Saturday, December 29, 2012

So Monday Night I'm Gonna Party Like It's 1978

Here are some of the places that folks rang in the New Year thirty-four years ago in downtown Silver Spring.  All of the advertisements are from the pages of the December 29, 1978 The Suburban Record.


The Record, which started publishing in 1944, was located at 8505 Dixon Avenue in 1978.  Today this address is part of an office building located at 1010 Wayne Avenue.

The Silver Spring Historical Society owns a rare bound copy of this newspaper's run from 1978 that was generously donated by Chip Py a few years ago.  If anyone has copies of this important newspaper, please consider donating them to SSHS.


Spring Garden was located at 1160 Bonifant Street which is no longer extant, having been replaced by a portion of the Paul S. Sarbanes Transit Center.


Courtesy Silver Spring Singular

Villa Rosa was located at 813 Ellsworth Drive which is also long gone.  The restaurant was located about where Zpizza sits today.


Beacon Auto Body was located at 8111 Mayor Lane.  Beacon closed in 2010 after being in business for 38 years.  The building is still there (and empty) but not Beacon's awesome sign which was the side of the actual 1956 Nash Metropolitan automobile.  This car is in the collection of the SSHS and it has been offered, along with other vintage Silver Spring business signs, for permanent display in the to-be-constructed Silver Spring Library!




And lastly Mike offered a "Cheers" from 1052 Ripley Street, now the site of the Solaire Apartments.

Wherever you spend this New Year's Eve, may it be memorable!

3 comments:

goldeneye said...

Jerry—

I love your photo of the wall with the Nash Metropolitan stuck to it—those were darling cars with a back seat like cement. Our family had one in the '50s. I met a fellow in the '80s who collected them and was a member of the CLUB. Thanks for the Memories!

Oh, and if you want to make a © symbol for your captions and text, if you are on a Mac the keys are Option+g, or on a Win the keys are Alt+0169 on numerical pad.

HAPPY NEW YEAR whatever year it is!

—Susan

Silver Spring: Then and Again said...

Thanks regarding © !

Anonymous said...

Just listening to some Charlie Byrd and remembered (and searched and found this site)being a little lad and going with my family to see Charlie Byrd perform at Villa Rosa--solo, not with his trio--around 1959. I believe he had some ownership or maybe just friends with the owner of Villa Rosa. Anyway, love your site and the memories of Silver Spring as I know it then.