Tower scales back first phase in giant redevelopment of The Blairs complex

By Sonny Goldreich

The Tower Cos. has scaled back the size of the first two residential buildings in its massive redevelopment of The Blairs complex in Silver Spring, under a site plan the firm filed with Montgomery County.

The ultimate 20-year build-out still calls for a 3.8 million-square-foot gateway neighborhood bordering DC, which would double the number of existing residential units to 2,800 and the amount of commercial space to 450,000 square feet. The site plan will not be available to the public until it is assigned to a county Department of Planning reviewer by the end of the month, but the first two apartment buildings have been redesigned to present less of a monolithic face to Eastern Avenue, according to company officials who have been conducting meetings with community groups in recent weeks.

What that means is the two apartment buildings will offer a combined 500 units, instead of the 527 included in the master and preliminary plans approved last year. Tower’s goal is to welcome the public to enjoy the acres of parks and new retail space as commuters come off the nearby Metro subway or drive by on their way home from work.

“This will not be a walled off, private development. This will be something that you’re really encouraged to interact with your neighbors,” Luis Bernardo, principal and partner at Design Collective, the project’s architect, said at a Blairs community meeting last month, which can be watched online. “We’ve really scaled down the project and had it stepped down to the community.”

The first 275-unit building will reach a height of 14 floors nearest the center of the 28-acre complex. The second 225-unit structure will max out at 18 floors. But they both will step down to seven floors, then five, along Eastern Avenue. The units fronting Eastern will look like town houses, similar to the Blair Towns, a 78-unit apartment project on the Colesville Road side of the complex that Tower completed in 2004.

“The original plan had 14 stories coming all the way up to Eastern Avenue,” Bernardo said.

The buildings also will feature design elements that mark a dramatic break with the drab uniform red brick of the vacant four 5-story Blair Towers buildings that were completed in 1959 and the neighboring 1960s-era glass high-rises. Plans include several types of windows, masonry color and roof gardens to provide “a very rich and complex read to the architecture that wasn’t present in the earlier buildings,” Bernardo said.

The first two apartment buildings will focus construction on the lower half of the property bordering DC. In the upper half, Tower plans to redevelop 85,196 square feet of retail and restaurant space, which includes a 54,000-square-foot Giant Foods grocery store that has 10 years left on its lease.

Ultimately, the project calls for a total of 125,000-square-feet of retail, a 200-room hotel and a 200,000-square-foot office building, which will replace a 72,562 square-foot one. The hotel and office space are part of Tower's Phase 2 site plan, which has not yet been submitted to the county.

The Blairs complex sits within easy walking distance of the Metro and is bounded on the northwest by Colesville Road, on the south by Blair Mill Road, on the northeast by East-West Highway and on the southwest by Eastern Avenue.

Demolition of the four Blair Towers buildings should start later this year after permit approval, with site plan clearance expected by the end of the year, according to Sri Velamati, Tower’s vice president of development. Construction on the first building should start by the middle of 2015 with delivery by the end of 2016. The construction of the smaller building should be completed by late 2017.

The buildings will share an underground parking garage, which is part of Tower’s broader goal to “turn parking lots into parks,” Velamati said during the community meeting last month.

The firm sped up plans for a public dog park, which will be part of the first phase construction, rather than follow after the two apartment buildings are completed, as originally planned.