Credit: Just Up The Pike Facebook profile picture.
More than a year before Dan Reed invited people to join him at local establishments to “ask [him] (almost) anything,” I sat down with the urbanism blogger and real estate agent to talk about Silver Spring history and a Washington urban legend known as “The Plan.” Reed has written prolifically on a wide range of Silver Spring topics for his blog, Just Up The Pike, the Greater Greater Washington blog, and Washingtonian magazine. I was interested in his epistemic background as it relates to how Silver Spring produces history and how Silver Spring uses history in placemaking and community-building efforts.
I spoke with Reed that day for my research on suburban erasure that is part of a book project about a suburban Atlanta city; Silver Spring and Washington are sources for comparative material. For the past five years. I have been asking interviewees some variant of this question: Where can I go to find Black history sites in your community? The interview with Reed was no different:
ROTENSTEIN: Where would you go in Silver Spring to see African American history?
REED: In downtown Silver Spring?
ROTENSTEIN: Yes.
REED: [Pause] I mean I guess – I would recommend Lyttonsville, which is not downtown; it’s next to it.
ROTENSTEIN: Very specific about downtown?
REED: [Pause] I’ll be honest, I can’t think of anything. I can think of barbershops. That’s the first thing that came to mind. There are a lot of black barbershops. I still go to the same barber that I went to when I was seven in downtown. His name is TJ. He used to be at Community Barbers on Georgia Avenue but now he’s in Petworth in D.C. Which reminds me, I need to make an appointment.
But that is an element of black culture that you can find here.
I hope you’re going to tell me there’s some piece of black history that I can go out and find this afternoon in downtown Silver Spring?
The reason for publishing the interview at this time, in its entirety, derives from something that happened this past June. Reed, in a series of tweets, alleged that he had been invited and subsequently uninvited as a speaker at a local African American history themed event. A woman working on the event’s planning committee had searched Google for potential speakers and she found Reed’s name because of his frequent public appearances and writing about Silver Spring.
The woman called Reed and spoke with him about the event and about the possibility of speaking. The committee on which she was serving had established that all invitations to speak at the event would be determined by a committee consensus, not by one individual. After speaking with Reed, the woman called me and asked if I knew Reed. I answered affirmatively and then I explained why I believed he might not be a good choice as a speaker. I described the 2016 interview that I did with Reed as well as things that he had written about Lyttonsvillle and his positions on such topics as the Purple Line — all information the woman did not know. She then called Reed again and told him that he may not be a candidate to speak.
And then the tweeting began.
There was no way that she could have invited Reed to speak at the event. The committee planning the program had agreed that invitations to speak would be extended only after a consensus had been reached by all members. This email sent by one of the event planners June 9, 2018, captures the committee’s response to the exchange among Reed and the woman with whom he spoke:
Personally, I am confused by this latest chain of events, as I was under the impression we had established a clear, transparent, and democratic process for deciding as a group what speakers we will invite. And the program committee was soliciting final feedback from the whole group before moving forward on that.Will try to find time today to send an email to both the program committee and the whole group to clarify the decision making process for inviting speakers.
Reed’s tweets that day were dishonest and malicious. His tweets generated a lot of engagement over several days: many likes, retweets, and replies from a wide array of individuals who took them at face value: journalists, county officials, and others. Tom Hucker, Silver Spring’s representative on the County Council, replied that the situation Reed was describing was “nutso” and he invited Reed to speak with him offline.
Another Silver Spring resident engaged with Reed’s tweets and urged Hucker’s office to “investigate” and Hucker agreed that Reed’s allegation was worth looking into. I recently ran into Hucker while he was running along the Sligo Creek Trail. I told him that I was working on this post and I asked him about the exchange with Reed. Before continuing on his run, Hucker said that at the time he thought Reed was responding to a threat.
I don’t know if Hucker or his staff ever did follow-up on his constituent’s request. I do know that Hucker did attend the event Reed tweeted about; the council-member appeared to enjoy himself and the photo opportunity.
