Reston

I live in Reston, Virginia, the town of the future of the past. (Check this page for pictures of my house in Hickory Cluster.) That is, in 1962, there were great hopes for the place. These days, it's not a bad place to live, but most of the hippie ambitions have been replaced with ugly strip malls and astounding traffic jams.

The Reston logo (other towns have seals, we have a logo), over to the left there, is officially explained thusly: The tree represents trees (oddly enough), while the grid represents the iron fist of the DRB, or Design Review Board, which is the body (part of the Reston Association) that tells you what kind of trees you're allowed to plant in your yard.

You can see maps of Reston -- both in relation to Washington, DC, and a larger-scale map showing all the streets, golf courses, and nature trails, here.

In 1962, Reston was planned as one of the first "new towns" to be built in the United States. It was specifically inspired by Milton Keynes, I believe. The first stage was, appropriately enough, a cast-concrete town center of sorts, called Washington Plaza.

Washington Plaza

Washington Plaza is still a terrific place to live, if you can afford the high cost per square foot. Problem is, there's no grocery store there anymore, and very little parking. The Hippie liberal idea was to walk everywhere, be a part of the "community" etc., but now that Reston is just a suburb, this presents a bit of a problem. If you try to walk from Washington Plaza to the new Reston Town Center (warning: this link features music) in 2000, you'll probably get run over by a bus before you get there. More likely you'll be run over by a speeding SUV, though, since public transport in the suburbs is close to nonexistent.

The original idea was that you'd live in Reston and work there as well. This was a logical choice, because in 1962 Reston was really in the middle of nowhere. The Dulles Airport road ran straight through the middle of it, but there was no way to get on it from Reston. Since then, the road has been expanded -- it's now 12 lanes wide -- and people commute both in and out. There are a lot of places to work in Reston; there are probably more jobs here now than there are places to live.

Of course, the problem is that Reston -- like most other towns -- was never meant to have this volume of traffic flowing through it. Consider this: The Dulles Toll and Access Road, a 12-lane highway, runs through Reston from east to west (or west to east, if you're coming from the airport). Reston Parkway runs through the town from north to south, and it's from four to six lanes wide, depending on where you are. Virginia route 7 -- four to six lanes -- runs along the northern edge of Reston. The Fairfax County Parkway, a semi-limited access, six-lane road, runs up from the south and (currently) ends in the middle of Reston. There are numerous other largish roads running all over the place, and Reston was carefully designed so that doing things like grocery shopping doesn't force you to use any major streets.

And it's still almost impossible to move around for four hours a day.

Part of the ideal of the town was that you'd be able to walk most places. Walk to work, to the grocery store, etc. I lived in Europe for a while, and I've definitely seen that this is possible, even for a person with American feet. But it's all fscked up in Reston.

Washington Plaza was one of the very first parts of Reston to be built. At the time, it had a pharmacy, restaurants, stationery store, etc., etc., and -- this is the important part -- a grocery store. The store was small by today's American standards, yes, but it was still large enough to feed the people living nearby. The main constituency for these stores was composed of the people who lived within walking distance. Parking was thus less convenient than we are now used to. The pharmacy (which, unlike the grocery, is still there) is perhaps a 200 to 300-foot walk from the parking lot. When you stand in front of the pharmacy, you can't see your car. This is totally unremarkable in Europe; it's the kind of thing that wins design awards (and then bankrupts the developers) here. You can see what I mean in the photo at right: Washington Plaza is at the end of the little inlet of the lake. There's a little pedestrian plaza in the center, with residential space above the pharmacy and other stores (I've got a lot more to say on that subject, another day), and parking at the perimeter.

While most of Reston is certainly more walkable and user-friendly than most suburbs, it's gone off the rails of its original good intentions everywhere except Washington Plaza. Strip malls, not unlike what you'd see anywhere else, are the dominant commercial space.

Let me just say here that strip malls are good; there's nothing necessarily wrong with them. The first thing a real estate development has to do is make money for the people who build them -- something Reston spectacularly failed to do in its early years -- and strip malls have shown that they make money. Passing drivers can see stores from the road, there's plenty of convenient parking, etc., etc. There's no grocery store in Washington Plaza today (except a tiny "Mercadito" which caters to the needs of Latinos but which offers a good enough selection to keep anyone alive) because it didn't have the ability to attract random passers-by.

Strip malls are incompatible with pedestrian activity, though. You really have to have either one or the other. It's inconvenient to walk from one end of the strip mall to the other -- the strip mall is basically a two-dimensional entity, strung along a line -- it's inconvenient to walk *to* the strip mall, because you've got to either pick your way through the semi-industrial wasteland behind the thing (the land of dumpsters), and then frequently walk all the way to the end to come around to the front, or you've got to traverse acres of steaming asphalt that's got little or no provision for people who aren't in cars.

Reston Industry

The early vision for Reston was that, unlike most suburbs, it would have "light industry" -- whatever the hell that means. I think the photo to the left shows what the idea was (click on the photo for the full size one, stolen from the image archive linked above): something involving chemicals that wasn't polluting and that wouldn't drive property values down. Owens-Corning had something going here in the early days, but, despite the fact that Reston was, at various times, owned by both Gulf and Mobil, at no time were there labs full of scientists looking at the Heron House through their boiling flasks.

One industry that was in Reston was the monkey-importation business. It's as a result of this that Reston has a strain of the Ebola virus named after it. The movie Outbreak was very loosely inspired by the Ebola Reston incident.

What industry has flourished here is telecommunications. Quite by accident, Reston has become something like the center of the world's telecommunications industry. Cable & Wireless, MCI, PSInet, Concert, Sprint, AOL, and many more all have their headquarters or major installations here. The big networking companies that are based in California all have major outposts here, or large holes in the ground for the basements of their major outposts. The IETF is based in Reston. Network Solutions is just down the road in Herndon. (A friend of mine calls the two towns "The Reston-Herndustrial Complex". He thinks this is very clever.) And it seems that MAE-East is moving seven miles west from its current Tyson's Corner location to Reston.

I will write more here when I get some inspiration.