The former National Park Seminary in the Forest Glen neighborhood of Silver Spring, Md., once a fancy girls finishing school and later an annex to Walter Reed Army Hospital, is to be reborn as an upscale residential community.

On a clear winter day in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, Bonnie Rosenthal is revisiting a collection of bizarre abandoned buildings she stumped upon 15 years ago in the Forest Glen neighborhood.  "I was dumfounded," she says, strolling sylvan ground bisected by a ravine with a hidden grotto. "What is a pagoda doing in the middle of Silver Spring>  You turn a corner and see a Swiss chalet or an Italian villa or a Dutch windmill. My God, what is this place? Epcot? Disney World?"