The Cinema movie theater building cleared out in Friendship Heights (Photos)

The building that was long home to The Cinema at 5100 Wisconsin Avenue NW in Friendship Heights has been cleared out. Like some other shuttered movie theaters, it was eventually converted into a gym - Crunch Fitness, in this case. A one giant-for-the-time screen theater, it could seat 800 moviegoers. It was known for its 70mm projector from the 1980s onward, and for being a theater where you might turn your head during a Tom Clancy thriller to see a United States Senator or national security potentate pumping his fist during a particularly patriotic moment. You might have also spotted, or even been interviewed by, a TV personality from WTTG Fox 5, which used to be right across the street.

Beyond the high-profile clientele, the theater's architecture combined space-age utilitarianism with attention-grabbing Googie neon signage. Passing through the ownership of several chains since its opening in 1965, the Cinema's anodyne name functioned much like Bar in Ocean City: mention you were going to The Cinema, and everybody in Bethesda, Chevy Chase, and Northwest Washington knew exactly which theater you were referring to.

Among the highlights of the theater's four-decade operation was being one of only a couple dozen movie houses in the U.S. and Canada to show The Exorcist upon its opening date of December 26, 1973. You can imagine the hysteria of this exclusive engagement at The Cinema, with the Washington setting only topped by the outlandish spectacle delivered by the movie itself. Local newspaper reporters were all-too-eager to file colorful reports of Cinema patrons collapsing, vomiting, or simply fleeing the auditorium with what was left of their sanity intact. 

Later, beginning with the release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, The Cinema would draw cinephiles from far and wide to experience the adventures of Indiana Jones and Jack Ryan in 70mm grandeur. With the building now empty, isn't it time for one of our few remaining local billionaires to step in and restore the movie magic to 5100 Wisconsin Avenue NW? The Cinema was a true remnant of a golden age when there were neighborhood movie houses, ones we still remember from Damascus to Twinbrook to Spring Valley to Georgetown Square to - yes - Friendship Heights.

Tia Queta closing in Bethesda after 45 years

The recent wave of closures of some of Bethesda's longest-operating businesses continues. Tia Queta at 4839 Del Ray Avenue announced on Facebook yesterday that it will permanently close on January 31, 2026. The family-owned Mexican restaurant has been in business for 45 years. As the family also owns the property the restaurant stands on, the small lot could be valuable if assembled with the planned - but ridiculously-long-delayed - redevelopment of the Steamers site next door. The Tia Queta property was advertised as being for sale in August of 2024.

River Road segment dedicated to CJPVFD Fire Chief James P. Seavey, Sr.

The State of Maryland has dedicated a portion of River Road (Maryland Route 190) in honor of former Fire Chief James P. Seavey, Sr. Chief Seavey began his career as a volunteer with the Glen Echo Volunteer Fire Department in Bethesda at the age of 16. His 43 years of public service culminated in his 25 years as Fire Chief of the Cabin John Park Volunteer Fire Department, the longest term by a fire chief with the CJPVFD. When Seavey passed away from cancer in 2018, the disease was determined to be occupational, and his death was ruled to have been in the line-of-duty as a result. 

Seavey had been a champion for firefighter safety and occupational cancer prevention at the local, state, and national levels, and his efforts led to important policy changes. Maryland has dedicated the segment of River Road between Falls Road and the Washington, D.C. border in memory of Chief Seavey's extraordinary service to the community. The dedication was announced last summer, but this particular sign was just installed by the Maryland State Highway Administration by the Kenwood Golf & Country Club east of Goldsboro Road.

Nathan Landow, developer and philanthropist, dies at 93

The Bethesda business and civic communities lost a giant earlier this week, when real estate developer and philanthropist Nathan Landow passed away on December 30, 2025, at the age of 93. He leaves behind an outsize imprint on the Bethesda skyline. His contributions to the town include his namesake Landow Building office property, and several apartment and condominium towers. Landow went above and beyond design and regulatory requirements, bestowing buildings such as The Seasons, Crescent Plaza, and Fairmont Plaza with resort hotel-style balconies and design features. If you've been inside The Promenade at Pooks Hill, you know it's like being on a luxury ocean liner on land.

Other landmark properties developed by Landow outside of Montgomery County include The Colonnade and The Carlton Towers in Washington, D.C., and Prospect House in Arlington. He was responsible for 17 large-scale residential buildings in total over his career, beyond his commercial and office developments.

Landow's contributions extended outside of improving the architecture of the region. He was a prolific fundraiser and contributor to the Democratic Party at all levels, and even served as Chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party at one point. He was not only a key benefactor of the Mayo Clinic and Charles E. Smith Life Communities, but also made architectural additions to both of their campuses.

Services will be held on Sunday, January 4, at 12:30 p.m. at Washington Hebrew Congregation (3935 Macomb Street NW). Shiva will be observed at the home of Harolyn and Michael Cardozo on Sunday, January 4 at 7 p.m. and on Monday, January 5 at 7 p.m.

Memorial donations may be made to Landow House, c/o Charles E. Smith Life Communities, 6121 Montrose Road, Rockville, MD 20852, or online at www.smithlifecommunities.org/giving.

Hot Shoppes memorabilia at Marriott HQ in Bethesda - but no Hot Shoppes food! (Photos)

The current leadership of Marriott International may not recognize or appreciate the centrality of its former Hot Shoppes brand and iconic menu items to the company's identity, but it is keeping the faint spirit of them alive at its downtown Bethesda headquarters. A collection of Marriott memorabilia is on display in the publicly-accessible area on the ground floor, which also includes the MI Cafe, a coffee shop that is also open to the public. The display is light on famous Hot Shoppes menu items like the Mighty Mo burger, Orange Freeze beverage, and Teen Twist sandwich. But it features a number of Hot Shoppes (or, "Hot Shoppe," the early singular branding) items, including cups, plates, a list of locations, and even a Hot Shoppes annual report. 

There are also Marriott-branded items in the collection, such as "Do Not Disturb" door hangers from around the world, and a photograph of the original root beer stand that grew into a global hospitality giant. But the Hot Shoppes content remains underwhelming. MI Cafe is joined on the corporate campus by the Seventh State restaurant and Hip Flask rooftop bar in the hotel next door. Yet none of these three restaurants open to the public feature Hot Shoppes menu items, much less a fully-functional Hot Shoppes restaurant.

To update you on my Mighty Mo Quest: Since my last report in July 2023, the Mighty Mo burger is still not available at any of the three restaurants at the Bethesda headquarters. One inch of progress made is the addition of Mighty Mo sauce, which is served on the side with the Cheddar Burger at Seventh State. The Cheddar Burger is a fine hamburger, but it is nothing like a Mighty Mo in appearance, ingredients, or construction. 

Over at the Pooks Hill Marriott, another trademark burger, the eponymous Marriott Burger, is available, but no Mighty Mo. We continue to face the absurd situation of being able to order a Mighty Mo in Sri Lanka, but not in Marriott's corporate town of Bethesda. Perhaps Marriott is taking cues from McDonald's, which today only features special burgers overseas, but not in the country where the Golden Arches were born. Talk about America Last!

Limon's Gems & Jewels closing in Bethesda after 105 years in business

A number of longtime Bethesda businesses have closed since I began this blog in 2006, but Limon's Gems & Jewels might just be the oldest. Owners Cliff and Robbie Limon have announced their shop at 7909 Norfolk Avenue will likely close by Thanksgiving this month. Their great grandfather, Jacob Limon, founded the business in 1920. The family has been involved in the jewelry industry even longer, 125 years. They are going to cease accepting new work sometime this week, and they will remain available after the closure to ensure any outstanding orders or work are fulfilled.

Internal street signs installed at Westbard Square in Bethesda (Photos)

Street signs for internal roadways have been installed at the new Westbard Square development in Bethesda. Signs are now in place for Zenith Overlook - which runs from Westbard Avenue back to the rear parking garage driveway - and Topaz Lane, which runs parallel to Westbard and will be behind the "Canal House" building and future apartments. Neither name has any local significance. While most of the historic names in the Westbard sector plan area are more related to River Road than Westbard Avenue, there were possibilities such as "Posey," for the farm of Peter Posey that made up most of the area around the Westbard Square development, or "Tauber," for the late Dr. Laszlo Tauber who developed the original Westwood Shopping Center.

Renovations at historic Bethesda Community Store (Photos)

The Bethesda Community Store and Deli at 8804 Old Georgetown Road has been closed for nearly a decade. Plans to renovate the historic structure have been floating around nearly as long, but are finally moving forward. Those plans included a rear addition to the building, which was in poor condition. You can see the building now extends much further back than the original store. The parking lot had hosted food truck tenants in recent years - most recently Call Your Mother Deli, which is now opening a bricks-and-mortar location in downtown Bethesda. As had been the idea all along, the building renovations and addition are designed to make the property more appealing to a prospective future tenant. 

