My daily commute joined US 1 at its intersection with Madison St in Hyattsville, MD. Three buildings have stood at that intersection over this entire period, although the appearance and use of each has changed during that time.

Click on any image for an enlarged view.

Just across Madison St is the former Jey's Auto Care. This building has undergone a slow but thorough transformation while retaining its basic geometry of squares and rectangles:

The third building at this intersection, across Baltimore Ave from the other two, is the former Lustine Chevrolet showroom and service center:

This Art Moderne structure, designed by the Baltimore-based architect Francis Dano Jackley and built in 1950, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A report prepared by Prof. Isabelle Gournay of the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, notes its significance as 

"one of the few remaining automobile dealership plants dating back to the decade following World War II which have not been demolished or altered beyond recognition. . . . Based on merchandising studies and meant to capture the attention of motorists, the design of the Lustine showroom reflects the consumerist zeitgeist of the years following World War II, the intensely personal pleasure most Americans took in purchasing and using automobiles from 1945 to the early 1960s. Although its design followed guidelines which General Motors provided to its dealers in the shape of a profusely illustrated manual published in 1948, the Lustine showroom is unique; our research leads us to believe that its massing curved show windows forming two staggered bays under a flat but sweeping canopy had no precise equivalent in the United States.

https://www.hpahyattsville.org/history-of-hyattsville/lustine-dealership-showroom

When it was new, this unique structure stimulated post-war development of businesses along this stretch of Baltimore Ave/US 1. Now, all these years later, it has been renovated to serve as a gym for residents of the surrounding, newly-constructed apartment complex. In that new role and with its Art Moderne facade refurbished, the Lustine showroom has again influenced development of this neighborhood.

I took the photo below in October 2005, long before I envisioned this intersection as the cornerstone of a twenty-year-long doccumentary project. While this snapshot does not provide as comprehensive a picture of "before" as I now wish I had, it does capture some key features, which you can see better by clicking to enloarge the image. Jey's Auto Care takes up the foreground. The building is out of sight, but I believe that the business had already folded by that time and, until steel cables were strung across the driveways, the site had become an impromptu parking lot. The Lustine building sits empty across the street, as empty as the adjoining asphalt lot with its sign advertising new and used Chevy trucks. Beyond that lot stands a tall white commercial building that towers over a small peaked-roof home that can be seen just under the Lustine canopy. To the left, farther down Baltimore Ave, past the weedy trees, an even taller brick building rises, the Verizon Central Office; more on it below. It overshadows two single-story commercial buildings that appear to have corrugated metal roofs.           

2005 

This is what that same stretch of street, from the Verizon building to the Lustine showroom, looked in 2011:

2011

This stretch of new construction strikes me as having a complex design relationship to the renovated Lustine building. The showroom itself embodies a kind of retrofuturism. I was born in the late forties and this is indeed what the future was predicted to look like when I was a kid. By the year 2000 there should have been flying versions of '57 Chevys on display behind those big curved windows, ready to be taken for a test drive (or a test flight; what else were those those big fins for?). But the closest we actually got to that dream of the future was the towering cities (with flying cars of all shapes) depicted in the cartoons of Jean Giraud ("Moebius") and the film Blade Runner. The refurbished Lustine showroom nostalgically evokes the time when those dreams were new. For an old coot like me, the building is itself a Moebius strip on which the past and future continuously chase each other, only to keep running into themselves.

The other buildings running down the block are engaged in a similar dance with the past. Their facades suggest that they are rehabs of old buildings that had been built over an extended period of time and for differing purposes; one building, the four-bay brick with the wall of double-hung windows, looks like it had once been a small factory with abundant natural lighting.

But as the 2005 photo shows, there were no old buildings on the ground between the Lustine and Verizon buildings, and there had not been any there since at least 1950, when the dealership opened. Therefore these condos are new construction, not rehabs. Their facades do harken back to a time, roughly the 1880s through the 1920s, when small factories and retail shops with loft storage that looked like that were built in many cities. Years later, no longer serving their original purposes, those buildings were converted into residences, at first informally and later officially, for big bucks. That did happen ... just not here in suburban Maryland.

So whether you dream of a borrowed past or long for a future that still hasn't come, you might find something that appeals to you.

Here is that that same stretch again, as it appears now, minus the Lustine building and with the addition of a building on the left end housing three addresses (5600, 5602, and 5604) that I had missed in the ealier pan. Structurally there are no differences since 2011, but in the intervening fifteen years, a few businesses appear to have folded (including a corner cafe) while others have opened (a bakery, an insurance agency).

Finally, here is the full facade of the Verizon Central Office at the intersection with Jefferson St:

This building is described online as a "technical facility that serves as a major switching hub for Verizon network services." The 2004 application for Hyattsville's designation as a historic district includes this description of its  design history:

"Sited at the northwest corner of Jefferson Street is 5500 Baltimore Avenue. This three-story brick building was constructed circa 1940 (with a non-historic addition of four stories built in 1962). Several features include a pedimented gable with the tympanum pierced with a circular window, a heavily molded cornice, and decorative swags between the second and third stories. The 1962 addition respected the form and used the same materials as the earlier building, thus preserving the integrity of the building's design."

The addional construction explains both the unmatched brick in the upper stories and the curious cornice and pediment-cum-tympanum halfway up the building. But these latter features also seem odd in that they are pretty fancy classical adornments for such a utilitarian facility. Contemporary data centers that serve similar purposes are housed in giant, anonymous-looking warehouses that sprawl over thousands of acres in the Northern Virginia countryside.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX