What Do You Think You're Looking At? #4
A fun illustrated series on the unexpected lives of commercial buildings
This week’s entry is in Herndon, Virginia, an old rail town that was once the source of a large percentage of the milk and dairy products that went to Washington, D.C. Today it is mostly a bedroom community for D.C.-area commuters. Here’s an image from one of the larger strip plazas that line Elden Street, the main thoroughfare.
Well…it’s a strip plaza. Or what looks like an addition to one. Notice on the right hand side, the façade is different. Not much to go off of here, but I’ll give you a hint: the back of the building(s) might help.
Any guesses?
OK. Here’s the building as it began life:
That’s right: a K-Mart! This is an example of a big-box store being reused, except it was gutted and subdivided to house a number of smaller tenants. There’s a gym, a Sprouts medium-sized supermarket, and a couple of restaurants. One large store became a handful of stores—you could call this, perhaps, “commercial upzoning” or an “increase in commercial density.” It isn’t exactly that, but it’s a pretty good adaptation of what’s generally an inflexible kind of space. It involved a lot of remodeling, but not demolition of the original structure itself.
Of course, it’s also a fairly expensive project, and so struggling towns may not have the populations to support expensive remodeling of vacant commercial space. You can see why smaller buildings, combined with less rigid zoning, make built spaces more adaptable. (In other words, a single person or small crew can adapt a Main Street storefront, but it takes a construction job to adapt a big-box store.)
I got a few pretty neat shots of this project in progress, and at one point they had the gutted building completely open, with no fence. Of course, I got as close as I could without entering the work zone and snapped a few pictures!
That red stripe, at the right side of this last photo, was, I believe, part of the visible wall when it was still a K-Mart. As you can see, even the floor was completely pulled up and redone. It was a little weird to stand there and wonder what department I would have been in!
Anyway, that’s this week, stay tuned and subscribe so you don’t miss anything.