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Vintage Rockville, Showing Its Ages
Former Rockville mayor Alexander Greene's longtime home is an 1891 Queen Anne Victorian; it was once a rooming house.
(By Robert A. Reeder For The Washington Post)
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Patricia Woodward, the current association president, who has lived in West End for nearly as long as Brewer, agreed. "We always grapple with keeping the town at bay," she said.
Creeping commercialization is a hallmark of West End because it is so close to downtown Rockville -- the new Town Center, assorted courthouse buildings, restaurants, a movie theater and the Metro station are all within walking distance -- but residential charm also defines the neighborhood.
Brewer's house, an American Foursquare built around 1924, was ordered out of a catalogue and assembled from a kit.
"When I first moved here, an original owner still living across the street told me my house and her house came in on the railroad on the same day," he said.
Woodward, the retired head nurse at the nearby and now-closed Chestnut Lodge mental hospital, lives in a Georgian revival built by her husband's grandfather. She was familiar with West End and enthralled with its history long before she lived there.
"I'd drive around and I fell in love with the neighborhood," she said.
That's essentially what happened to Jeanne O'Meara and Bruce Plunkett, too. They have been living in and restoring their 1890 Queen Anne Victorian for 12 years.
"We were looking for a vintage home to restore. This one called out to us," said O'Meara, 40, a media buyer for Time-Life.
O'Meara said her four-bedroom, two-bath house, one of the oldest in West End Park, was modernized in the 1940s -- popcorn stucco now covers the original clapboard -- and the wraparound porch was removed in 1970.
"We hope to put it back on. We're waiting for the price to come down. The popcorn stucco may or may not come off. This is nothing that is sensible financially. You've got to have a lot of heart" to restore an old house, O'Meara said.
She said West End's look and location are incentives for the work in progress that is her home.
"It's a neighborhood of old houses and charm and families. People stop and talk, and with the [Rockville] Town Center going in, we'll be able to walk. It's a plus," O'Meara said.
