News and notes from Reston (tm).

Monday, September 19, 2011

Flashback Monday: Tall Oaks, 70s Style

PCA_Media-Photos_107-10_aerial1_Aug16-1979.jpg

Set the earth-toned Wayback Machine to 1979, where we can witness a sight unfamiliar to us in today's modern era: a bustling Tall Oaks Village Center, complete with a nearly full parking lot and a grocery truck unloading foodstuffs into what is now empty space.

Before we start getting the time-travel equivalent of the bends, let's orient ourselves. LANK and the Tall Oaks pool are at the right of the photo. The senior citizen storage facility assisted living high-rise hadn't yet been built, nor had the townhouse development on what is now Oak Spring Way. Yet optimism abounds! Along with the aforementioned near-full parking lot at the village center, if you squint (or look at the almost disturbingly detailed full-sized photo here), you can see a moving truck in one of the townhouse cluster parking lots, ready to disgorge a house full of furniture and shag carpeting and we dunno, beaded curtains for the opening to the "great room" or whatever it was called back in the 1970s. And so another Restonian was born, or at least moved here from Chantilly, the end.

5 comments:

  1. Oh for crying out loud --- "great rooms" are creatures of the 90s --- in ths 70's they were called "rumpus rooms."

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  2. Or "conversation pits." Especially since so many homes of that era had step-down living rooms. Classy!

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  3. "family room" is what it says on my original 1974 floor plan.

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  4. If they were smart, they were moving OUT.

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  5. We just laid over the original flooring in the master bath. Great spanish pattern in harvest gold.

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