Flashback Monday: Under the Sea Lake

Behold Reston's original stream restoration project: the creation of awesome manmade lakes from whole cloth, all the better to live in harmony with nature, or something resembling it, only with more valuable waterfront real estate parcels.

This is a picture of "Lake Wyeth," which is what Robert E. Simon apparently wanted to call Lake Thoreau, but the painter, apparently not a fan of earth tones, said no, leading Reston's developers to instead name it after some writer or something who 1) liked trees and 2) couldn't sue, on account of having been dead for more than 100 years. Either way, this muddy pastoral landscape would ultimately be replaced by a murky, algae-filled lake, the end.