McCrillis house and gardens

 

One of the lesser known parks in Montgomery County is McCrillis house and gardens.  This is a five acre park donated to the county in 1978.

There are numerous paths winding their way throughout the property with a large variety of trees and shrubs, many of which have signs with their names on them.

There is also a house which you can rent for special events but isn't normally open to the public.

The park is located at 6910 Greentree Road, Bethesda, Maryland 20817 and is  open daily from 10am until sunset.

The Rae apartments, construction update.

 The Rae is a new 343-unit, five-story apartment building being constructed on Motor City Drive across from the Home Depot and Montgomery Mall in Bethesda, Maryland.  This is the site of the former Ourisman Ford car dealership.

 Here is a context shot that I took from the bridge over the I-270 spur.  On the right is The Rae construction, in the distance behind it is the Home Depot. The road you see is Westlake Terrace which is what Fernwood Road becomes.  On the left, outside of the picture, is Montgomery Mall.

 

Here's a good view of the construction. In the distance to the left is the parking garage and there is the concrete block tower that the rest of the building will be built around. The building will be primarily constructed out of wood.

Here's the view from Motor City drive. What can I say, that is super ugly.  Looking at their website it does appear that there will be apartments in front of the bare concrete wall of the parking structure, so it should look a lot better once it is done.

Amalyn Update

 It has been a while since I have posted an update on the Amalyn development, which is the new housing development on the former WMAL transmitter site.  They have been busy so lets get started.

The main road, which is an extension of Grayswood Road to Greentree Road is paved (that was in my last update) and they now have planters blocking you from driving onto it from Greentree.  For a while it was just the barrels and some tape.  They intend to leave it blocked until traffic calming devices are installed on Grayswood.

Up until this weekend, the sales office was all dark gray, which made it hard to read the "Toll Brothers" sign on it.  Now thy have painted the front part white.  To the right of it you can see the first house has also been given a dark gray color.  It looks like it is nearly done with drywall up on the inside.

The first set of townhouses are under construction.  They have garages in the back.  I assume these will be the model townhomes.  They are bare plywood right now.

It looks like this isn't for a house since there isn't a basement, and it looks to big to be townhouses.  Maybe it is a commong clubhouse or activity building?

A fairly new water retention pond. This is right at Greentree and Grubby Thicket Way.

They have been burying a lot of pipes for drainage and it looks like they have a lot more to go.