Infrastructure and racial segregation have a long and fraught history. Railroads and highways frequently created firm boundaries separating racialized spaces. Many cities throughout North America have their “other side of the tracks” or interstate highways that were built to separate Black neighborhoods from white ones. In some places, like Detroit, Michigan; Decatur, Georgia; and, North Brentwood, Maryland, walls and other barricades divided Black space from white space.
Mitigation is the term of art used to describe how federal agencies prefer to resolve adverse effects to historic properties. More jargon, I know. Yet, mitigation is a fact of life for every American who lives in an old place. This post is about mitigation and the Talbot Avenue Bridge in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Historic properties are buildings, structures, objects, and sites that are determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act requires agencies to identify properties eligible for listing in the National Register before a proposed action like a new road, bridge, railroad, pipeline, or power line is built. If eligible properties are identified in an area that will be impacted, agencies are required to evaluate what effects the action will have on the properties. Effects range from complete demolition to partial alteration to the introduction of visual impacts. It’s a complicated thing.
Pittsburgh Wool Company, before demolition(1998) and during demolition (2000). The Pittsburgh Wool Company was the last wool pullery in the United States. A historic business founded in the early 20th century, it occupied a former tannery building constructed in the 1880s.
If the proposed action is found to adversely affect historic properties, i.e., alter the characteristics that make them historic (important), then the agencies are required to resolve the adverse effects. The process, from the identification of historic properties to determining why they are historically significant to resolving adverse effects to them, is a legally-mandated consultation process. In other words, people living in and around the historic properties must be consulted at every step along the way.
Work inside the Pittsburgh Wool Company prior to demolition.
Oftentimes, this consultation never happens. Or, it happens in a perfunctory and highly limited way that is inconsistent with the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. As a result, mitigation all too often simply involves a transaction in which the federal agency or its state and local partner (or private sector entities like telecommunications firms) buys the right to demolish something old and historic.
Pittsburgh Wool Company mitigation products: Heinz History Center exhibition (left) and Historic American Engineering Record drawings (right).
This compensation (sometimes derided as bribery) involves more perfunctory actions: completing a community historic resource survey, funneling money to a local museum, writing reports that no one will ever read, etc. Once the mitigation is decided upon, the agency is free to demolish the old building or structure.
This is what happened with the Talbot Avenue Bridge. The bridge was determined eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places and a mitigation plan was developed to resolve the adverse effects introduced by the construction of the Purple Line light rail line.
Purple Line Community Advisory Team, Talbot Avenue Bridge Design Meeting, August 30, 2018.
Purple Line Community Advisory Team, Talbot Avenue Bridge Design Meeting, August 30, 2018.
The bridge was determined historically significant for its associations with the railroad; the adverse effect is demolition; and, the mitigation was the completion of more documentation prior to demolition.
Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 22, 2018.
Two years ago, Silver Spring residents learned more about the bridge’s history and its ties to local African American and civil rights history. Since then, folks have taken things into their own hands by raising awareness of the bridge’s history and by appropriating the bridge for public programs. These programs have included community meetings, a pop-up museum, and a centennial celebration festival that attracted more than 200 people on a warm fall afternoon in 2018. And beyond the space, we can include the composition of a song to commemorate the bridge, the production of a documentary video, and the various visual artworks that have been created among grassroots mitigation created.
Converting abandoned infrastructure into festival space. Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 22, 2018.
As these events were unfolding, I was invited to participate in a “diamond session” panel on historic preservation at the 2018 American Folklore Society meeting in Buffalo, New York. Diamond sessions are like pechakucha for folklorists. Each presenter is limited to showing only 21 slides that are precisely timed to be visible for only 20 seconds. The objective in these sessions is to move the focus off of the speaker and to spur discussion.
My AFS presentation was titled, “More than Old Metal and Wood: The Talbot Avenue Bridge.” The abstract published in the meeting program book reads:
For 99 years, the Talbot Avenue Bridge carried cars, bikes, and pedestrians across railroad tracks in Silver Spring, Maryland. The bridge connected two very different neighborhoods: a historically Black hamlet and a Sundown suburb that developed around racially restricted residential subdivisions. Though eligible for the National Register of Historic Places as an engineering structure associated with the B&O Railroad, historians neglected to explore the bridge’s social history. This presentation demonstrates what happened when the bridge’s links to Jim Crow segregation were revealed to white residents, the press, and local government officials.
The video below is a rendering of the presentation.
I began describing Silver Spring, Maryland, as a “sundown suburb” two years ago in articles and in public talks. My research has identified more than 50 residential subdivisions covering about 10 square miles next to Washington, D.C. that had racially restrictive covenants attached to them between c. 1904 and 1948. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that the covenants were unenforceable in the courts, whites used other tools to keep their communities free from African Americans (and Jews): steering, redlining, gentlemen’s agreements, club memberships, etc.
