Green Means Go

Build it of polypropylene, and still they will come.

The first time people see it -- while checking out the surrounding stores, theaters and restaurants of the revitalized Silver Spring -- they do a double take. The green of this urban green space is so green. So perfect, like the 18th hole of a country club you can't afford.

"It's like something out of a David Lynch movie," says Matt Shortridge of Takoma Park.

He is sitting on the green, eating ice cream with his wife, Kathy O'Rourke.

"It bums me out that it's okay that it's fake," she says.

"Maybe this is what miniature golf courses look like before they put the holes in," he says. Their son, Truman, 4, has left his ice cream half-eaten to take off across the green with a look of pure joy.

"You look out here and you want to be in the middle of it," O'Rourke says.

Nearby, Michael Shereikis, guitarist with the local Afrofunk band Chopteeth, sits and watches his 7-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter run around.

"They walked past here and said let's check out that field," Shereikis says. "If it's professional sports, I'm totally against AstroTurf. But for some reason, this is working."

This peculiar brainstorm was born over the summer in the mind of Don Scheuerman, a senior engineer with the Montgomery County Department of Public Works and Transportation. He was faced with a problem and a set of requirements, and he arrived at a logical solution.

The county was demolishing a parking garage on the site. Public events were scheduled for late summer and fall, including the Silver Spring Jazz Festival. The county wanted to create a public space quickly. Any surface would be temporary, slated to be torn up next fall to make way for a pavilion and ice-skating rink, if funding is approved.

Scheuerman considered and discarded grass seed (it wouldn't take in the drought), real grass turf (ditto), asphalt or gravel (unappealing). Fake grass seemed to meet all the requirements at a comparatively reasonable price -- $96,000.