Last week, we explored how massive engineering projects and car-centric post-war suburbanization transformed the Route 1 corridor over the past 70 years. Now, we’re going to focus on a more-recent phenomenon which has also fundamentally altered the built environment of the Route 1 corridor: urbanism.
For decades between the end of World War II and the new millennium, the Route 1 corridor was shaped by the road, the car and by single-use zoning. You had your office parks, your shopping centers and your residential areas, and never the treble shall meet. But something has changed. In the past two decades, urbanism has come into vogue among city planners. The defining feature of 21st century urbanism – as opposed to mid-century suburbanism – is the mixed-use of land, where offices and apartments may sit atop street-front retail to create a built-environment that’s more familiar in traditional densely-built urban cores. Urbanists argue such environments can have social and environmental benefits, if planned and executed thoughtfully. Opposition to the urbanizing of suburbia can be intense, with concerns ranging from impact on local resources by additional residents to traffic issues and beyond.
In the juxtaposed images below, we’ll explore the landscapes of the Route 1 corridor most-altered by urbanism over the past two decades. On the left side of each image is the landscape as it appeared in 1998. On the right side, we see the landscape as it was in mid-2018. Our imagery comes from the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission’s library of aerial photography of Prince George’s County. Use your mouse or your finger to move the slider in each image from side to side, revealing exactly how new development has reshaped our communities.
Empty Parking lots become the Hyattsville Arts District
It’s 1998. “Too Close” by Next blares out of every stereo. I’m either a freshman or a sophomore at DeMatha Catholic High School, which we can see in the upper northwest quadrant of our imagery. In Hyattsville, a sea of parking lots and car dealerships – many by this point no longer in operation – line the Baltimore Avenue corridor. It is essentially a ghost town, covered in asphalt. Slide to 2018. Those lots are gone, replaced with a grid of hundreds of townhomes and apartments and a thriving retail center called the EYA Arts District Hyattsville.
It took a lot of work to go from one to the other. In 1998, you literally weren’t allowed to build anything like the Arts District Hyattsville. It would take the creation of an entirely new set of zoning regulations for the area: the Gateway Arts District Sector Plan and associated zoning overlay for such infill development to be legalized, and that didn’t happen until 2004. The Gateway Arts District was enormously influential, and spawned a proliferation of similar urbanist overlay zones throughout the county.
But the Gateway Arts District may not live on much longer, at least not on any zoning map. The comprehensive rewrite of Prince George’s County’s zoning code, approved by the prior County Council in 2018, eliminates these overlay zones while at the same time trying to emulate their effects. A crucial element of that is the looming and potentially controversial “translation” of the zoning map that has begun across the county, where properties will be assigned an updated zoning designation designed to be the closest approximate designation in the new zoning code.
Prince George’s Center becomes University Town Center
Prince George’s Center, home to three massive mid-century office buildings designed by Edward Durrel Stone, was supposed to be a jobs hub to rival any in the region. By 1998, it had yet to live up to the hype. Like many office parks of its era, it was surrounded by a sea of parking lots built atop former farmland. Fast forward to 2018, and the surface parking lots have been consolidated – for the most part – into two visible parking decks as the area has been redeveloped into the University Town Center, which features residential towers, a movie theater and street-level retail.
One of the most controversial development projects in the Route 1 corridor’s recent history focused on the Cafritz Tract. In 1998, it’s a wooded tract of land with a history of agricultural and industrial uses faded into time. To the extreme north of our imagery, you can see the square electrical substation for the Green Line. In 1998, it’s the approximate southern terminus of the Trolley Trail, which by then only officially existed in College Park. Unofficially, the Trolley Trail continued south, albeit in a more rugged condition, through the Cafritz Tract to link up with Riverdale Park’s town center. Though it wasn’t paved, it was used frequently. By 2018, we see a radically transformed Cafritz Tract, home to townhouses, a parking garage and mixed-use town center of street-level retail and above-ground commercial space. A new bridge across the Camden Line and CSX tracks connects east, where the old Erco airplane factory used to stand. The area could develop further, with Metro officials seeking buyers for a strip of land immediately north of the Cafritz tract.
Midtown College Park
Redevelopment near the University of Maryland, aided by new overlay zones that allowed dense redevelopment, have radically altered the Baltimore Avenue Streetscape in midtown College Park over the past 20 years. Near the city’s Berwyn and Lakeland neighborhoods and the central core of the university, massive student-oriented housing development now overlooks Paint Branch as it flows under Route 1. On campus, some parking has made way for new academic buildings, but we can also see additions – perhaps to offset – crowding out athletic fields to the north.
Gravel mine becomes Greenbelt Station
Most redevelopment in the Route 1 corridor has altered environments that were already commercial or residential in some way. Greenbelt Station is unique, then, for being an example of an industrial-to-residential redevelopment in the Route 1 corridor. In 1998 – around the same time these guys paddled down Indian Creek – the site is a still-active sand and gravel mine run by A.H. Smith. The mining operations here, dating to the early 1900s, radically altered a lowlying wetland that formed part of the Hollywood Swamp and Indian Creek. By 2018, the site has been redeveloped into Greenbelt Station, a multi-phase townhome and apartment residential project designed to connect to the Greenbelt Metro Station to the north.