In This Months Business Monthly

When my family moved into the Bryant Woods neighborhood in Columbia in the summer of 1968 there were model homes on our cul de sac making it a regular stop for the Columbia tour buses. There was 7-11 store nearby with a snack bar but the real action was up at the Wilde Lake Village Center where, in addition to a grocery store, there was a butcher, a bookstore, a cheese shop, a pharmacy with a soda fountain, a women’s clothing store and a record store. The village center was the social and commercial hub of the community. One of the highlights of the holiday season was when the village center would host an open house. As Columbia residents visited the different stores, each merchant provided some type of holiday fare. The punch that Columbia Bank and Trust ladled out was particularly popular.

For some residents of Columbia, this was the embodiment of the Jim Rouse vision.

Only it wasn't.

In the late sixties, Columbia was still a small town with a population of less than 10,000. A forlorn silo stood where The Mall is today.

It didn't last long. The true Rouse vision was to build a city ten times that size. By the beginning of the seventies residents of the new city began to get new places to gather. Oakland Mills village center came online in 1969 and Harper's Choice got their own village center in 1971. Wilde Lake was no longer something unique, it was simply one of three.

The biggest change for Wilde Lake though came in 1972 when that lonely silo was replaced with a regional mall. The bookstore and clothing store moved out of Wilde Lake and into The Mall. The slow decline of the centers fortunes had begun. By the mid seventies memories of those early year holiday open house nights had already begun to fade.

You can read this months column here.

Secret Garden

We've driven by it numerous times but never stopped. That in and of itself is not so unusual, it’s an old graveyard after all and neither of us knows anyone interred there. I suppose it was a combination of curiosity, a warm Saturday, and the profusion of daffodils that spurred Mama Wordbones to suggest we take a closer look at Whipps Garden Cemetery on St. Johns Lane in Ellicott City.

I’m glad we did. True to its name, Whipps is as much a garden as it is a 180 year old cemetery. Carefully overseen by the Friends of The Whipps Cemetery and Memorial Gardens and community volunteers, the one acre “heritage-garden park” is both historic and botanic. It features a native plants “typical of those grown in Maryland gardens of the 1800’s.”

You can find more pictures of Whipps Garden Cemetery here.

Moving Day

The Rouse Company building ends its original purpose today. The Howard Hughes Corporation is moving out and over to new offices above Clyde’s restaurant and the building will now essentially shut down until the massive redevelopment effort begins in May. Monday morning, for the first time since 1974, no one will report to work in the building.

Before they turned out the lights one last time, I took the opportunity to capture a few final images of its former life, while it still had a third floor. That 33,000 square foot chunk of internal space goes away with the buildings restoration and reincarnation.

Then again, it won't really eliminate the third floor because what is now the fourth floor will become the new third floor. Suffice it to say that the ceiling height on the street level floor will be dramatically higher and this staircase would lead to nowhere.

When this building opened in the mid-seventies it broke the mold for suburban office buildings, particularly in the more conservative Baltimore business community. Frank Gehry created a corporate headquarters that mimicked the ambiance of its malls with clerestory glass and ficus trees. Gehry once described it as an "elegant warehouse."

I just recall that it was a very cool place to work, especially in those heady days of the Malling of America. From the mid seventies to the late eighties the company was opening five or six new malls across the country every year as if it would never end. 

And then it did.

To see more of the pictures from yesterday, go here.

Mulligan’s Wall

After the retaining wall along Mulligan’s Hill Lane in Ellicott City collapsed during Tropical Storm Lee in 2011 the county erected a temporary wall to stabilize the site and keep Dohony Hall from tumbling down the hill. The temporary fix eliminated about seven parking spots in Parking Lot C.

They aren't coming back.

The replacement wall will have much the same footprint of the temporary one but at least it will look a lot better than current conditions.

Nonsense about Noise

In a recent posting on the Howard County Citizens Association, perennial naysayer Russ Swatek wrote that “Merriweather Post Pavilion (MPP) was supposed to only serve the community, not be a huge amplified regional attraction.”

