In the five years since it opened, the Silver Spring Civic Building has become an all-in-one community event space, government center, architectural landmark and, perhaps, the one element most responsible for tying together downtown Silver Spring’s revitalization.
“Without it, Silver Spring would just feel like any business district,” local civic leader Bernice Mireku-North said. “With it, it feels more like the community living room.”
The Civic Building (and the adjacent outdoor event space known as Veterans Plaza) was one of the major parts of Montgomery County’s renewal effort for a rundown Silver Spring central business district that in 1995 was famously compared to downtown Beirut by business leader Steve Silverman.
The $22 million, three-story building, near the corner of Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street, was opened as a “tangible, public testament to this community’s long-standing desire for a gathering place,” County Executive Ike Leggett said at the July 8, 2010, grand opening ceremony.
In the years since, its meeting rooms, event halls, county government offices and art facilities have made it the center of downtown Silver Spring. Veterans Plaza, which includes a seasonal ice skating rink, hosts crafts fairs, concerts and food tastings.
Eric Rasch, operations manager for the Civic Building, said there were just nine events permitted for Veterans Plaza in its inaugural year. In 2014, the county permitted events on 287 days of that year.
Last week, Leggett gathered at the building with other county officials and U.S. Secretary of Labor Tom Perez to sign the county’s paid sick leave law. On Friday, well-known R&B singer Charlie Wilson will hold a book-signing on Veterans Plaza that will be filmed by television channel BET.
“You begin to get a sense of a place where people from all walks of life, across the ethnic spectrum and across the economic spectrum, come and share the same space,” said Reemberto Rodriguez, director of the county’s Silver Spring Regional Center headquartered in the building. “That’s pretty darn unique.”
Before nearly $1 billion in public and private money went into transforming downtown Silver Spring, the area’s comparable community place was the historic Silver Spring Armory, according to longtime resident and civic activist Gus Bauman.
The Armory, which was essentially on an island in the middle of Wayne Avenue, was torn down to make way for a parking garage the county thought necessary for the massive retail and restaurant project along Ellsworth Drive.
“That’s literally why the Civic Building happened, because the armory had to be sacrificed,” said Bauman, the former county Planning Board chairman who authored a timeline of downtown Silver Spring’s revitalization titled, The Silver Spring War and Rebirth: The Fall and Rise of an American Downtown.
The site of the Civic Building used to be home to a county parking lot and a few small businesses before it was included in the county-designated renewal area.
The new retail and restaurant district, the opening of the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center and Discovery Communications’ move from Bethesda to a new headquarters at the corner of Colesville Road and Georgia Avenue were a few of the projects that anchored the initiative.
Bill Mooney, who worked as then-County Executive Doug Duncan’s point man on Silver Spring, credited developer Bryant Foulger for meeting with the community, a process that resulted in the concept of the Civic Building, plaza and ice skating rink as an anchor location for the area.
“The phrase that was used was Silver Spring’s living room,” Mooney said. “Bryant Foulger went to, I would bet, at least 50 community meetings and sat with people and listened. Bryant came back and presented it and told us it was the first time he had ever received applause when he presented a development plan.
“It was a convergence of things, that if you wrote it down and said, ‘This is what we’re going to accomplish over the next 10 years,’ no one would believe it,” Mooney said. “And it happened.”
Next month, Rodriguez and the Silver Spring Regional Center will take part in a celebration of the building’s five-year anniversary, an event he hopes attracts those who currently use the facility and those who helped come up with the idea for the building, plaza and downtown Silver Spring as a whole.
“You had folks who worked on this two decades ago, who pulled it together in a various serious process,” Rodriguez said. “I will forever be grateful to them.”