Montgomery County Councilmembers (L-R) Tom Hucker, Nancy Floreen, and Marc Elrich at the Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 22, 2018.
Reed’s tweets imperiled the event which was conceived by, organized by, and managed by a pair of African American women who are lifelong Silver Spring residents. Just to reiterate: the organizers never extended an invitation to Reed to speak. And, if his name had been considered as a candidate, he likely would have been rejected for his positions on a wide variety of issues that residents of Lyttonsville feel are contrary to their own and against their best interests. Furthermore, as an event highlighting African American history in Silver Spring, Reed by his own admission isn’t a very knowledgeable source.
I waited until the event was over to publicly respond to Reed’s malicious comments and the wreckage left in their wake. In the 2016 interview, I did ask Reed “almost anything.” The complete, wide-ranging interview transcript is reproduced below.
Interview with Dan Reed
Kaldi’s Social House, Silver Spring
July 28, 2016
[We met at 10:30 a.m. and got a seat in the back of restaurant and began speaking before I switched on the recorder. Equipment used was an Olympus LS-14 audio recorder. Transcribed by David Rotenstein October 13, 2016.]
ROTENSTEIN: This is David Rotenstein. It’s July 28, 2016 and I’m speaking with Dan Reed. Back to what you just said, Dan, how long have you lived in Silver Spring?
REED: I’ve lived here since nineteen ninety-one. My mother was a student at the University of Maryland and we were living in Prince George’s County at the time. I was born in D.C. and her family is from D.C. but she wanted to be closer to College Park and somebody had told her, I guess, that Silver Spring was – or, specifically, downtown Silver Spring – was quiet. I’m using air quotes. So, it drew her to the area.
ROTENSTEIN: Quiet in what way?
REED: Like literally quiet. There wasn’t a lot going on. It was a nice quiet place to raise a kid, I guess.
ROTENSTEIN: What part of D.C. did she live in?
REED: Petworth. My mother’s family, when they emigrated here in the seventies, they lived in an apartment in Columbia Heights. She and her eight sisters and brothers, one by one, moved up here from Guyana. When her parents followed, they moved to Petworth to an apartment building, which is still in our family, and most of my family is still in the District. We have some relatives who live in Virginia and Prince George’s County and a couple in Montgomery County.
ROTENSTEIN: Before I get into what I want to talk about Silver Spring, I want to ask something about the District. Did you ever hear of an urban legend called The Plan?
REED: Oh I know about The Plan.
ROTENSTEIN: Can you tell me when you first heard about it?
REED: It might have been when I was a teenager. My uncle is a cabdriver in D.C. and has been for thirty, forty years. And I remember we were driving through the city. This is like in two thousand two, maybe. It was when Tony Williams was in office. And we were looking at all the cranes over the buildings and he said, “Man, you know, Tony Williams is gonna run all these black people out of D.C. That’s been the plan.”
I had never heard anyone describe it as such before. I mean when I was a kid, D.C. and by extension, Silver Spring, was as my mother felt, quiet and sleepy and I associated much of it with, like, my grandparents, who were still living in Petworth and it was old and your grandparents lived there and the houses were old and smelled like grandmas and that was that. Likewise in Silver Spring, too. It was kind of old and rundown and very, very sleepy.
ROTENSTEIN: So you heard it from your uncle. At that point did you ask any questions about what the plan was?
[2:41]
REED: Not really. I’m not sure if I had like developed enough of a thought process about it yet. And it seemed really far-fetched at the time because even fifteen years ago, it was still an open question whether D.C. would have a revival, I think. And the idea that there would be any massive demographic shift I think was still largely an idea if not a thing that was being executed. Because you know Tony Williams said he wanted to attract a hundred thousand people to D.C. and he never alluded to what color those people would be. So at least at that moment it still felt like a theory.
ROTENSTEIN: Did you ever revisit The Plan intellectually because you’re interested in urban issues and that sort of thing. Did you ever look into The Plan after first hearing about it?
