The building at the corner of Old Georgetown Road and Greentree Road has sat empty since May 2016, longer than some current Bethesda residents have owned their homes. What finally changed was not that someone got tired of driving past a dark porch and a fading Coca-Cola sign. It was that a residential-zoned corner carrying an unusual grandfathered right to operate a store, a café, or even a clinic finally became worth more to run than to renovate and resell. That shift took a decade, three separate owners, and one national bagel chain that looked at the construction math and walked away.
The Store Bethesda Grew Up Around
Commercial use of this exact intersection goes back further than most people assume. A store called Morgan's Store appears on an 1894 map of the site, back when a trolley line ran along what is now Old Georgetown Road toward Rockville and terminated near a long-gone amusement park a few blocks away. The building that still stands there today went up around 1924, a narrow one-room structure with a wraparound porch and the kind of three-sided painted sign that made it a landmark rather than just a shop. Montgomery County designated it a historic site in 1986, one of the few surviving early-20th-century commercial buildings left in Bethesda.
Arnie Fainman ran the store for its final fifteen years, selling barbecue, breakfast sandwiches, and penny-candy nostalgia to a mix of regulars and NIH staff from the campus directly across the street. He closed the doors on May 16, 2016, telling reporters at the time that business had never fully recovered after security gates went up at NIH in 2001 and cut off the casual foot traffic the store had relied on for decades.
The Decade Nobody Could Quite Fill
What followed was not neglect so much as a string of near-misses. The property's owner spent the rest of 2016 looking for a new tenant while longtime residents pushed back over the removal of the store's original sign, a small controversy that said a lot about how much this corner mattered to people who had never set foot inside it.
The parking lot, meanwhile, kept working even while the building didn't. Call Your Mother parked a trolley car there starting in July 2020 and swapped it for a pink-and-blue trailer in September 2023, building a loyal following without ever occupying the historic structure itself. According to Bethesda Magazine, the bagel chain's co-owner said the company had seriously considered moving into the vacant building but ultimately passed because renovation costs were too high. Call Your Mother chose Pike & Rose and a storefront on St. Elmo Avenue instead, and by early 2025 had left the Old Georgetown Road lot entirely.
That is roughly when Bethesda residents Mimi Brodsky Kress and Phil Leibovitz of Sandy Spring Builders stepped in, buying the property outright in October 2024. Public sale records put the purchase price at $750,000, a fraction of what the site would fetch once work was done. Kress has said the couple drove past the empty building daily for years and could not stand watching it fall further into disrepair. Over the following months they gutted the structure down to its porch, a wall, and the roofline, salvaging what original wood they could and matching the rest, while adding a rear extension and new HVAC, plumbing, and electrical systems. The county's Historic Preservation Commission signed off on the revised plans that December, clearing the way for a tenant search.
A timeline of who has owned this half-acre corner, and what happened while they did:
- 2016 – Fainman closes the store after fifteen years, citing lost foot traffic since NIH's 2001 security changes.
- 2020 to early 2025 – Call Your Mother operates a food truck and trailer from the parking lot without occupying the building.
- October 2024 – Kress and Leibovitz buy the property for a reported $750,000 and begin a full renovation.
- April 2026 – The finished property is listed for $2.1 million, delivered as a vacant shell ready for a tenant to customize.
- September 2026 – Bethesda resident Craig Hillman buys the property for $1.899 million, announcing plans for a general store and café.
Why a Postage-Stamp Building Nearly Tripled in Value
The jump from $750,000 to a $2.1 million asking price is not just about new plumbing. The lot, at roughly 12,363 square feet, is zoned residential, which normally would limit it to housing. But this particular parcel carries commercial entitlements that predate current zoning rules, allowing eating and drinking establishments, retail, service businesses, and even a clinic on a lot that would otherwise be restricted to a single home. That combination, a small historic building on a signalized corner with rights most residential lots in Bethesda simply don't have, is what made a national chain look seriously at the address in the first place, and it's likely what made the finished, renovated property worth holding out for the right buyer rather than the first offer.
What Actually Changes on the Corner This Fall
Hillman has said publicly that he wants to open a general store and café, adding that he hopes the project inspires similar revivals of old neighborhood stores elsewhere in Montgomery County. No opening date has been announced, and given the scale of the previous renovation, a build-out for the new concept will likely take time. In the meantime, a barbecue food truck currently operates from the parking lot, continuing the pattern of the last several years where the lot stayed active even when the building sat dark.
What makes this corner worth watching isn't the square footage or the sale price. It's that three consecutive owners of this same tiny building have all been Bethesda residents who drove past it regularly and decided, on their own money, that it was worth saving rather than tearing down or leaving as a parking lot with a food truck. A national chain looked at the numbers and chose easier real estate elsewhere in North Bethesda and downtown. The people who actually live near Old Georgetown and Greentree kept betting on it anyway.
That is the part of this story that outlasts any single tenant. Long after the general store opens, or doesn't, the pattern will still be true: this particular corner of Bethesda has been kept alive less by commercial logic than by neighbors who happened to drive by it twice a day.
For residents thinking about their own next move in Bethesda, whether that means finding a home near a corner like this one or understanding what a piece of property can and can't become, Jill Schwartz Group offers the kind of neighborhood-level insight that goes beyond the listing sheet. Request a private, confidential consultation to talk through what's happening in Bethesda's Old Georgetown corridor and beyond.
