If you live anywhere near downtown Silver Spring, you have probably already seen one. A light rail vehicle, energized and moving under its own power, sliding along the alignment between Lyttonsville and Bethesda in broad daylight. Live-wire testing reached Silver Spring on August 3, and the trains have been running on that western stretch both overnight and during the day since. The project is past 90 percent complete, with all track laid as of early May.
And Bonifant Street is still a one-way construction site with no parking on the south side.
That gap is the actual story of this fall. Not the trains. The nine-year habit those trains created in the rest of us, and the fact that the businesses on the most disrupted block along the entire 16-mile line have to survive one more season before anyone rides anything.
The one-way street is not temporary
Here is the detail most people around here have not absorbed: Bonifant Street has been permanently reduced to one-way eastbound, with no parking permitted on the south side. Permanently. Not until October, not until the ribbon-cutting. The crews shifted the work zone to the south side between Fenton Street and Georgia Avenue to finish utility connections, storm drain installation, and curb and sidewalk reconstruction, and vehicles left in the zone get towed at the owner's expense.
So the instinct a lot of longtime residents are holding onto, the one that goes I'll go back to Bonifant when I can park there again, is waiting for something that is not coming. What is coming in October is the reopening of Dixon Avenue and Bonifant Street to through traffic, which has been closed to finish track installation. That is real, and it matters. But the way you get to that block from here on out is on foot, from the north, from exactly where the rest of downtown already puts you on a Saturday.
Which is why the two calendars below deserve to be read next to each other rather than separately.
| Dates | On Bonifant Street | A short walk north |
|---|---|---|
| Through Sept. 9 | Georgia Avenue closed overnight 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. between Thayer and Wayne, which also closes Bonifant access, for catenary wire installation | — |
| Sept. 12 | One-way eastbound, no south-side parking, pedestrian access maintained | Silver Spring Jazz Fest, free, Veterans Plaza, noon start, Cimafunk headlining the Main Stage at 8:30 p.m. |
| Sept. 14–25 | Wayne Avenue at Fenton Street closed overnight for catenary work; Wayne Avenue paving between Georgia and Flower continues | AFI Latin American Film Festival opens Sept. 16 at AFI Silver, 8633 Colesville Road |
| Sept. 27–Oct. 2 | Wayne Avenue overnight closure on or about Sept. 28 through Oct. 2 | Takoma Park Folk Festival Sept. 27, 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Buckets & Beats Youth Block Party at Veterans Plaza Oct. 2 |
| October | Dixon Avenue and Bonifant Street scheduled to reopen to through traffic | Dominican Culture Fest Oct. 4; AFI's Noir City DC Oct. 8–22; Fall-O-Ween at Veterans Plaza Oct. 25 |
| November | Silver Spring Library Station work continues at the McGee Library, ADA access maintained via Wayne and Fenton | Silent Cinema Showcase through Nov. 15; AFI Silver Classic Film Weekend Nov. 12–15; community concert at The Fillmore Nov. 14 |
Nobody planned it this way. But between September 12 and mid-November, downtown Silver Spring is going to put tens of thousands of people within a few minutes' walk of a block they have been conditioned to drive around.
Twenty-three businesses, one long detour
The block is not empty. It never was, which is the frustrating part.
Kefa Café at 963 Bonifant Street turned 30 this year. Abeba Tsegaye and her siblings Abiy and Lene, who came here from Ethiopia, opened it in 1996, and the June 20 anniversary party drew a citation from Councilmember Kate Stewart and remarks from Councilmember Will Jawando. The café has since expanded into the Silver Spring Recreation and Aquatic Center and the Wheaton Public Library. It got through a fire in 2015. It has gotten through this. New awnings, signage, outdoor seating, planters and a new color scheme went up as part of a façade project funded through Montgomery Housing Partnership and Montgomery County's Facade Refresh program, and MHP has been supporting Bonifant Street businesses since 2018.
When a Greater Greater Washington writer who lives around the corner decided to visit every business on the street, he counted 23 of them and came back with a very specific list of what is behind the fencing: jollof rice at Sweet Sweet Kitchen, peanut chicken stew at Roger Miller Restaurant, green curry from Kook Kai's Thai Noodles, beef tibs at Lamrot Ethiopian, Noodles #3 at Mandalay. Haircuts at Salon Zoma and Ebony Barbers. Silver Spring Books. Nancy's Nails. Deja Wellness and Spa. He also documented the thing owners keep saying, which is that the "Businesses are Open" banners have not been enough, because people see fencing and assume the answer.