The original, one-room store was built in 1921, when a trolley line ran along today's Old Georgetown Road to Rockville. That line originally terminated at Bethesda Park, a 50-acre amusement park on the west side of Old Georgetown Road, between today's streets Greentree Road and Cedar Lane. By the time the store was built, Bethesda Park had long ago burned down, and streetcars were running all the way to Rockville. You can travel a large segment of the old trolley route today, on foot or via bicycle, using the Bethesda Trolley Trail.

Western Market property for sale in Bethesda

An iconic landmark on Western Avenue at the border of Maryland and Washington, D.C. has just hit the market for sale. The Western Market property at 4840-4842 Western Avenue could be yours for $1,375,000. That's relatively cheap, when you consider what new residential housing at a prime location like this would sell for - and that's what's likely to replace the market, as its exemption to operate a retail market here has expired.

The 8000-square-foot site is zoned R-60, for single-family detached housing. It is walking distance from the Friendship Heights Metro, the commercial areas of Friendship Heights and Spring Valley, and Fort Bayard Park. As always, check with Montgomery County and a good land use attorney to determine what is, and is not, possible here. Bethesda-based AMR Commercial, LLC is marketing the property, with brokers Sam Farnum and William Montrose.

Photos courtesy AMR Commercial, LLC

Pumphrey Funeral Home in Bethesda gets new signage (Photos)

The main signage in front of the Robert A. Pumphrey Funeral Home at 7557 Wisconsin Avenue in downtown Bethesda has been replaced. Gone is the large retro font, but the new signs make room for a notation of the family business' incredible run of operation since 1854. They also resemble tombstones in many ways, which is quite appropriate given the business at hand. Pumphrey's has shown a funereal sense of humor in the recent past, with its "CASKET" vanity-plated vehicle. Needless to say, the funeral home has been a landmark near the crossroads of Wisconsin and East-West Highway, even outlasting Hot Shoppes!

Bethesda Black cemetery advocates sue River Road self-storage developers

A seven-year dispute between advocates for a desecrated Black cemetery in Bethesda, and the developers of a self-storage building directly adjacent to it, is moving to the courtroom. Several activists have filed suit against the project's developers, 1784 Capital Holdings, LLC and Bethesda Self Storage Partners, LLC, in Montgomery County Circuit Court. The civil case is the latest effort by the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition to halt and reverse development impacts to the burial ground - which is located under land occupied by the Westwood Tower apartments and a second plot hastily-purchased by Montgomery County to avoid an archaeological search for graves - and ultimately have the graveyard memorialized and restored.

The six plantiffs in the case are asking the court for "a judicial declaration that the land, designated as parcel 242, was used as a burial ground and that human remains, burial artifacts and funerary objects were wrongfully removed from the site, and for an order requiring the defendants to return such remains, artifacts and objects to BACC," a press release from BACC today notes. The plaintiffs are also seeking monetary compensation. 

Although the self-storage site was not part of the original cemetery, the concern since 2017 has been that burials in Black cemeteries sometimes were placed beyond the boundaries of the graveyard in question, when property lines were not delineated by fencing. The core of the dispute is that observers with BACC say they saw potential remains and funerary objects being excavated and trucked away, while the archaeological expert hired by the developers reported that they had determined these were not human remains or funerary objects. Those bones and objects in question are now stored in a Virginia warehouse, and BACC has sought to have them reviewed by their own experts.

Among the plaintiffs are Harvey Matthews, a former resident of the Black community on River Road between Brookside Drive and Little Falls Parkway, that was wiped out by developers who evicted the residents to redevelop the area into an industrial and commercial zone in the 1960s. A second plaintiff is Darold Cuba, a historian who has extensively researched kinship communities and networks that formed in post-Emancipation America, exactly like the one on River Road formed by freed slaves from the adjacent Loughborough plantation. Cuba is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. 

BACC and its President, Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, are also plaintiffs. BACC community organizer and activist Ari Gutman, and activist and former Green Party candidate for Montgomery County Council Timothy Willard round out the parties filing suit.

The plaintiffs have the highest-powered legal representation yet in the cemetery saga. They are being represented by the prominent and massive international law firm of Holland & Knight.

A pre-trial conference in the case has been scheduled for June 5, 2025 in Montgomery County Circuit Court. The case has been assigned to Judge James A. Bonifant.

Photo: Gail Rebhan

Bethesda Metro station 40th anniversary celebration this Sunday, Aug. 25

The Bethesda Historical Society will mark one of the greatest moments in Bethesda history this Sunday, August 25, 2024 from 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM on the Bethesda Metro Center plaza. It will have been exactly 40 years ago Sunday that the Metro subway system officially arrived in downtown Bethesda with the opening of the Bethesda Metro station. A time of tremendous excitement, the redevelopment of the site that became the Metro Center also brought an upheaval and departure of beloved businesses and old architecture. 

