Arrive Silver Spring, formerly Georgian Towers among other names, on March 8, 2023. Image by the author.

Last month Arrive, a high-rise apartment building in downtown Silver Spring caught fire, claiming the life of a 25-year-old woman and her two dogs. Another 400 people were displaced, and 89 apartments were condemned. It seems like everyone I knew knew somebody in the building, or had lived there themselves. Including me, from 1991 to 1998.

Back then, it was called Georgian Towers. For my family, our apartment was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to put down roots in Montgomery County – and it’s hard to see tenants face the same maintenance and safety issues we did 30 years ago. Let’s talk about the history of this building, why this building matters, and what we need to do to keep people safe.

How the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles built, then lost this building

Montgomery County grew at a fast clip during the 1960s, doubling in population. A lot of that growth happened in Silver Spring, where high-rise apartment and office buildings were sprouting up around the planned Metro station. Many of those buildings, like Summit Hills and Silver Spring Towers, were built by Jerry Wolman, a Pennsylvania native who sweet-talked his way into a successful development career, then used his fortune to buy the Philadelphia Eagles with his friend and business partner.

A half-finished Georgian Towers in late 1967. Image from Washington Post archives, accessed via the Montgomery County Public Library on March 8, 2023

Georgian Towers shortly after completion in 1968. Image from Washington Post archives, accessed via the Montgomery County Public Library on March 8, 2023.

In 1967, he embarked on Georgian Towers, two twin 17-story buildings with 900 apartments that filled an entire city block, complete with skywalks, a mall’s worth of shops, and a courtyard half the size of a football field. “The building, featuring curving lines and exposed concrete and brick, has been likened to a doughnut,” wrote a Washington Post reporter. By then his financial problems were mounting, beginning with the botched construction of the John Hancock Center, a 100-story office and apartment building in Chicago that ultimately bankrupted him.

On top of that, the bank that lent him the money to build Georgian Towers was charged with falsifying records for him. Arriving at a Maryland District Court in a limousine in January 1968, Wolman testified he had just $24 to his name. Construction halted on Georgian Towers, which was sold at auction to the bank. It sat half-finished for a year with a handful of tenants already living in it before construction could resume.

The Eagles weren’t doing well either, and Wolman made no friends by giving a 15-year contract to a coach who traded quarterback and future Hall of Famer Sonny Jurgensen to the team we now know as the Washington Commanders. In 1969 – a few months after Eagles fans infamously booed Santa Claus – Wolman was forced to sell the team. A decade after his career started, it was basically over.

Meanwhile, a finally-completed Georgian Towers was filling up with tenants at a rapid clip. A September 1968 ad boasted that 200 apartments had been rented in six weeks, starting at $120.50 for a studio ($1027 in 2023 dollars). “This will be a quiet building–it’s not for them young swingers,” said J.B. Willmann, an unidentified person (a manager, perhaps) in a Washington Post article. Like most new apartment buildings, it was marketed as a “luxury” building but its tenants were solidly middle-class. And a lot of them were young, if not swingers. Children weren’t allowed in Georgian Towers until the 1980s when the Fair Housing Act was updated to prohibit discrimination against families with kids.

A joke among my friends in Silver Spring is that everyone they know lived in Georgian Towers, or one of the two other big apartment complexes, Summit Hills and The Blairs, at some point in their lives. The common denominator is usually being young, starting a career or a family, and trying to put down roots in a very expensive place.

How I got there

My mom was one of them, moving there with a three-year-old me in 1991. It was a time of transition: she had sold her house in Suitland and was going back to school at the University of Maryland. When I’d later ask her why we moved to Georgian Towers, all she said was, “it was quiet.”

Me, age 7, on the balcony of our apartment in 1995. Used with permission.


Except for the fire alarms, which happened frequently. I remember waiting outside, in all kinds of weather, for the firefighters to trudge in. When I was too little to walk down 12 flights of stairs but too heavy for my mother, strangers would offer to carry me. My dad moved in with us in 1994, a year after he met my mom, and the first time he heard the alarm he rushed to the door and asked my mother why she wasn’t getting up. “It happens all the time,” she said.

Eventually he got used to it too. We waited in our apartment during a fire while my mom was out, and she came home from a hallway filled with smoke. And I remember the fire a few floors below our apartment, and seeing the window directly below my bedroom boarded up for months.

