Things to Do in Wheaton: A Local’s Guide

Montgomery County's award-winning 50-acre public display garden, set inside Wheaton Regional Park and free to the public. Themed gardens, conservatories, and walking paths, with entrances at 1800 Glenallan Avenue and 1500 Glenallan Avenue. Parking is limited to the lots — none is allowed along Glenallan itself. The Randolph Road and Heurich Road Ride On stop serves it, and it is worth knowing that Heurich has a sidewalk the length of the walk in while Glenallan does not. It is the county's single most visited horticultural asset and it sits inside Wheaton's borders.

The county's all-in-one, and the reason families move to this side of Montgomery County: a nature center, riding stables, a dog park, and a picnic area with a carousel and miniature train, plus an athletic complex carrying indoor tennis, an ice rink, an inline skating rink, and ball fields. It wraps Brookside Gardens entirely. Most Montgomery County residents have been here whether or not they know it was Wheaton — the park draws from well outside the town's own boundaries and always has.

A wooden playground structure inside Wheaton Regional Park that has been a rite of passage for local children for decades. It is the thing every adult who grew up in Wheaton names first when the town comes up, ahead of the mall, ahead of the Metro, ahead of the gardens. In a suburb built in a single decade for young families, the playground where three generations of those families learned to climb is not a small thing.

Opened as Wheaton Plaza and, in the 1960s, the largest shopping center in Maryland's DC suburbs, with more than sixty stores and 5,000 parking spaces. It runs over 100 retailers and 27 restaurants today. The food court is a local institution in its own right — a legitimately good international food hall that happens to sit inside a mall, and one of the few in the region where the mall food is the reason to go rather than the compromise.

Downtown, where Veirs Mill Road, University Boulevard, and Georgia Avenue meet. The commercial heart and the reason Wheaton has one of the best ethnic food scenes in the Washington metro: Salvadoran pupuserias, Vietnamese pho houses and bakeries, Ethiopian and Eritrean kitchens, plus West African, Thai, Korean, and Peruvian. It was called Mitchell's Crossroads before it was called Wheaton, after the tavern Robert T. Mitchell kept at the corner of the Union Turnpike and Old Bladensburg Road until it burned in 1940.

Worth naming as a destination on its own. The escalator spans 508 feet — the longest in the Western Hemisphere — and it is the first thing anyone tells a visitor about this town. It is also a genuinely strange experience the first time, a two-minute descent under the Triangle that ends at a platform 100-plus feet below the intersection you were standing on.

Downtown Wheaton's civic square, host to community events, free public health programming, and the gatherings that anchor the Triangle's public life. It is the piece of the county's long revitalization effort that actually made downtown Wheaton a place to stand rather than a place to park, and it carries a slice of the events calendar year-round.

Central green space in the downtown core carrying festivals and community gatherings, and the outdoor room the Triangle's restaurants spill into when the weather cooperates. Small, urban, and heavily used — which in a town this dense is the whole point.

The stream valley park running along Wheaton's southern edge, part of Montgomery County's connected greenway system — trails, picnic areas, and the mature tree canopy that defines every neighborhood along it. Montgomery Parks runs Sligo Creek Fest along the parkway in May, transforming the open parkway into a street festival with performance stages, Touch-A-Truck, tree climbing, food vendors, and roving entertainers.

The stream valley bounding Wheaton to the east, running down toward Silver Spring and the District. Trails, hardwood canopy, and the rocky stretches that make it the more rugged of Wheaton's two creeks. Together with Sligo Creek it is why this town's eastern half sits in shade — and why the doors under that shade collect what they collect.

Off Wheaton's western edge past Connecticut Avenue, running through North Kensington and south toward the District. The reason the western belt sits under such heavy canopy, and the same Rock Creek that Samuel Clark Veirs dammed for his grist and sawmill in 1838 — the mill that gave Veirs Mill Road its name ninety years before the suburb existed.

Inside Wheaton Regional Park: indoor tennis, a full ice rink, an inline skating rink, and ball fields. The ice rink in particular pulls from across the county and runs year-round, which for a suburb built in the 1950s as bedroom housing is an unusual amount of civic infrastructure to have ended up with.

ANNUAL, mid-November through New Year's Day. Brookside Gardens' winter walk-through — a half-mile path lit by more than 1.5 million LEDs, with animals, insects, and plants built from light, including a lighted Loch Ness Monster. Montgomery Parks staff start planning next year's show as soon as the current one comes down. Advance online tickets only, no walk-ups, $10 per person age five and up, under-fives free but still ticketed. Main entrance, 1800 Glenallan Avenue.

ANNUAL, spring. The food festival that has celebrated this community since 1996, built around the cultural diversity, flavors, and entrepreneurial spirit that make Wheaton what it is. In a town whose identity is its restaurants — Salvadoran, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Peruvian, Korean, West African — this is the signature day of the year, and the one where the Triangle's small businesses get the audience they have earned.

ANNUAL, late September. The arts parade through downtown Wheaton, with Brookside Gardens as a partner — the gardens commission local artists for public installations tied to it, including the flamingo sculptures repainted as native species for the Children's Garden. Along with the Triangle and the food, the Arts Parade is what Wheaton is known for outside its own borders.

ANNUAL SERIES, Tuesdays in June, 6:30 to 8:00 pm. Free outdoor concerts on the Visitor Center lawn by the Bluestone Terrace, with food trucks on site. Chairs, blankets, and picnics are allowed on concert evenings only — the one time of year the gardens let you eat on the grass. No alcohol. Parking at the Main Entrance, 1800 Glenallan Avenue, and it fills early.

ANNUAL. Brookside runs an Art in the Garden series alongside spring and fall concert series, and the GreenScapes Symposium has been an annual program since 2004, focused on where horticulture meets environmental stewardship — a core value of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Brookside's parent organization. It draws gardeners and professionals from across the mid-Atlantic to a 50-acre garden inside a 1950s suburb.

ANNUAL. Brookside's two seasonal exhibits bookend the year: the Butterfly Experience through the warm months in the conservatory, and a winter Garden Railway built in partnership with the Washington Virginia Maryland Garden Railway Society — G-scale trains running through custom model buildings that recreate Montgomery County landmarks in miniature, set among poinsettias in the conservatory houses.