My parking garage in Ballston is the "warehouse" level in a video game
But for something that sprang up out of nondescript sprawl in the 1980s (and much of it more recent) this is pretty convincing quickly built urban environment
However, because of its origin as a modern density corridor and not an actual urban neighborhood, the old highway through here is pretty much fully intact. Wide, fast, loud. Trucks. Heavily pedestrianized but still intimidating in many spots.
Driving home (mostly west on U.S. 29) is interesting. Here's Wilson Boulevard, on the way out of Arlington's dense area. Lot by lot, the area is changing. This immediate area isn't quite there yet.
A kind-of street area along 29. Interesting how the new developments have a more urbanist design, but are still just little pieces along a highway landscape.
And here is the Garden City Shopping Center, an early (50s) strip mall along U.S. 29. Very interesting building. Looks like an urban block. Packed parking lot and full of mostly immigrant-owned businesses.
The first "Marina" Safeway I've seen that's still a Safeway! Beautiful, well preserved piece of 1960s commercial architecture. A little off 29 in McLean
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This old-fashioned Chinese restaurant on U.S. 50 in Falls Church, Virginia, appears to be out of business, and suffered poor reviews for years. It's a time capsule of an American, and Chinese-American, cultural moment. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/the-sun-sets…
Along with a mediocre takeout-style buffet, Harvest Moon was a cavernous banquet and event hall, commonly used for large weddings. Here’s the view through the entrance. The names of whichever couple was last to hold their wedding here are, for now, preserved by abandonment.
A place like this is a nonrenewable cultural resource. A restaurant is a business, but it’s almost like an organism too, a living repository, a little compendium of folkways unique to the era in which it was started and the people who started it.
Here are some of the afterlives of Kinney Shoes, a defunct national retailer fondly remembered by many a kid growing up in the 60s. I tracked down and photographed every Fairfax County, VA location and what it is today. thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/kinney-shoes…
This was really fun to do, and it illustrates how even a standardized suburban commercial structure can be adaptable and durable. I think it's very cool how many of these are still standing, and how many different types of businesses they're now home to.
The Garden City Shopping Center in Arlington, VA is a window into how we used to build, even in suburbia.
It's built into a slope, so much of it is actually two stories. Its storefronts are quite small, meaning the "commercial density" here is high. The parking (which was larger before the highway was widened in the 1960s) is often nearly full.
Designed in the 1950s as the local shopping center for the adjacent neighborhood - single-family houses sit right across a back alley from the strip mall - it's now a magnet for the Bangladeshi community in Northern Virginia and beyond. arlingtonmagazine.com/little-banglad…
This was a difficult piece to finish. It started as a lighthearted, snarky piece about how Reddit can teach you what kind of person you don't want to be. The more I read and wrote, the more the material seemed too dark for that kind of treatment. theamericanconservative.com/articles/reddi…
There’s an irreducible weirdness to the Internet. You see it on all relatively uncontrolled platforms. Like YouTube, where pop culture, click farming, and the telephone game of transmitting pop culture across culture and language produces this stuff: medium.com/@jamesbridle/s…
Or even Amazon, where the product search pages, the combination of algorithms, fast, custom production, global shipping, and sellers chasing and mimicking algorithms, produce results like this. Page after page of increasingly spammy, word-salad titles and brandless, generic junk.