He references Columbia’s “original planners” as his source for this blatantly erroneous statement.

Ian Kennedy, who with fellow Columbian Justin Carlson, played a role in keeping Merriweather alive in the dark years, rebutted Russ. He pointed out that that the outdoor theater  named after Majorie Merriweather Post, had originally hoped to be the summer home of the National Symphony Orchestra, not the Columbia Orchestra.

“Furthermore, during the early years of Merriweather -- when the "original" planners still owned the pavilion and ostensibly oversaw its operations -- it hosted such acts as The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and other amplified acts.”

It was those types of performances that kept Merriweather viable when the National Symphony opted to make Wolf Trap Farms their summer home instead.

The proposed noise legislation that the Howard statehouse delegation recently approved is intended to protect and preserve Merriweather for future generations of concert goers. It allows for noise levels up to 95 decibels between 9 AM and 11:30 PM within a quarter mile of the theater. Right now there are no residences within this quarter mile radius but as the downtown Columbia redevelopment progresses, this will change. It is inevitable that some of these new residents will complain about the noise just like those who now live outside that radius do now, even though Merriweather was there, rocking away summer nights, long before they moved in.

Predictably, the only member of the HoCo delegation to vote against this legislation was Liz Bobo. 

Blockbusted

It doesn't seem like all that long ago that having a Blockbuster store nearby was seen as a plus. Then came Netflix in 1997, Redbox in 2002 and Video on Demand shortly thereafter and the corner Blockbuster store began to lose relevance.

Seeing this banner draped across the Blockbuster storefront on Dobbin Road reminded me just how quickly a hot retail trend can cool off. The first Blockbuster opened in 1985 and by 2004 the company had over 9,000 stores and 60,000 employees. Six years later the company sought protection of the bankruptcy court. Today, the company now owned by Dish Networks, has approximately 1,000 remaining stores. I believe this is the last one in HoCo.

Sunday Seminar

Last Sunday we decided to take the historical tour of the Shrine of St. Anthony. It is something we’d often discussed but the timing never seemed to work out. The tours are only held on the last Sunday of every month.

It’s a pretty interesting place in that it was once part of the original Carroll estate and in 1832, the Manor House was completed on the farm that was then known as Folly Quarter. Today the house remains true to its original form.

At least what little we saw of it.

The tour begins in the Manor House but does take visitors past the main hall. On Sunday we stood in that hall while our guide embarked on lecture about the history of the Catholic church in Maryland, beginning with George Calvert, the First Lord of Baltimore, in 1627. He continued on for about forty-five minutes before getting to the present day. If you are interested in Maryland history, you would probably have enjoyed it. If you were one of the younger members of the audience, not so much.

Though the website says the tours are open to families, I wouldn't recommend bringing the little ones. They’ll be bored to distraction. In fact we noted that a few families began to peel off towards their cars as we moved from the Manor House and headed to the shrine building.

Even adults started getting fidgety as the tour moved into the second hour and we had only moved through five rooms in the shrine. The tour guide over shared just a bit. For example, in the dining room the walls are lined with portraits of former popes. Our guide told stories about almost all of them. 

The next tour will be given on Sunday, February 24th at 2:00 PM.

In This Months Business Monthly

I first began writing a column in The Business Monthly in the very first issue back in the earlier nineties. We were in the midst of an earlier recession and that first column focused on the changed landscape of HoCo loco commercial development. Almost everyone in the business was handing at least one of their properties back to a lender. For the up and comer developers like Peter Issel, Chris Kurz, Pete McGill and Fred Glassberg, the down turn took them down.

That’s what I should have written this month.

Instead I banged out a pretty weak effort at the absolute latest deadline of deadlines. I wrote about how next year, 2013, nothing much is going to happen except building towards 2014. 2014 is when everything happens: Whole Foods, the Metropolitan, Mall expansion and the gubernatorial election.

I’m not proud of it.

