By JADE TRAN
Photo Credit: Google Maps
Before the vivacious murals and the cozy clutter of Busboys and Poets, or even a Yes! Organic Market, Route 1 in Hyattsville, wasn’t known for much at the turn of the century. Think flickering neon signs and sprawling parking lots with nowhere to go.
Enter Mike Franklin, a toy seller, and Peter A. Shapiro, a political organizer who cut his teeth in labor organizing and the Rainbow Coalition, two unlikely characters in what became a decades-long transformation of one of Prince George’s County’s most iconic, and arguably artsiest, corridors.
Mike Franklin didn’t move to Hyattsville in 1988 with grandiose plans to become a neighborhood business owner. He was just tired of commuting in heavy traffic to sell his wares. He worked in the toy business, had a family, and stumbled upon a The Washington Post listing in 1991 for an old hardware store on Route 1. He bought it for $150,000, building and contents included, and started selling general store items, as well as his collection of toys.
Meanwhile, in Brentwood, Shapiro, a self-proclaimed “lefty community-organizer type” who served on the Brentwood Town Council from 1993 to 1995 and later on the Prince George’s County Council from 1998 to 2004, was eyeing the same overlooked stretch of road with bigger plans. After moving to the area only a year after Franklin, he quickly dove headfirst into the rigor of local planning efforts, looking to use art and culture as a machine for revitalization. One of his biggest pushes — spearheading the Gateway Arts District, which, according to Hyattsville Aging in Place (HAP) treasurer Lisa Walker, helped funnel in $500 million in new investments along Route 1.
“There was pretty much nothing here,” Franklin said during April’s Corridor Conversations virtual talk, sponsored by a coalition of local neighborhood “villages,” including HAP, Helping Hands University Park, Neighbors Helping Neighbors College Park, and Explorations on Aging.
Walker said the title of the session, “There at the Beginning,” applied to both Franklin and Shapiro, who were present at the start of Route 1’s modern revival, during the era of Tesst Electronics, De’s Deli and rows of used car dealerships and repair shops.
In 1992, the Franklins opened a restaurant with vintage tables, hung artwork and the lingering scent of old hardware supplies left over from Hyattsville Hardware Store. Oh, and they named it Franklins.
At a time when Route 1’s Hyattsville end was still more of a punchline than a trendy destination, Shapiro and Franklin began working in tandem, one through planning policy, the other through beer and expansion. Through a chance meeting in the early ‘90s, Shapiro sat next to a “hippy guy” in a citizens’ advisory committee meeting for Planning Area 68, he said, and the pair sparked a friendship and allyship that’s lasted around 30 years.
“Almost right away, Mike is saying, ‘Yeah, I got this idea for a little restaurant,’” Shapiro said. “I had the absolute pleasure of sort of living vicariously through him as he went through this whole joy and disaster of a process that’s brought it up to where it is now.”
After momentum and years before businesses like Busboys and Poets and Yes! Organic sprouted, local leaders from nearby areas gathered to figure out how to brand and revive the growing corridor. At one meeting, someone tossed out an idea that stuck: With all the artists around, why not just call it an arts district?
Organizers from Brentwood, North Brentwood and Mount Rainier, a tri-town coalition led by former Mount Rainier Mayor Fred Sissine, formed the Mount Rainier Community Development Corporation (CDC), focused on neighborhood revitalization. The group sought to involve someone from the outskirts of the city and asked Shapiro to help, eventually watching their vision come to life with the establishment of the Gateway Arts District in 2001. According to Shapiro, it was no small feat in a region long divided by segregation history and carved-out racial lines.
As their official “coming-out party,” the tri-town coalition hosted an Arts District Summit in 1998 or 1999, Shapiro said, bringing in national players like Artspace. Soon, the up-and-coming district was buzzing with live-workspaces for artists — 47 units, across the traffic circle from what’s now Pennyroyal Station in Mount Rainier.
Franklin took the gamble too, opening a brewery inside his restaurant with a third-position $500,000 loan.
But success has a cost, Franklin reminded the Corridor Conversations attendees. With real estate now far removed from the ‘90s, Shapiro said it’s harder to build anything, and harder still for artists to afford to live in Hyattsville.
“Prices [on the corridor] will have priced out the kind of funkiness that we all kind of settled here for in the first place,” Franklin said. “And that’s kind of like a natural evolution, it’s kind of hard to stop.”
Twenty years later, this Hyattsville corridor is barely recognizable as the one previously filled with tire shops and auto stores. But the bones remain — local and homegrown, sustained by a belief in community-led growth, and by a few very stubborn dreamers.
Franklin is still dreaming. He’s now opening an ice cream parlor to add to his conglomerate of assets. Shapiro, now chair of the county’s planning board, is still pushing for development that honors the community’s historical roots.
Even for HAP treasurer Walker, the story of Route 1 continues to unfold.
“I learned a lot about the history, which I thought I was there at the beginning, as well, but I guess I wasn’t,” she said, reflecting on the event.
April’s Corridor Conversations session wasn’t just a look back. It was a blueprint for how a half-formed vision, some policy and a really good sandwich can collide and transform a town brimming with untapped potential.
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Jade Tran is an undergraduate journalism student at the University of Maryland.
