I was pulling off the Beltway the other morning into College Park, and was greeted with a rather amusing scene. You know that brick sign on the off-ramp? It says, “College Park, A Livable Community,” in bright pastel colors. There was a homeless man propped up against it, passed out with paper bag in his hand. Welcome to College Park.
The irony of the situation was compounded by the rest of my trip south on Route 1. Across the street from the homeless person was a sign that read “QUICK CASH” in big, bold letters. Farther down on my right, I passed the charred gravel lot where Lasick’s used to stand before it was set ablaze by a drunk patron. On my left, I saw the abandoned building where Mandalay Restaurant used to be, before it picked up and moved to a more lucrative location in Silver Spring. Next to it hung a small Verizon Wireless sign, dangling upside down by the wire that doesn’t keep it lit anymore. The only thriving business on Baltimore Avenue seemed to be the liquor store on the right, in front of the University View, or the other one on the left, farther south, or the other one on Greenbelt Road, or the other one over on …
College Park: A Livable Community. For whom?
I was talking to my officemate the other day. He works as a professional engineer for the lab where I work, and he graduated from the university a number of years ago. He actually grew up close to the campus and even went to a public high school in the neighborhood. He told me when he attended school, the high schools were decent, the neighborhood was nice and he had a great time. He moved away for a few years and then came back to find the neighborhood he knew had vanished.
“It’s amazing how fast it fell apart,” he recounted to me. “I was only gone a few years.” Now he lives in Montgomery County.
I had to take a lab visitor out to dinner a few weeks ago, and I had having trouble deciding where to go. He’s a successful technology entrepreneur from Arizona, so none of the greasy spoons seemed appropriate. The only nice restaurant off the campus used to be Lupo’s, but that has long since closed, turning into yet another bar that serves Miller Lite and smells like stale urine. I used to take my parents to Lupo’s whenever they came to College Park to visit me. They don’t come to visit anymore. We finally settled on Franklin’s (in Hyattsville, of all places). I made a joke to the visitor that Hyattsville is where they take all the cars that get stolen in College Park. On the way down Route 1, we passed two or three abandoned car dealerships and more bail bondsmen than I cared to count.
This will likely be my last column for The Diamondback. I’m hoping to graduate within the year, and I’m planning on focusing entirely on my thesis. But I’d like to leave you with a question to ponder this summer. College Park is at a tipping point. Its future is not yet written, but is yet to be formed by our decisions and our actions. What we do now will determine the course that this community and this university will take in the decades to come. Will we maintain the status quo, continuing the long, painful decline that my officemate noticed when he tried to return to his childhood home? Or will we take the bold, simple, concrete steps toward reversing the slide, recapturing the potential of the thriving academic environment that is the University of Maryland and let it be expressed in a livable surrounding community? Public transportation, affordable housing, economic development, good local schools, effective law enforcement – these are the things that create the livable community that the homeless man was mocking in his presence. These are the things that make the top students choose to go to this university over other schools. These are the things that must be addressed, and they must be addressed now, before it’s too late.
Two roads will be diverging this summer, and it will be up to you to decide which one to travel. Which one will you choose?
Danny Rogers is a graduate student in the chemical physics program. He can be reached at drogers2@umd.edu.
