Gateway CDC (4102 Webster Street)

At the corner of Webster Street and Rhode Island Avenue, this unassuming small commercial building will almost certainly play a key role in North Brentwood’s rebirth as a center of entrepreneurship. Positioned at the southernmost edge of North Brentwood, this building, constructed at some point between 1940 and 1959, has served as a sort of gateway business into the North Brentwood community, just a stone’s throw from its primary streetcar stop.

Boasting a varied and colorful past, this building appears to have started out as Brentwood Villa, a little restaurant run by a Mr. Hall that, according to Barbara Spriggs in her oral history, “used to have ice cream and the regular foods and even have booths that you sit in with a jukebox alongside the table...we thought we were in heaven when they first opened up.”

After that, this building was a cleaners, before becoming, the site of a palm reading business in 1958. We know this because its proprietor, Rose Costello, took the Prince Georges County Council to court after they passed an ordinance designed to do away with such businesses by introducing burdensome requirements. We have no indication of the success of Ms. Costello’s suit, but this history appears to coincide with the nadir of the building’s fortunes as a place of business.

This building now is the main office of Gateway CDC (Community Development Corporation). Formed in 1998 around the values of “Connect, Provide, Thrive” and working within the communities of North Brentwood, Brentwood, and Mount Rainier, Gateway CDC has dedicated its energies to “creating [an] arts-driven revitalization of the Route 1 Corridor.” One has only to travel from Mount Rainier up through Hyattsville, which encompasses the Gateway Arts District, to gain a measure of the success of this ongoing endeavor.
Speaking at the twentieth anniversary celebration of Gateway CDC in 2018, Ann Bernanke, founder of Chance Academy, which operates out of Joe’s Movement Emporium in Mount Rainier, expressed the ongoing community-centered work of this organization: “We are the answer to resolving this problem of the loss of community, and we can accomplish this by building the bridges and breaking the barriers that hinder us from working together.” Check out their ongoing work at www.gatewaycdc.org.

Sources

“Fortune Tellers May Test Law,” The Evening Star, March 4, 1959, B-2
https://streetcarsuburbs.news/gateway-cdc-celebrates-20-years-of-arts-focused-revitalization/

Gateway CDC images retrieved from Google Maps