The thing about the AFI Silver Theatre, especially Auditorium No. 1, is that the theater is so beautiful, you forget you’re at the cinema (except, of course, for that huge screen at the front of the room!)

The AFI Silver is an architectural and cultural highlight of Downtown Silver Spring, and its renaissance has been a major driver of redevelopment and re-investment in downtown since the early 2000s. The original Silver Theatre opened on September 15, 1938, its Art Deco and Art Moderne architecture the work of famed theater designer John Eberson. He embraced a nautical theme, and the theater’s grand, vertical sign was meant to evoke a ship’s mast.

By the early 1980s, the theater’s owners were resisting public calls for the historical preservation of the building. Undoubtedly, such designation would require extra investment on their part. Instead, they opted to start demolition and even vandalized their own property when objections were raised. Concerned Silver Springers rushed to stop the wrecking ball, and in 1984 the county ordered demolition to cease. The owners boarded the facade, and the theater’s future was uncertain. The Art Deco Society of Washington led a 19-year effort to save the theater, and in 1998 Montgomery County government convinced the American Film Institute to relocate their national headquarters from the Kennedy Center in D.C. to a renovated Silver Theatre in Downtown Silver Spring.

Renovation and rehabilitation of the site began in 2001, and the $20 million price tag was paid entirely by Montgomery County. (Our MoCo tax dollars have certainly been spent on less worthy endeavors.) In April 2003, the AFI Silver reopened with a gala attended by Clint Eastwood. Since that time, the theater and the AFI have been dedicated to providing the best of American and foreign films with state-of-the-art technologies.

For showtimes and tickets visit: https://afisilver.afi.com. Auditorium No. 1 is the third largest screen in the entire DC Metro area. And the beautifully restored Art Deco decor puts the theater in a class all its own.

You can rent skates and even take lessons. With chilly temperatures, music piping and the sound of skates on ice, the area feels closer to Bavarian town center than it does an urban core just outside the nation’s Capital. Another out-of-place and out-of-time element of the Silver Spring Skate Rink is the penguin. Sure, they make sense as ice-adaptable animals. And they are adorable as skate-trainers for the young and the neophytes on ice. But there is more to it than that.

Since 1990, the penguin has slowly become the unofficial mascot of Downtown Silver Spring. (The previous mascot: An Acorn.) That was the year that artist Sally Callmer unveiled her 100-foot long outdoor mural, “Penguin Rush Hour.” It decorates the entrance to the Red Line Metro station on Collesville Road and shows busy penguins commuting via WMATA to their busy downtown D.C. jobs. Sadly for Metro at least, fewer penguins are commuting downtown since the pandemic. More and more, they are working from their well air-conditioned homes.

When he found the spring, Blair was looking for a site for a summer home, where he could escape the heat of Washington D.C. Two years later, he finished a 20-room mansion that sat on 250 acres. He called the estate Silver Spring. The house stood until the 1950s. But Blair’s name (and his son’s name, Montgomery Blair) lives on attached to streets, parks and the largest high school in the state of Maryland.

Kaldi shared his discovery with the abbot of a nearby monastery. That abbot, so the story goes, was the first to brew a drink with those goat-goading beans. It helped him stay alert through evening prayers. Soon all of the monks were riding the coffee train and news of the new energy bean began to spread.

Whatever the exact story is, it is an undisputed fact that Silver Spring, Maryland, has a large Ethiopian diaspora. There are dozens of Ethiopian eateries, stores dedicated to Ethiopian foodstuffs and wears and, of course, a multitude of fantastic Ethiopian coffee shops.

To honor this rich local culture, I included a traditional Ethiopian jebena in my Silver Spring illustration. In the traditional Ethiopian (or Eritrean) coffee service, the green coffee beans are roasted over an open flame, usually by the matriarch of the household. The beans are then ground with a wooden mortar and pestle. The ground beans are then mixed with boiling water in the jebena and left over the open flame. Traditionally, the jebena is made of pottery, with a spherical base and an elongated neck.

The Silver Spring Store offers both the Silver Spring poster and a custom coffee mug featuring the jebena. Check out the coffee mug here.