A Glimpse into the Future Gateway
By Silver Springer • Oct 23rd, 2006 • Category: Uncategorized
Right now two gigantic cranes hover over the site. But if you can’t wait till the dust settles to see the end result of what will become the Silver Spring Gateway, then check out this video rendering created by Pat Kelly’s Clairvoyant Media.
The video gives a birdseye view of this addition to the Silver Spring skyline. It shows you the architecture, enormity and scope of this predominantly residential project.
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Beware of Pyramid Scheme recruiters in that Giant…I got one one time and I was ready to kill him…
The Galaxy: Very monolithic for something that is supposed to be nebulous…
har har
Snider’s
Thanks for the spelling correction, Pennster…you are right. They can spell it any way they want as long as they keep doing what they are doing.
When I lived in Arlington, VA, I used to shop in the Harris Teater at Pentagon City. Very nice place.
Yeah, I can’t stand that Giant. The employee morale is really bad too. The cashiers used to be more friendly…not so much anymore.
I should try Sniders for food shopping. I have heard good things about that market.
I love Snider’s…lots of my friends work or have worked there during high school and college. It’s the first supermarket I’ve ever been to and I grew up with it. One of the best success stories of mom & pop businesses in the area.
One of my favorite parts of shopping at Sniders is the checkout experience. The banter between the cashiers, bag boys and other employees is often pretty comical and entertaining. They all carry on as if the customer can’t hear them. Maybe I’m getting old, but “dude-speak” just cracks me up.
excuse me - but i live in dc, just over the line from eastern ave. The Giant and the Blairs shopping center is a 2 block walk from my house. So what in your warped world view makes it wrong for me to walk or drive and shop at MY neighborhood store, just because it’s on the MD side of the line. I also don’t appreciate the racist overtones of telling the “natives” to stay out of SS.
I don’t see any “racism” there… I doubt the racial demographics change drastically when you cross the DC border into Silver Spring.
Anonymous 9:47 a.m.,
There’s a significant African-American population in Silver Spring itself.
I am complaining about the crowded stores. Silver Spring can’t build enough food markets to meet the demand of the surrounding communities. When you have people driving 15-20 minutes to the Safeway or Giant in Silver Spring…there’s not enough supermarket retail development in places like Takoma Park or the District.
Some of us from the District are actually closer to the Giant then other areas of Silver Spring. So, if you are concerned about people coming from 15-20 minutes away, why do you point to DC as the problem in your original post?
i think the natives should stay on their side. i usually go to the whole foods because there are less “ethnics” there. the whiter the grocery store, the better it is. if you think that’s racist, too bad. which would you rather go to: a giant in oxon hill or reston?
Anonymous 2:51 pm…
Obviously, you have heard the “DC People Get Out of Silver Spring” schpiel before. It happened with City Place Mall. It happened with the Metro Station rail station & bus station. There’s a lot of race and class meaning behind that.
My point was completely different. I notice that many shoppers come to the Giant from DC BECAUSE THE DISTRICT HAS UNDER-DEVELOPED RETAIL ZONES!!!
The fact that grocery shoppers have to hike to Silver Spring from many neighborhoods stretching from Connecticut Ave. to Eastern Ave. tells you something about the sorry state of commercial affairs in DC. Ditto for Takoma Park. Ditto for most of Silver Spring too.
Its not just the sorry state or retail.
Alot of those communities don’t want large grocery stores in their community. They may have valid or invalid reasons, but part of the whole slow growth and NIMBY mentatlity is that they don’t want to ruin their pretty communities with a large boxy store and larger asphalt parking lot when it can be in someone elses community nearby
Their communities aren’t so pretty.
Yesterday I saw that a sales office for KSI’s Midtown Silver Spring was open at the corner of Georgia & Thayer (in the same spot as the old sales office for the condos at 930 Wayne Avenue.
Has this been here for a while or is it new?
The last time I checked the windows were plastered so you couldn’t see in.
If they are open it hasn’t been a week.
When I lived Downtown, Sniders was the place where the Woodside families shopped and the Downtown (read: apartment-dwelling) families (like mine) went to Giant. I always felt the people who shopped at Sniders considered it a status symbol (kind of like Whole Foods today) . . . I mean, does it offer anything Giant doesn’t?
Snider’s is much closer than the Giant for people who live in Woodside, Forest Glen and Montgomery Hills. It has less than Giant, but the service is far, far, far, far, far superior. Snider’s is a community grocery store, run by the same family who live nearby for more than 60 years. It’s fabulous.
Yeah, Snider’s! Boo, Snider’s parking lot. It’s like a freakin’ demolition derby.
Oh come on…sure, their parking lot is small, but the turnover is VERY fast. Occasionally, you might have to wait a minute or so for someone to leave, but once you park, look how close you are to the store’s front door. Can you say that for the Giant or any other big box grocery store? I guarantee that you will spend more time circling for a distant spot than you will waiting for a very close-in spot at Sniders. Snider’s rules.
Anybody ever shop at the Giant on Arliss & Piney Branch? Huge Giant (been there for many years) that has just been renovated with a big big parking lot. Much better than that Giant on EW Hwy - Cheaper than Whole Foods - & no parking problems.
so about that project and video. Looked like a huge waste of money and time. Building looked terribly bland and boring, what was their public amenity? I loved how one of the stores was a ‘cleaners’. Pretty inventive, needed retail for the neighborhood.
Anonymous said…
“…what was their public amenity?”
Another paved plaza and pocket park.
If you really want to go to a Giant, go to the one in Wheaton. It’s another 10 minutes up the road but it’s much cleaner, the selection is better, and checkout is faster. I gave up on the Giant in downtown Silver Spring (and the nasty crew of checkout clerks) years ago when there were never any shopping carts available on weekends. Now depending on what I need, I go to Snider’s, the Wheaton Giant, or Trader Joe’s.
Could the difference in the Giants store be the quality of the produce? Having lived in Northern VA, then DC and now MD, I can safely say I did not buy any produce from the DC locations. The quality is quite substandard.