A better story would have included some historical perspective like the story of the office building that the county government owns in Columbia Gateway, 6751 Columbia Gateway Drive. It was built by Peter Issel in 1990 when the Gateway Corporate Park was the hottest business campus between DC and Baltimore.

And then, just as the building was completed, that no longer meant anything. Even a great building in a great location is powerless against a retrenching economy. That’s the greatest risk in the development business and a highly leveraged developer doesn't stand a chance when financing constricts.

And perhaps that would help create some appreciation for the exposure that at least at five developers are now taking on as they begin the creation of a real Columbia downtown. They have the right product and location but other forces, beyond their control, could alter their outcomes. I might have even thrown in something about another term limited county exec back in the nineties who had gubernatorial aspirations .

Unfortunately, that’s not the column I wrote. Now that I've warned you, if you still care to, you can find this month’s column here.

Hidden Memorials

Yesterday, on the real Veterans Day (11^th hour, 11^th day and so on…), Mama Wordbones and went for a walk around the hills of Ellicott City. At the top of Court Avenue we stopped at the Circuit Court courthouse facing what was originally the main entrance when the building was built in 1843. It remained the front door until a major renovation and expansion in 1986 moved the “court house steps” to the rear of the building.

It occurred to me that I had never stood at the original entrance so I bounded up the old granite steps to take a look. It was there that we discovered this memorial to the veterans of World War I, World War II, and the Korean “Conflict.”

This wasn't the only memorial we found up there. To the left of the entrance we discovered this memorial to the “brave men who fought so courageously in the Confederate Army.”

I was intrigued by the listing of a General James R. Herbert since I hadn't heard of any HoCo citizen that served as a general in the Confederate Army. A little research revealed that General Herbert was a Colonel in the Confederate Army but after the war became a Brigadier General commanding the Maryland National Guard in 1874. 

Happy Veterans Day (observed).

An Oella Morning

This morning I met up with Charles Wagandt, the president of The Oella Company. His company has been involved in the redevelopment of the former mill village along the banks of the Patapsco River since 1973. Oella was not served by public and sewer until 1984. Before then many homes still used outhouses.

               

It’s a different place today. The William J. Dickey & Sons Textile Mill was built in 1918 and ceased operations in 1972. It is now a 147 unit luxury apartment project offering spectacular views of the river. Homes dating back to the early 1800’s have been painstakingly rehabbed and new homes have been added that maintain the architectural integrity of the village. Oella is now a National Register Historic District.

It’s still a work in progress and that’s what bought me back to see Charles this morning. Earlier in the year he had asked me to come up and take a look at the old village Community Hall which he had leased to a technology company called SensorStar. The company had since moved their operations down the hill to Ellicott City and Charles wanted to find a new tenant. He asked for my advice.

At the time, the building was clad in asbestos shingles. It sorely lacked what we call curb appeal. I suggested to Charles that getting rid of the asbestos shingles might be a good start.

He actually listened to me!

Today, with the old shingles removed, the original plank siding was exposed. I only wish I had taken a before picture. The place looks great.

If any HoCo loco business is looking for something a little different than the standard suburban office fare, there is a 5,000 square foot building in Oella that’s well worth a look.

And yes, this was a bit of a shameless plug for my real job.

Instant Village

As we were leaving the Maryland Renaissance Festival yesterday, I stopped and asked a period dressed hostess how many people had passed through the gates that day.

“We had somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-five thousand revelers in the village today,” she replied.

I knew it was a big crowd but I didn’t realize it was that big. I wondered if that was close to some kind of record.

“No. We once got pretty close to thirty thousand,” and added, “that was a lot of people.”

I thought twenty-two thousand was a lot of people but the weekend period village of Revel Grove is spread out over 25 acres so it never felt claustrophobic. If anything, the large number of attendees made the overall experience more festive.

Some of those attendees go all out in getting into the whole medieval spirit thing.

There were lots of things that made us laugh too. Who knew the 16^th century could be so funny?

