Rockville’s awful parking lot, and the development that will replace it.

For literally decades, downtown Rockville’s most central block has sat empty, used only as a parking lot. It’s been a huge hole in the city’s urban fabric, separating the area near Rockville Metro station from the more vibrant Town Square. Now, after multiple failed attempts, it is finally, finally, being developed.

And with this property, the most visible sign of Rockville’s failed 1960 urban renewal will be erased.

Back in 1960, Rockville was transitioning away from its historic role as a sleepy county seat, and into a booming post-war suburb. City leaders fully embraced the notion that walkable urban places were obsolete, and approved an urban renewal plan that bulldozed 111 buildings covering 47 acres – almost all of Rockville’s historic downtown.

Like countless such plans from that era, this one was a disaster. A few mostly car-oriented buildings were constructed, including the short-lived Rockville Mall, but much of downtown remained empty.

It wasn’t until New Urbanism started taking hold in the 1990s that Rockville once again began thinking about its downtown as a downtown, instead of a glorified strip mall and office park.

Since then Rockville has had many successes. The Regal Theater opened, a grand new courthouse was built, and of course, the impressive new Town Square redefined the center of downtown. But in all that time, one key property has failed to redevelop, despite repeated attempts.

Town Center parking lot

Ever since the 1960 mass bulldozing of downtown, the block bounded by Middle Lane, Montgomery Avenue, Maryland Avenue, and Monroe Street, has been vacant of buildings. It’s the central block in Rockville’s downtown street grid, and marks the transition between the remaining urban renewal era highrises to the south, and the new Town Square to the north.

Arguably, it’s the most important single block in Rockville, and it’s been nothing but a parking lot for decades. In 2009 I named it the 5th most offensive parking lot in the Washington region, and the #1 worst outside of the District.

In 1994 the city worked with developers to plan a huge complex of office towers, including what would have been the tallest building in the city. The proposal floated around until the dot com bust soured the upper Montgomery County office market. By the turn of the millennium, the proposal was dead.

Then in 2005 the City of Rockville approved a new mixed-use redevelopment for the property, with somewhat shorter buildings. But development never got started, and when the recession hit those plans were once again tabled.

But now it appears that 2005 proposal has been dusted off and is ready to be built. The developer has a tenant and bank financing, which had always been the major holdups.

7 years after project approval, 18 years after the first proposal, and 52 years after urban renewal ruined Rockville, downtown is finally being stitched back together.

Upon seeing the property fenced off for the start of construction last week, Thisisbossi said it best on Twitter: FINALLY.

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington.

Oh sure, in 2012 we’ve got cycle tracks and bikesharing and all sorts of cool stuff, but in 1895 it was all the rage to race your pennyfarthing down the steps of the US Capitol.

And by “all the rage, ” I mean I found one picture of that on the internet.

Original source unknown. Image sourced from imgur.

Trolleys and ruins are two things that nobody associates with Fairfax. And yet, it has got some of both.

Once upon a time there was a trolley line that ran from Washington, DC to Fairfax, VA, along a route roughly parallel to today’s Metrorail Orange Line. Remnants of that line still exist scattered around Northern Virginia.

One such remnant is this ruin of a bridge, located in the City of Fairfax near the intersection of US Route 50 and Chain Bridge Road (map). It’s a virtually forgotten structure, totally surrounded by thick vegetation and impossible to reach except on foot. To find it, you must know where to look, and seek it out purposefully.

I learned of the bridge while working in Fairfax a few years ago. Today I dropped by and snapped a couple of pictures. Enjoy.

The bridge, crossing over a headwater branch of Accotink Creek.

The top of the bridge, its railbed overgrown with vegetation.

One of the only photos of 19th Century bloodletting known to exist. Public domain image from Wikipedia.

Before the rise of modern medicine, doctors all around the world practiced something called bloodletting. The basic idea was that illnesses were caused by bad blood, which had to be removed. A whole profession rose up around the theory and practice of bloodletting. It dominated medicine for generations.

But there was a problem: People who should have been getting better after bloodletting kept dying. George Washington is the most famous example. On the day he died, enough blood was intentionally removed from his body to fill a 12 pack.

As the 19th Century rolled on, humanity’s grasp of science improved and we eventually learned that removing large amounts of blood weakens patients and doesn’t treat most illnesses. Rather than helping people, bloodletting actually made them worse. Doctors who were trying to help people had actually been murdering them.

In short, the fundamental theory behind bloodletting was completely wrong.

