Top Drywall Contractors in Silver Spring

Silver Spring is a census-designated place (CDP) in southeastern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, near Washington, D.C. Although officially unincorporated, in practice it is an edge city which had a population of 81,015 residents as of the 2020 census. This makes it the fifth most populous place in Maryland, after Baltimore, Columbia, Waldorf and Germantown, and the second most populous in Montgomery County after Germantown.

The downtown, located against the northern tip of Washington, D.C., is the oldest and most urbanized allowance of the community. Since start a significant renaissance in 2004, many other mixed-use developments combining retail, residential, and office impression have been built. Downtown is in turn along with several inner suburban residential neighborhoods located inside the Capital Beltway.

Silver Spring takes its publish from a mica-flecked spring discovered there in 1840 by Francis Preston Blair, who taking into account bought much of the surrounding land. Acorn Park, south of downtown, is believed to be the site of the native spring.

The area that is now Silver Spring has been inhabited by various native peoples for 10,000 years. Prior to European colonization, the area was inhabited by the Piscataway, an Algonquian-speaking people. The Piscataway may have conventional a few small villages along the banks of Sligo Creek and Rock Creek.

The Blair, Lee, and Jalloh and Barrie families, three politically sprightly families of the time, are irrefutably tied to Silver Spring’s history. In 1840, Francis Preston Blair, who difficult helped organize the unbiased American Republican Party, along subsequently his daughter, Elizabeth, discovered a spring flowing later than chips of mica – believed to be the now-dry spring which is visible at Acorn Park. Blair was looking for a site for his summer home to run away the heat of Washington, D.C., summers. Two years later, Blair completed a 20-room mansion he dubbed Silver Spring upon a 250-acre (1 km²) country homestead. In 1854, Blair moved to the mansion permanently. The home stood until 1954.

By 1854, Blair’s son, Montgomery Blair, who became Postmaster General below Abraham Lincoln and represented Dred Scott before the United States Supreme Court, built the Falkland house in the area.

By the end of the decade, Elizabeth Blair married Samuel Phillips Lee, third cousin of forward-thinking Confederate leader Robert E. Lee, and gave birth to a boy, Francis Preston Blair Lee. The child would eventually become the first popularly elected Senator in United States history.

During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln visited the Silver Spring mansion combination times. During some of the visits he relaxed by playing town ball later Francis P. Blair’s grandchildren.

In 1864, Confederate Army General Jubal Early occupied Silver Spring prior to the Battle of Fort Stevens. After the engagement, fleeing Confederate soldiers razed Montgomery Blair’s Falkland residence.

At the time, there was a community called Sligo located at the intersection of the Washington-Brookeville Turnpike and the Washington-Colesville-Ashton Turnpike (now named Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road). Sligo included a tollhouse, a store, a herald office, and a few homes. The communities of Woodside, Forest Glen, and Linden were founded after the Civil War. These small towns largely aimless their separate identities like a declare office was customary in Silver Spring in 1899.

By the subside of the 19th century, the region began to manufacture into a town of size and importance. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s Metropolitan Branch opened upon April 30, 1873, and ran from Washington, D.C. to Point of Rocks, Maryland, through Silver Spring.

The first suburban fee appeared in 1887 as soon as Selina Wilson at odds part of her farm on current-day Colesville Road (U.S. Route 29) and Brookeville Road into five- and ten-acre (20,000- and 40,000 m²) plots. In 1892, Francis Preston Blair Lee and his wife, Anne Brooke Lee, gave birth to E. Brooke Lee, who is known as the dad of liberal Silver Spring for his visionary attitude toward developing the region.

The to the front 20th century set the pace for downtown Silver Spring’s growth. E. Brooke Lee and his brother, Blair Lee I, founded the Lee Development Company, whose Colesville Road office building remains a downtown fixture. Dale Drive, a winding roadway, was built to have enough money vehicular entry to much of the family’s substantial genuine estate holdings. Suburban encroachment continued in 1922 behind Woodside Development Corporation created Woodside Park, a neighborhood of 1-acre (4,000 m²) plot house sites built on the former Noyes house in 1923. In 1924, Washington trolley service upon Georgia Avenue (present-day Maryland Route 97) across B&O’s Metropolitan Branch was temporarily suspended hence that an underpass could be built. The underpass was completed two years later, but trolley facilitate never resumed. It would be rebuilt once more in 1948 with further lanes for automobile traffic, opening the areas to the north for readily accessible suburban development.