The wooded setting is perfect too. Yesterday it was cool under the trees yet warm in the open air spots near the Kings Field jousting arena. This is one of the few places you can go to enjoy Maryland’s official sport.

There is a HoCo connection too. The festival began in 1976 on what was then undeveloped land behind Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, some of which is now the Village of Hickory Ridge and the interchange of Broken Land Parkway and Route 29.  It moved to Crownsville in 1985 where it could finally erect structures that could stay in place year round.

The 36^th Maryland Renaissance Festival runs every weekend up until October 21^st. If you plan on going, plan on going early. The gates open at 10:30 AM and by 11:30 the traffic begins to clog up the two lane roads leading to the site.

If you haven’t been, it is well worth the price of admission, especially on those gorgeous fall days like yesterday.

Enterprise to Relocate in Town Center

Enterprise Community Partners, one of the oldest tenants in the American City Building, one of Columbia's oldest office buildings, will soon be relocating to 11000 Broken Land Parkway. Enterprise, which currently occupies over 80,000 square feet in the 117,000 square foot building, has been in the building for over 26 years.

11000 Broken Land Parkway was recently purchased by the Howard Hughes Corporation. The American City Building is also owned by Howard Hughes.

The American City Building was built in 1969 and was HoCo’s first high rise office building. It was named after the American City Corporation, which was once the largest tenant in the building.

Given its location next to recently announced Whole Foods Market, it would have to be considered a prime candidate for redevelopment.

Columbia’s Confederate Roots

I finally got around to checking out “The War Came by Train” exhibit at the B&O Railroad museum in Ellicott City yesterday and I walked away with a new understanding of the origins of the Village of Harpers Choice in Columbia. It was once part of the farm of Lt. Robert Goodloe Harper Carroll, Aide De Camp to Confederate General Richard Ewell. He went south at the beginning of the war with the Howard Dragoons and saw action in Virginia and Maryland, including the retreat from Gettysburg. He resigned from his post in November of 1864, almost four months prior to Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865.

Harper, as he was generally referred, returned to his farm in HoCo where he lived until he died in 1915. He was the great grandson of Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

Keeping It Real

A commenter to this post wrote, that after a recent visit to the home of George Washington, he was “reminded of the remarkable character of the people in positions of public trust and authority at the time which  set the standard of how public officials and their appointees were, and still are, expected to conduct their official duties.”

It has become common practice among certain activists to nostalgically reach back to the days of our founding fathers and compare them with contemporary politicians. They'll often write and  speak in revered tones of the wisdom and character of Washington, war hero and first president, Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and Madison, author of the Constitution.

In doing so, they tend to gloss over the fact that these three white guys were humans, not saints. For example, it is important to remember that all three of these men held other humans in bondage while simultaneously championing the cause of liberty and equality.

I just completed Ron Chernow’s 904 page biography of George Washington, “Washington. A Life.” I am fan of Chernow’s work, having previously read his biographies of J.P. Morgan, John D.Rockefeller, and Alexander Hamilton. The author painstakingly researches his subjects leaving no stone unturned.

This is actually the second biography of George Washington that I’ve read. From “His Excellency” by Joseph Ellis I first learned that Washington was quite the land speculator, buying up thousands of acres of land west of the Allegheny Mountains in the path of the new nations growth. What I further discovered after reading Chernow’s book was that Washington also profited on what today would likely be considered insider information. While president, he took a personal interest in the layout and development of the new capital city and purchased a few choice parcels of land for his own account. That hardly “set the standard” for conduct in office. If a public official tried to pull that off today they’d be run out of office in a New York minute.

Don’t misunderstand me. George Washington served our country selflessly, both as a warrior and a politician. At the same we do a disservice to history by overlooking the things that made him human. While he did free his slaves in his will, waiting until he died meant that he was able to avoid dealing with the social and political consequences of his actions. That makes him human and a bit flawed, just like the rest of us.

Local Coffee

Last Friday, at the Colosseum Gyms' member appreciation barbecue, I struck up a casual conversation by the deserts with Patti Griffin. Predictably our small talk turned to work.

