Canada Dry Building

Canada Dry Building. . , Designed in 1946 by New York City architect Walter Monroe Cory, the Canada Dry Bottling Plant is the most architecturally significant Streamline Moderne industrial structure in Montgomery County and a landmark in downtown Silver Spring. The extant two-story administrative section was connected to a one story manufacturing bottling facility and warehouse. This complex occupied 2.9-acres adjacent to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's "Metropolitan Branch" (est. 1873), allowing ease of delivery of raw materials for the production of carbonated beverages. The opening of the plant was part of the postwar commercial and retail expansion of Silver Spring and its rise to prominence in the D.C. metropolitan area., Upon the business's closing in 2000, the Silver Spring Historical Society raised awareness of the bottling plant's architectural and historical significance as well as the importance of its architect. The result was placement of the administrative, architecturally significant, portion of the structure (including the monumental central lobby and CANADA DRY "crown"), on Montgomery County's Locational Atlas and Index of Historic Sites (#36/44) in 2001. The interior walls of the rotunda entrance are faced with ginger-colored structural tiles, sized to match the glass block of the prominent window that provides a diffused and serene light. The entrance lobby floor and steps are terrazzo, with a pattern of circles resembling soda bubbles. A curving decorative, open, flat iron railing provides a strong visual line for the cantilevered curving stairway along the interior lobby wall. , In 2003 the Canada Dry Bottling Plant was documented for the Historic American Engineering Record. An archive of photographs and architectural drawings are housed in the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Bottling plant drawings and data are available at the Library of Congress "American Memory" website, www.memory.gov.