Mandalay, for what it is worth, reopened after a planned relocation fell through. The Burmese curries and noodle soups are back where they were.
The money ran on a schedule that did not match the damage
The state has not ignored this. It also has not solved it, and the reason is worth understanding if you want to know why the next few months carry more weight than the last few years did.
MDOT's Purple Line Small Business Grant program offers awards of up to $50,000. The department distributed $2 million in 2025 and plans to award $1 million in each of 2026 and 2027. Read those numbers in order: the total aid remaining for the final two years across the entire line, from Bethesda to New Carrollton, is half of what went out in a single year.
The early rounds had a design problem that hit this block specifically. Award amounts were set partly by a business's size, including annual revenue over the previous three years, which meant that the more revenue a business had already lost, the smaller the award it qualified for. Owners on Bonifant watched a few businesses in Bethesda and parts of Prince George's County receive $40,000 while they received a few thousand. MDOT adjusted. By the third and final round of 2025, Bonifant businesses received the largest awards, and the department says every business on the street cleared at least $25,000 across the three rounds. Some owners applied repeatedly and still received nothing.
Stephanie Helsing of the Greater Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce put the underlying problem plainly back when the tracks were first going in, pointing to the loss of street parking and the constantly changing traffic patterns as the thing actually draining these businesses. That has not changed. What changes this fall is that the grant money is thinning out at precisely the moment the construction is quiet enough for customers to come back. From here, revenue has to come from people, not programs.
How to actually spend a Saturday down there
Start where you were going anyway. If you are at Veterans Plaza for Jazz Fest on the 12th, the lineup runs from noon through Cimafunk at 8:30, with Marcus Johnson, Lil' Maceo, the Paul Carr Quartet featuring Alison Crockett, Michael Hawkins and The Brotherhood, the Elijah Easton Trio and Alfred Yun in between. That is a long day. Somewhere in the middle of it, walk south instead of back to your car.
If your fall runs on movies rather than music, AFI Silver is holding its 37th Latin American Film Festival from September 16 through October 7, with 43 films from 21 countries and 12 U.S. and North American premieres. It opens with The Match, the documentary about the 1986 Argentina-England quarterfinal, and closes with Almodóvar's Bitter Christmas. Then Noir City DC runs October 8 through 22, the Silent Cinema Showcase carries through November 15, and Classic Film Weekend lands November 12 through 15. That is roughly two months of reasons to be on Colesville Road after dark.
Ellsworth Place has its own draw now. Commas Food Hall occupies 13,000 square feet on the third level with a dozen vendors, including MoMo Hub for Nepali dumplings, jerk chicken wings at The Champs Kitchen and loaded fries at Tato's, plus the C³ bar and its Old Ellsworth, made with Sagamore Spirit whiskey out of Baltimore. It is a good pre-movie stop and a genuinely different food court than the one that used to be up there.
None of that competes with Bonifant. It feeds it, if anyone makes the two-block walk. Coffee at Kefa before an afternoon screening. Takeout from Roger Miller or Sweet Sweet Kitchen instead of the plaza vendors. A used book from Silver Spring Books on the way to the McGee Library, where the future station is still going in and pedestrian access is being kept open on the Wayne and Fenton sides throughout.
What this fall is actually deciding
The Purple Line is slated to carry passengers in winter 2027, with testing now underway on four of the seven segments and trial running still ahead. When it does, a train will cross Georgia Avenue and roll down the 900 block of Bonifant in under a minute, past storefronts that have been serving this community for decades. Whether those same storefronts are the ones the riders see out the window is being decided right now, in a season when the construction is finally quiet and the crowds are finally back downtown, three or four minutes' walk from a street most people have not turned onto since 2017.
Downtown Silver Spring is one of the reasons buyers keep looking at this part of Montgomery County, and blocks like Bonifant are the reason it feels like somewhere rather than anywhere. If you are thinking about what the next few years look like here, for your own home or for someone in your family weighing a move within the DMV, the team at Charisse Callender Scott knows these corridors block by block and is glad to talk it through. Contact Us.