North Woodside is part of the historic Silver Spring sundown suburb. In the early 20th century subdivisions filled in the former farmland east of the B&O Railroad tracks and the Talbot Avenue Bridge. Like many of its counterparts, early landowners attached racially restrictive covenants to their properties prohibiting African Americans from living there — unless they were domestic servants.
David Cox wipes away tears during an emotional statement renouncing his neighborhood’s use of racially restrictive deed covenants.
At the Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial celebration September 22, 2018, a remarkable thing happened. David Cox, the current president of the North Woodside-Montgomery Hills Civic Association made an emotional statement renouncing the anti-Black racism that kept his neighborhood all-white for much of the twentieth century. Cox affirmed North Woodside’s new bonds with the community “on the other side of the tracks,” Lyttonsville, Cox read a resolution unanimously approved by his neighborhood association’s board of directors.
Racially restrictive covenant included in a deed for the sale of a lot in Silver Spring’s North Woodside neighborhood, November 16, 1923.
After reading a racially restrictive covenant attached to a North Woodside deed in 1923, he said, “it is evidence that at one time, people in my neighborhood were interested in keeping it white.” Cox became emotional and as he regained his composure, he said, “My wife says I cry at McDonald’s commercials.He also acknowledged that the practice wasn’t limited to his neighborhood and that it was common throughout Silver Spring. “The tracks between our neighborhood and Lyttonsville were a dividing line between black and white spaces. Racially restrictive deed covenants enabled and perpetuated racial segregation and even after these restrictions were outlawed, the social dynamics caused by such patterns continued.”
Lyttonsville’s Charlotte Coffield (front) and North Woodside’s Anna White.
North Woodside neighbors worked closely with Lyttonsville residents and others to plan and produce the Talbot Avenue Bridge celebration. “Over time, of course, neighborhood change,” Cox said. “And we think North Woodside has changed for the better. I believe our community is a welcoming place.” He added
Over the past several years, our civic association has worked in collaboration with the civic associations of Lyttonsville and Rosemary Hills on issues associated with the bridge … we have advocated together at meetings. I hope we have started to build a level of trust. We want that spirit of trust and connection to continue and desire that it should extend beyond the work we are already doing on these issues to encompass social gatherings such as this centennial celebration.
Thank you David Cox and the people of North Woodside for taking this historic step.
Three Silver Spring neighborhoods are teaming up to throw a birthday party for a bridge Saturday September 22. The Talbot Avenue Bridge turns 100 this year and it is slated for demolition next year to make way for a new structure over the Purple Line. For most of its history, the bridge was a vital link connecting historically Black Lyttonsville with Silver Spring and Washington.
Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial celebration being promoted on two “jumbotron” screens in downtown Silver Spring the week before the event.
The celebration at the bridge over the CSX Railroad tracks near Rosemary Hills Elementary School features musical performances by the Washington Revels Jubilee Voices and singer-songwriter Lea. Speakers from all three neighborhoods will talk about their experiences living there. There will be a student art show, African drumming, a libation ceremony, and pies and other sweets contributed by neighbors. County Executive Isiah Leggett will be there to present a proclamation declaring it Talbot Avenue Bridge Day. Continue reading →
The Talbot Avenue Bridge has probably taken on a life of its own — Charlotte A. Coffield, July 19, 2017
It has been a year since I first wrote about Silver Spring’s Talbot Avenue Bridge. In that time, many Silver Spring residents have learned that the bridge is much more than some old metal and wood. Most Silver Spring residents only thought about it as: A) a way to cross the CSX Railroad tracks; or, B) a nuisance (or “junk” as one graffiti tagger recently wrote).
Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 2017. Photo by David Rotenstein.
Jay Elvove on the Talbot Avenue Bridge as a CSX train passes beneath, September 24, 2017. Photo by David Rotenstein.
Elvove’s performance capped off a program held Sunday afternoon, September 24, 2017 that was sponsored by the Presidents’ Council of Silver Spring Civic Associations (Prezco). I was invited to speak about the history of Silver Spring as a sundown suburb and the African American hamlet of Lyttonsville. About 50 people attended the program in unseasonably hot 92-degree weather.
Public historian dressed for the occasion. Photo by Jay Mallin.
“Standing here in the center of the Talbot Avenue Bridge, there is no other side of the tracks, ” I began my 30-minute talk. “From the center of this bridge, everywhere is the other side of the tracks.”
Charlotte Coffield talks about Lyttonsville and the Talbot Avenue Bridge, September 24, 2017. Photo by David Rotenstein.
The Talbot Avenue Bridge is an endangered site of conscience where the people gathered there last Sunday could hear about its history, take in its visual and aural environments, and touch an artifact that once connected two communities divided by race and the railroad tracks. The newfound social connections to the bridge and attachments add new urgency to the community’s efforts to ensure some sort of preservation, whether it’s in place at the crossing or elsewhere in the community.
Photo of Prezco program participants taken by a passing cyclist. Courtesy of Alan Bowser.
A resident who lives in the formerly all-white community, North Woodside, and who attended the program wrote to me afterwards that she now has, “a great affection for Talbot bridge (that has deepened further upon learning more about its history).” Her comments are typical of what people now tell me when I speak about the bridge and Silver Spring history.
This research and subsequent public interest in the Talbot Avenue Bridge is what I call true public history.
Postscript: I would like to thank Alan Bowser for organizing the program and for inviting me to speak. Alan and Prezco leader Valarie Barr plus nearby residents Charlotte Coffield and Patricia Tyson did most of the heavy lifting to make the program a success.
Talbot Avenue Bridge approach. Photo by David Rotenstein.
In the spring of 2017 Silver Spring videographer Jay Mallin asked if he could interview me for a documentary video he was producing. The subject was Lyttonsville’s Talbot Avenue Bridge. I agreed and we met near the eastern approach to the bridge on a comfortable morning in late June.
Jay Mallin sets up to interview me at the Talbot Avenue Bridge, June 27, 2017.
Screen capture from “The Bridge.”
Jay completed the video in August. He invited me along with Lyttonsville residents Charlotte Coffield and Patricia Tyson to view the rough cut and we met in Charlotte’s dining room where Jay had set up an iMac on Charlotte’s dinner table.
Jay Mallin, Patricia Tyson, and Charlotte Coffield discuss Jay’s new video, “The Bridge,” August 30, 2017.
I invited Jay to write a brief introduction to his video and he graciously complied:
When I first moved to Silver Spring a few years ago one of the most charming things about my new neighborhood was a small bridge over the nearby railroad tracks. It was surfaced with wooden planks, and the structure itself appeared to be made of cast iron and been manufactured in the heyday of steam locomotives. Because it’s only one lane wide, cars patiently took turns to cross it, but the steady stream of pedestrians and cyclists didn’t wait for the cars.
But over the next few years, through mentions on the neighborhood listserv and conversations with neighbors, I gradually learned there was a lot more to the story of the Talbot Street Bridge. It connected a historically black and a historically white neighborhood across the tracks. To one community the bridge had served as a lifeline; to the other, it was a disagreeable nuisance they fought to shut down. Then David Rotenstein, though this blog, researched and gave a much fuller account, which was picked up in the press. Seeing a great story in my own neighborhood I put on my filmmaker hat and went to work. Today the bridge is closed to cars and scheduled for removal because of the Purple Line. I wanted to tell and preserve the story while the bridge, and the people who experienced and remember its history, are still available, and to have that in turn bring forward some of the buried history of segregation in Montgomery County.
Now that Silver Spring, Maryland’s, Talbot Avenue Bridge has a new history can it also have a new future?
Last year Montgomery County officials and many county residents learned that the Talbot Avenue Bridge was more than just some old metal and wood assembled in 1918 by the B&O Railroad spanning the CSX Railroad tracks. They discovered its important ties to the county’s civil rights history. Once slated for demolition and replacement to make way for the proposed Purple Line light rail project and closed since April for safety reasons, the bridge’s fate is now undecided.
My research into Silver Spring’s history as a sundown suburb, a place where people of color were unable to live unless they were domestic servants for most of the 20th century, exposed the bridge’s history beyond the Lyttonsville residents I was interviewing for my work. Longtime Lyttonsville residents have deep attachments to the bridge. Residents in the adjacent North Woodside and Rosemary Hills neighborhoods have mixed feelings about the bridge but acknowledge that before last year they knew little about its history. Even County Executive Ike Leggett told me in a recent interview that my research had changed his understanding of Lyttonsville’s history and the bridge.
The bridge is contested space where competing interests now collide. There is the newfound interest in the bridge’s history that is shared by people well beyond the railroad tracks and the neighborhoods the bridge connects. And, there are the compelling arguments originating in those neighborhoods: some folks in North Woodside want the connection closed to reduce cut-through traffic and people on both sides of the tracks make a strong case for keeping the crossing open to vehicular traffic, including emergency vehicles.
Talbot Avenue Bridge, closed approach from the North Woodside neighborhood, June 2017.
