A Universe of Uses
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #48
We’re in Woodbridge, Virginia today, about 40 minutes south of D.C. and just off I-95. I’m going to start with the satellite view this time. Our building is the Floor & Decor showroom, in the middle of a relatively recent sprawling commercial district.
Here’s what it looks like now at ground level. One half is a closed Gander Mountain store, and the other half is the décor showroom.
Now that’s a huge building, so huge that it’s home to two very large stores today. So you wonder how it began life. (At least I do.) A little searching, and Google Maps Street View historic imagery, revealed something very interesting. As late as 2011, it wasn’t a store at all. It looked like this. It was a manufacturing plant for the defense contractor General Dynamics!
Solved? Hold on now. The parking lot, the sidewalk in front of the entrance, and that rotunda on the left sure scream “retail,” not “factory.” And that rotunda looks like a little piece of brand-specific architecture. So once I noticed that, I guessed that even the defense-contractor plant was an intermediate use. Here’s a better view of that part, which is actually the front:
Any idea?
Well, a little more searching revealed the answer. It would have looked like this (photo from this blog post, which got it from a defunct site—I’d credit it if possible):
Incredible Universe was one of those early electronics superstores (kind of like Crazy Eddie’s, or Nobody Beats the Wiz.) They were only in business for five years—1992 to 1997—and there were only 17 of them. The average store was nearly 200,000 square feet, and they had stages, demonstration rooms, and stocked tens of thousands of consumer electronics and related products. It was operated by Tandy—also known as the company behind Radio Shack!
Here’s the chain’s Wikipedia page; here’s a neat entry about it at a retail blog, with lots of awesome images, including of the interior of one of the stores; and here, from the year 2000, is a news story noting that General Dynamics had agreed to take over most of the then-empty building.
So: this building began as a massive store, by the standard of any time period. Then, due to its size, it sat empty, unattractive to other retailers—so much so that it became a factory for a defense contractor (who even kept the brand-specific rotunda entrance!) Then, in the 2010s, it was subdivided, the rotunda was removed, and it became retail once again. That’s a very unusual life for a big-box store. The zoning meetings must have been fun!
The point here is that the bigger these buildings are, the harder they are to adapt. Take a look at the Wikipedia entry linked above, and you’ll see that some of the other surviving Incredible Universe structures also have unconventional (i.e. non-retail) second lives.
I just wish the rotunda had been left intact.
Check out the related reading links too: they’re both bits of neat corporate retail history, rather than other entries from this series.
Related Reading:
Walmart, Sam’s Club, and...Bud’s?
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