This fountain will be removed, opening up the entrance to City Place Mall. Photo by the author.

A lot of things have kept City Place Mall from success since it opened in 1992. The five-story mall at Colesville and Fenton in Downtown Silver Spring has a mix of discount and off-brand stores that attract shoppers from across the region but aren’t relevant to well-heeled people living in the immediate area.

It also suffers from a reputation for crime, notably a drug-related shooting during rush hour last fall. (The lack of an Internet presence beyond this listing and a Wikipedia entry doesn’t help, either.)

Like most enclosed malls in an urban setting, City Place’s biggest flaw is that it presents big blank walls to the street, meaning that pedestrians who don’t know what’s in there have no reason to go inside. That’s what owners Petrie Ross Ventures seek to fix about City Place in the first phase of a major renovation, approved by the Montgomery County Planning Board last Thursday.

Nighttime View, City Place EntranceDaytime View, City Place Entrance

Nighttime (left) and daytime (right) views of the new City Place entrance at Colesville and Fenton. All images taken from the Planning Department’s report.

They want to renovate the plaza at the corner of Colesville Road and Fenton Street, the mall’s most visible entrance but perhaps also its most foreboding. Signs for anchor stores Marshalls and Burlington Coat Factory are plastered several stories up, making them hard to see for people on foot or driving past. A large sculptural fountain, lined with spiky strips to discourage loitering, blocks the door.

New Plaza, City Place Mall

A plan of the new plaza.

The developer’s proposal would take out the fountain and repave the entire plaza, making it easier for people to circulate and open up sight lines. This will hopefully discourage loitering and make the space feel safer. A tree that interferes with wheelchair ramps at the crosswalk for Colesville Road will be removed.

And a new metal screen, similar to the ones placed along Ellsworth Drive and Fenton Street in 2005, will wrap around the corner. It’ll display large tenant signs, a new sign for the mall itself, and a video screen “that will televise events, ads and information as an aesthetic response to this admittedly commercial enterprise,” according to a report filed by Planning staff. The screen will be required to display public information and event calendars every five minutes.

The proposal doesn’t address any changes to the restaurants flanking the entrance, Taste of Morocco and a shuttered Ruby Tuesday that was vandalized in the fall of 2008. Both eateries’ street-facing windows are either covered up or tinted, and their patio seating - a great way to activate the plaza - is largely unused. Hopefully, renovating the plaza will encourage at least Taste of Morocco to open up to the outside.

The ten-screen movie theatre atop City Place, closed since 2004, could be converted to offices.

A new plaza is only the beginning of ambitious changes planned by Petrie Ross. Parts of City Place’s upper two floors, occupied by a ten-screen movie theatre that closed in 2004, could be converted to offices. Signs around the mall already advertise the yet-unbuilt space for rent, and a flyer from the leasing agency shows how the building would be retrofitted - both inside, where the theatre would be gutted, and outside, where new windows would be added to the upper stories - to accomodate the renovations.

The office addition, both within the existing mall and in a nine-story office building on top that was first approved twenty years ago, brings a customer base that could draw new, higher-end retailers to City Place. As recently as last summer, the developers had unsuccessfully courted Park and Planning to occupy the 300,000-square foot tower. But without office tenants willing to take a chance on the mall’s potential turnaround, it’s likely that nothing could happen at all.

City Place Mall Office TowerCity Place Mall Office Tower (Seen From Colesville)

Renderings of the renovated mall and office tower addition, seen from the corner of Fenton and Ellsworth (left) and Colesville Road (right).

In the meantime, there’s a possibility that City Place Mall could get a new name. All of the renderings above show new signage at the corner of Colesville and Fenton reading “The Galleria at Silver Spring.” As Silver Spring, Singular first suggested in 2006, the name City Place carries with it some serious baggage and could use a new moniker to get disenchanted shoppers interested again.

Dan Reed (they/them) is Greater Greater Washington’s regional policy director, focused on housing and land use policy in Maryland and Northern Virginia. For a decade prior, Dan was a transportation planner working with communities all over North America to make their streets safer, enjoyable, and equitable. Their writing has appeared in publications including Washingtonian, CityLab, and Shelterforce, as well as Just Up The Pike, a neighborhood blog founded in 2006. Dan lives in Silver Spring with Drizzy, the goodest boy ever.