Not Too Small To Be Indoor
Not Too Small To Be Indoor
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #176
This, in Springfield, Virginia, looks like a typical small strip mall anchored by a supermarket:
I was quite surprised when I went inside—I was driving home from a buffet dinner on Route 1 in suburban Alexandria and just stopped to do a little grocery shopping—to see this:
This is a tiny indoor mall!
It even has a mall-style walkway kiosk:
And some seating:
The Giant entrance is inside the mall only. Despite items for sale from Giant in the middle space here, and the labels on the doors bearing the Giant logo, the left door leads outside and the right door leads to the tiny concourse.
Like any proper mall, there’s some space for lease:
I wasn’t able to find the property on the official Fairfax County property lookup database (not uncommon—probably because of changes in addresses or errors in digitizing), but this neat history of suburban development in Springfield identifies it as having been completed in 1990. Here’s a charming little local blog post from a few years ago about it, though it doesn’t mention that it’s a tiny indoor mall.
1990 seems a little late for an indoor mall that isn’t huge—a lot of these small neighborhood-sized indoor malls date back to the 1970s (that’s when the mid-sized Beltway Plaza in Maryland had an indoor portion added), and my hometown of Flemington had two small indoor malls from the ’70s or ’80s, both now standard strip plazas. For whatever reason, this style fell out of favor, with virtually every random shopping center I’ve ended up in being a typical strip plaza, with no indoor entry/concourse element. (The only one I can think of is the 1990s additions to Eden Center, creating a mini-mall atmosphere not unlike what you might find in Asia.)
I love stuff like this. It’s not the most interesting thing out there, and the retail options here are no different than any other neighborhood shopping center, of which there are probably hundreds in the region. But I guess the writer in me sees a story when one of them doesn’t fit the mold like this.
There’s something localist in a good way, something civic, about caring about and documenting these things, I think. Even if it’s just a little story of a little place.
Related Reading:
Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only piece, plus full access to the archive: over 1,000 pieces and growing. And you’ll help ensure more like this!
Check out the Target in Watertown, MA. It's been a few years since I've been there, but it's another teeny mall anchored by Target and Best Buy. It's essentially a regular suburban strip mall, except all of the smaller tenants are indoors and the big boxes have both indoor and exterior entrances.
The largest indoor tenant (at least when I was there) was the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles.
Across the street was a typical enclosed mall that was partially demolished for a "lifestyle center."
"There’s something localist in a good way, something civic, about caring about and documenting these things, I think. Even if it’s just a little story of a little place." -- Yes, indeed, and thank you. Speaking selfishly, I especially appreciate posts on Northern Virginia architecture and planning since I lived there for almost all of my adult life. Now in Tennessee for at least a year, I experience them as letters from home.