REED: Well, I’ve read the Tom Toles comic that talks about it, right. It’s the six slides and it’s whites move into cities, then blacks follow. The blacks say hi, whites say bye, move into the suburbs, minorities follow them, whites go farther out, minorities move farther out, whites move back. Ah, finally.
And you know, working as a planning consultant often for the District, I’ve gotten my hands dirty on some of the city’s plans and stuff. There was a lot of discussion about economic development and revitalization. And, you know, I’ve been following this since I’ve been a teenager and it was all exciting and seemed far-fetched and then it happened. Or is happening, present tense.
I don’t know if I’ve visited it intellectually as much as I have experienced it, sometimes viscerally in the city. I mean I remember as a kid, my mother and I would bake brownies and take them down to Martha’s Table on Fourteenth Street to bring to the homeless people. And now Fourteenth Street is luxury condos and expensive bars and restaurants and stuff. And you know, me, I’m twenty-eight, I’m mixed-race, I’m gay, I have a degree from an Ivy League university and even I walk down Fourteenth Street and feel a little out of place sometimes. Sometimes it’s exhilarating, all these people, this activity, like we did it; it worked. This is like vibrant and exciting. And other times it’s like, I don’t belong here. And it is hard – it’s still hard to reconcile those two things.
ROTENSTEIN: So The Plan, is it just a story or is it something that has some legs?
REED: I think it depends on who you ask. I think were you to ask Tony Williams or many of the black political leaders in the District, I think they genuinely want to see investment in their neighborhoods and do feel that a rising tide lifts all boats. Especially when you consider how large the black professional class is in this region. Like, they want the nice things too! And they want them for themselves and for everybody.
There definitely may be some actors in D.C. who see the revitalization as an opportunity to reclaim or appropriate the space for them, whether subconsciously or overtly. My parents joke that people don’t always say what they mean when I’m in the room. So if they’re having these conversations, I’m not always privy to it.
ROTENSTEIN: How long do you think The Plan story has been around?
REED: Well if you go back to the thirties or the forties when redlining was happening and you look at how sections of the city were sort of cordoned off for certain groups over others. If there is a capital T The P Plan, I think it would go back pretty far.
ROTENSTEIN: This is a good segue to Silver Spring. You wrote an article on your blog and GGW about Silver Spring’s boundaries. Can you tell me about how you came to write that?
[7:22]
REED: Well sure. So growing up I lived in an apartment in downtown Silver Spring and then in ninety-eight, my parents moved to a townhouse outside the Beltway in an area called Colesville that still has a Silver Spring address though it’s maybe five or six miles from the core. And I still identified with Silver Spring even though I was in Colesville.
But my mother started saying, okay, “We are going to Silver Spring,” now as in we are going to downtown Silver Spring and I would say, “No, we already are in Silver Spring. We’re here. We’re still a part of it.”
And that’s when I think the idea first emerged like who is defining the boundaries because, you know, the Post Office assigned the address to like half the county but depending on who you ask, the boundaries are much smaller, particularly when you get closer in. My experience is that people who live in and around downtown Silver Spring tend to see that as Silver Spring and the further out you go, somebody living off of Briggs-Chaney Road might also say they live in Silver Spring but are nine or ten miles away.
ROTENSTEIN: So when did this “Big Silver Spring” start?
REED: My understanding is that it originates in the first half of the twentieth century as the early suburbanization started and most of the east county was pretty much undeveloped and farmland because as development followed the rail lines, the main rail line, the Metropolitan Branch, now the Brunswick line, goes west through Montgomery County. So the entire eastern half of the county, there wasn’t a whole lot there. And as suburbanization began, those communities oriented themselves to downtown Silver Spring.
There was an ad for a development called Burnt Mills Hills, which is off of New Hampshire, that in the thirties when it was being built marketed itself as being three miles from the Silver Spring stoplight at Colesville and Georgia, which I assume was the only stoplight.