“What do you do for a living?” I asked.

“I work in a family business,” she replied.

It’s an old family business too. Pfefferkorn Coffee has been roasted in Baltimore for over a hundred years. Patti is the daughter of the family patriarch; Louis Pfefferkorn, Sr. She told me that her grandfather once owned a sizable farm in western HoCo. “He moved out here after selling his original farm behind what is now Edmonson Village Shopping Center in Baltimore." The business needed a farm for the horses for their delivery wagons. Before they focused exclusively on coffee the family was in the grocery business.

It’s good coffee too but you can’t buy it in HoCo right now. The last HoCo retailer that carried Pfefferkorns coffee was Yates Grocery on Main Street in Ellicott City. Last month the store owner, Betty Jacobs, announced that Yates would be closing after 127 years.

“We hope to have a couple of new retailers in Howard County soon,” Patti told me, “and we also plan to make it available online.”

Right at Home

Last night, as I passed through Ellicott City, I spotted this 1961 Ford pickup parked across from the Phoenix Emporium. Though unremarkable in terms of restoration, it caught my attention from a historic perspective.

In 1961 a pickup truck just like this would have been a familiar sight on Main Street. In that pre-Columbia period HoCo was largely an agrarian county and EC was the center of commerce. In those days E.T. Clarkes Hardware was next door to the Phoenix.

When I take a picture of an interesting auto for To2C, I always make some attempt to find the owner. Since it was parked directly across the street from the bar I thought this would be as good a place as any to make an inquiry. I enlisted the aid of Ashley, the bartender, who in turn asked the other patrons at the bar. She came up blank. I spoke with John the bouncer too. He hadn't seen the truck yet and went to the door to check it out.

“Not a very good paint job,” John observed. It turns out that John is a bit of a car guy himself and we talked cars while I finished my beer.

Considering that the truck is over fifty years old, I’d have to say that its paint job is more than serviceable. It doesn’t look like a showpiece. It just looks right at home.

Wayside Going by the Wayside?

The history of Ellicott City's Wayside Inn predates the creation of Howard County. When the granite stone house on Old Columbia Pike began hosting overnight guests back in 1780, HoCo was still part of Anne Arundel County.

The roadside inn has seen many travelers passing through HoCo over those years, including rumored visits of George Washington and John Adams.

I know for certain that it was at least visited by Jim Robey. According to the Inn’s website, in 2004, to celebrate the latest “reopening” following an extensive renovation, then county exec Jim Robey cut the ceremonial ribbon.

The inn is now listed with rock-star HoCo realtor, Creig Northrop. The asking price is $1.2 million and the listing says it “May also be purchased for single-family or multi-family use.”

In other words you don’t have to run the property as bed and breakfast anymore if you buy it. After 232 years, it's days of hosting HoCo visitors may now be coming to an end.

In a way, it really isn’t much of roadside inn anymore. Before they built the hulking sound barrier right across the street, the inn with its candles in the windows was a HoCo loco landmark, visible to all travelers passing by on the county’s main artery.

Nowadays, the only traffic that passes its door are the members of the Forest Hill Swim Club and HoCo locos taking the back way to Dorsey’s Search. Folks passing through HoCo on their way from Point A to Point B wouldn't even know it was there.

So Long Laptop Alley

The Dobbin Road Starbucks closed Tuesday. Tomorrow it will reopen in a new building across the street. The staff will be the same and so will the coffee but it will be different. For one, I won’t call it Laptop Alley anymore.

The old Dobbin Starbucks space was very linear, about three times as long as it was wide. To get to the counter you passed through a narrow seating area that always seemed full of people on laptops. It was Columbias Laptopistan.

The new space is over a thousand square feet smaller, though it does have a drive thru window. Personally, as an acknowledged coffee shop person, I don’t see that as an improvement.

I’ll likely drop in tomorrow morning to check it out. I’m hoping that it retains at least some of the vibe of the old place. Familiar faces behind the counter will help.

