Before the first mall, the mega-warehouse stores and the first car dealership on Ritchie Highway, Glen Burnie was a small American town.
Crain Highway was its Main Street, an avenue flanked by shops and stores wielding bold neon signs. The town boasted three drug stores, three grocery stores, three barber shops and two department stores. Crowds lined up on Friday nights outside two movie houses, and gathered for lunches and dinners at the WB&A Restaurant.
There was work at Johnson Lumber Co., which did a flourishing business selling building supplies to the growing community. Those residents who didn't work in town could walk to the station on Crain Highway and take the train to jobs in Annapolis or Baltimore.
Then, in 1958, the first enclosed shopping mall east of the Mississippi River opened on Ritchie Highway.
Harundale Mall was a marvel. Local politicians presided over the opening ceremonies and crowds nudged their way into the covered shopping paradise. None of them could guess then that Glen Burnie was about to become one of the first casualties of the suburban shopping mall.
In that first year, seven businesses moved from downtown Glen Burnie into Harundale Mall. The downtown merchants tried to make the town center more attractive, but failed to agree on a parking plan that could compete with the free and plentiful parking at the mall.
The downtown declined, and more sinister elements found their way into the community. Several businesses were bombed or burned in what were probably disputes among gambling factions.
In the 1970s, the federal, state and county governments tried to save Glen Burnie by razing many of the old vacant stores and erecting a county office building and courthouse. But those public buildings did not revive the town's center.
Today, Glen Burnie is not so much a town as an amorphous collection of shopping centers and subdivisions laid out between the Baltimore Beltway and Route 100.
It's the place where you spend half the morning waiting in line to get your driver's license at the Motor Vehicle Administration headquarters. If you need a car, you know you can find just about every make and model on Ritchie Highway. And bargains galore are available in the warehouse stores.
Glen Burnie -- a typical American small town in the 1950s -- has become the typical sprawling suburb. It is the Rodney Dangerfield of Anne Arundel County. The hotsy-totsy folks sitting in their colonial homes arranged around cul-de-sacs look down their noses at Glen Burnie's rows of post-war cottages sitting on concrete slabs.