And so that became the orientation, for lack of anything else. The marketing company-slash-website Silver Spring Inc. did an interview with Ken Dougall, who’s the owner of Tires of Silver Spring on East West Highway and he said that back in the fifties you would see Silver Spring addresses all the way out to Howard County. So it seems like from the start that the idea of Big Silver Spring was the best and only way to organize an entire section of Montgomery County that didn’t have a lot of other major landmarks.
ROTENSTEIN: What is Burnt Mills good reference point to learn about this?
REED: It’s the first historical note that I’ve seen written – and I think it’s meaningful because it’s three or four miles away. And, you know, as it is today whenever a developer is trying to market the location of their property, they’re going to figure out what is the most meaningful-slash-what is the most value-adding thing that we can append to our location? And at the time it was Silver Spring.
And it’s funny you still see that today. I mean you look at new housing developments in the East County, they don’t say that they’re in Glenmont or in Colesville or in Calverton. They say that they’re in Silver Spring.
ROTENSTEIN: Do you still stand by what you wrote two years ago?
REED: Oh yeah. I am still a fan of Big Silver Spring. The transportation-slash-writer Jarrett Walker talks about the resonance of a city name and he uses, like Chicago, for instance. Chicago is like only so much area in its boundaries. But when people hear Chicago, they imagine like the big towers on the lake and then just stuff going out for miles away from Lake Michigan.
And I think for many people in this region Silver Spring is like that. They both imagine like downtown Silver Spring as a major substantial regional urban center but also like all of the stuff around it that people who live there, the communities that support the downtown, as one sort of cohesive connected entity.
I imagine, and I say that because I don’t know, but I imagine to a lot of the minority communities of East County, Silver Spring is a natural gathering place just because many other communities in Montgomery County do not have I think that same resonance in minority communities. I mean you don’t see it in Bethesda. Bethesda has a very different sort of identity than Silver Spring, a much less diverse identity and thus for so many people in the county Silver Spring is your natural gathering place and thus it is a place you will identify with, even if you are half way to Columbia.
ROTENSTEIN: Do you think Silver Spring has always had this diverse identity?
REED: No, I mean, you’ve done a lot of research about some of the earlier suburban developments and how they all pretty much had racial covenants. My understanding is that the more diverse identity of Silver Spring came about in the sixties and seventies as families started, both black and white, started moving out of the District into this area. And also as the second wave of suburban sprawl was drawing investment away from Silver Spring and with it more affluent and predominantly more whiter households.
But that said, I mean East County as a whole also has had a lot of historic African American communities like Good Hope or Sandy Spring that I think have also lent an identity to the larger area as being more diverse.
ROTENSTEIN: How about the commercial core of Silver Spring? What’s your understanding about that in terms of its ethnic diversity history?
REED: I think you can see the diversity of Silver Spring reflected in its businesses.
ROTENSTEIN: But how far back in time does that go?
REED: Well, I would joke that when I was a kid there weren’t a lot of businesses to begin with so it was kind of hard to tell. But there have, you know, as long as I have been here there have been businesses catering to the Hispanic community and to various African American communities and to the Caribbean community and in the past ten or fifteen years, there’s been a lot more Ethiopian businesses in Silver Spring. And that is increasingly becoming a major part of the identity here.
I always tell people that if they’re looking for Little Ethiopia, they need to get off of U Street because it’s like they all live here now, anyway. And naturally there’s going to be a business community that forms around that.
ROTENSTEIN: When you were talking about the history of suburbanization and racial covenants you said it was something that the developers farther out. Would that have been something you would see here in the core of Silver Spring?
REED: That’s a good question and I’m not totally sure about that. You know there are sort of two flavors of early suburban development inside the Beltway. There are the streetcar suburbs that were built in the early, early twentieth century around East Silver Spring. I guess originally it was called Silver Spring Park where it was you’d lay out the streets and then sell off the lots and you’d have this really interesting mix of house types as a result because it developed slowly.
But in developments like Woodside Park, which were built in the twenties and were much more exclusive, they have curving romantic-inspired streets. You have the bigger houses. I don’t know if Woodside Park had covenants but it was definitely designed to be a much more exclusive, upscale community.
ROTENSTEIN: Do you think Silver Spring Park is the jumping off point for development in Silver Spring?
REED: I think so and I say that as someone who has done less research about that than others. You should talk to Jerry McCoy.
ROTENSTEIN: Why is that?
REED: Because he’s the head of the historical society.
ROTENSTEIN: Do you think that the historical society is an authoritative source about Silver Spring history?
REED: I think so.
ROTENSTEIN: Why?
REED: Well, Jerry McCoy has devoted a lot of time to exploring the history of Silver Spring. They have a really extensive record on their website. And, I don’t know, he’s someone who’s done a lot of research and knows a lot about local history and I trust him.
ROTENSTEIN: Is that a universally held opinion?
REED: What, everybody trusts Jerry McCoy? Maybe not, but I don’t know what other people might think of him.
ROTENSTEIN: But to you he’s an authoritative source?
REED: Yes.
ROTENSTEIN: Where do you go for your information besides Jerry McCoy for Silver Spring history?
[17:28]
REED: I read county planning documents. I read your stuff, David. I would consider you an authoritative source. I try to learn from other people in this community who I’ve gotten to know through the years.
There’s a really good documentary that was made in two thousand two by Walter Gottleib who’s a local filmmaker called “Silver Spring: Story of an American Suburb.” That I would consider a pretty good source.
And there are lots of people who still live in this community who have stories to tell, as well. And in oh-seven I did a series of blog posts on interviewing a woman names Lisa Null who lives in East Silver Spring. Has lived here for decades and is a folk singer and talked a lot about the folk music scene in this community and the community of artists and musicians that formed here in the sixties and seventies, many of whom still live in the area.
ROTENSTEIN: Have you read the two thousand two Silver Spring CBD historic resources survey?
REED: I haven’t.
ROTENSTEIN: Would you be surprised to learn that the words black and African American don’t appear anywhere in the document?
REED: I wouldn’t be surprised, which is disappointing. I mean it’s not exactly within the CBD but there are historic black communities in inside the Beltway Silver Spring.
ROTENSTEIN: So in the history covered by that document, African Americans played no role in the development of Silver Spring?
REED: Well, we know that’s not true necessarily.
ROTENSTEIN: Why wouldn’t that be true? I mean that’s the Planning Department’s official history of Silver Spring?
REED: Personal biases, the records may or may not be available. I mean there are different reasons. I mean like I don’t – when I approach things like that I want to start by assuming that people have the best of intentions and then trying to understand what personal biases or missing pieces that might have been there, you know. And to be fair, the two African American communities, historical, that I know of in Silver Spring, Linden and Lyttonsville, are not in the CBD.
So I understand that there was also a bigger Silver Spring master plan about fifteen or twenty years ago and I’m curious having not looked at that plan for a long time what references those plans made to the black community here.
ROTENSTEIN: How about the Silver Spring Historical Society? African Americans are notably absent from their website, their publications.
REED: That’s disappointing too. Well, they do talk about Linden and Lyttonville, don’t they?
ROTENSTEIN: Peripherally. The only African American faces in Jerry McCoy’s book are postal workers that he photographed as the Blair station was closing.
REED: Yeah. Well, perhaps I should qualify that. I do trust him as an authoritative source. He’s also not the only source. That said, you know, if you’re going to represent a community it’s important to represent the whole thing. And maybe there’s an opportunity for a more extensive history of this community.
ROTENSTEIN: I guess you’re too young to remember the Little Tavern and Tastee Diner –
REED: Well I know the Tastee Diner. I mean the Little Tavern building was there until like ten years ago. It was never a Little Tavern while I lived here. Well, actually, there were two Little Taverns, neither of which was a Little Tavern when I was here. But the Tastee Diner was when I was a kid, when it used to be over on Georgia Avenue.
ROTENSTEIN: But you’re too young to remember the historic preservation over those buildings?
REED: No, I would have been like in elementary school.
ROTENSTEIN: What do you know about the African American history attached to those buildings?
REED: The Tastee Diner? Nothing.
