The Montgomery Hills Shopping Center photographed from Seminary Road. Image by the author.

Back in the late 1920s, as the area outside downtown Silver Spring was filling up with residential subdivisions, one developer wanted to build a neighborhood shopping center at the intersection of Georgia Avenue and Seminary Road. You would imagine that this would be a strip mall.

But it was not: The developer built a series of connected, multistory structures, sold to separate owners, close to the street and intended for pedestrian access, with shops on the ground floor and apartments on the upper floors.

This is what is known as the Montgomery Hills Shopping Center, the Tudor Revival-style strip that will be familiar to anyone who lives in or has passed through the area. As Maryland rebuilds Georgia Avenue to become more of an urban boulevard, it’s worth remembering that suburbia wasn’t always suburbia. Instead, in its earliest iterations, exemplified by this development, suburbia could be a gentler, less intense urbanism.

A shopping center with urban character

Here is the street-facing portion of the shopping center, which fronts the sidewalk directly on Georgia Avenue:

Image by the author.

And this is the back of the Montgomery Hills Shopping Center, showing that it is indeed a block of buildings and not a faux-urban strip plaza:

Image by the author.

Here, captured in 1993 from Montgomery County’s aerial imagery archive but looking much as it did as far back as the 1950s, and much as it still does today, is the overall commercial area, which is called Montgomery Hills:

Image by Montgomery County.

The circled area beneath Georgia Avenue here is the Montgomery Hills Shopping Center. Above it and across is a small strip of buildings. They are also attached but separate buildings, owned separately, and basically urban in their form. They look like this:

The small commercial block across Georgia Avenue from the Montgomery Hills Shopping Center. Image by the author.

There are two *more *quasi-urban strips towards the right side of the aerial image: a strip mall with a conspicuous two-story building on one end, which may predate the strip, and a smaller street-facing single-story strip, with a later multistory office building on one end.

But it’s the Montgomery Hills Shopping Center and the strip directly across Georgia Avenue that I’m looking at in this piece.

Not a whole lot has ever been written about these buildings, which, after all, look a lot like most of what we built before somewhere between the 1920s and the 1950s.

Here, Dan Reed notes a 1970s suggestion, never implemented, to suburbanize the appearance of the strip across from the Montgomery Hills Shopping Center by giving it a common facade (to look more like a strip mall), suggesting that the buildings perhaps looked a bit ragged even back then; they were only built, as far as I can tell, in the late 1940s. They still do look a bit ragged, especially sitting amid one of the region’s most traffic-choked corridors.

More information is available on the Montgomery Hills Shopping Center itself. The best source I was able to find on it was a Maryland Historical Trust determination of eligibility form, prepared in 2013, which details the building’s history meticulously.

It notes:

The property includes all of Block J of Montgomery Hills, which was subdivided in 1928. Robert Benner and George E. Good, the original developers, designated the block for commercial purposes. The main block of buildings at 1901-1919 Seminary Road and 9416 Georgia Avenue were constructed between 1929 and 1931, the one-story addition at 9414 Georgia Avenue was built between 1936 and 1941, and the one-story store at 1921 Seminary Road was added circa 1950.

And, intriguingly, this: “Primarily constructed between 1929 and 1931, the Montgomery Hills Shopping Center consists of seven attached commercial buildings with residential units above and to the rear of a number of the businesses.”

After a comprehensive description of the building’s architectural details, the document goes on to note that additions were made in the back/alley side of the buildings, well into the 1950s or even beyond: “Largely completed by 1959, the rear additions on the buildings at 1901-1919 Seminary Road reflect the residential use and lack of an individual owner with a singular development plan.”

The builders also intended for there to be a landscaped park where the parking lot now is. This never happened because the need for parking overshadowed it. Most important of all its design elements, though, might be the inclusion of residential units. Look at this from the document:

Image by Montgomery Planning.

The urban character of this cluster is partly explained by the fact that the streetcar traveled Georgia Avenue and Seminary Road in the 1920s. But by the time these buildings were built it had already stopped running.

Suburbia as a gentler urbanism

So what *is *so remarkable about these ordinary, somewhat rundown buildings on an arterial road? On one level, nothing really. They are certainly curiosities, given their unusual amalgamation of old urban and new suburban design elements.

But it makes sense that aspects of this old way of building would have a long tail, even as they were being rapidly outmoded. These buildings are obviously “transitional species” of a sort. It would be easy to view, or dismiss, them as a last gasp of old urbanism. Maybe they say no more about our built environment than the handful of typewriters still produced in the 1990s said about word processing technology.

But on another level, these buildings are a glimpse of a past that actually existed, and therefore of a possible future. They are so interesting because in them, you can see how the timeline split right around this period. These buildings, despite their suburban elements and placement, clearly still preceded the final break with old urbanism that occurred later in the 20th century.

The stock plan for a neighborhood shopping center to serve a suburban subdivision — a new idea in 1929 — was still, essentially, an urban block. A barber shop with living quarters in the back is not just a historical curiosity. It is an ordinary thing, yet deeply symbolic of an entire approach to, and understanding of, how commerce, urban space, access, and density work.

Silver Spring in this period, it should be noted, was closed to minorities, due to racial covenants. But exclusion had not yet been engineered on so granular a level as banning small living spaces in commercial areas. Single-use zoning and the innovation of minimum building or lot sizes had the effect of preventing poorer people from buying a little slice of very valuable, proximate land.

Yet here, in the genesis of the DC suburbs, are an unassuming series of buildings that could have been the beginning of a different and more open, welcoming, and accessible kind of suburbia.

What if?

More broadly, these surviving buildings raise the tantalizing question of what Silver Spring — and the United States — would look like now if we had simply continued along the original timeline, in which the suburban built environment was not a complete departure from the design principles of our old towns and cities.

What if we had never used zoning to ban small mixed-use buildings and to separate residences from places of commerce; never replaced individually owned attached structures with developer- or landlord-owned shopping centers; never required minimum numbers of parking spots; never demanded wide setbacks or other features that warped urban streets into “stroads”?

It all would have looked like more connected and plentiful small neighborhood buildings and businesses; like these blocks on Georgia Avenue, but more.

“Even though some businesses are just a few blocks away, many people end up driving,” observed a 2025 Post piece on the Montgomery Hills area. “And when you’re already in your car, you often decide to just leave the neighborhood altogether,” the founder of Friends of Montgomery Hills told the Post.

Instead of traffic separating residents from their own local commercial areas, the true spirit of the neighborhood shopping center could have endured. Instead of workers being pushed out of the communities in which they work, there could have been small, inexpensive homes integrated into commercial buildings everywhere.

Of course, this will all sound very familiar, because it is exactly what urbanists, housing advocates, and transit advocates want for our region today. And it is all very good and important. But perhaps we sometimes think — and certainly our critics claim — that we have come up with something new and disruptive.

A handful of little old buildings on Georgia Avenue remind us that we’re merely picking up where we left off, not all that long ago or all that far away.