Need more traffic here?

Watch the police car try and navigate this intersection.

Proposed drive-thru will be to the right of where the Metro bus drives in on right.
Video taken 5:29 pm Nov 8, 2024. Dinner time at McDonald's drive thru.
Ager Road facing west, looking towards Riggs Rd where E-W Highway merges in.

The addition of a McDonald's store at this intersection will increase traffic and decrease pedestrian and cyclist safety at an intersection that is already struggling with providing safe crossing for non-vehicular traffic.

5th most dangerous road in the county!

The High Injury Network = one-mile corridors in Prince George’s County with the greatest frequency and severity of bike and pedestrian crashes

3 pedestrian fatalities from just 2018-2021

Increased Traffic

Traffic Dangers

McDonald's Corporation Erroneous Natural Resources Inventory (NRI)

Missing from NRI:

•Black Gums (Nyssa sylvatica),

•Common Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana),

•large Willow Oaks (Quercus phellos)

•Confused American Elm (Ulmus americana) for Slippery Elm (Ulmus rubra)

County Code

Section 25-117

Woodland & Wildlife Habitat Conservation Ordinance

Requires the County to conserve and protect trees, woodlands and wildlife habitat.

They propose to cut a forest to make room for parking and prevent neighbors from hanging out in the forest.

Walkable neighborhoods,
not drive-thrus!

INCREASED POLLUTION

More vehicles will flock to the area to purchase food through the drive-through in idling vehicles, which will increase the congestion and air pollution.

We need higher quality services in this area. We are already flooded with McDonald's in the area. We want to see the County Plan for the area enacted, including walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented development.

"Job Creation"

McDonald's claims they will create 50 jobs...

A General Accounting Office report published in October 2020 found that aside from Walmart, no company has more employees enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and MEDICAID than McDonald’s.

Fast Food Pattern and Cardiometabolic Disorders

• Higher fast food consumption also increases the risk of developmental diabetes, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease.

Bahadoran, et al 2015

McDonald’s Density and Food Equity

•14 in a 10-mile radius

•7 Additional planned

Healthy Food Priority Areas

•Prince George’s County Food Security Task Force, via Council Resolution CR-62-2020 has a goal to ensure every Prince Georgian has access to nutritious, affordable, sustainably grown, safe and culturally appropriate food.

•In 2019 Healthy Food Priority Areas (HFPAs) were developed by 7 agencies, County Council and County Exec.

Proposed McDs is within a...

Healthy Food Priority Area

HFPA is an area of the county that lacks access to healthy foods = Food Swamp

Equity Emphasis Area (EEA)

Above average concentrations of low-income or traditional disadvantaged African American, Hispanic and Asian populations.

McDonald’s to be built on a wooded area that might hold an enslaved peoples burial ground.

Next door to the site of the proposed McDonald’s is the Green Hill Historic Site, a plantation built in the 1820s and added onto several times. Since 1960 it’s been owned by the Pallotine Catholic order, who use it as a residence and training center.

If you’ve heard of Green Hill, aka Chillum Castle Manor, it’s likely because Pierre Charles L’Enfant used to be buried there. He died penniless in 1825, but he was friends with the plantation’s owner, William Dudley Digges, who gave L’Enfant a dignified burial in his front yard. In 1909, L’Enfant’s body was exhumed and reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery.

Digges died in 1831 and left Green Hill – and at least twenty enslaved people – to his wife Norah, who lived there until it was sold in 1863 to George Washington Riggs (of Riggs National Bank and Riggs Road fame).

Here are some ads from the Maryland State Archives that the Diggeses placed looking for enslaved people who self-emancipated from Green Hill.

A 1933 deed says there are two servant’s quarters, but it doesn’t say where those quarters were, or if those servants were enslaved or post-emancipation employees

In general, enslaved people were buried out of view but not too far from the mansion, either behind the enslaved quarters or by the white burial ground, often in a grove of trees. They did not get engraved headstones, usually just a fieldstone or wooden stake as a marker. Sometimes loved ones came back and placed engraved markers post-emancipation. Many have been totally lost, perceptible only by grassy depressions or ground-penetrating radar.

Buried Slaves

Slave burial ground

Here’s an illustration of Green Hill in 1877. You can see the chapel, the hilltop, the mansion.

Is that the overseer’s house on the right? I don’t know!

And what are those stones at the bottom of the hill in the foreground. I don’t know.

But if – IF – this is the view from the SW corner of the mansion, then those stones are right about where the McDonald’s is supposed to be.

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