Whatever Happened to … the Knox Boxes?
Off-Campus Apartments Were At Once Beloved and Bemoaned
The off-campus residences known as Knox Boxes housed UMD students—and their parties—since the 1950s. Most of them were demolished in 2015 to make room for the Terrapin Row development.
Photo by John T. Consoli
For more than a half-century around College Park, two words were synonymous with “Animal House”-style undergraduate debauchery: Knox Boxes.
The squat brick four-unit apartment buildings that populated the area between Knox Road and Guilford Road west of Baltimore Avenue were famous for being cheap, grungy and seemingly able to fit all of one’s freshman floormates. (This writer attended at least one Knox Box toga party that would have made John “Bluto” Blutarsky feel right at home.)
“For a lot of kids, a Knox Box apartment was your first taste of independence,” said Dan Reed ’09, a city planner who’s regional policy director for Greater Greater Washington, a site that focuses on transportation, housing and land-use issues in the Washington, D.C., area. “It was the first time you could pick your roommates, have parties and not have to worry about an RA.”
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Cars parked in front of the Knox Boxes in 1995. (Photo courtesy of The Diamondback/University Archives)
The 29 buildings that constituted the Knox Boxes were built in the 1950s and were typical of the era. As the federal government workforce expanded after World War II, so did the population of D.C. and its suburbs, leading to construction of lower-cost garden apartments and small apartment buildings. “You can find examples of buildings like the Knox Boxes all around the inside-the-Beltway suburbs as homes for working people just starting out who were moving to the area,” said Reed.
Over time, the community developed a strong identity among the University of Maryland population. “They were notoriously the worst living accommodations on/near campus,” wrote one Reddit user in 2016. Residents routinely complained about bugs, poor heating and air conditioning, and unresponsive landlords.
“Our landlord told us he doesn’t normally rent the basement to girls because of the bugs that were down there, and girls freak out because of the bugs,” then-resident Lauren Culler ’05, M.S. ’08 told The Diamondback in 2005.
Cockroaches weren’t the worst of the Knox Boxes. In January 2006, UMD student David Ellis died in a fire in a Knox Box on Rossburg Drive. The building’s owners had recently been cited by the city of College Park for not complying with regulations to enlarge the unit’s windows.
Still, the party scene powered on until 2013, when the city approved a plan with development company Toll Brothers to replace the Knox Boxes with Terrapin Row, a student apartment complex that includes a swimming pool, turf volleyball court and gym, along with retail establishments like Dunkin’, SeoulSpice and an Amazon Hub Apartment Locker. By 2015, the Knox Boxes were largely history. (A few remained until 2021.)
“It was bittersweet” to see the Knox Boxes knocked down, said Reed. “Those memories are just memories now.”
Still, Reed acknowledges, Terrapin Row has its advantages. “There’s much more of an intention of creating a community,” they said. “It’s a much nicer place, even if a little bit of the College Park I remember isn’t there anymore.”
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