ROTENSTEIN: So the entrepreneur who developed the Tastee Diner chain was a pretty well known segregationist. Until Montgomery County passed a law in nineteen sixty-two, African Americans couldn’t dine in Tastee Diner.
REED: That doesn’t surprise me. There’s a lot of that in our county and it’s funny this county has developed a really strong progressive reputation in the past twenty or thirty years. It has an entirely Democratic county council, entire Democratic state delegation, Congress, what have you. But we had our struggles with segregation in the twentieth century. I mean the school system took its sweet time after Brown v. Board to desegregate. And in the traditional Montgomery County way tried to do a committee and committee its way to a solution when the apparent: desegregate.
And we see the effects today in a school system that is still segregated by race and class. And I make that point to say that it doesn’t surprise me that the Tastee Diner was owned by a segregationist because there’s still a lot of that in this community.
ROTENSTEIN: When Montgomery County was looking at the CBD as a historic district, many members of the African American community came out in opposition of designating properties like Tastee Diner and Little Tavern because of that segregationist past. And they were very critical that the history presented by the Planning Department and by the Silver Spring Historical Society was very nostalgic and omitted the complicated issue of race.
REED: No, I get that. I don’t think that’s a reason to not historically designate it but it’s important to present as much of it as you can. I mean the fact of the matter is this community was, like a lot of communities in this country, segregated and the aftereffects of that exist today.
That said, it’s still a part of our history that needs to be recognized. I mean when there was a discussion last year about removing the Confederate statue in Rockville town square, Rockville town center, and personally I don’t think that it should have been moved because it sucks and it’s painful and it belongs in a very prominent location not because we’re celebrating it but because we are I think recognizing our flaws as humans and as a community and it should stand as a reminder of we need to do better at all times.
ROTENSTEIN: It’s a teaching tool.
REED: Yeah. And I would love to see more of that history in downtown Silver Spring. I could tell you more about my thoughts about how we present our history – I’m not sure I want to do that on the record, honestly. But –
ROTENSTEIN: Okay, if you’re willing to share, I promise I to not write about it.
REED: Can you stop the tape?
ROTENSTEIN: That I can do.
[25:37: Recording Paused]
ROTENSTEIN: Where would you go in Silver Spring to see African American history?
[29:00]
REED: In downtown Silver Spring?
ROTENSTEIN: Yes.
REED: [Pause] I mean I guess – I would recommend Lyttonsville, which is not downtown; it’s next to it.
ROTENSTEIN: Very specific about downtown?
REED: [Pause] I’ll be honest, I can’t think of anything. I can think of barbershops. That’s the first thing that came to mind. There are a lot of black barbershops. I still go to the same barber that I went to when I was seven in downtown. His name is TJ. He used to be at Community Barbers on Georgia Avenue but now he’s in Petworth in D.C. Which reminds me, I need to make an appointment.
But that is an element of black culture that you can find here.
I hope you’re going to tell me there’s some piece of black history that I can go out and find this afternoon in downtown Silver Spring?
ROTENSTEIN: Do you know anything about the civil rights demonstrations that occurred in Silver Spring in the sixties?
REED: No. I’m sorry, I don’t.
ROTENSTEIN: You wrote a post about signs neighborhood names and you posted a photo of Bottleworks Lane. Tell me about Bottleworks Lane?
REED: Well there used to be a couple of bottling plants on East West Highway when it was more of an industrial street. There was a Coca Cola plant, which is now a National Tire and Battery store, and there was a Canada Dry plant, which in two thousand was converted to condos. I live in that building. I live in the Canada Dry building.
And so Bottleworks Lane, which is a new street. The county built it in two thousand nine or two thousand ten, the name refers to bottling plants. This is my understanding.
ROTENSTEIN: What was there before?
REED: Before that street was there? There was a building there, I think?
ROTENSTEIN: Yes. Do you remember anything about it?
REED: I didn’t live in the neighborhood yet.
ROTENSTEIN: The building that was there was owned for a long time, between the nineteen forties and two thousand six by the Crivella family. Have you heard of them?