The Metro Center redevelopment did deliver modern office buildings and a hotel that are still impressive today. There was even a Burger King for a time! And the Metro Center plaza became a central gathering space for downtown Bethesda, with its ice rink, Christmas tree, and July 4th firework displays. All of those seasonal features are gone now, as the center of activity drifted over to the newer Bethesda Row development this century. The plaza fountains still provide an oasis of respite in the Central Business District.

It's hard to imagine today how exciting it was to ride the Metro subway for the first time in the 1980s. The system's stations were the design envy of the world. Some of that original aesthetic and vision has been lost with recent attempts to brighten surfaces and wreck the dramatic lighting. Suffice it to say, there is little appreciation of Brutalism (or great architecture, for that matter) among those who now dominate regional decisionmaking.

Sunday's event will feature historical exhibits, music, and family activities. There will be special remarks delivered at 12:15 PM. The event is co-sponsored by the Marriott Bethesda Downtown hotel, the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Regional Services Center, the Greater Bethesda Chamber of Commerce, transit agency WMATA, and the KID Museum. 

Purple Line tracks laid under East-West Highway in Bethesda (Photos)

Trucks began hauling rail for the future Purple Line into downtown Bethesda at the end of March. Now you can see the first trackage for the light rail line between Bethesda and New Carrollton under the bridge on East-West Highway. Standard-gauge rail has been laid atop concrete ties on a gravel railbed. To the left is the parallel right-of-way for the Capital Crescent Trail, which will be rebuilt alongside the rail line. 

You can also see how much wider the Purple Line is than the single-track CSX freight railroad that originally used this right-of-way between Silver Spring and Georgetown in Washington, D.C. Had regional railroad history turned out differently, it might have ended up being this wide anyway. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad originally constructed the Georgetown Branch railroad as its future gateway from the north to the south, and were attempting to reach a bridge over the Potomac River it had planned to build. 

If this project had come to fruition, today it would be a major interstate rail corridor and gateway to the south. Like many other main lines, it might have widened to two or three tracks. However, the B&O scrapped those plans when the Pennsylvania Railroad finally granted it permission to use its Potomac bridge. 

The B&O continued to use the Georgetown Branch for over 60 years to deliver freight to customers at Chevy Chase Lake, downtown Bethesda where Bethesda Row is today, the industrial area at River Road, the former U.S. Defense Mapping Agency site that was established in 1942 in the Brookmont area, and on the Georgetown waterfront. Through mergers, the line was later operated by the Chessie System, and ultimately, CSX. 

CSX upgraded the track of the Georgetown Branch, which had fallen into such poor condition that engineers were forced to cap their top speed at 10 MPH on some sections. But their investment was ultimately a complete waste of money. When CSX ceased operations and received permission to abandon the line in the mid-1980s, the line was acquired by Montgomery County, and all of that new track was ripped up. The Georgetown Branch right-of-way was then used to build the Capital Crescent Trail.

Bethesda Black cemetery advocates raise Juneteenth flag at Jamie Raskin's office

Leaders and members of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition traveled to Congressman Jamie Raskin's office last week, to protest Raskin's "continued refusal to take congressional action on the desecration, flooding, pouring of concrete on our ancestors, and cover-up of crimes against African people in Moses African Cemetery." Raskin previously visited the site of the burial ground, which is located under Montgomery County government-owned parcels of land on the Westwood Tower property, and directly across the Willett Branch stream from the rear parking lot of Westwood Tower. However, he has refused to meet with the group since or take action at the federal level on the cemetery issues, BACC says.

At Raskin's office last week, the group raised the Juneteenth flag in honor of Pvt. William H.H. Brown, who served with the United States Colored Troops who fought for the Union side in the U.S. Civil War. Brown is among the many former slaves buried in Moses African Cemetery. BACC has also created a video with a Civil War reenactor playing Pvt. Brown. "We told the White Union officers, if they would give us the gun, we would free ourselves," the actor portraying Brown says in the video. "We won our freedom. Now Montgomery County, Maryland is desecrating our sacred remains."

The BACC has called on the public to boycott all official Montgomery County government-sponsored Juneteenth events, in light of our elected officials' inaction on the cemetery matters. It has planned a full program of alternative Juneteenth events it encourages residents to attend instead. See the event announcements below for full details: