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This story was corrected on March 30, 2011. An explanation follows the story.

By 5 in the afternoon, a shadow hangs over Stan and Ethel Schiff's brick home along East Parkhill Drive behind Bethesda's naval hospital. For almost 40 years the Schiffs have been able to look out at a grove of tall grasses and trees, with Navy buildings in the distance, and the backyard where their daughter was married fills with sunlight and blossoming azaleas in the spring.

"It was like an oasis back there," said Stan Schiff.

Now, a 57-foot-tall barrack and administrative office towers over their home; the view from the couple's bedroom window is a concrete wall, with the tree buffer cut down; and the patio the Schiffs spent thousands to renovate is almost always shaded and undesirable for entertaining guests.

The Schiffs are among those who have lived in their Bethesda neighborhood for decades, almost as long as the military campus, which moved into town in 1942, and have watched the area change — more cars, larger houses.

The campus has grown from fewer than a dozen medical and research buildings planned by the hospital's visionary, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to an 83-building gated city, and is now adding more to accommodate a consolidation this September between the National Naval Medical Center and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

The effects of this development will span far beyond the campus' gates — neighbors' views now includes a cityscape towering over their homes, some residential streets serve as a drop-off point for employees and already-packed roads are expected to become even more jammed — and military leadership has broached the change with an unprecedented outreach to those communities.

Bethesda's neighbors say they are proud of Navy Med's work and are honored to live near the medical center known as the president's hospital.

But despite the Navy's outreach, some neighbors feel that as the campus and its renown have grown, their voices are becoming smaller and that the government agencies involved did not take a large enough role in shaping the merger's effect on the community.

"You wouldn't be able to change their mind about doing the consolidation, but there should have been more consideration for how," said Ethel Schiff. "There was really no great consideration of the neighborhood at all," she said.

The good old days

In September, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center will open, bringing an additional 2,500 employees and a total of 1 million visitors to the Bethesda campus, an increase from the current 8,000 employees and half a million annual visitors. Construction is under way for additional medical buildings, parking garages and other services; outside the gates, county and state transportation staff has plans for $165 million in road, Metro, sidewalk and bike path projects to ease the anticipated traffic problems.

As the military base prepares for one of its largest changes since opening in 1942, people remember a quieter time in the neighborhoods near the campus that are now home to thousands of families.

When Susan and Jack Lass moved to Chestnut Street in East Bethesda in 1975, the houses were of modest size, the streets were smooth and the neighborhood children made the rounds after a snowstorm to offer shoveling services. There were so many trees, driving down the road was like passing through a tunnel, said Jack Lass, 72.

The Lass' home and most others in their neighborhood were built in the early 1950s, after World War II, and now house a mix of federal employees who work at Navy Med and the National Institutes of Health, lawyers and political types who take advantage of the neighborhood's proximity to Metro stations to commute to the District.

Much of what the Lasses remember from their first years in their home has changed, but a few key aspects of the neighborhood that attracted them have stayed the same.

"It's not one of those neighborhoods where people say, oh, I've lived here for 10 years and I don't know my neighbor," said Susan Lass, 67.

The sense of community that the neighborhoods provide in an increasingly crowded area, south of the Beltway, north of downtown Bethesda and bisected by two federal institutions, Navy Med and NIH, is among the top reasons many residents gave for what attracted them— and what keeps them there.

In Parkview, a neighborhood of about 120 homes sandwiched between the military campus and Cedar Lane, a group of women meet regularly at a Mahjong club, a Chinese game of matching tiles; a Coyote Club for men has been revived; households with children have their pick of sitters from a babysitting co-op.

"It's become so fast-paced that people have to work at keeping communities," said Bonnie Fedchock, 48, who has lived in Parkview with her husband, Craig, for 12 years. "This neighborhood has been able to do that."

While the bonds within Bethesda's neighborhoods remain strong, some residents feel their connection to their military neighbors has weakened.

Before heightened national security resulted in a gated fence and secured entry to the campus after Sept. 11, the campus' grassy expanses — and even it's McDonald's restaurant — were open to neighbors.

"It went from being like a college campus to these armed guards — really, it felt like a war zone," said Craig Fedchock, 56.

The couple used to walk over to the hospital to let their golden retriever mix a chance to chase the geese that still populate the campus.

Not only are residents spending less time on campus, the campus' business day is spilling out into the neighborhoods.

At the campus' afternoon shift change, a line of cars forms in front of Felicity McGrath's home, where Glenbrook Parkway connects to Jones Bridge Road, across from a campus gate. The number of parking spaces on campus is expected to decline from one per every two employees to one space per four employees. Already, a growing number of employees seem to be getting rides to and from work, and without a place to pull off the road at the gate entrance, those rides queue on the closest residential street.

The Navy denied a request from the East Bethesda Citizens Association for a drop-off area along the Navy's side of Jones Bridge Road, said Ilaya Hopkins, who represents the neighborhood on the BRAC Implementation Committee. Hopkins said the association is hopeful that when construction is complete, access to the campus will improve and fewer cars will queue in on the neighborhood's streets.

