Town center represents 20 years of work
Riverdale Park Station is being built between three classic Maryland streetcar suburbs of the early 20th Century—Riverdale Park, University Park, and College Park. The 36-acre transit-oriented development (TOD) is “inside the Beltway” about three miles from DC in Prince George’s County. It includes 349 residential units (119 townhouses and 230 apartments)—plus 600 approved multifamily units to come. Twenty-eight commercial buildings on the site comprise 160,000 square feet of retail space, 20,000 square feet of office space, a 120-room hotel, and the county’s first Whole Foods Market.
Typical for building a town center in the suburbs, the zoning had to change to allow mixed-use. MV+A Architects explains: “The entitlements effort included not only the re-zoning … from all-single-family zoning to mixed-use multifamily, but also transportation access enhancements that involved exhaustive coordination with myriad municipalities, a university, and railway transit entities along with the inclusion and accommodation of several noteworthy easements.”
A key piece of infrastructure is a rail line overpass, where the train tracks present a difficult barrier to accessing the town center from the east. The solution, MV+A reports, “was to line most of the edge with multifamily housing and create a ceremonial entry sequence that included a dramatic bridge connecting our main street to the other side of the rail line. This … prevented the development from becoming semi-insular with a back-of house edge condition. It also activated a dormant edge for the neighboring university tech campus. Lastly, it created an overpass in a location where the nearest overpasses were a couple miles to the north and south. While the coordination for these features was extremely complex and exhaustive, it made a world of difference to the project, community, and the region.”
The town center is a social and civic gathering place for surrounding communities. These include an art park that lines Route 1, on the west side of the town center, the “Bear Square” public plaza at the center (named after a sculpture), and a popular children’s park in the residential area.
A bike trail runs through the development along an old streetcar line. “That is part of a larger trail network providing cyclists safe passage to the District and points further south in Northern Virginia, and as far north as Baltimore,” the designers explain.
“There are some weeks I don’t even get in my car,” says Dan Collinga, a resident of Riverdale Park Station. Here, instead of people going home after work and shutting up inside, people are oriented to the public spaces, like the town center or the farmers market.”
The town center, which still has more to build, is the work of 20 years. The county published the plan in 2004. “Our team has been working on this project for over 15 years,” says MV+A, the design architect for the project.
