Flags can say a lot about a place, but sometimes what they say can be quite confounding.

For example, the purple banners draped high above Georgia Avenue announce a “concert in the park”. (A few banners also adorn Fenton Street near Wayne Avenue.) But the banners raise two big questions: What concert? And more importantly, what park?

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The Downtown Silver Spring shopping center does host free concerts during the summer — the county-sponsored Silver Spring Swings series on Thursday nights, the shopping center’s gigs on Saturday nights, and now a bunch on Fridays.

But the asphalt on Ellsworth Drive, on which the stage is erected, doesn’t exactly qualify as a park. (Technically, it’s a public road leased and managed by a private company.)

How about the annual jazz festival on the Turf? Is it a concert? Yes. Is the Turf a park? One can make that argument.

But The Penguin reported in May that this year’s gig would be held in the Lee parking lot off Georgia Avenue. The temporary move would allow construction crews to tear up the Turf to build a hardscaped Veterans Plaza.

Perhaps the purple banners should read: Concert in the park(ing lot).

And then there are those banners along Georgia Avenue between the 16th Street merge and the Beltway. Penguin reader QB Steve alerted the newsroom to rows of technicolored flags adding to the sensory overload in Montgomery Hills.

“The last thing that half mile of blight needs is more eye pollution,” the neighborhood resident wrote. “There’s already way too much in the way of traffic signs, overhead wires, gas station signs, etc., so what the hell are they doing planting those flag poles?”

And not just any scrawny flag poles. Those babies are like tree trunks, the kind of poles that would support 50-pound halogen street lamps.

Of course, pictures say a thousand words. But driving that stretch of Georgia Avenue while managing a camera isn’t as easy as it sounds. If you’ve got pics of these new banners, holler back.

Photo by Ron Pace/SSP.