A project that aims to transform two county surface parking lots into an urban park in downtown Bethesda is moving forward, with Montgomery Parks inviting the public to hear an update on concept plans during a June 18 virtual meeting.
The meeting will be held from 7 to 8:30 p.m. via Zoom and participants can register for the meeting at this link. Registration is not required.
Plans call for the future Bethesda Market Park to be built between Wisconsin Avenue and 46th Street, adjacent to the Montgomery Farm Women’s Cooperative Market and Elm Street Urban Park. They include building the park on top of a future underground parking garage and combining it with Elm Street Park.
“We think this is a park that’s going to attract a lot of people, serve the residents of Bethesda and Chevy Chase well, but also be a destination park,” Darren Flusche, deputy director of administration for Montgomery Parks, said Monday. “It’ll be a place where the community can come to see performances, to walk their dogs off leash in the dog park, to come together and be a community gathering place.”
Bethesda Market Park will be developed as a part of a public/private partnership between the county’s parks department, Montgomery County Department of Transportation, the Town of Chevy Chase, and Wisconsin Columbia Venture LLC., the owners of the Bethesda Market project, according to the release. The park will be co-developed by Chevy Chase-based Berstein Development Corporation and Bethesda-based EYA Multifamily.
The park is one aspect of a multi-phase commercial redevelopment project called Bethesda Market. Plans for the redevelopment project include updating the historic Montgomery Farm Women’s Cooperative Market and the construction of a new residential mixed-use high-rise building.
In March 2023, Montgomery Parks began gathering feedback from county residents about what they wanted in a future park. The concept plans that will be shared on June 18 are based on the feedback received from an online survey that planners conducted in the spring of 2023 and a community meeting last summer.
“We received a lot of great suggestions from the community about amenities for this park—including a stage, open spaces, a dog park, game area, and water features,” Miti Figueredo, director of Montgomery Parks, said in a press release. “We’re excited about creating an engaging, beautiful, and active urban park that serves the Bethesda and Chevy Chase communities and park visitors from across the county.”
Once completed, Bethesda Market Park will provide approximately 4 acres of green space to the downtown Bethesda area, an important aspect of the vision of the 2017 Bethesda Downtown Plan. In addition, the future green space will align with the parks department’s 2022 Park, Recreation and Open Space Plan, which outlines the county’s social, active and environmental stewardship goals, according to the release.
Flusche told MoCo360 the June 18 meeting will be a follow-up to a session held last summer.
Planners will share “what we heard from [the community] last time and how we’ve endeavored to deliver on the vision that we formed and heard from the community,” he said, noting that the information will be purely conceptual and the parks department hasn’t begun designing the park.
Those who attend will see the basic conceptual layout of the park and can send questions and comments to planners during the session.
After the meeting, the park project’s next steps involve the developers holding a public meeting about their plans and then submitting a site plan to the county Planning Board for approval, Flusche said.
The board approved a sketch plan for the overall development in October 2019, according to Montgomery Parks.
Flusche said the parks department does not have an opening date for the new park. He said its construction is “entirely contingent on the development going forward” and the completed construction of the proposed underground parking garage.
“We’re downstream from a number of different things that the timing isn’t in our control for. Best case scenario–we’re looking at a couple, three, four years out,” Flusche said.