Sound familiar? It’s a lot like 20th Century traffic engineering. At the advice of traffic engineers, America spent the latter half of the 20th Century building larger and larger roads in order to relieve congestion, which only got worse and worse with every subsequent enlargement. We rebuilt our civilization around universal car use, and then discovered that when everyone is forced to drive everywhere for everything it actually reduces our mobility.

Oops.

And so, as the 21st Century chugs along, more and more people are calling into question the ridiculous tools of traffic engineering, and no longer giving the profession carte blanche to design our infrastructure. Traffic engineers, as a result, are finding themselves increasingly marginalized. Those who cannot or will not evolve away from what they learned in the 20th Century are being gradually stripped of their respected authority.

In an interesting oped to the Engineering News-Record, traffic engineer Sam Schwartz discusses this increasing marginalization, and calls upon traffic engineering to progress as a profession. He decries the mentality that cars are “real transportation” and anything else is “alternative transportation, ” and cites easy-to-understand mathematical facts supporting multimodalism.

If we are going to function as a technologically advanced civilization then we need transportation engineers. Street design is a difficult and complicated proposition, and requires a professional touch. The good news is that many traffic engineers are beginning to see the light, and move away from the archaic dogma of the 20th Century.

Five years after the great mortgage collapse ruined outer suburbia, Americans are starting to believe that it isn’t coming back. Demographic and cultural changes have resulted in a permanent oversupply of suburbia.

That’s the basic premise behind an interesting New York Times op/ed by Chris Leinberger titled The Death of the Fringe Suburb. Leinberger claims that we are now in the midst of a reversal of the 1950s suburban explosion, and that the demographic convergence of millenials entering adulthood and baby boom empty-nesters ensures that the reversal is no mere blip.

Leinberger is right, but he fails to mention that what is happening is bigger than a simple reversal of trends. It’s the failure of an experiment, and the return to traditional methods of city building.

Most Americans think of suburbia as normal, but in reality it is anything but. American suburbia was a 50 year experiment. After World War II we made a massive investment in a new way of living. We abandoned thousands of years worth of urbanist heritage in order to build our lives around cars. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now, a half century later, we’ve learned that our new paradigm has problems of its own. Large numbers of us now believe that the old way is better.

Never again will Americans think of suburbia as the problem-free utopia that our grandparents imagined it to be. The results from our experiment are in, and they are mixed at best.

My point is this: American suburbia was an historical blip, and our return to urbanism is nothing but a return to normalcy. We’ve always had suburbs and we always will have suburbs, but their day in the sun as the dominant paradigm of city building is coming to an end.

This is a partial scan of a 1978 Metrobus map produced by Arlington County. A couple of interesting things that jump out to me are the fare zone boundaries running along the left side of the page and through Arlington Cemetery, and several routes that no longer exist, such as route 10 running along Fairfax Drive in “Parkington” (now Ballston).

What do you see that’s interesting?

Somewhat larger version.
Much larger version.

Take a look at this picture of Key Bridge, taken in 1965. Rosslyn is in the foreground, with Georgetown across the river. That circle, which was called Rosslyn Circle, is not there anymore. Zoom in to the full-size image and you can clearly see an old bus terminal. According to the photo description, the terminal is where DC Transit buses turned around. Much like DC Circulator today, the old DC Transit bus system included a route that crossed into Rosslyn. Photo by Roger Wollstadt.

Spend enough time in Arlington and you will eventually hear reference to something called “Clarendon Circle, ” but take a look at map and it is obvious that there is no circle in Clarendon.

You can’t see it because it’s not there anymore. What used to be the circle, at the intersection of Wilson, Washington, and Clarendon Boulevards, is now a gigantic intersection.

But thanks to the Arlington public library there are plenty of records, including the picture shown at right. The picture shows Clarendon in the early/mid 20th Century, prior to the elimination of the circle or the urban renewal that accompanied construction of the Metro system.

The circle isn’t the only thing in the picture that you won’t find in Clarendon today. The entire block of buildings shown in the center of the photo is gone, replaced by the linear park that tops the Metro station.

Holy cripes is this cool! A team from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has put together a computer model of the L’Enfant city in 1814. Watch the video for more.

I ran across this picture hanging on the wall at the Council of Governments building. It shows a “Capital Flyer” commuter bus from the late 60s or possibly early 70s in front of a big building with a Sears sign. Southwest Mall, maybe? I’m not sure. Interesting, in any event.