Hall Hanging It Up After Nearly 40 Years

In early 1973, the Rockville Municipal Swim Center hired a recent graduate of Amherst College. As a part-time, temporary swim coach and pool supervisor, Burt Hall earned $1.99 an hour.

Nearly 40 years later, on Friday, Hall, 62, will retire after climbing the ranks of the City of Rockville’s recreation and parks department and ascending to director, where he's served for the last 20 years.

“Sometimes it seems shorter than that,” Hall said on a recent Friday morning in his office in City Hall. “Sometimes it seems longer than that.”

During his two decades as recreation and parks director, an increasing number of city programs, events and facilities have come under Hall’s management.

The variety and the value they add to the city is what Hall said contributed to the love and longevity he brought to the job.

“There’s a lot of stuff that any city has to do,” he said. “You have to make the toilets flush. You have to get the trash picked up, maintain the roads, the traffic signals—all those things. Recreation and Parks tends to do the things that are less mandatory, but also the things that I believe really make a difference in quality of life for our residents.”

A big portfolio 

During his time with the department, Hall has seen its involvement in city life expand.

Other municipalities have a parks system (Rockville has 65 parks), but few towns have a recreation program like Rockville’s, Hall said. The city offers senior citizen services and programs, special events like Hometown Holidays and special use facilities like the Senior Center, the Rockville Swim Center, the Civic Center and Croydon Creek Nature Center. Other touches, like the city’s 30,000 street tree and tens of thousands of flower bulbs and annuals planted each year in nearly 200 flower beds “makes Rockville stand out as a special community,” Hall said.

With most of the city’s buildings being recreational buildings, Hall oversees maintenance of all of the city’s buildings, including City Hall, the Gude Drive Maintenance Facility, the water treatment plant, and the Fallsgrove Transportation Center. He has had a hand in the planning the , which began in 2005. The police force is expected to move in later this month with the new station, in the historic United States Post Office in Town Center, to be officially dedicated in early fall.

“Obviously on a project like that we’re working hand-in-glove with the police department in the planning of it,” Hall said. “But basically it’s my staff who are working with the architects to do the technical design work and to manage the construction project.”

In the late 1980s, beginning with the administration of Mayor Douglas M. Duncan, the city made an effort to promote Rockville’s downtown—now known as Town Center.

Rockville Days that were held at the Civic Center were moved downtown and became Hometown Holidays. The started, as well as the Rockville Farmers Market.

With so much in his portfolio, Hall said he relies on the people around him.

“I have an excellent set of division heads,” Hall said, before rattling off the names of the managers in his department, most of whom he hired.

“That’s one reason why I feel very good about retiring at this point, because I’ve got a great team of division heads who I think will carry on,” he said. “I really don’t think the department is going to skip a beat.”

Chris Henry, who oversees the budget process and community services, including the city’s recreation centers, will serve as acting director. She stood in for Hall at Monday’s City Council meeting.

Big changes

Hall said the biggest change he saw during his four decades with the city was the development of the last two big farms at the city’s edges. The birth of the King Farm and Fallsgrove communities “greatly increased our population and greatly changed the city,” Hall said.

The second big change was the transformation of Town Center. Hall had a supporting role, participating in the design and construction of Town Square Plaza as a city park.

“For all those years we had a bunch of parking lots and now we have this really nice Town Center,” Hall said. “And that was thrilling to be involved with that. [To] watch the [old Rockville] Mall come down and then Town Center come up, that’s been great.”

The pace of the city has changed as well.

“When I started in the ‘70s, this was still very much the suburbs,” he said. “It seemed much farther out.”

Since then, Hall said, Rockville “has become, over these decades, much more of a true city.”

All the while, it’s remained unique, he said.

“What I like about Rockville, and what people really like about Rockville, is that when you live here you really have a sense of place—that you live in a community that has an identity,” Hall said. “And I’m not sure whether that’s true when you’re in these areas of the county that are not incorporated, that don’t have their own local government, that don’t have their own events.”

You can tell when you cross the municipal border into Rockville, he said. 

“You can really notice it when we’ve had a significant snowfall,” he said, a nod to the snow removal and “higher standard of maintenance” on city roads.

Big plans

In retirement, Hall plans to spend time with his new grandchildren and volunteering.

The Bethesda native plans to remain in Rockville, where he moved his family in 1992 as a condition of becoming recreation and parks director.

“I didn’t want to work anywhere else,” he said.

Tomorrow: Burt Hall on "probably the hardest thing I ever did in my career."