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The greening of Silver Spring
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Photos: Richard Jaeggi |
It is a quarter to three on a warm Sunday afternoon in the middle of March. I am sitting on a green carpet of PlastoTurf on the edge of Silver Sprung. Almost a year old, the artificial grass is starting to show its age. The once verdant green has faded several shades grayer so that now it appears less shocking if not quite natural. The turf could also use a good vacuum to pick up the sticks and stones that don't know how to blend into the plastic foliage.
There are probably fifty people on the green right now. Most are scattered in groups of twos and threes and fours around the periphery while a bevy of nine-year-old boys plays touch football in the middle. Three Africans in their twenties expertly pass a soccer ball back and forth; each adds a signature flourish to demonstrate a unique dexterity.
Over against the fence a young man sits with a pit bull puppy named Cleopatra. Small children come up and ask if it is all right to pet the frisky dog. Eight feet away a man is lying on his side with his head on a trash bag, presumably containing his worldly possessions. He has taken his shoes off and I watch his socked foot keep beat to an internal rhythm that only he can hear.
Despite the abstract popularity of the proposed ice rink, it seems to me the actual popularity of the PlastoTurf should cause us to rethink this plan. |
The edge toward Fenton Street seEms to be the preferred meeting place for teens. This group is a mixture of punks, skate boarders, and pseudo-thugs whose apparent commonality is their determination not to blend in to the dominant culture. A green-haired punk wrestles playfully with a pseudo-thug attired in tattoos and spiked wristlets. |
To my other side is a man in Ray Charles sunglasses banging an electric keyboard while he sings an unrecognized song. Apparently, he has hauled the entire set-up--stool, microphone on a boom, keyboard and stand--in a shopping cart, which still contains his CD player. The portable studio is powered from an outlet on a light pole. The only equipment missing, mercifully, is a speaker. The musical qualities of his low volume, impromptu performance are not apparent to me, but what he seems to lack in talent are amply compensated in enthusiasm.
A comparison with the equally popular Silver Triangle a hundred yards away is instructive. Small children play in the waterless fountain while parents and grands watch and chat from the surrounding benches. The Interactive Fountain crowd is both younger and older, paler, and far more mainstream. The PlastoTurf crowd consists of older kids, younger adults, and people with darker skin tones; they seem, at the same time, more active and more relaxed. At the Interactive Fountain the spectacle is the fountain and the small children playing in it. At the PlastoTurf the people, in all their eccentric diversity, are the spectacle.
These two places represent two distinct modes of public gathering: the one is commercial, planned, neat, and predictable; the other is noncommercial, unplanned, chaotic, and spontaneous. It is all a matter of preference, comfort, and style. It is fortunate, though probably accidental, that downtown Silver Spring can embrace both styles in such close proximity. Usually they are as far apart geographically as they are stylistically, as, for instance, the distance between Dupont Circle and Wheaton Regional Park.
The PlastoTurf was laid as an interim solution, first to solve the immediate needs of last year's Jazz Festival, but also to save the county from the full embarrassment of yet another year passing without the building of the Town Center, "the heart" of the new Silver Spring. The civic building and plaza were supposed to be built where the PlastoTurf now lays, a replacement for the Armory grounds, torn down in 1998 to make way for the new development.
When the executive proposed eliminating an ice skating rink and scaling back the Civic Building there was a unified outcry from the Silver Spring public. The executive and the council wisely listened and moved quickly to restore funding. The ice skate rink in particular became a kind of rallying cry that focused a determination to accept nothing less than a complete Silver Spring redevelopment.
Despite the abstract popularity of the proposed ice rink, it seems to me the actual popularity of the PlastoTurf should cause us to rethink this plan. The plot is not very large and a functional covered ice rink would dominate most of the space. The surrounding area would be mostly hard surface along the lines of the Interactive Fountain. Functionally the space would serve much the same as the Interactive Fountain: there would be benches for sitting but no ball playing, no aimless reclining in the sun.
It is the job of urban planners and developers to improve the earth by covering it with structures and materials that serve some useful rational purpose. They speak a language of planning and predictability. And yet despite the many magnificent public plazas and gardens designed and built by the world's great architects, not one is quite so charming and alluring as a simple field of green grass under a wide blue sky.
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