Drive past 8123 Harford Road this fall and you will notice the marquee is lit for the first time in years. It is not advertising a movie, and it has not hosted a VFW fish fry in a while either. What is going up behind that sign is a $9 million answer to a question Parkville has been asking quietly since the last VFW post closed its doors: what happens to a building that has outlived two different community purposes?
The short version is that it gets a third one. The longer version is worth knowing if you live nearby, because the story of this address says more about where Parkville sits on the region's radar right now than any single ribbon-cutting usually would.
Three Lives, One Address
The building opened as the Colony Theatre in the 1940s, a neighborhood movie house on Harford Road. Decades later it became home to VFW Parkville Post 9083, where generations of veterans gathered until declining membership led the post to sell the property in 2022. For a while after that, it sat as exactly the kind of vacant, familiar-but-frozen structure that shows up in every older Baltimore County corridor: a landmark everyone recognizes and nobody quite knows what to do with.
That changed on March 25, 2026, when community leaders, Baltimore County Executive Kathy Klausmeier, and Councilman Mike Ertel of the Sixth District gathered under the old marquee to break ground on The EPICENTER, a nonprofit community center taking over the site in partnership with Mountain Christian Church. The renovation is expected to wrap up by the end of this year, according to a state bond fact sheet tied to the project, which puts the existing structure at roughly 12,000 square feet before planned additions.
What Actually Goes Into the Building
This is not a vague "community space" in the press-release sense. The plans are specific, and they were shaped by direct input from Parkville residents rather than handed down from a developer's template. Once complete, the site will include:
- A community café
- A choice-style food pantry, where visitors select items rather than receive a pre-packed box
- Hot showers for people experiencing homelessness
- Youth programming classrooms
- Dedicated community green space
That list is the visible layer of a $1.1 million public campaign called Parkville Promise, which funds the buildout of those specific rooms. It sits inside the larger $9 million transformation of the property, with funding drawn from a mix of private pledges, grants, county support, and a $100,000 state legislative bond request.
Karson Langenfelder, Mountain Christian Church's chief growth and operations officer, put the dollar figure in context at the groundbreaking:
"It represents trust, partnership, and a shared conviction that Parkville is worth investing in."
Why a Harford County Church Picked Parkville
Here is the detail that changes how you should read this project. Mountain Christian Church already runs EPICENTER locations at its Aberdeen, Abingdon, and Edgewood campuses, all in Harford County. Parkville marks the organization's first expansion across county lines. That is not a small operational footnote. An institution with an established track record in one county chose to cross into Baltimore County for its next investment, and it chose Harford Road specifically because of the building's history and the community's stated needs.
Executive Director Darrell McDavid framed the groundbreaking as the product of years of local listening rather than an outside group parachuting in with a plan already written. "It reflects years of listening, planning, and partnership," he said at the ceremony. Local educator Kelly Smalls, speaking at the same event, connected the physical work to something less tangible: laying "a foundation for renewed hope, opportunity, and connection within this community."
The Eight-Year Gap That Makes This Different
The single fact that puts the rest in perspective is one you will not find repeated much elsewhere: this project marks the first major commercial development in Parkville in eight years. That is not a comment on retail vacancy or population change. It is a statement about how rarely anyone has bet real capital on shared civic space in this neighborhood recently, and it is why a converted theater matters more here than a similar project would in a corridor that sees new construction every year.
Put the two facts next to each other and the shape of the story gets clearer. A church with no prior presence in Baltimore County chose Parkville for its first cross-county expansion, at the same time that Parkville had gone the better part of a decade without a development of this scale. Those two things are not a coincidence so much as a signal. Something about the building, the site's history under that marquee, and what residents said they needed made this specific address worth the first move.
What to Watch This Fall and Winter
If you live in Parkville, the practical version of all this is simple: keep an eye on 8123 Harford Road between now and the end of the year. The state bond fact sheet lists a construction completion target of December 31, which means the building most residents have only seen from the outside for the past few years should be functional, staffed, and open well before next spring.
When it opens, the day-to-day use will look less like a grand civic monument and more like a place people actually stop into. A cup of coffee at the café. A stop at the food pantry on a week that got tight. An after-school pickup that ends in a classroom instead of an empty parking lot. Baltimore County's own leadership showed up at the groundbreaking specifically because those uses, however ordinary they sound, are the kind of infrastructure that is easy to overlook until it disappears, and hard to replace once it does.
The marquee going dark when VFW Post 9083 sold in 2022 was a quiet loss. The marquee coming back on this year, attached to a building doing its third distinct job in eighty years, is the opposite kind of quiet. It is the sound of a neighborhood getting reinvested in without anyone needing to say so out loud.
For more on what is happening in and around Parkville, or if you have questions about the neighborhood beyond this project, Dan Cohen Homes is always glad to talk. Get a Free Consultation whenever you are ready.
