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Can College Park, Maryland become a college town?

June 16, 2011

Anyone familiar with College Park, Maryland may realize that it doesn't hold up compared to other college towns. The central part of town itself is U.S. 1, a major highway, which runs along the east side of the University of Maryland campus. Only a few bars, restaurants, and shops exist in a small section along the highway before giving way to strip shopping centers and sprawl. And that one section has a brick wall designed to prevent pedestrians from stepping into the high speed traffic zooming past. As college town Main Streets go, College Park can't compete with the likes of Newark in Delaware, Charlottesville in Virginia, Chapel Hill in North Carolina, or Athens in Georgia, just to name a few.

But a new project in the works could change all that. The Baltimore Sun reports that an East Campus town center is currently in the works. Plans call for hotels, restaurants, and shops in a walkable environment. The project would include a transit center for the future Purple Line light rail, which will connect College Park with Bethesda, Silver Spring, and New Carrollton. Other amenities include a grocery store, movie theatre, music venue, conference center, and much needed student housing. The hope is for the new town center to form a new core for the town and give the University of Maryland a public face that a University in its standing deserves. The challenge for the developers will be to make the project unique enough to give it personality so that it doesn't just look like any other shopping center around the country. Too much surface parking or too many chain stores could cause the plan to backfire.

Go to the East Campus Redevelopment Initiative web site for more information.