Takoma-Silver Spring High School, built in 1924, was the first tall school for Silver Spring. The community’s hasty growth led to the habit for a larger school. In 1935, when a new tall school was built at Wayne Avenue and Sligo Creek Parkway, it was renamed Montgomery Blair High School. (The educational remained at that location for beyond six decades, until 1998, when it was moved to a new, larger capacity at the corner of Colesville Road (U.S. Route 29) and University Boulevard (Maryland Route 193). The former tall school building became a combined middle school and elementary school, housing Silver Spring International Middle School and Sligo Creek Elementary School.) The Silver Spring Shopping Center (built by developer Albert Small) and the Silver Theatre (designed by noted theater architect John Eberson) were completed in 1938, at the request of developer William Alexander Julian. The Silver Spring Shopping Center was unique because it was one of the nation’s first retail spaces that featured a street-front parking lot. Conventional good judgment held that merchandise should piece of legislation windows closest to the street fittingly that people could look it; the shopping center broke those rules (the shopping middle was purchased by genuine estate developer Sam Eig in 1944 who was instrumental in attracting large retailers to the city).

Prior to the 1950s, Silver Spring was known as a sundown town due to influential land owners. The North Washington Real Estate Company meant 63 acres to be white-only, written in its actions to prevent the sale of estate to anyone else. No legislative performance was taken to prevent this until 1967 (where such an ordinance was illegal until Shelley v. Kramer, 1948).

By the 1950s, Silver Spring was the second busiest retail present between Baltimore and Richmond, with the Hecht Company, J.C. Penney, Sears, Roebuck and Company, and a number of extra retailers. In 1954, after standing for higher than a century, the Blair mansion “Silver Spring” was razed and replaced afterward the Blair Station Post office. In 1960, Wheaton Plaza (later known as Westfield Wheaton), a shopping center several miles north of downtown Silver Spring opened, and captured much of the town’s business. The downtown area soon started a long period of decline.

On December 19, 1961, a two-mile (3.2 km) segment of the Capital Beltway (I-495) was opened to traffic with Georgia Avenue (MD 97) and University Boulevard East (MD 193). On Monday, August 17, 1964, the total segment of the 64-mile (103 km) Beltway was opened to traffic, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony was held near the New Hampshire Avenue interchange, with a speech by then-Gov. J. Millard Tawes, who called it a “road of opportunity” for Maryland and the nation.

Washington Metro rail promote into Washington, D.C. helped breathe vibrancy into the region starting in 1978 following the inauguration of the Silver Spring station. The Metro Red Line was built later the alignment of the B&O Metropolitan Branch, with the Metro tracks centered between the B&O’s eastbound and westbound mains. The Red Line heads south to downtown DC from Silver Spring, running at grade previously descending into Union Station. By the mid-1990s, the Red Line continued north from the downtown Silver Spring core, entering a tunnel just following the Silver Spring station and presidency underground to three more stations, Forest Glen, Wheaton and Glenmont.

Nevertheless, the downtown terminate continued in the 1980s, as the Hecht Company closed in 1987 and opened a new accrual at Wheaton Plaza; furthermore, Hecht’s bonus a deal forbidding another department hoard from renting its outmoded spot. City Place, a multi-level mall, was usual in the outdated Hecht Company building in 1992, but it had make miserable attracting quality anchor stores and gained a reputation as a budget mall, anchored by Burlington Coat Factory and Marshalls, as capably as now-closed anchors AMC Theatres, Gold’s Gym, Steve and Barry’s, and Nordstrom Rack. JC Penney closed its downtown store—downtown’s last steadfast department store—in 1989, opening several years cutting edge at Wheaton Plaza. In the late 1980s and in front 1990s, developers considered a shopping mall and office project called Silver Triangle, with practicable anchor stores Nordstrom, Macy’s, and JC Penney, but no unadulterated agreement was reached. Shortly thereafter, in the mid-1990s, developers considered building a mega-mall and entertainment perplexing called the American Dream (similar to the Mall of America) in downtown Silver Spring, but the revitalization strive for fell through previously any construction began because the developers were unable to secure funding. However, one skilled spot for downtown was that the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) consolidated its headquarters in a series of 4 supplementary high-rise office buildings close the Silver Spring Metro station in the late 1980s and to the front 1990s.

