'Boomtown' May Finally Have Its Boom

Long-Awaited Town Center Seen as Key to Fort Meade Strip's Revitalization

Mr. Major's Barber Shop, across Route 175 from Fort Meade, bustles with customers, perhaps a sign of things to come in a run-down retail strip that's been known for decades as "Boomtown."

But the name mocks the scene: the barber shop, a fast-food joint, a karate school sit beside boarded-up buildings in an area where GIs once packed into bars, tattoo parlors and pinball arcades during the strip's World War II heyday, when Fort Meade prepared 4 million soldiers for war. Since then, the soldier population dwindled. The Army post, 30 miles outside of the District, transferred 8,000 acres once used for target practice and tank training to a wildlife preserve in the early 1990s and settled into a smaller footprint, becoming a "briefcase base" teeming with mathematicians, engineers and physicists of the National Security Agency and other government tenants.

The Boomtown mile of retail withered during the base's transformation. The county presented plan after plan to revitalize Route 175, which curves north and east of the 5,400-acre base, but for two decades, until recently, those plans went nowhere.

Anne Arundel County Executive Janet S. Owens (D) despaired at Boomtown's decay, trying everything short of condemning properties to push revitalization. "I started fining some of the property owners based on crazy laws that say if the grass is over 14 inches, we can fine them," she said. "I even had the health department out there looking for rats."

Owens and others say their long struggle is nearing an end.

Under the Pentagon's most recent base-consolidation plan, more than 5,000 jobs will move to Fort Meade, most from Northern Virginia, in the next five or so years. Tens of thousands of workers for contractors are expected to follow those jobs. And state and county officials hope the growth will jettison the vestiges of Boomtown's boarded-up past and jump-start economic development in the small town of Odenton that includes it.

"Maybe things shouldn't change, because my rent will go up," mused Bill Major, 40, who is about to retire as a sergeant first class from Fort Meade and opened Mr. Major's Barber Shop less than a year ago. But a sense of optimism creeps into his voice, too, at the possibility of profiting off the $50,000 he invested in his business, one of the few places filled with life on this strip. On a recent afternoon, customers filled all 11 barber chairs and a dozen guys watched sports on a 65-inch flat-screen television or leaned up against a pool table, talking to buddies. "If 20,000 people or more come to this area, some of them are bound to end up in my store. Right?"

Others smell the possibility of profit, too.

After decades of bureaucratic wrangling, plans to build an Odenton Town Center just got the permits needed for homes, shops and offices a few blocks from Boomtown. The federal government appropriated $12.5 million toward widening a five-mile stretch of Route 175. A few investors are starting to put their money into strip malls. Others are poking around for opportunities.

The county has relaxed its zoning rules and begun offering tax breaks. That helped lure businessmen such as Edwin F. Hale Sr., chief executive of 1st Mariner Bank and owner of the Baltimore Blast professional soccer team, who thought a bank outside a burgeoning base would draw plenty of customers. Two years ago, Hale bought a boarded-up Burger King with a sunken roof across the street from the base for $450,000.

"The decision to buy took all of five minutes," said Hale, whose bank demolished the Burger King and opened a branch in November.

"We really hope to go from tattoo parlors to boutiques on 175," said J. Michael Hayes, director of military affairs at the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development. "We knew for years, even before the Pentagon announced its plans, that this area would be growing."