And speaking of Starbucks...the Worst Busiest Starbucks in HoCo recently got a makeover. It wasn’t completed the last time I was over there but it looked like they were trying to accommodate more solo patrons by replacing tables with communal counters. I’d be interested in hearing what To2C readers think about it.

Anyone?

A Papers Route

When The Washington Post closed it’s HoCo office back in 2006 the media company was grappling with the harsh budget realities of declining advertising revenue and stagnant subscriber growth. Branch offices don’t come cheap.

Retrenching from the suburban beat even further, in December of 2008 The Baltimore Sun and the Post announced that they were going to begin sharing content rather than competing for stories on the same turf. For the Post this allowed them to pull back even further from the burbs. In the most recent example of this content sharing, the Post picked up this Jessica Anderson story from the Sun about the proposed HoCo growler legislation. In their "shared content" version, the Post editors dropped the HoCo loco angle. While Randy Marriner with Victoria Gastro Pub and David Venable with the Ellicott Mills Brewing Company were predominately featured in the original story, the HoCo loco innkeepers were edited out in the Post. It was as if they had planted the white flag at the HoCo border.

In the not so distant past, The Post and The Sun battled for readership in HoCo. HoCo readers and advertisers were once coveted by both papers. Now, it appears that the Post is ceding that ground. Last week in this story by Jeremy W. Peters in The New York Times, the reporter notes that the paper “serves a purely local print market, one that for decades had limited competition, and it has depended on local advertisers and subscribers who have since fled to the Web.”

Senior Post writer and editor Robert G. Kaiser put it even more succinctly:

“When I was managing editor of The Washington Post, everything we did was better than anyone in the business,” he said. “We had the best weather, the best comics, the best news report, the fullest news report. Today, there’s a competitor who does every element of what we do, and many of them do it better. We’ve lost our edge in some very profound and fundamental ways.”

So far, The Post has not taken the same route as The Sun with digital subscriptions. Subscribers to the print edition still receive free access to the digital Post, which includes a nice little app for the iPad. On the other hand, The Sun has taken greater initiative in embracing loco blogs to supplement its loco coverage while the Post has relegated the DC metro blogging community to deep within its website.

It will be interesting which of these different routes provide a road map for survival in the digital age.

In This Months Business Monthly

Seventeen years is a long time, even for a Twinkie. I thought about that as my seventeenth annual box of birthday Twinkies arrived in the mail last month. My sister Pat, who now lives in St. Augustine Beach, has dutifully sent me a box of Hostess Twinkies, accompanied by a pack of birthday candles every year since 1995.

This birthday Twinkie tradition started right here in HoCo with a column I wrote for a now defunct newspaper. In 1994, a fellow named Ed Pickett tried to buck the trend of declining newspaper readership by launching Howard Counties first ever daily newspaper. He called it the Columbia Daily Tribune.

It lasted three months.

I had met Ed in 1992 when he rolled into town and started a monthly business publication originally called the Columbia Business Journal. I don’t know how he got my name but he invited me to meet him for a drink at Piccolo’s (now Three Brothers Pizza) and asked me to write a column for his paper. After being threatened with a lawsuit by the Baltimore Business Journal, Ed changed the name to the Columbia Business Monthly, which was eventually shortened to The Business Monthly.

Ed was a bit of bit of restless character and by 1994, with The Business Monthly actually making money, he decided to start a daily paper. The problem was he tried to do this with very little capital. By the time the paper “suspended” publication he owed money all over town and he soon left for greener pastures.

I stayed in touch with Ed for a few years after that. He ended up in Maine where he started the Bangor Business Monthly which, eventually grew to include monthly business papers in Penobscot Bay and Kennebec under the banner of The Maine Business Monthly Group. Those papers ceased publication in May of 2001 due to declining advertising revenue. Undeterred, he then moved to Portland to try and start another daily paper called the Portland Morning Sun. It lasted for thirteen issues. Last I heard he was living in Pittsburgh.

Through all of this, the birthday Twinkies have endured. You can read this months column here.