Tag Archives: Silver Spring Historical Society

Tastee Diner’s secret historic menu

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Tastee Diner, Silver Spring, Maryland.

It’s well known that the most exclusive restaurants have special menus with items reserved for well-heeled and well-connected patrons. These special people dine on dishes carefully prepared by chefs not line cooks. During its earliest years in business, the Tastee Diner had its own special menu of sorts. Not only that, the Silver Spring, Maryland, eatery also had a special cover charge. Entry and seating were free for white folks; the admission price for people of color was astronomically high: it was the color of their skin.

The Silver Spring Historical Society celebrates the Tastee Diner in its books, blog posts, walking tours, and other public programs. The group talks about the community’s nostalgia for the diner and how Silver Spring mobilized to “save” and move the diner when downtown redevelopment threatened it nearly 20 years ago.

Earlier this week the Silver Spring Historical Society posted on its facebook page, “A local high school student will be utilizing SSHS’s collection of materials about Tastee Diner for a school project.”

Silver Spring Historical Society Facebook page screen capture, October 12, 2018.

I wonder if the historical society will tell the high school student about the diner’s special menu, the one with prices that people of color could never pay. I wonder if this exercise in nostalgia economics will include scholarship by historians who have explored Tastee Diner’s special menu, the one that historian Andrew Hurley wrote about in 2002:

Segregated service was by no means exclusive to diners located in the Deep South. Luncheonettes, coffee shops, and diners in the Middle Atlantic and midwestern states resorted to many of the same practices that prevailed in the old Confederacy. Eddie Warner, for instance, ran a chain of diners in suburban Maryland on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Warner instructed his employees to notify black patrons that they could not be served inside the diner, but that take-out service was available. Warner made no exception for the African-American cooks and dishwashers he hired periodically. Company policy dictated that they take their meals alone in the back kitchen. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2002, pp. 88-89.

Today’s Tastee Diner clientele looks nothing like its Jim Crow-era predecessors. The restaurant is a popular eatery and meeting place for people of all races and cultural backgrounds — mostly. A decade ago, the Tastee Diner faced and overcame allegations that it discriminated against LGBTQ diners. The discriminatory practices leading to episodes between 2009 and 2011 appear to have been abandoned and mostly forgotten. Yet, when I did Black History tours in downtown Silver Spring, people who recalled them made sure that I mentioned them as we met across from the restaurant.

So who is making sure that Montgomery County students using the Silver Spring Historical Society as an educational resource are getting real history, not fake whitewashed history? How are parents and educators to know whether the history lessons about menus and economies at the historic eatery will include the hidden charges not published in the historic menus.

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein

Time to hang it up Silver Spring Historical Society

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The identities of Blair’s slaves will never be known — Jerry McCoy, In Search of the Lost Souls of Silver Spring (February 2018).

If only the Silver Spring Historical Society had made even the most rudimentary effort to go beyond Ancestry.com and digitized Washington newspapers in its search for people enslaved by Silver Spring founder Francis Preston Blair, they might have been able to learn about Albert, Abraham, Vincent, Henry, Emily, Sarah, Nancy, Olivia, Mary, and Phillis (who married Samuel Lytton, founder of Lyttonsville, in 1859).  The group’s 2018 “Black History Month” posts in a local blog are yet another glaring example of erasure, one of many by the 20-year-old organization.

Maryland State Archives. BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS (Assessment Record, Slaves) C1112, 1853-1864.

 

Montgomery County Historical Society BOOM exhibit is a dud

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If I were mounting an exhibition to tell the story about Montgomery County, Maryland, in the 1950s, there would be lots of material from which to choose: the Cold War, suburbanization, and civil rights would certainly be in the mix. But how would I choose to tell the story about the Black experience in Montgomery County during that eventful decade?

One place I wouldn’t look for inspiration is the Montgomery County Historical Society’s exhibit, BOOM: The 1950s in Montgomery County. My latest article in The Activist History Review tackles the exhibit’s deficiencies.

There are many stories about African American entrepreneurialism, education, consumer choice, housing, religious life, and sports that would be solid candidates for some sort of exhibit featuring artifacts, texts, and photographs. How would I select the most compelling stories to tell? Continue reading →

Silver Spring’s history is racially biased. Let’s fix it.

