Vintage Rockville, Showing Its Ages

By Janet Lubman Rathner
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, March 10, 2007

It began as a 19th-century subdivision of rainbow-hued, bric-a-brac-adorned Victorian houses, but today, Rockville's West End is a microcosm of suburban development.

Sandwiched around the original Painted Ladies are American Foursquares, popular in the early 1900s; bungalows dating to the 1920s; Arts and Crafts cottages from the 1930s; World War II-era revivals; 1950s Cape Cods; and ramblers and split-levels from the 1960s. In recent years, assorted infill houses, some modest, some grand, have filled the remaining vacant lots or replaced older homes.

"You can see the whole history of Rockville through this area, and that's what is so charming about it," said Eileen McGuckian, executive director of Peerless Rockville, a nonprofit community-based preservation organization. "West End is a place where the town evolved."

The West End, which began as West End Park, was the creation of Washington lawyer Henry N. Copp, who had previously developed the early Montgomery County exurb of Garrett Park. In 1890, Copp bought about 500 acres of what had been the Julius West Farm, subdivided it into a neighborhood of circles and boulevards lined with lots of one-half to three acres, and began selling to commuters.

Rockville was 16 miles from the District of Columbia -- a long trip by horse and buggy. But Copp banked on the ease of traveling to downtown Washington thanks to the B&O Railroad. West End Park residents were within walking distance of the Rockville station. The trip to Union Station was 45 minutes.

"Getting on the train was enticing," McGuckian said. "The alternative, a horse and carriage down Rockville Pike, was crude transportation. [The road] wasn't paved until 1920. The train was everything."

Copp's promotional booklet, "Peerless Rockville: How to Get Health, Wealth, and Comfort," cited plenty of other advantages: "An altitude of 500 feet, unapproached train service, and an organized community of about 1,500 people, are the claims upon which its superiority is based. While people in Washington are restless and sleepless during the sultry nights of summer, the residents of Rockville are quietly sleeping beneath coverlets and being refreshed for their next day's duties. There is no malaria here, and rarely a mosquito. . . . A location in cool Rockville . . . promotes sound sleep at night. . . . Mind and body are so refreshed next day as to enable a man to think and work fast, and make more money than he otherwise would."

According to McGuckian, Copp was so taken with his new subdivision that for a time he lived there himself. Over a decade, he sold about 220 lots before economic hardship forced him sell the rest of the property at auction in 1900.

Today the original West End Park, much of it included in the West Montgomery Avenue Historic District, is part of what is known as Rockville's West End. To stay abreast of issues such as development and traffic, approximately 1,535 households belong to the West End Citizens Association.

On a recent walk through the neighborhood, John Brewer, 67, an independent computer consultant and former association president who has lived in West End for 30 years, pointed to several houses that were converted to commercial use in recent years.

"We have what I call residential erosion around the edges," he said.

"You lose residences, you lose people."

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.

A drawback is the traffic. O'Meara's home is on West Montgomery Avenue, which is part of Route 28 and links to Interstate 270.

"I grew up on a busy street. I wasn't scared by it, [and] we're kind of set back, but the soot and dirt takes a toll on some of the houses that are closer," O'Meara said.

What troubles her more is new construction around the neighborhood. There has been a spurt in recent years as larger lots are subdivided and older homes without historic protection are demolished.

"Some infill is great, but the bulk [of new homes] clash with styles and design of the neighborhood. You can't legislate taste, design and style," O'Meara said.

She's not the only one reacting to the ongoing building.

"We've been overtaken by urbanization, but we still think it's the best neighborhood in the best city in the world," said Jayne Greene, who has lived in West End Park for nearly half a century.

Greene fancied the neighborhood and, in particular, her 1891 Queen Anne home, long before she actually owned it.

"I'd pass through every day when I walked the kids to school. I always envied them their big houses and I liked this house," said Greene, 84.

She watched the five-bedroom, two-bath house sell twice before she and her husband, Alexander, 83, a retired federal employee and former Rockville mayor, bought it in 1958. The Greenes added a third bathroom and a sunroom and reared five children in the turreted Victorian.

"It's got room, tall ceilings and a sense of space," Alexander Greene said.

The house also has a history that has revealed itself in bits and pieces over the years.

The Greenes have been told it was a rooming house at some point. That would explain the sheer number of what Jayne Greene refers to as "the world's most amazing collection of useless bottles of medicine and milk from the early '20s."

She said the bottles turned up when her husband, out working in the yard, dug into the remnants of an icehouse. They also found the frame of an old buggy and, in the attic, a license tag from 1911.

From their own time, the Greenes recall a neighborhood that was more settlement than city.

"We were the last outpost in the county. The last bus stop was across the street. Now everything has grown," Alexander Greene said. "Traffic is a constant stream, [but] the neighborhood was always great. It still is."