A new approach to

being neighborly

The 2005 Base Realignment and Closure, the fifth federal mandate since 1988, will reorganize or consolidate 800 military facilities, including Walter Reed and Navy Med. Bethesda Naval Support Activity officials said they recognize that the structural changes needed at Navy Med to accommodate Walter Reed and the amount of traffic the new hospital will draw to the area will have a significant impact on the neighboring communities.

In response, leadership has expanded its outreach to the community, resulting in an unprecedented level of communication between the military and its neighbors.

"Part of it is it's the right thing to do — if we're not proactive we're going to be reactive," said Malanoski. "We want to be good neighbors. It's our neighborhood, too."

During the last major construction on campus, when the medical buildings were modernized in the 1980s, there was no concerted effort to communicate with neighbors because the scope of the project was contained on campus, said spokeswoman Sandy Dean.

Now, Naval Support sends representatives to monthly meetings of the BRAC Implementation Committee, a group for neighborhood and government stake holders. They speak at neighborhood meetings when asked and have an information line for residents to call any hour of the day or night.

Five neighborhood representatives were invited earlier this month on campus for an intimate information session about the status of on-campus projects.

Neighborhood representatives said they are impressed with leadership's efforts to keep their communities abreast of BRAC progress and to seek out their input.

"We've bridged a gap that was there — they're really engaging and being very positive," said Deborah Michaels, who attended the on-campus meeting as president of a Glenbrook Village homeowners association, which is located at the corner of Rockville Pike and Jones Bridge Road.

Michaels said the officials that met with the group of neighborhood leaders expressed interest in maintaining an ongoing conversation. Naval Support plans to hold similar meetings about once a quarter and when important information arises, Dean said.

"I think it's imperative we are transparent in what we're doing and I think we have been," said Malanoski of the BRAC. "The communities have not always been happy, but I think they have been understanding."

McGrath is among those understanding neighbors. Even though efforts to get a formal drop-off area along the campus' boundary have failed, she said she thinks the Navy has done its part to listen.

"They did make a good effort to be the good neighbor," said McGrath. "They didn't have to do that, but they did."

Malanoski also made trips to Parkview, to hear concerns from the neighbors, including the Schiffs, whose quality of life will be most affected by the hospital expansion. Parkview is one of two neighborhoods that share a land boundary with the hospital and the new buildings are visible overtop the houses along East Parkview. Neighbors say construction starts early in the morning and floodlights at the sites illuminate the neighborhood through the night.

Stan Schiff said he believes the Navy officer who came to talk about the barracks and administrative office going up behind his house listened to his suggestions, but outside his window is one of six new buildings on campus called for by BRAC.

"You can only judge by what you see out the window," Schiff said.

A community of communities

Many neighbors are proud to live next to Navy Med — it's a world-class hospital with a mission that few could criticize — but when the hospital was federally mandated to merge with Walter Reed, with no money set aside by Congress for community improvements to accommodate thousands of more people, residents said they felt let down, forgotten about.

"We have tried to find a champion for this since the onset — someone to step up, take it on, own it," Michaels said. "No one wants it."

When residents saw a lapse in government leadership, they began to speak for themselves by forming the Coalition of Military Medical Center Neighbors. The group represents about 10,000 people who live, work and attend school in the neighborhoods surrounding the military campus. The coalition formed in 2007, when community members who stay abreast of changes to the area noted the need for people living near the campus to work toward common goals. They wanted advocate for what was best for the community as a whole, rather than leaving each neighborhood association to fight separate battles, said Hopkins, a founding member of the group.

"There's been more leadership from the community and more proactive problem solving from this group of communities than there has been from elected officials, that's for sure," Hopkins said.

The group has played a role in educating the community about traffic problems, pushing for sidewalk and bikeway improvements and influencing the design of a Metro crossing project to include a pedestrian walkway under Rockville Pike and elevators connecting the military hospital's side of the sidewalk to the Medical Center Metro.

The coalition has also served as a unifying force among the neighborhoods.

"The coalition of neighbors is like something I've never seen before," said Ed Krauze, president of the Parkview Citizens Association. Not only are the people who live in a neighborhood in close contact with their next-door neighbors, each neighborhood is now in tune with the next cluster of homes down the road, forming what Krauze described as a community of communities.

"It has made the conversation, I believe, better," Krauze said.

Coalition members believe BRAC and the formation of the coalition may mark a change in community involvement. With its newfound voice and network of members, the group could take on other issues that affect multiple neighborhoods.

For now, the focus is BRAC and fighting for a way to make the hospital provide for service men and women in need while maintaining roads that are manageable to drive. It is a goal that many feel is still far off, despite the hospital's approaching opening day.

"We're supposed to be creating a world-class facility to help people — and they're doing that inside the fence," said Michaels. "Outside, we're creating a nightmare."

sgantz@gazette.net

Correction: This story was corrected to make clear that a certain building on the campus of the National Naval Medical Center does not have a fitness center.