A Pancake Amid Stacks

What Do You Think You're Looking At? #165

I want to show you something in Ballston, Virginia, a neighborhood in Arlington County:

Obviously I love the classic, unaltered IHOP building, complete with the old-school lantern sign. There aren’t a whole lot of these fully intact vintage IHOPs left. But that’s not why I’m showing you this.

Look at the buildings that surround the IHOP compared with the IHOP’s likely age. The pancake house is a living fossil that tells you what this corridor used to be. From Greater Greater Washington:

However, Arlington officials were able to convince Metro’s planners to reroute the Orange Line about a half mile south of I-66, in a subway to be built beneath the declining commercial corridors along Wilson Boulevard and Fairfax Drive. By concentrating development around the new Metro stations in these areas, Arlington would be able to massively grow its population and job market in the coming decades without increasing automobile traffic.

Read the whole piece.

That last sentence is actually true—I’ll never get tired of sharing this chart from an Arlington traffic study, showing decreased automobile traffic in most of Arlington’s major thoroughfares since the 1990s:

In fact, the GGWash article understates how incongruous it is for this building to still be here. It was built all the way back in 1966! At that time, the area looked like this. The IHOP is about in the middle here, but this imagery is from 1964, so it hasn’t quite been built yet:

That whole area was just your typical and somewhat rundown suburban sprawl commercial corridor. Absolutely nothing about it suggested that it would become one of the region’s main urban, transit-rich hubs.

The IHOP building, perhaps improbably, has suffered and survived at least two kitchen fires in recent years—a few of the comments in the linked news item speculate that perhaps they’re not unrelated to what must be the immense value of the dirt under this decades-old single-story building. Who knows. On the other hand, someone points out the place is mobbed on Friday and Saturday nights after all the young people hit the area bars. It probably makes pretty good money or it wouldn’t still be standing.

Let me note further that Ballston is not just a generic mid-to-high-rise neighborhood. Sure, it has a little bit of that movie-set/master-planned feeling, but as that type of place goes, it feels pretty “real.” This looks like the real thing to me:

And more than that, the density here is almost off the charts: Ballston is the densest neighborhood in the greater D.C. region, and, according to author Payton Chung, it’s even “the densest locale between NY metro and Miami.” Wow. It’s almost inconceivable that this was built almost overnight, and that the only trace in the immediate neighborhood of the old form is that IHOP (further down the street there are still areas in between the Metro stops full of old, low-rise commercial structures.)

This isn’t something that happens much in America anymore. Some will see it as too much change too quickly. Maybe. But if that kind of change is going to occur anywhere, it should be in a place like Arlington, with its great transit and very close proximity to the nearby big city. And more than that, it gives me a sense that we can still build things and do things—that our records for “tallest” and “biggest” and “fastest” don’t all have to be dim legends shrouded by time.

But hey, can we keep the IHOP around?

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Related Reading:

Didn’t Used To Be a Pizza Hut

Pecan Log Rolls and Hotel Rooms

Doomed Restaurants

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