REED: I haven’t, no.
ROTENSTEIN: Ever hear of Crivella’s Wayside Inn?
REED: No.
ROTENSTEIN: In nineteen sixty-two, Montgomery County passed a public accommodation law prohibiting discrimination against people based on skin color. There were some holdouts and the first one to make it into court was Samuel Crivella and the Wayside Inn. [described case and DOL office] In 2006 Montgomery County bought the Crivella property.
REED: And that’s where the building was.
ROTENSTEIN: Yes. As a historian, this is just my opinion, I think that it would have been a perfect spot to teach about change and African American history in Silver Spring. Yet a whitewashed history was created with Bottleworks Lane.
REED: That’s fucking shit. You know what, so I’m curious. Of the people who made that decision, right, the people at the DOT who laid out the street, whoever decided the name for the street, the councilmembers who were at the ribbon cutting, how many of them knew that story?
ROTENSTEIN: It’s a pretty well-known story. The Montgomery County Planning Board easily has access to the records. The HPC, which I was on when that planning process was going forward, I knew nothing about that history because it’s completely omitted by folks like Jerry McCoy and Planning Department histories yet dig a little deeper beneath the face-value history and it’s right there. It’s in court cases, it’s in newspaper articles, doctoral dissertations.
REED: Well I find that really disappointing. I wish that we recognized that part of our history more. Because like I said, it is something that lingers today. I mean you can talk to people of color in this county today and I’m sure they’ll tell you stories from like this decade about being if not overtly discriminated against, being more softly discriminated against for just existing in this community that is really the story of our country still.
It’s like I said, I don’t blame people for not acknowledging it. But, it is a missed opportunity.
ROTENSTEIN: Fair enough.
REED: I mean, in general this county is not always, I think, receptive to its fifties and sixties era history. Perhaps because it is too recent and occasionally too painful. Or oftentimes, just people don’t think it’s old enough, you know. I mean I’m still – this is still annoying to me that we knocked down the Wheaton Youth Center this week because no one was willing to recognize the sixties, the architecture of the sixties, or things that happened in the sixties as relevant to the history of this county. Or worth preserving. Or, worth putting into a new age.
And it’s funny because there were occasionally a demographic argument made for why we should knock down the youth center which was we have a much more diverse community now that has different needs and building a new rec center and knocking down the old rec center for a park is part of that. And I was – some of the folks who used to hang out there in the sixties threw a birthday party for the rec center a couple of years ago and I remember standing on the stage of the auditorium with these older white gentlemen who in the sixties had played in a band and hung out at the youth center. They were standing up on the stage overlooking these mostly black kids playing basketball and are probably nothing like – embodies that divide more than that.
And it’s disappointing because that is a part of our heritage. Like the suburban part of the county, the white part of the county, that architecture. The ways that we built, the ways that we organized this community, like that’s part of our history that deserves to be acknowledged. It deserves to be saved and it deserves to be adaptively reused. I mean I’m proud to say I live in a building, you know, that is part of our county’s history from the forties. Some of it, right? The lobby.
But we don’t always value that and it’s unfortunate because it is what makes this place special and valuable. Like suburbs are only boring and placeless if you deny the things that happened before you showed up. And we have every bit as colorful and interesting a history as the District. The difference is the District acknowledges and celebrates at least some of that history in its built environment, in its storytelling, in its making of itself and its brand.
You know, Duke Ellington and Victorian rowhouses make some of it obvious, I guess, as things to hang your hat on. Though there are things here, too.
We could be not just a progressive community but like a progressive community that is actively and consciously trying to amend for the wrongs of segregation and consciously trying to build a better more inclusive community as opposed to some sort of rich limousine liberal suburb. We’re not that. But, too often it is described as that.
ROTENSTEIN: Do you think the Montgomery County Historic Preservation Commission and Planning Department reinforces this nostalgic image of Silver Spring or tries to be more inclusive?
