In a recent post, Aspen Hill blogger and Council District 4 candidate Thomas Hardman has gotten me thinking about Wheaton Library and urban redevelopment in downtown Wheaton.
The county has been soliciting public opinion on whether to relocate the Wheaton library to the Central Business District (CBD).
Here’s my take on this. Overall, it’s pretty simple:
Keep the library in its current location in east-central Wheaton. This area straddles suburban and urban segments of Wheaton very nicely. Instead of relocating the library as part of a costly and protracted construction project, give it a major overhaul and increase its accessibility to west-side and downtown Wheaton residents. This latter goal could be met by broadening sidewalks/walkways and adjacent public spaces and by creating more pedestrian-friendly crosswalks and traffic patterns in the immediate vicinity, for instance.
As for the Wheaton library itself, give it a well-designed renovation with vigilant project cost oversight. If the existing building is structurally sound enough, it can easily withstand a major renovation. The county only needs to recruit architects and structural engineers creative and responsible enough to rise to the challenge of such a renewal project.
Wheaton does not need a cool, glittering edifice to rival the regional libraries of places like Rockville and Bethesda; we only need a comfortable, serviceable community library with enough upgrades to meet our population growth.
The county can use the funds saved to help relocate the “Wheaton” Police Station to Wheaton proper.
As it stands, the District 4 station is located in Glenmont, probably more for historical than logistical reasons.
The station would better serve county citizens if it were moved to downtown Wheaton.
1. Wheaton has become an unfortunate magnet for crime and other social ills in the county, being located along the southeast-to-northwest crime corridor.
Some Glenmont and Aspen Hill residents will object to moving the District 4 station south along Georgia Avenue. If you are such a resident, keep in mind that criminals based in Wheaton and other points south/southeast often prey on your communities. In addition, remember that well sited and coordinated community substations can very effectively meet local community policing needs and can also tailor their operations to your particular area.
Also note that many other urban MCPD stations are either located in or adjacent to downtown areas; Bethesda, Rockville, and Silver Spring are good examples.
2. MPD personnel based in Wheaton would be at the nexus of several major regional arteries:
MD-193 / University Blvd (W/E)
MD-97 / Georgia Ave (N/S)
MD-586 / Veirs Mill Rd (NW/SE)
A site like Wheaton Triangle might be a good option for a new police station.
A location along a key downtown street such as Grandview Avenue (N/S), Amherst Avenue (N/S), Reedie Drive (W/E), or Blueridge Avenue (W/E) would also provide good secondary routes for 4th district police.
3. Law and order are potentially good for business.
Image-conscious business interests helped eject the police substation out of Wheaton Mall several years back.
Some of us are old enough to remember when “Wheaton Plaza” was a place where more suburban county residents felt relatively safe (and you could enjoy free Fourth of July fireworks with family and friends, for that matter).
Mismanagement by offshore landlords (Westfield Group) allied with powerful county business/developer interests have helped turn this so-called “Shoppingtown” into a local crime haven. Residents from all over the region routinely pan Wheaton Mall as a hangout for thugs, juvenile delinquents, and their groupies. On top of the constant reports of shoplifting/thefts and other crimes that happen around the mall regularly, we have high-profile shootings, stabbings and gang displays at the mall that bring notoriety to the area and ward off many customers with higher disposable incomes.
Moving the police station to downtown Wheaton could help lower crime and disorder in the business district overall. Ultimately, open-minded residents from surrounding areas would find Wheaton more welcoming for running errands, shopping, and dining. This would potentially counter the creeping retail blight that has been afflicting Wheaton in recent years.
Many south-central county residents seem frustrated with the course of Wheaton “redevelopment.” Does anybody have an inside line as far as what the Wheaton Kensington Chamber of Commerce, the Wheaton Redevelopment Advisory Committee (WRAC), and other controlling business/development interests are really up to? Much of the information out there seems to be mostly slick packaging and promises.
11 comments:
From: [my email address]
To: wheatonlibrary@montgomerycountymd.gov
Date: March 4, 2009 9:17 PM
Subject: Wheaton Regional Library Planning (feedback from a west Wheaton resident)
Hello,
The public comment period for residents weighing in on the future of Wheaton Library was too short. However, since we have excellent public officials who are very responsive to county citizens, I have faith that you will read public feedback submitted after the March 2 deadline.