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Panel discusses “Silver Spring: Story of an American Suburb,” September 2017. Left to right, Jerry McCoy (Silver Spring Historical Society), Walter Gottlieb (filmmaker), and Todd Hitchcock (AFI Silver Program Director).

For the past six years I have taken a deep dive into how communities produce history and historic preservation. Silver Spring, Maryland, and Decatur, Georgia, are inner ring suburbs with similar development histories and comparable historiographies. In both places, like many others throughout North America, white (oftentimes male) histories and historic places are preserved and narrate while people of color are omitted or marginalized.

I have written about both places here and in history and planning publications. My community’s history is racist. How can I correct it? recently was published in the National Council on Public History’s History@Work blog.. The article recounts my community’s efforts to reframe how history and historic preservation are produced to create a more accurate and inclusive record. Continue reading →

An erasure primer

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Two maps of Silver Spring, Maryland, published 80 years apart provide a palpable and accessible example of erasure.

Top: 1933 North Washington Realty Company map of “North Washington”; Bottom: Historic Neighborhoods of Downtown Silver Spring. The dotted line shows the approximate location of the historic African American hamlet, Lyttonsville.

The first map was published in 1933 by the North Washington Realty Company. It shows all of the area the company and community boosters were branding as “Maryland North of Washington.” The promotional map showed the existing street network, community institutions (schools, churches, commercial buildings), and neighborhood names, including areas shaded where the company had investments and plans for new residential subdivisions. Continue reading →

The three Silver Springs

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There are three Silver Springs. There’s the mica-flecked spring where Francis Preston Blair established an antebellum farm in rural Maryland north of the District of Columbia.

The Silver Spring site. A reconstructed 19th-century acorn-shaped gazebo is in the background.

The Silver Spring site. A reconstructed 19th-century acorn-shaped gazebo is in the background.

Then there’s the early 20th century place created by real estate entrepreneurs and community boosters with visions of creating an all-white middle-class Washington suburb. Continue reading →

Montgomery Preservation: Tear down that fence

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In 1998, the historic preservation group, Montgomery Preservation, Inc. (MPI), bought the old and abandoned B&O Railroad station in Silver Spring, Maryland. A fence continues to separate the property from a popular and historic pedestrian bridge. Shortly after MPI acquired the property, novelist and Silver Spring native George Pelecanos introduced the pedestrian bridge and the railroad station to readers around the world in his 2001 novel, Right as Rain:

[Terry Quinn] crossed the street to the pedestrian bridge that spanned Georgia Avenue. He went to the middle of the bridge and looked down at the cars emerging northbound from the tunnel and the southbound cars disappearing into the same tunnel. He focused on the broken yellow lines painted on the street and the cars moving in rows between the lines. He looked north on Georgia at the street lamps haloed in the cold and watched his breath blow out into the night. He had grown up in this city, it was his, and to him it was beautiful. Sometime later he crossed the remainder of the bridge and went to the chain-link fence that had been erected in the past year. The fence prevented pedestrians from walking into the area of the train station via the bridge. He glanced around idly and climbed the fence, dropping down over its other side. Then he was in near the small commuter train station, a squat brick structure — George Pelecanos, Right as Rain (Grand Central Publishing, 2001).

Pedestrian bridge over Georgia Ave. in Silver Spring. Photographed Spetember 2016.

Pedestrian bridge over Georgia Ave. in Silver Spring, looking south from the edge of MPI’s property. Photographed September 2016.

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Silver Spring’s Perpetual Building may be historic …

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Former Perpetual Building Association building, 8700 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, Md.

Former Perpetual Building Association building, 8700 Georgia Avenue, Silver Spring, Md.

… But not necessarily for the reasons preservationists suggest.

In 2007 Montgomery County, Maryland,  historic preservation advocates asked county leaders to add the former Perpetual Savings Association bank building in downtown Silver Spring to the county’s Master Plan for Historic Preservation. The designation would have ensured the 1958 building’s presence along Georgia Avenue in perpetuity. Instead, the proposed designation led to litigation and recriminations. The Perpetual case was precedential, examining the pitfalls of preserving buildings of recent vintage and the minutiae of due process in county master plan legislation.

The Perpetual Building Association was a Washington banking institution founded in 1881. It built branches throughout the District during the early 20th century and expanded to Montgomery County after World War II.  The bank became one of the leading local mortgage lenders, helping provide the capital for homebuilding in Washington’s rapidly expanding automobile suburbs.

Continue reading →