Anyone Remember Bethesda and Silver Spring in 2000?

[Anonymous]

Bethesda in 2000...used to go there for medical appointments or work meetings or lunches with clients. The parking garages totally creeped me out. When I changed jobs I never went back.
All I know of Silver Soring is there is a truly horrendous cross intersection full of Maryland drivers.
Ballston had parking, has more now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just want to know where I can find a Giant in MOCO as nice as the one in McLean or a Harris Teeter as nice as the ones in Ballston, Dunn Loring, or in Crystal City.

I’ve seen homeless people literally asking for change from people in the self checkout lines at the Harris Teeter on Battery Lane and saw shoplifters rushing the door in the morning last week at the Harris Teeter near White Flint. I asked the women who worked at the bakery if it was a regular occurrence and they said it happens all the time but no one does anything to stop it. It’s not like this in the VA Harris Teeters I go to and they’re nicer and stocked better as well. Why?

Oh boy, the dude who compares Harris Teeters and Targets in the suburbs is back. Do you just spend your weekends running around to different big box stores? Your comparisons are silly. If you're going to interview store clerks, then do it across the board and for stores that are in similarly walkable locations -- is the McLean location of HT walkable to anything? The ones in White Flint and Bethesda are in very urbanized areas. The idea that VA doesn't have shoplifting is silly.

Meanwhile, while this dude was making the grand tour of grocery stores, here's what else was happening in VA over the weekend:
https://www.arlnow.com/2025/02/15/breaking-shooting-reported-in-crystal-city/

Have you been to the places I’m talking about? We’re comparing the same stores. The Ballston and Mosaic Targets are as walkable than the Rockville Target and the Wheaton Target. Go across the bridge sometime and see for yourself and then ask yourself why things are this way.

And we get it, Crystal City and Pentagon City have crime at times. Let’s compare Potomac to Great Falls, Tysons to Bethesda, Leesburg to Frederick. Let’s drill down on the crime data if you want. While we’re at it let’s compare the crime stats in PG County to any VA suburb.

You didn't answer my question as to why you're spending the weekend running around to big box stores in the suburbs? Maybe you're just making everything up? Because normal people don't do this. Depending on what I need, I shop at the HT Bethesda, Trader Joes Bethesda, Giant Bethesda, and Costco Wheaton, and that's it. I think the overwhelming majority of people are like me. I'm not driving 45 minutes into Nova to go to a Harris Teeter there -- that's truly bizarre.

I live in VA and it takes me 15 minutes to get to the 495 Old Georgetown Road exit where I have family nearby. I’ve been going to all these stores for the past 5 years and am in MD at least 2 days a week. You’re acting like someone is comparing stores in Fredericksburg to stores in Owings Mills. Tysons is a 10 minute drive to Montgomery Mall in no traffic. It takes 25 minutes to drive from the Mosaic Target to the Rockville Target in no traffic. It makes as much sense as comparing somewhere in Gaithersburg to somewhere in Bethesda.

A more interesting question is why you are so set on never going to Virginia. If you live in Bethesda, North Arlington and McLean are 10 minutes away and a lot closer than Wheaton.

Sorry, there's no world in which North Arlington and McLean are 10 minutes away from Bethesda, even if you live in 20816 right on the DC line and you do the trip at 5 AM. Even then, you'd get to a part of McLean and North Arlington that has no grocery stores, so you need to drive even further to get to one of the stores you mentioned. I live near downtown Bethesda, and all of the stores I mentioned are within 5 minutes of me, except that Costco is a bit of a longer drive. I actually do have family in Falls Church, but I go there to visit them, not to do my grocery shopping. Like I said, that would be truly bizarre. At best, I have been to some of the restaurants in that area.

Sorry, but I live near Chain Bridge and can 100% be to Bethesda by Mass/Western in about 10 minutes. Sorry this bothers you so much.

You didn't read the thread closely enough. I am very familiar with the area, and of course you can get from Chain Bridge to Bethesda in 10 minutes -- that wasn't the issue. The PP was saying you can get from Bethesda to a Harris teeter or Target in North Arlington or Mclean in 10 minutes. So please tell me the exact point in Bethesda and the exact Harris teeter or Target in McLean or North Arlington that can be done in a 10-minute drive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just want to know where I can find a Giant in MOCO as nice as the one in McLean or a Harris Teeter as nice as the ones in Ballston, Dunn Loring, or in Crystal City.