I am a west Wheaton resident who would ostensibly benefit from having the Wheaton Regional Library relocated downtown.
However, I oppose this move. Exploiting the library as an urban renewal locus would potentially be very expensive and misguided.
Instead, keep the library in its current location in east-central Wheaton. This area straddles suburban and urban segments of Wheaton very nicely. Instead of relocating the library as part of a costly and protracted construction project, give it a major overhaul and increase its accessibility to west-side and downtown Wheaton residents. This latter goal could be met by broadening sidewalks/walkways and adjacent public spaces and by creating more pedestrian-friendly crosswalks and traffic patterns in the immediate vicinity, for instance.
As for the Wheaton library building itself, give it a well-designed renovation with vigilant construction cost oversight. If the existing building is structurally sound enough, it can easily withstand a major renovation. The county only needs to recruit architects and structural engineers creative and responsible enough to rise to the challenge of such a renewal project.
Wheaton does not need a glittering monument to New Urbanism to rival the regional libraries of places like Rockville and Bethesda; we only need a comfortable, serviceable community library with enough upgrades to satisfy current trends in population growth and demographic change.
Thank you for listening to us and we are grateful for your service to our communities.
[name withheld], west Wheaton (Connecticut Avenue Estates neighborhood)
This is a well written, but uninformed blog post. The mall has a police substation. It is on the 2nd level near Children's Place. It opened last year.
Excellent writing on the subject of the proposed Wheaton Library relocation.
I concur -- as, it seems, do most Wheaton residents, especially those closer to Glenmont than to Downtwon Silver Spring -- that it's best to redevelop the existing library at the present location.
The IDF report suggesting the co-location of a Senior Center, Cultural Center, and a new Wheaton CBD Library should be accepted as such, with the modification that the proposed Wheaton CBD Central Library should in fact be merely an annex to a much larger allocation of space to the elements of Senior Center and Cultural Center.
Redeveloping the extant library, and creating a more celebratory public space around it, makes use of extant facilities and improves them, and the gains to the public in terms of library facilities can be far more immediate and far less expensive.
As to the issue of police stations, we are seeing a general increase of use of the "substation facility" concept nationwide. As suburbias continue to sprawl, and highways become more congested at all hours and transit times for emergency vehicles increases, it's more necessary to have widely distributed facilities rather than central depots and bases. Indeed, the idea of widely distributed substations and neighborhood-based police presence directly conforms to the Community Policing model which is now prevalent and which has been demonstrated to be extremely effective, when properly funded and administered with appropriate policy.
I agree on keeping the library where it is, I think the combined pull of the Rafferty center when it re-opens and the library makes for a nice end point to the Wheaton urban district. I would love it if the put the police station in the old rescue squad building site when the EMS moves onto Arcola (now that was a bone-headed move).
Really I think they should look more to fixing the sidewalks (wasnt PEPCO supposed to pull down the power poles on Georgia opposite the Safeway 3 years ago?) and pushing the trash out of the Triange. Westfields is a dying tree waiting to get pushed over by the next big wind, so other than Target and the Giant if the rest of the mall collapses, I wouldnt be too adverse.
Wow. These visitor comments are so good that I felt compelled to reverse the annoying comment popup feature.
“The mall has a police substation. It is on the 2nd level near Children's Place. It opened last year.”—Anonymous #1 comment
Thanks for setting the record straight on that. I confess that I have not been patronizing the mall very often now that our household income has fallen off and I feel like yet another jumpy flea on the mangy hide of the global economy. In fact, I’ve never even heard of “Children’s Place.”
A lot of us thought it was nuts when they removed the mall substation a while back. I am glad they restored it.
Go 4th District cops! They are a tough, hardworking bunch. Hey, if they can patiently deal with a bunch of raging civic association activists, they can go up against nearly anybody. Even I couldn’t handle that bunch of screaming harpies for any prolonged amount of time.
The 4D cops may be a tough bunch, but the sure aren't patient. If you sit and watch the lights between Veirs Mill and Randolph on Georgia late at night you see the following over and over again....
Cop car rolls up to red light, pauses, flips on the party lights runs the red, turns off lights continues on their merry way. Sometimes the forget to turn on the lights and just plain old run the red after a stop....
I think its also the 4D cops who blow past the speed cameras on Randolph and then claim that Montgomery County should pay the bill because "they own the cruiser".
On the other hand they are pretty responsive when dealing with the wanna-be thug-4-life(tm) that Section 8 moved onto my street.
Hmmmm......
4D cops == 4th Dimension-defying 2fast2furious fiends?
I’m a sucker for alliteration.
* * *
“On the other hand they are pretty responsive when dealing with the wanna-be thug-4-life(tm) that Section 8 moved onto my street.”
Hey now, don’t you believe in mixed-income neighborhoods? They’re all the rage in planning circles.
One of my quasi-thug neighbors (a basement duplex tenant) looked very baby-faced and acted very innocent but he played this loud damaged-@$$ mara (c)rap that drove me mad. I haven’t heard it for a while, maybe he headed for the warmer climes of el suroeste or something. <crossing fingers>
Good luck with your own local suburban street menace.
Mixed income implies that there is an income in the first place.....when you have a landlord who bought his house in 2005 thinking he was a flipping genius and then caught in market reality first you get the unlicensed rental to a stream of nice undocumented people who build a 2nd apartment in the basement, then after he gets caught at that game, you get a single mom, her 5 kids clearly on a section 8 voucher out of Capitol Heights and you begin to feel like Eastwood in Gran Torino talking about his neighbors house and lawn
So it's not just me and all of my neighbors who are a bit annoyed by the following trend?
-- Speculator buys house, possibly through rather sketchy financing, such as "liar loan applications resulting in variable annual-percentage-rate mortgage". (The house has to be continually refinanced to keep paying only the "low low introductory rate".
-- Speculator can't make the note on their own, even at the low introductory APR. So they subdivide the basement and rent it out.
-- The renters sublet.
-- 20 people wind up living in the basement. All of them like to play really annoying music.
When this happens in about every third house in a neighborhood, the place becomes effectively unlivable to anyone who bought their place thinking that it would be single families in each house.
So, it's not just me being delusional and unreasonable? ;)
A correction to my original mini-essay: “MPD” should read “MCPD.”
Guess I’ve been listening to the “[D.C.] Politics Hour” too much or something.
Re community policing as mentioned by Hardman. I definitely think this concept needs to be revived, especially since street-pounding beat cops seem to be fewer and farther between these days. I wonder if there is any good hard data on the effectiveness of community policing initiatives. A few rookies fresh out of the academy seem to earnestly believe in it but of course your mileage will likely vary depending on the particular cop you’re dealing with & the culture within each department/unit.
My only immediate misgiving about the community policing model is that overzealous self-appointed vigilante block mayors may single out (mostly) harmless neighborhood weirdos like yours truly for closer scrutiny & more frequent visitation.
I mean there’s good block intelligence, poor block intelligence, and everything in between.
Speaking of the fuzz, we had an unplanned encounter with a 1st District patrol in the 4th District last night. Perhaps I’ll build a blog post around this odd episode.
“Westfields is a dying tree waiting to get pushed over by the next big wind, so other than Target and the Giant if the rest of the mall collapses, I wouldnt be too adverse [to it].”
—Anonymously #2
I prefer imagery of crumbling edifices like the plaster-over-armature-and-wood palaces and emporia of the 1893 World Columbian Expo.
Perhaps my choice of imagery reflects the fact that there are too many oaks & maples around here in clear & present danger of falling victim to the tree butchers of Asplundh and lower slumburbia.
Re the whole topic of suburban slumlord enterprises, I think this issue deserves its own separate post/comments thread. I oughta copy+paste a lot of these descriptions posted here to corroborate / supplement my own humble observations (and not-so-humble opinings).
Thx for the feedback/talkback, Anonymouses, Hardman, et al. It’s nice to feel like one’s blog isn’t just a graphically enhanced existentialist echo chamber there to remind one of the terrifying futility of one’s existence.
Okay, single-sentence impersonal pronoun quota: MET/EXCEEDED.
(This is just one reason why I didn’t major in English.)
Bring on the slumlord thread!
-Anon#2 also the white-collar desperation guy
Tom-Id post to your blog but I refuse to identify myself, and your comments wont let me in...
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