Scene This Week In…

After erroneously reporting that the Wecker boys were involved in the reincarnation of the Friendly Inn in Ellicott City, I decided to take a drive out to shuttered roadhouse.

There’s not much to see. There didn’t appear to be any renovation work going on and according to this story by Kellie Woodhouse in Explore Howard there won't be any for awhile at least. The owner, Jason Cooke has experienced an “unexpected hiccup in his plans to renovate the building before opening a new restaurant.”

“In order to renovate, Cooke needs a building permit. But if he gets a permit, Cooke said, the building would lose its "grandfathered" status and need major upgrades to comply with the county's building code.”

It’s a bit tricky to renovate these old roadhouses. For example, the Friendly Inn is much closer to the road than current codes allow. The parking lot and storm water management would likely need upgrades as well.

Still, it’s been done before in HoCo. Maybe Jason should talk to those guys.

Who said that?

In Columbia the highly contested Walgreens in Oakland Mills has finally opened. Well, it was contested by some people anyway.

It looks a helluva lot nicer than an abandoned bank building.

My one critigue is that there is no straight in pedestrian path at the corner of Twin Knolls Road and Thunder Hill Road. The sidewalk takes you all the way down to the vehicle entrance on Twin Knolls, away from the building entrance. That doesn’t make sense to me.

Other than that I like it just fine.