I’ve seen homeless people literally asking for change from people in the self checkout lines at the Harris Teeter on Battery Lane and saw shoplifters rushing the door in the morning last week at the Harris Teeter near White Flint. I asked the women who worked at the bakery if it was a regular occurrence and they said it happens all the time but no one does anything to stop it. It’s not like this in the VA Harris Teeters I go to and they’re nicer and stocked better as well. Why?

Oh boy, the dude who compares Harris Teeters and Targets in the suburbs is back. Do you just spend your weekends running around to different big box stores? Your comparisons are silly. If you're going to interview store clerks, then do it across the board and for stores that are in similarly walkable locations -- is the McLean location of HT walkable to anything? The ones in White Flint and Bethesda are in very urbanized areas. The idea that VA doesn't have shoplifting is silly.

Meanwhile, while this dude was making the grand tour of grocery stores, here's what else was happening in VA over the weekend:
https://www.arlnow.com/2025/02/15/breaking-shooting-reported-in-crystal-city/

Have you been to the places I’m talking about? We’re comparing the same stores. The Ballston and Mosaic Targets are as walkable than the Rockville Target and the Wheaton Target. Go across the bridge sometime and see for yourself and then ask yourself why things are this way.

And we get it, Crystal City and Pentagon City have crime at times. Let’s compare Potomac to Great Falls, Tysons to Bethesda, Leesburg to Frederick. Let’s drill down on the crime data if you want. While we’re at it let’s compare the crime stats in PG County to any VA suburb.

You didn't answer my question as to why you're spending the weekend running around to big box stores in the suburbs? Maybe you're just making everything up? Because normal people don't do this. Depending on what I need, I shop at the HT Bethesda, Trader Joes Bethesda, Giant Bethesda, and Costco Wheaton, and that's it. I think the overwhelming majority of people are like me. I'm not driving 45 minutes into Nova to go to a Harris Teeter there -- that's truly bizarre.

I live in VA and it takes me 15 minutes to get to the 495 Old Georgetown Road exit where I have family nearby. I’ve been going to all these stores for the past 5 years and am in MD at least 2 days a week. You’re acting like someone is comparing stores in Fredericksburg to stores in Owings Mills. Tysons is a 10 minute drive to Montgomery Mall in no traffic. It takes 25 minutes to drive from the Mosaic Target to the Rockville Target in no traffic. It makes as much sense as comparing somewhere in Gaithersburg to somewhere in Bethesda.

A more interesting question is why you are so set on never going to Virginia. If you live in Bethesda, North Arlington and McLean are 10 minutes away and a lot closer than Wheaton.

Sorry, there's no world in which North Arlington and McLean are 10 minutes away from Bethesda, even if you live in 20816 right on the DC line and you do the trip at 5 AM. Even then, you'd get to a part of McLean and North Arlington that has no grocery stores, so you need to drive even further to get to one of the stores you mentioned. I live near downtown Bethesda, and all of the stores I mentioned are within 5 minutes of me, except that Costco is a bit of a longer drive. I actually do have family in Falls Church, but I go there to visit them, not to do my grocery shopping. Like I said, that would be truly bizarre. At best, I have been to some of the restaurants in that area.

There are some people who have lived in both MD and VA over the past 25 years, or who work in one and live in the other. It’s odd that you would think it was weird to go to grocery stores or a Target in a state that’s literally across a bridge. Are people from New Jersey not allowed to comment on grocery stores in NYC or are they weird for stepping in a grocery store there?

Yes, it is actually weird to be surrounded by every imaginable grocery store in Bethesda, and yet prefer to drive in this area's nightmare traffic to get to the exact same grocery store in Virginia.

[Anonymous]

All this talk about grocery stores is so funny. The Harris teeter looks exactly the same in North Bethesda, as in Park Potomac, as in Bethesda, as in N Arlington.