That aside, I loved growing up in the complex, and have written about it before. As a small child I learned to interact with adults, like Mr. Ali at the front desk and Ms. Theresa in the leasing office. My dad and I had an epic snowball fight during the blizzard of 1996 in the courtyard. Without leaving the property I could get a bag of Fritos at 7-Eleven or walk by the office of an architecture firm and watch the people through the big windows working on blueprints. There were also always kids around to play with most of the time. Including my third grade class bully who lived on the sixth floor. He got to stay in the hotel across the street once after a fire, and I was jealous, not realizing this meant his family had been displaced.

While my parents had spent most of their time in Georgian Towers trying to leave Georgian Towers, we couldn’t have stayed in Montgomery County without it. In 1998 we moved out, first to a rented house in Colesville, then in 1999 to buy the home in White Oak where they still live today.

High-end marketing, but ongoing problems

Georgian Towers started as a “luxury” apartment complex, and throughout its life it’s been marketed as one. Ads from 1992 boast of “radio-dispatched maintenance service”, “prestigious stores”, and “decorator bathrooms” (speaking from experience, our bathrooms still had that 60s blue and white tile!). A 1981 condo conversion failed, and newer, fancier buildings went up in the 1990s and 2000s.

A May 2001 ad for Georgian Towers in the Apartment Shoppers Guide.


In a 2004 Washington Post article, one resident called it “a multicultural building, almost like the United Nations.” The Downtown Silver Spring complex opened that year, and tenants worried about gentrification and rising rents while noting that the maintenance staff were slow to make repairs. Newspaper ads show that between 1997 and 2003, the advertised rent for a studio jumped from $600 (about $1100 in today’s dollars, and only slightly more than when the building opened) to $810 ($1300 in today’s dollars).

In 2008 Stellar Management bought the building, rebranded it “The Georgian,” and began a multi-million dollar facelift, holding a rooftop party to celebrate with then-County Executive Ike Leggett and sushi served atop a live model. In an echo of Jerry Wolman forty years earlier, Stellar couldn’t afford to pay their construction loans and went bankrupt. Renovations stopped and tenants complained about vandalism, thefts, and break-ins, even after huge rent hikes. Another company, Pantzer Properties, bought the complex in 2012, renamed it “The Point,” and resumed the renovations before current owner FPA Multifamily bought it in 2021 and renamed it Arrive.

“This isn’t a drill”

In the days after this year’s fire, news dribbled out slowly. Two reporters who live in the building report on their own home catching fire. The man who led his partner and several neighbors out, crawling through the smoky hallways. Neighbors opening their balconies to each other because they can’t get downstairs. A man approaches a TV news crew, telling them how his 25-year-old daughter Melanie Diaz died in a stairwell covering her two dogs with a jacket.

The building at the time of publication. The air still smells of smoke.

The news is hard for me to digest because it all feels so familiar. One tenant tells MoCo360 what my mom told my dad 30 years ago: “When the fire alarm went off … I thought: Here we go again; I’m not dealing with this, and I just happened to take a peek at the blinds through the window and [thought]: Oh, s—. This isn’t a drill.”

When it’s all over, 89 units, 10% of the entire complex, are condemned. Tenants say they fear their unprotected apartments were being looted—which police confirm—and that management is holding their belongings hostage unless they promise not to sue. Officials say the fire started in a seventh-floor living room and could have been prevented by a single sprinkler head.

One fucking sprinkler.

Maryland started requiring sprinklers in new construction in 1990 and older buildings in 2019, but they don’t have to be installed in 2033. And there are other fire safety protection measures that older buildings don’t always have, like automatic alarms that don’t need to be pulled, or fireproof doors that shut during an alarm, preventing the fire from spreading.

The night before the Arrive fire, there was a fire at Elizabeth House, an almost identical building across the street that has sprinklers. A few apartments were damaged and one person went to the hospital, but everyone is okay.

Tens of thousands of people live in buildings like Arrive across Montgomery County. There are 76 high-rise apartment and condo buildings in the county without sprinklers, many of which date to that 1960s building boom. These buildings are a key source of affordable homes for working people and families trying to build lives here, and now one is the place where someone lost her life. We need to ensure people are safe in their homes, and that means doing whatever we can to get these buildings modern safety protections as soon as possible.