[38:51]
REED: I think it’s probably a bit more nostalgic. I mean the story I think that you hear of Silver Spring from that perspective tends to be mid-century, mostly, and white, primarily, right? What I really appreciate about Walter Gottleib’s story, American Suburb, is that it talked about Silver Spring in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. And it brought that, however briefly, African American perspective of the community. Which is important. It’s not a story that you hear and it’s a story that, like for me growing up in the nineties, it is the one that I am closest to. Right, like the Silver Spring I grew up in was not thriving and not white. It was black and Jewish and Hispanic.
But, again, is it too recent to commemorate in any meaningful way?
ROTENSTEIN: A little bit farther back, are you familiar with the National Dry Cleaning Institute?
REED: Oh yes.
ROTENSTEIN: What do you know about that?
REED: That’s the place where they invented dry cleaning.
ROTENSTEIN: Pretty historic.
REED: It is. It’s a gorgeous building.
ROTENSTEIN: Did you know it was the site of civil rights complaints because the institute wouldn’t admit African Americans yet African Americans comprised most of the workforce in drycleaning?
REED: It doesn’t surprise me. I mean as soon as you said that I thought of Jim Dandy, who – was he a dry cleaner or a tailor? I forget. I’ve been to the shop before he passed. Yeah.
ROTENSTEIN: If you read the Planning Department’s designation document, there’s no mention of that.
REED: You know, it would be nice to have more of that story in there.
ROTENSTEIN: The Planning Department’s also wanted to designate garden apartments designed by Carl Freeman –
REED: And I’m sure he was discriminatory too. I mean –
ROTENSTEIN: There were pickets in front of Freeman’s office yet none of that appears in the histories written by the HP office.
REED: It’s not something that people wanted to contend with. You know, more than any other place, because we have these liberal bona fides that we get to ignore. I mean growing up here, the narrative was that racism is over. Things are great. Things are great, yay! That was the extent of it, right? It really wasn’t until I was an adult living in the county that I came to reckon with like just the idea that discrimination was still around.
I mean I don’t think it’s unique to me, I don’t think it’s unique to here. I think part of it is being able to grow up in a place that is diverse and much more accepting that it used to be. My brother’s a senior at Paint Branch High School, which is the county’s first majority-black high school since desegregation and a common refrain from one of his teachers is, “The rest of the world doesn’t look like Burtonsville.” And I always take that to mean that like my brother has had the privilege of growing up in a community where a lot of people look like him, where he is generally not judged for the color of his skin. With exceptions. And I really do wonder if he’s going to have that moment like I did when he gets a little bit older when he realizes for real that the rest of the world isn’t like Burtonsville. He doesn’t have to go that far, you know, to find it, either.
ROTENSTEIN: So there’s this image of Montgomery County and Silver Spring and the image doesn’t quite measure up to reality. How can people move beyond that?
REED: Move beyond that dissonance? I think it takes leadership who’s willing to admit that we totally haven’t moved past it, for starters. I mean we are blessed to have a number of African American elected officials in the county who have often been frank about their experiences, especially in the past couple of years, Ike Leggett has I think been more vocal about his experiences as a person of color in the county. But I think he has only touched on the surface of what that means. And I would love to see more of that from him and from other people of color in offices in the county.
I think that’s not the only place it has to come from, but it could start there. They get to set the tone for what we’re about. It’s hard because we have – I mentioned the black professional class earlier, we have a large one in this region, you know, affluent, vocal, established. But they are less of a presence in Montgomery County than they are in say Prince George’s County. And that voice I think is still – hasn’t like been fully asserted yet as the county becomes more diverse.
And I don’t know how that actually plays out because there are so many other voices here. This is a really diverse polyglot place. That is a good thing. We are often still segregated by class and race, but there’s a lot of different voices here and I think they are still figuring out how to make themselves heard.
ROTENSTEIN: Does history have a role in making those voices heard?
[45:33]
REED: I think so. I think it puts a lot of things in context. And I think it makes the story of how we got here a lot more interesting than it was, than it is often presented.
ROTENSTEIN: Fair enough. Thank you.
—- END INTERVIEW —-
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