The Japanese pagoda at the school was originally the Chi Psi Upsilon sorority for residents of the elite boarding school founded in 1894. A partial renovation took place in 1999 by SOS, but it will eventually be sold as a single-family home. It’s presently being used as the sales center for the historic condominiums.
National Park Seminary is one of those places you can’t truly appreciate unless you go there and experience it for yourself. It was a forgotten place until Save Our Seminary (SOS) intervened and stopped the Army from demolishing many of its 26 historic buildings as part of its master plan to build military housing.
An elite women’s boarding school for nearly 50 years, once rivaling Ivy League schools in cost, National Park Seminary started with the lease of Ye Forest Inne in 1894 by John and Vesta Cassedy. As enrollment grew, so did the structures including the addition of sororities in single-family homes designed to bring the architecture of other countries to the Silver Spring, MD, campus. A Swiss chalet, a Dutch windmill, an English castle, and a Japanese pagoda are among the 12 single-family homes. An additional 15 buildings linked by covered walkways, wood-shingle and stucco structures, and neoclassical buildings made it a one-of-a-kind campus.
In 1942, the Army took over the seminary as a rehabilitation center for wounded veterans from World War II, and later Korea and Vietnam. It remained an annex to Walter Reed Army Medical Center until the 1990s when SOS, a local group of concerned citizens, lobbied to reclaim National Park Seminary and its historic structures.
The PH4 condo in President’s House offers 1,074-square-feet of living space including an interesting curved wall in the living area. Washington Spaces asked Jeff Akseizer, principal of Akseizer Design Group, to show us how he would decorate this area of the condo. The rendering and products, opposite, give a prospective buyer an idea of what could be done to take advantage of the room’s height and views.
Revival of the Fittest
In 2003, SOS, Montgomery County, The Alexander Company, a Wisconsin-based adaptive-reuse building company, and EYA, a local builder, teamed to reincarnate National Park Seminary. The President’s House and Senior House will become 20 condominium homes; the Ballroom will add 14 more. There will be a total of 88 historic condos with unique floor plans in structures once used for dancing, swimming, and singing. The redevelopment plan also calls for the preservation of the 12 historic single-family homes on the site, which includes the English castle in a potential future phase, 66 apartments located in the main building on campus, and 90 new townhomes built by EYA.
“Community input sometimes scares off developers; however, we welcome it,” says Randall Alexander, president of The Alexander Company. “The support we’ve gotten from the local community at National Park Seminary has been phenomenal. They understood and embraced our vision, which called for the most preservation of this historic site.”
Unique Designs
From Unit PH4 in President’s House, one can see senior class plaques placed in a dormitory’s facade. This could have been a congregating corner in those days with talk of what the future might bring. These plaques will remain as symbols of what National Park Seminary once was.
“It’s a complicated site with environmental and construction issues,” says Natalie Bock, senior development project manager for The Alexander Company, and is also unique because of the buildings’ original wood frame construction. But once complete, the public benefit will be immense, she says. Green space and new trails will bring neighbors out to socialize and take in the site’s rich history.
“We’re committed to creating appropriate designs,” she adds, which often means investigating deteriorating buildings to establish the best use of the space. “Inconvenience is no excuse,” Bock adds.
Each unit will be one-of-a-kind with some designs, such as four narrow 1,674- to 1,840-square-foot condos in the upper floors of the Ballroom, particularly challenging. Prices in the Ballroom range from the low $400,000s to mid-$700,000s. Others range from the low $400,000s to more than $900,000, with most units priced lower than $700,000. These prices don’t reflect the Maryland state historic tax credit.
“The Alexander Company is endorsed by organizations like Save Our Seminary because of our experience as a master developer and our commitment to saving as much of the historic structures as possible,” Alexander says.
Bock adds, “National Park Seminary is a nationally recognized redevelopment because of its size, location, architecture, and history.”
