Dena Levitz, The Examiner
2007-07-06 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

SILVER SPRING, Md. -

Silver Spring residents are livid that crews have reportedly started to alter the facade of a building on a registered historic block of their city without approval by Montgomery County’s preservation commission.

The building, which is the site of former women’s apparel store Rostas, is at 8668 Coleman Road along a row of 60-year-old Art Deco buildings where developers are prohibited from making changes to the outer structure unless they have approval from the commission.

In spite of the protections, Marcie Stickle, advocacy chair for the Silver Spring Historical Society, said she was horrified late last week to find that a portion of the front exterior had been renovated.

“It’s just devastating,” Stickle said. “They’ve put up a stockade fence that’s almost as high as the canopy so you have to climb on things to look over the stockade fence. When we borrowed a chair, we saw that the first-floor facade is essentially gone. The beautiful original plate-glass display windows are all gone, too.”

She was one of dozens whose complaints led Department of Permitting Services to put a stop-work order on the project Monday.

But Stickle said because permit officials didn’t act until the weekend, residents fear original elements of the building could be permanently altered.

Permitting Services Division Chief Reginald Jetter, who called for the stop-work order, said he went to Colesville Road early Saturday and saw no evidence that crews had erroneously altered the outside of the building.

Last month his department issued a permit allowing telecommunication giant T-Mobile to do work on the interior of the structure, but not the exterior.

For that, permission from the county’s Historic Preservation Commission is required.

Still, the heavy volume of complaints prompted him to put a sign outside the property forbidding anyone from doing any physical work.

“We’re not 100 percent sure of what they’ve done,” Jetter told The Examiner Tuesday. “That’s why our inspectors are going out there [later this week] to see. ... If they have done work on the outside, we’ll issue a notice of violation.”

The inability of permitting services to properly oversee the work harkens back to an incident 23 years ago on the same block, said Wayne Goldstein, president of Montgomery Preservation Inc. At that time, crews did renovation work at the former Silver Theatre just days before the project could be decided upon by the Historic Preservation Commission.

dlevitz@dcexaminer.com