The only difference is Maryland doesn’t have a Ballston-Rosslyn corridor of urbanization. You step outside Ballston and N Arlington is exactly the same as North Bethesda or Silver Spring in terms of endless suburban sprawl, strip malls, and highways. Fairfax arguably has more highways than MoCo

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Remember when MOCO was trying to get Amazon to come to the White Flint Mall site? Amazon’s already built office buildings in Crystal City and there is nothing but dirt and no plans to build anything at White Flint. You can’t make this stuff up.

Let's go ahead and put that "attainable" housing up at White Flint, since we have this housing crisis, per Friedson, Glass, Stewart, and Fani-Gonzalez.

Well, only if it’s luxury.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All this talk about grocery stores is so funny. The Harris teeter looks exactly the same in North Bethesda, as in Park Potomac, as in Bethesda, as in N Arlington.

The only difference is Maryland doesn’t have a Ballston-Rosslyn corridor of urbanization. You step outside Ballston and N Arlington is exactly the same as North Bethesda or Silver Spring in terms of endless suburban sprawl, strip malls, and highways. Fairfax arguably has more highways than MoCo

There's some weird contingent (or more likely one or two lunatic cranks) here that does nothing but make "doesn't everybody just HATE Bethesda?!" posts over and over again. You're entirely right, Bethesda and North Arlington are both top-tier suburbs and their chain stores are indistinguishable from each other. Some people have so little going on in their lives that they obsess over nothing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:All this talk about grocery stores is so funny. The Harris teeter looks exactly the same in North Bethesda, as in Park Potomac, as in Bethesda, as in N Arlington.

The only difference is Maryland doesn’t have a Ballston-Rosslyn corridor of urbanization. You step outside Ballston and N Arlington is exactly the same as North Bethesda or Silver Spring in terms of endless suburban sprawl, strip malls, and highways. Fairfax arguably has more highways than MoCo

That’s because of the proximity to the DC line. Wisconsin Ave and CT Ave from Bethesda/CC into DC is that. Tenley, friendship, Bethesda is essentially that corridor. We just don’t have a river blocking the access to dc

[Anonymous]

BRING BACK MONGOLIAN GRILL

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All this talk about grocery stores is so funny. The Harris teeter looks exactly the same in North Bethesda, as in Park Potomac, as in Bethesda, as in N Arlington.

The only difference is Maryland doesn’t have a Ballston-Rosslyn corridor of urbanization. You step outside Ballston and N Arlington is exactly the same as North Bethesda or Silver Spring in terms of endless suburban sprawl, strip malls, and highways. Fairfax arguably has more highways than MoCo

That’s because of the proximity to the DC line. Wisconsin Ave and CT Ave from Bethesda/CC into DC is that. Tenley, friendship, Bethesda is essentially that corridor. We just don’t have a river blocking the access to dc

That’s part of the problem. Places like Cleveland Park and Tenleytown were nicer 10-20 years ago. Cleveland Park peaked when Dino and the Uptown Theater were still around.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All this talk about grocery stores is so funny. The Harris teeter looks exactly the same in North Bethesda, as in Park Potomac, as in Bethesda, as in N Arlington.

The only difference is Maryland doesn’t have a Ballston-Rosslyn corridor of urbanization. You step outside Ballston and N Arlington is exactly the same as North Bethesda or Silver Spring in terms of endless suburban sprawl, strip malls, and highways. Fairfax arguably has more highways than MoCo

That’s because of the proximity to the DC line. Wisconsin Ave and CT Ave from Bethesda/CC into DC is that. Tenley, friendship, Bethesda is essentially that corridor. We just don’t have a river blocking the access to dc

That’s part of the problem. Places like Cleveland Park and Tenleytown were nicer 10-20 years ago. Cleveland Park peaked when Dino and the Uptown Theater were still around.

They are doing a massive overhaul of Friendship, I would imagine the corridor from Friendship to Tenley is next. It's too affluent of an area to have such blah.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:BRING BACK MONGOLIAN GRILL

YES!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All this talk about grocery stores is so funny. The Harris teeter looks exactly the same in North Bethesda, as in Park Potomac, as in Bethesda, as in N Arlington.