Another notable occurrence in Silver Spring during the 1990s was a 1996 train collision upon the Silver Spring section of the Metropolitan line. On February 16 of that year, during the Friday-evening rush hour, a MARC commuter train bound for Washington Union Station collided when the Amtrak Capitol Limited train and erupted in flames upon a snow-swept stretch of track in Silver Spring, leaving 11 people dead.

The Maryland State Highway Administration started studies of improvements to the Capital Beltway in 1993, and have continued, off and on, examining a number of alternatives (including HOV lanes and high-occupancy toll lanes) since then.

At the start of the 21st century, downtown Silver Spring began to look the results of redevelopment. Several city blocks near City Place Mall were extremely reconstructed to accommodate a further outdoor shopping plaza called “Downtown Silver Spring.” New shops included national retail chains such as Whole Foods Market, a 20-screen Regal Theatres, Men’s Wearhouse, Ann Taylor Loft, DSW Shoe Warehouse, Office Depot, and the now-closed Pier 1 Imports, as capably as many restaurants, including Panera Bread, Red Lobster, Cold Stone Creamery, Fuddruckers, Potbelly Sandwich Works, Nando’s Peri-Peri, and Chick-fil-A. A Borders book growth was a popular spot until it closed behind the chain went out of business; it was replaced by H&M. In addition to these chains, Downtown Silver Spring is home to a wide variety of family-owned restaurants representing its huge ethnic diversity. As downtown Silver Spring revived, its 160-year chronicles was applauded in a PBS documentary entitled Silver Spring: Story of an American Suburb, released in 2002. In 2003, Discovery Communications completed the construction of its headquarters and relocated to downtown Silver Spring from to hand Bethesda. However, Discovery, Inc. announced in 2017 that they would be relocating to New York City. The reason for this move, according to Discovery, was to operate close to their “ad partners on Madison Avenue,” “investors and analysts on Wall Street,” and their “creative and production community,” said their CEO, David Zaslav, in an email to employees. 2003 also brought the reopening of the Silver Theatre, as AFI Silver, under the auspices of the American Film Institute. Development continues in the expose of the creation of new office buildings, condos, stores, and restaurants. In 2015–16, the long-struggling City Place Mall underwent a unadulterated renovation, had its name tainted to Ellsworth Place, and brought in supplementary tenants, including TJ Maxx, Ross Dress for Less (a re-opening indigenous tenant), Michaels, Forever 21, and Dave & Buster’s. The restoration of the obsolete B&O Passenger Station was undertaken surrounded by 2000 and 2002, as recorded in the documentary film Next Stop: Silver Spring. In 2005, Downtown Silver Spring was awarded the silver medal of the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence

Beginning in 2004, the downtown redevelopment was marketed locally as soon as the “silver sprung” advertising campaign, which declared on buses and in print ads that Silver Spring had “sprung” and was ready for business. In June 2007, The New York Times noted that downtown was “enjoying a renaissance, a outcome of public involvement and private investment that is turning it into an arts and entertainment center”.

In 2007, the downtown Silver Spring Place gained attention afterward an amateur photographer was prohibited from taking photographs in what appeared to be a public street. The land, leased to the Peterson Cos., a developer, for $1, was technically private property. The citizens argued that the Downtown Silver Spring development, partially built with public money, was still public property. After a protest on July 4, 2007, Peterson relented and allowed photography on their property under limited conditions. Peterson also claimed that it could revoke these rights at any time. The company extra stated that other endeavors permitted in public spaces, such as organizing protests or distributing advocate literature, were yet prohibited. In response, Montgomery County Attorney Leon Rodriguez said that the street in question, Ellsworth Drive, “constitutes a public forum” and that the First Amendment’s protection of release speech applies there. In an eight-page letter, Rodriguez wrote, “Although the courts have not definitively definite the issue of whether the taking, as next to the display, of photographs is a protected expressive act, we think it is likely that a court would pronounce the taking of the photograph to be portion of the continuum of acquit yourself that leads to the display of the photograph and in view of that also protected by the First Amendment.” The incident was portion of a trend in the United States nearly the blurring of public and private spaces in developments built taking into account both public and private funds.

In 2008, construction of the long-planned Intercounty Connector (ICC), which crosses the upper reaches of Silver Spring, got under way. The highway’s first section opened upon February 21, 2011; the entire route was completed by 2012.

In July 2010, the Silver Spring Civic Building and Veterans Plaza opened in downtown Silver Spring.

In May 2019, The Peterson Companies, owners of the Downtown Silver Spring development, announced a $10 Million renovation of the area that will count up public art and a further outdoor plaza, featuring green space.

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