A Drive Through “the Ugliest Place in Maryland”: Part 1

This is the first in a two-part photo essay on Maryland’s DC-area suburbs. Stay tuned for part two tomorrow! All images in this piece were provided by the author.

Maryland Route 355 in Montgomery County is worth driving down and exploring. The state highway runs from the edge of Washington, DC, up to the city of Frederick, tracking Interstate 270 and serving as the commercial strip and main highway for the suburbs along the I-270 corridor. Any local or commuter can rattle them off: Bethesda, Rockville, Gaithersburg, Germantown, Clarksburg, Urbana. I’d like to eventually drive that entire stretch, and document what it’s like to pass through each ring of suburbia as you leave the city. But for now, I’ve focused on a fascinating four-mile stretch in Rockville—local names Hungerford Drive and Rockville Pike—which is a microcosm of the history, and the change taking place, in the DC-area suburbs.

It’s always interesting to find old write-ups of commercial strips like this, especially from the 1970s, when they had become old enough to be studied with some sense of time and perspective, but young enough that they were still mostly intact in their original form. For example, check out this piece in the Washington Post from 1979, simply titled “The Rockville Pike.” It identifies Rockville Pike as “the Main Street of the suburbs,” and notes that in 1964, a Montgomery County council member dubbed it “the ugliest place in Maryland.” (He must not have been familiar with Maryland’s portion of U.S. 1.)

The Post article also profiles a produce vendor, who opened up back in 1946 when there were dozens of such vendors. By 1979, he was the last one. It’s remarkable how recently you could still find such semi-regulated, small-scale commerce along a major thoroughfare. On many country roads, you still can. It’s heartening, in a way. The stroad form these thoroughfares take today is really quite recent in the big picture.

One last note from the Post article: There’s an interesting paragraph about a 1970 sign ordinance that prohibited flashing lights along Rockville Pike. I wrote about this phenomenon here, arguing that the highway beautification movement basically got it wrong: the problem was not aesthetics but land use. Yet instead of reforming the land use, we settled on things like banning neon and regulating how many times a sign could blink. And what’s worse, we went full-bore into “urban renewal.” Rockville embodies all of this history. But it also suggests what can come next.

Let’s Hit the Road

Today, there’s not much of that old vaguely-Wild-West Rockville Pike left. Most of the surviving structures and signs from the heyday of the American roadside have either been demolished or remodeled beyond recognition. And, despite the area’s long history of settlement, there’s very little that survives from earlier than that. Even the historic, old-fashioned Hank Dietle’s Tavern is a rebuild, though a nearly exact one; the original structure was destroyed in a fire in 2018. One of the most visually interesting commercial structures of some age is a Wendy’s, with a unique glass-block sign on its roof.

Rockville Pike is currently undergoing dramatic change in its feel and land use. All over, aging office buildings, strip malls, and indoor malls are being replaced by new mixed-use apartment complexes or town-center style developments. In a few more years, a certain transformation may be complete. For now, the area is in flux, and it’s a perfect illustration of the transition ongoing in many suburban locales, driven by the housing crunch and a growing desire among a younger and more diverse demographic for suburbs to mature into amenity-rich places.

I began my drive at King Farm, an early-2000s housing development in the traditional neighborhood development style, at the northern edge of the Rockville Pike stretch. It’s stunning how little it really takes to produce a feeling of pleasant calmness, and how such a high level of density, relatively speaking, can feel more peaceful than the wide-open but mostly cosmetic spaces of a large-lot subdivision. The mix of housing types, as well as the development’s use of inclusionary zoning, at least help to ensure that unlike those subdivisions of identical houses, a mix of families and household types at different income levels and stages of life can live here.

These are real streets, with wide, buffered sidewalks, slow traffic, narrow setbacks, and buildings and layouts that maximize space without feeling crowded. The development offers private shuttle service to the nearby Shady Grove Metro station. (It’s absolutely walkable, too, but you’d have to scurry across the busy Rockville Pike to get there.) Designed to be “transit ready,” King Farm is bisected by a grassy median intended to be the right-of-way for the Corridor Cities Transitway, a light rail once envisioned to connect the I-270 suburbs. First, its northern terminus was cut from Frederick to Clarksburg. Then it was reimagined as a bus-rapid-transit project. Then, in 2019, it was killed. The grassy median, visible running through every one of these cities, remains, ready for another policy lurch. Some of the residents in these transit-ready developments even protested the potential arrival of transit.

At both a conceptual level and a granular level, however, this is a lovely housing development. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I challenge anybody who thinks of this sort of thing in the abstract as social engineering or busybody planning to level that charge against this place in particular. Apart from, and deeper than, my political and philosophical commitments to urbanism, this is a place where I can imagine feeling at home.

Read part two of this series here.

Addison Del Mastro writes on urbanism and cultural history. He tweets at @ad_mastro and writes daily at Substack.