The only difference is Maryland doesn’t have a Ballston-Rosslyn corridor of urbanization. You step outside Ballston and N Arlington is exactly the same as North Bethesda or Silver Spring in terms of endless suburban sprawl, strip malls, and highways. Fairfax arguably has more highways than MoCo

That’s because of the proximity to the DC line. Wisconsin Ave and CT Ave from Bethesda/CC into DC is that. Tenley, friendship, Bethesda is essentially that corridor. We just don’t have a river blocking the access to dc

That’s part of the problem. Places like Cleveland Park and Tenleytown were nicer 10-20 years ago. Cleveland Park peaked when Dino and the Uptown Theater were still around.

They are doing a massive overhaul of Friendship, I would imagine the corridor from Friendship to Tenley is next. It's too affluent of an area to have such blah.

A lot of these places have been left behind for Shaw, The Wharf, Crystal City, Mosaic, Ballston, etc. There are some places that were nice 25 years ago and have only become moreso, like Old Town and Del Ray. Places like Upper NW, Bethesda, and Silver Spring haven’t kept pace.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I remember when Bethesda was MUCH nicer than a boring, run down place like Ballston, which had an old Radison hotel, a decaying mall, and a subpar movie theater and not much else. I remember when Silver Spring had more going on than Crystal City or Pentagon City.

No one would prefer Ballston over Bethesda 25 years ago. Now it’s a toss up, and some might want to live in Ballston instead. You could make comparisons to VA suburbs vs MD suburbs over the course of the past 25 years and in almost every instance VA will come out ahead when you look at how much economic and infrastructure development they’ve had.

What happened to all of MOCO’s momentum? Is it all Elrich’s fault? Who’s to blame for the complete lack of forward momentum compared to Virginia in business and infrastructure development in the past 25 years?

Your assessment is wildly off the mark.

Silver Spring in the year 2000 didn’t have much of anything but a dying mall with discount stores where Hecht’s was until the 1990s when it closed. Pentagon City had Pentagon City with the DC region’s second Nordstrom and Macy’s and other upscale shops like the Nature Company and Benetton along with a Ritz Carlton.

Ballston in the year 2000 had a somewhat decent mid range / healthy mall before its death spiral and also a Kramer Books. Nearby Clarendon had that new shopping area with one the first Apple Stores that replaced an old Sears department store. Bethesda at the time had Bethesda Row which was still new.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I remember when Bethesda was MUCH nicer than a boring, run down place like Ballston, which had an old Radison hotel, a decaying mall, and a subpar movie theater and not much else. I remember when Silver Spring had more going on than Crystal City or Pentagon City.

No one would prefer Ballston over Bethesda 25 years ago. Now it’s a toss up, and some might want to live in Ballston instead. You could make comparisons to VA suburbs vs MD suburbs over the course of the past 25 years and in almost every instance VA will come out ahead when you look at how much economic and infrastructure development they’ve had.

What happened to all of MOCO’s momentum? Is it all Elrich’s fault? Who’s to blame for the complete lack of forward momentum compared to Virginia in business and infrastructure development in the past 25 years?

Your assessment is wildly off the mark.

Silver Spring in the year 2000 didn’t have much of anything but a dying mall with discount stores where Hecht’s was until the 1990s when it closed. Pentagon City had Pentagon City with the DC region’s second Nordstrom and Macy’s and other upscale shops like the Nature Company and Benetton along with a Ritz Carlton.

Ballston in the year 2000 had a somewhat decent mid range / healthy mall before its death spiral and also a Kramer Books. Nearby Clarendon had that new shopping area with one the first Apple Stores that replaced an old Sears department store. Bethesda at the time had Bethesda Row which was still new.

You are right about Silver Spring. Better comparison is 2011 to now. In 2011, the Downtown had just been revitalized 4 years earlier, AFI was 8 years old, and Discovery was still there, and The Fillmore just opened. It’s all been downhill for the past 10 years imo.

[Anonymous]

Yeah Silver Spring has been going downhill (still love AFI Silver tho, best repertory movie theater in the country).

Bethesda is still really nice, better than any place in NoVa to me. But other than Bethesda I’d take the Clarendon-Ballston-Arlington Forest region over any place in MoCo