Big And Tall
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #177
I want to show you a mixed-use development not far from where I live:
When do you think it was built?
This is Lake Anne Plaza, the first of the “village centers” built by Robert E. Simon, the founder of Reston. Reston is a planned community in Fairfax County, Virginia that was part of a movement called “New Towns” which also included Columbia, Maryland—a sort of proto-New Urbanism that intended to build places where people could live, shop, work, etc. (though commuting was expected from the beginning here.) “Work, Play, Live” is almost a joke now with these mixed-use developments, because in reality the job market never worked in a way where most people would work within the community.
Oh—year built, with the tower in the background:
I think it’s interesting that as early as the 1960s, you could already call something “New Towns.” There was also an understanding that these communities were suburbs—both Columbia and Reston are about 20 miles from the urban core. We had already lost the idea of actually living in towns that early, and we were already talking about reimagining them.
But there were still some “legacy” elements of this development. Look at this historical overview of Lake Anne:
The small scale of the shops at the Lake Anne center bespeaks an earlier concept of retail development, in contrast to the larger square footage of most mall stores of today, making the center a period piece and a utopian vision of American suburbia.
There was even a Safeway grocery store here when it opened! That spot is obviously too small for a modern chain grocery store today.
But I mainly want to focus on that tower. (It’s condos rather than apartments, and it’s undergoing repairs this year. Robert Simon actually lived in it!) Imagine a building that tall and modern going up in the mid-1960s in western Fairfax County, which was still quite rural in those days. Perhaps that made it easier to build something like this, since the area wasn’t already “built out” in a way that was expected not to change.
One thing you’ll hear from Reston community groups is that Reston is getting too crowded, growing too much, or losing open space. Reston is growing, but most of the growth is concentrated in a few areas: around two Metro stations and some of the older residential clusters. Pretty much everything else is low density.
I once saw on Nextdoor (my mistake) an article about new apartment high-rises near the Metro stop, and someone commented, “Robert Simon must be spinning in his grave.”
I responded: “Robert Simon built this in 1964:”
But Simon himself, in 2012, commented on the controversies over growth and density:
“There is a relatively small group of active people who are against anything except the status quo,” Simon told [Sam] Moyer. “…They seem to think that density is bad and they are very anxious to have open space. Well, if you use your head, you’ll figure out that, if you don’t have high-rise buildings, you’re not going to have a lot of open space. Density creates open space. They want to have it both ways, which doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
More from Simon, from a previously unpublished interview:
The original plan for Reston called for seven village centers anchored by supermarkets and supported by “dense residential housing,” Simon said in his interview with Moyer.
Lake Anne Village Center, the first of the planned centers, opened in 1966. It was designed to be a community hub within walking distance of most homes in Reston, missing residential and commercial uses with the natural backdrop of the lake, according to the history on the village center’s website.
Because supermarkets have grown in size and are now able to support more people, Simon allowed in his conversation with Moyer that Reston only has a need for four or five village centers now, but he lamented that the dense residential housing to support the centers mostly did not materialize.
According to Simon, there were supposed to be five high-rise buildings located at the village centers, but community opposition “managed to squelch that.”
The Reston Town Center, a later addition, also gets an endorsement: “He [Simon] described Reston Town Center as ‘the perfect plaza.’”
Even on the preservation of a golf course, which Simon was known to support, he allows some wiggle room:
According to his interview with Moyer, Simon initially staunch in his belief that the golf course needed to remain as it was.
“A friend of mine has been working at me to change my mind, and he’s got me halfway there,” Simon said. “A golf course really doesn’t take care of a lot of people, and there are [other] golf courses in the neighborhood. And this golf course isn’t inexpensive.”
Simon added that he could “conceive” of the course being converted into a park in the style of Central Park in New York City.
Not quite spinning in his grave.
It’s funny—there are people who would think of Simon’s openness to new growth as a kind of arrogance—I’m the town founder, I know better than you residents what you need. But it’s really a kind of humility: the ability to start something in motion, and then step back and watch it take its own path and be content with that.
What the founder does not express is the idea that he got it all right and nobody should ever change it. In that respect, this “New Town” kept a continuity with the old towns and cities.
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Have you ever read The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn? There was an interesting phenomenon where early Yuppies (like 50s and 60s early) invented a kind of collective fantasy for the history of the Brooklyn neighborhoods they were "rehabbing". They sort of thought that Brooklyn brownstones were like Manhattan brownstones -- the homes of individual grand families in the sort of Edith Wharton way. In reality, most of them were built as multi family homes that the Yuppies bought, kicked the tenants out of and turned into one-family homes. But they were so taken in by their own pretensions they completely renamed the neighborhoods and rewrote civic histories. So it doesn't surprise me that Robert Simon was much more willing to see change in the town he helped found than the people who have moved there since.
You can see a similar phenomenon in Silver Spring, which was largely built and still partially owned by the Lee Development Group, which was founded by two brothers of the Maryland Lees, a branch of the Virginia Lees -- as in Richard Henry and Robert E. Lee. They inherited the property around the eponymous springs, I understand, from Francis Preston Blair (who built the Blair House in Washington, DC). Their whole interest and now the interest of the company they founded, was to profit from real estate development, not live up to some suburban gentry fantasy.
and the townhouses nearby (where I live!) were bold at the time, too. people here weren’t used to that kind of density in suburbia, either, especially not in the middle of nowhere, as Reston really was.
they put Bob Simon on that Lake Anne bench for a reason! the kind of radical thinker we need more of 60 years later.