense of urgency, McCoy has to point no farther than his T-shirt with vintage postcards of Silver Spring landmarks. "Gone," he said, pointing to the old Montgomery County government building. "Gone. Now a parking lot," he said, pointing to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory building, where scientists developed the proximity fuse, a World War II-era bomb guidance system. "Gone to make way for a seven-story parking garage," he said, pointing to the old Armory.

Losing the elegant wood ballroom dance floor in the Armory is what pushed Goldstein, an avid social dancer, into historic preservation. McCoy, a librarian with the D.C. Public Library Washingtoniana Division, has always been hooked on historical preservation.

The preservationists' list, modeled on the one put out annually by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is one powerful way to try to save endangered sites from the same fate as the Armory, especially since in fast-growing Montgomery County the cranes of new construction, bright yellow earthmovers and torn-up land awaiting new development are common sights.

McCoy and Goldstein credit the annual list, which first came out in 1999, with saving the old Canada Dry bottling plant in Silver Spring. The yellow brick building, built in the art deco moderne style with sleek, rounded curves, was covered in vines and planned for demolition until it appeared on the list last year.

Since then, a developer has promised to save a portion of the exterior and incorporate the interior lobby, which is circular-shaped, like a soda bottle, into a series of four-story buildings and courtyards.

"We're not asking for something identical to what was," said Goldstein, of Kensington. "One of the expectations of historic preservation is to be able to tell old and new apart -- and find a way to balance preserving the old and its meaning to our history with making the new usable and economically viable."

Listing another site last year, the 1850 Jessup Blair House and Park, just off Georgia Avenue in downtown Silver Spring, helped spark a compromise that preservationists support, Goldstein said.

Montgomery College planned to expand its Takoma Park campus and build a cultural arts center that preservationists said would harm too many of the oak trees in the park.

"We believe this is the largest remaining stand of old-growth trees in Montgomery County," Goldstein said, motioning toward the grove of oaks. "These were the trees that were here in the 1850s when this area was settled."

Although the college agreed to open its culture center on Georgia Avenue, the park remains on the endangered list this year because a lawsuit has yet to be resolved and because the college still plans to build a pedestrian bridge that preservationists say would do too much damage to the trees.

Just up the block, the funky, pocket-size Little Tavern, an old hamburger joint with white, green and red trim that evokes a Krispy Kreme doughnut box, is not only on the endangered list but also on the county's 30-day demolition list. Owners of the site listed the building for sale on eBay last spring, even though their original plans called for incorporating it into their design.

The new plans call for a sleek, black-glass office building.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing," McCoy said of owner Pyramid Atlantic's plans. "A glass box. That's so '80s."

McCoy and Goldstein acknowledge that their efforts are sometimes met with hostility, and they deny that they want to save every last historic structure.

"Communities have to evolve and change," Goldstein said. "But there are unique, individual places worth holding onto."

Fred Holycross, director of programs at Preservation Maryland, a statewide nonprofit preservation group, agrees. A restored historic building not only evokes a sense of place, he says, but can reenergize blighted urban areas. Developers also often use the historic cachet to attract high-quality tenants.

"We're not saying an old community has to remain a museum," Holycross said. "But we believe historic properties and historic places provide an environment that is both meaningful and beautiful."

One of Goldstein's missions in releasing the list is to save the old Park Street Elementary School, scheduled for demolition in 2005 to make way for the new Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville.

The building, constructed in 1934 in the Georgian Revival style of red brick, white dormers and fan windows, was designed by Howard Wright Cutler and is a classic in Montgomery County school architecture.

"The school system argues that the county already has a Georgian Revival style school at Bethesda-Chevy Chase," Goldstein said. "You could make the argument that we've got the original Georgian Revival in England. There's already one on the planet, so we don't need any more."

A number of the sites on this year's list are in Germantown, where building has been booming. In the former farmlands can be found the Black Rock Log House, built in 1890; the John Gassaway Seed and Fertilizer Store, from the 1880s; and the Eugene Waters House, built in 1918.

The log house is considered important because it is one of the oldest structures in the area. The store is a physical reminder of an important shift in Maryland history, when tobacco farmers sought to replace the nutrients in their depleted soil and switch to growing corn and wheat, said Susan Soderberg of the Germantown Historical Society. The Waters House is considered worth saving simply because the area is losing so much else.

Until recently, the historical society would look only at houses built before 1900 to consider for a survey of the county's potentially important historic sites, known as the locational atlas.

"But we've lost so many properties in Germantown. More than half of our regional buildings are gone," Soderberg said. "Now, we're accepting nominations for houses built after 1900."

Back in Silver Spring, Goldstein and McCoy circled around Blair Mill Road and pointed out the site where once stood the stately mansion of the founder of Silver Spring, Francis Preston Blair. "Furniture Sellout, Inc" reads the sign on the squat brick warehouse.

The only remaining sign of what was once a sloping pastoral back yard is a small gazebo with a giant, brown, acorn-shaped roof. Blair had the structure, furbished through the years, built on the site for his wife, Eliza Gist Blair, to commemorate how he proposed to her under an oak tree. Around the corner, just down the street from the empty high-rise buildings that once housed the Atomic Energy Commission and other 1950s-era federal government buildings, lies a small pool of water in a depression on the lawn of the Discovery Communications building.

The pool of stagnant water, clogged with muck, dead leaves and garbage, is where Blair once saw mica chips sparkling in a gurgling stream and was so taken with it that he named it Silver Spring and decided to live near it.

The spring stopped running after access to its underground source was dynamited in the construction of East West Highway.

A few years ago, there was a bitter dispute about whether this was the original site of the spring. Then workers cleared topsoil and discovered a slab of granite from 1872 and a marble surround from 1894.

Goldstein shook his head. "How quickly we forget," he said.

© The Washington Post, 2003