Blob's Park doesn't get many accidental visitors. To get there, you drive to Jessup and turn off Route 175 at the flashing yellow light by the volunteer fire station, itself obscured by trees, and travel along what looks to be a private lane. Only as you approach the first bend do you see a decrepit sign marking the way to "Blobs Pa," the "r" and "k" long fallen to the ravages of time.

Soon the famed German dance hall—a gingerbread building unevenly seated on the higher end of a field—will probably succumb to a more immediate sort of threat: the wrecking ball. After more than sixty years, Blob's Park closes for good this winter. The Eggerl family, which owns and runs the place, isn't saying exactly when, but speculation among the regulars has pegged the final night as New Year's Eve.

Although Blob's Park has been touted as the Baltimore area's only Bavarian Biergarten, taxonomically, it really is closer to a GastHaus: a voluminous hall for drinking and dancing. Blob's is awash in such endearing inconsistencies. The large painting behind the bandstand appears to be of the St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague (a city the Germans bombed in World War II). And although the facility was dubbed "one of the East Coast's great polka meccas" on the accordion blog Let's Polka (www.letspolka.com), the house band, the Rheinlanders, doesn't always play the irresistibly bouncy Central European dance music—they also pump out some rockabilly, some slow waltzes, and various Germanic oom-pah numbers. Anything that will get people dancing.

It's a quiet November night, and the rain outside is the kind that would make most stay home with a DVD. The lone waitress on duty, Janice Lochner, rolls her stainless-steel food cart by the rows of banquet tables pushed together for family-style dining and socializing. Pitchers of Spaten Oktoberfest are flowing, recalling the spirited celebration of that holiday that was held here recently, and the kitchen is serving up schnitzel and dumplings and other specialties from the Old Country. On the parquet-tiled dance floor, burly dance instructor Butch Kotowski instructs a busload of Catholic University students how to polka. They circle Kotowski under the disco ball, gawkily half-stepping with smiling determination.

"Just relax and lean forward on the ball of your foot and flex your knees," he instructs.

Behind the bar, 69-year-old John Eggerl pours me the house ale but declines further discussion. "Too busy," he mumbles, marching off to move trays of freshly washed glasses. The fate of Blob's Park is something of sensitive subject for the Eggerls, in a way that only family matters can be. Despite this evening's sparse patronage, failing attendance isn't why Blob's Park must close: Weekend nights and Sunday afternoons can still fill the place. Instead, it's the steady march of suburban development that has doomed the dance hall. 

Blob's Park grew from regular social gatherings held by Eggerl's great uncle, Max Blob, who settled on this site in 1933. Soon he built a bowling alley and opened up the farm to the public for weekly dancing and sauerbraten-eating. In 1942, Max's niece, Katherine Blob Eggerl, and her husband, John, started helping out with the operations, raising five children in the farmhouse next door. She died this April at age 89, but before she passed she arranged to have the remaining land sold, her son John later tells me.

Outside the GastHaus, farmland stretches out in all directions. This is the Gold Coast, as Anne Arundel County executives like to call this area. Within a few years, according to proposals, these fields will be transformed into a mixed-use development called Parkside. A site plan presented to the county in 2005 by the owners of the land surrounding Blob's, Bethesda-based developers Classic Group LLC, showed just over 1,000 residential units, plus 400,000 square feet of offices and a shopping center. Office space near Baltimore-Washington International airport goes for a premium, and a few miles up Jessup Road, Fort Meade is bracing for the arrival of more than 5,000 military and civilian personnel over the next two years as part of the federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) program.

Later in the evening, a senior but spry brunette snakes across the floor and asks for a dance. I have two left feet, but I find a simple footwork, and she falls in step. Her name is Joan Willette, and afterward the 75-year-old introduces me to what seems like her entire family. Her 64-year-old sister Brenda McCoy is here, in a sparkly dress. Nearby sit Willette's daughter, Peggy, and her husband, Dave Rice, both regulars since 1989. Peggy's daughter and son-in-law are in attendance as well.

Many patrons have been stepping out to Blob's for decades, and they are a faithful group. Steel-eyed Bill Miller, doorman for the last sixteen years, first heard of Blob's Park when he was a soldier in Germany in the mid-1970s. "When you get to Fort Meade," fellow soldiers instructed, "track down this place." He and his wife settled in Maryland after retirement, he tells me, in part to be near Blob's Park. Leon Umberger, the accordionist and vocalist for the Rheinlanders, estimates there are about fifty people who show up pretty much every weekend. Umberger, who first picked up the accordion when he was 6, started going to Blob's Park in 1974. In 2005, when he retired from General Motors' East Baltimore plant, he took on the job of bandleader as a second career.

Blob's Park has served as a polka-related business incubator for others as well. Lochner and her husband Jay run an Internet polka radio station (www.familypolka.com). Butch Kotowski and his wife, Mary, who got their start teaching polka at Blob's in 1976 (they later married here), have appeared on Good Morning America and alongside Bobby Vinton in his theater in Branson, Missouri.

With closing only weeks away, the regulars are preparing in different ways for life after Blob's. Umberger has started inquiring about other venues to book his new band, the Keepsakes. (The Rheinlanders will disband after the park closes.) He figures he can promise any club owner a strong turnout of Blob's Park refugees. Mary Kotowski's social club, the Spice of Life Dance Club, offers a newsletter listing of other polka nights around the region. Peggy Rice and family have searched out a few other places to dance, like the Polish Home Club on Broadway in Fells Point.

But it won't be the same, Peggy says. People have forged friendships and built lives within these wood-paneled walls. Where will they go now? "There's just been a lot of heartbroken people who have been asking that question." 

Like many, she doesn't seem to have quite accepted that Blob's Park will close. Not in her heart. Perhaps the new owners will preserve the building? Perhaps it could be listed in the National Register of Historic Places? "It won't be over," Peggy says, "until the bulldozer hits the building."

—Joab Jackson