For the better part of three years, if you wanted to see the inside of Potts Hall, you had to squint through a chain-link fence. The building sat wrapped in scaffolding from March 2023 until construction wrapped in December 2025, while the City of Mount Rainier spent, depending on which city release you read, somewhere between $6 million and nearly $7 million restoring it. On January 7, 2026, Mayor Celina Benitez cut the ribbon on what's now called the Potts Hall Welcome Center, and residents got their first look at what all that work had actually done.
Here's the part that matters more than the ribbon cutting itself: Potts Hall isn't just a restored old building sitting quietly at the civic end of town. It sits almost exactly halfway between the two blocks that already define daily life in Mount Rainier, the food-and-wine stretch around 3300 Rhode Island Avenue and the arts corridor running up 34th Street. For years those two ends of town operated on their own schedules. Now there's a building in the middle again, and it changes how the whole stretch reads.
A Building That Was Never Just One Thing
Potts Hall has earned the right to be reused this way. It was built in 1909 by Robert E. Potts, a local widower with no real estate background, who marketed it as "the largest place of meeting in Mount Rainier." He wasn't exaggerating for long. Over the following century the building cycled through nearly every use a small town could ask of one address: a movie theater, a pool hall, a duckpin bowling alley, Baptist, Methodist and Episcopalian church services at different points, a local women's group, a Masonic lodge, and eventually a luncheonette.
This renovation doesn't erase that history so much as formalize it. The completed Welcome Center, at 3405 Rhode Island Avenue next to the public library, connects the historic hall to City Hall at 1 Municipal Place with a new double-height lobby, so the two buildings now function as one accessible civic complex. It includes a modern council chamber, an audiovisual room, a multipurpose area, and first-floor space the city has flagged as potential retail. City Administrative Offices and the Social Services Coordinator moved into the connected complex in mid-December 2025, ahead of the January ribbon cutting. A building that spent a hundred years hosting whatever the neighborhood needed that decade is now positioned to do it again, just with better HVAC.
Three Blocks, Now Connected
Walk a few minutes south from Potts Hall on Rhode Island Avenue and you hit the Singer Building, spanning roughly 3300 to 3310, home to Pennyroyal Station and Era Wine Bar side by side. Era is the 2025 RAMMY winner for Best Wine Program of the Year from the Restaurant Association Metropolitan Washington, a category it had been nominated for twice before winning on the third try. It's also Black-owned, run by Ka-Ton and Dr. Michelle Grant, who opened it in November 2021 after considering a District location before settling on Mount Rainier.
Walk a few minutes north and slightly east instead, and you're on 34th Street heading toward Red Dirt Studio at 4051, one of the anchor spaces for the neighborhood's working artists. Earlier this year, the city selected a mural design by local artist Jay F. Coleman for a 34th Street Mural Arts Project, with installation planned for whenever the weather turned warm, sometime in the months since.
What used to be a stretch of Rhode Island Avenue with a food scene at one end and a studio scene at the other now has a functioning civic building sitting at the midpoint, one with a lobby, a council chamber the public can actually use, and floor space the city has already floated for retail. That's not a small detail for a city of roughly 8,300 residents that counts about 84 businesses citywide.
"When I think of the owners of this bar, I think of commitment, consistency and curiosity," Mount Rainier resident Olivia Harpster told The Washington Informer of Era's owners.
The Calendar That Runs Through It
None of this would matter much if the neighborhood's events still felt scattered across unrelated weekends. They don't, and this is where the new middle earns its keep.
This year's Gateway Open Studios Tour ran Saturday, May 9, from noon to 5 p.m., pulling in more than 250 artists across the four towns of the Gateway Arts District: Mount Rainier, Brentwood, North Brentwood, and Hyattsville. Red Dirt Studio and Joe's Movement Emporium represented Mount Rainier directly in the lineup, and organizers ran free shuttles along the roughly two-mile Route 1 stretch since the self-guided tour involves a fair amount of walking between studios. It's an annual fixture on the spring calendar, not a one-off, which is part of why a functioning middle of town matters going forward and not just for one season.
The Gateway Farmers Market started its season April 18 and runs every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, through November, which means there's still real season left on the calendar this fall before it closes for the year.
A few blocks over the line in Brentwood, miXt Food Hall keeps its own weekly rhythm going: bingo on the first and third Thursday of the month, trivia on the second and fourth, all with an all-night happy hour attached. It's a five-minute walk from the Potts Hall corner and close enough that residents on the Mount Rainier side of Rhode Island Avenue treat it as part of the same evening-out rotation as Era and Pennyroyal.
Add it up and the pattern looks less like a scattered events calendar and more like a corridor with three fixed points now instead of two:
- South end: Era Wine Bar and Pennyroyal Station at the Singer Building, roughly 3300 to 3310 Rhode Island Avenue
- Middle: the newly reopened Potts Hall Welcome Center at 3405 Rhode Island Avenue, connected to City Hall at 1 Municipal Place
- North end: the 34th Street arts cluster, anchored by Red Dirt Studio and the new mural project
None of these three points is new on its own. What's new is that the middle one finally reopened, with a public lobby and event-capable space, right where the walk between the other two used to just be a walk.
What This Means If You Already Live Here
If you've lived in Mount Rainier through the scaffolding years, the practical shift is smaller than the symbolic one. You now have a reason to actually go into the building at 1 Municipal Place beyond paying a water bill. The council chamber is a public space again, the lobby connects two buildings that used to require going back outside to move between, and the first floor has room the city has already suggested could become retail down the line.
If you're the kind of resident who plans a Saturday around the farmers market, you've got a couple more months of that rhythm before it pauses for the winter. If the Open Studios Tour is already part of your spring routine, this year's edition came and went in May, but it happens annually, so the next one will land around the same weekend in 2027, and the shuttle logistics along Route 1 are worth planning around ahead of time rather than figuring out parking on the day.
And if you've watched the corner of Rhode Island and 34th feel like two separate neighborhoods stitched together by a commute, this is the year that stitch got a building in the middle of it again.
Mount Rainier didn't need a new identity. It needed its middle back. As of September 2026, it has one.
If you're thinking about what a home in this corridor is actually worth, given how much has changed on the ground since the last time it was assessed, that's a conversation worth having with someone who watches this stretch of Rhode Island Avenue as closely as the people who live on it. Branches Realty works this market block by block. Talk to a local broker before you guess at what any of this means for your own address.
