Behold the New Hawtness of Tysons Corner, Same as the Old Hawtness

Assuming you find anecdotes about billionaire developers cute, there's a cute story in the Post today about two development titans going to a Nationals game and carving up Tysons as if they were approaching the endgame in a midnight dorm-room game of Risk maybe discussing their plans for "Fairfax County's downtown." In sum, the approach appears to be of the "stick big tall buildings next to the low-rise shopping malls and allow hilarity to ensue" variety. In other words, more of the same for Tysons, fancy Wal-Mart on the other side of "town" notwithstanding.

Behold the edgy urban vibe we'll soon be experiencing:

A proposed 50,000-square-foot plaza is intended to allow easy connections between the mall and the new buildings, and Coppola envisions promotions and incentives linked by all four. Fans of the American Girl store, for instance, may be offered discounts on hotel or restaurant bills. Employers in the office building may use the AMC theater for corporate video conferences. The plaza may host weddings or events in conjunction with the hotel.

Got to be honest. Tysons may have a Cheesecake Factory, but we like our awesome parallelograms better than theirs.

Flashback Monday: A Tour of the Reston Home Tour of Homes, Redux

As Flashbacks go, this one only requires a soupcon of plutonium for the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine, as we journey back to last fall, that gauzy, halcyonic time before that giant flood Took Away Our Innocence Forever. You see, our BFFs at the Reston Museum posted a fancy YouTubes video slideshow of pictures from last year's Reston Home Tour. Enjoy the John Teshesque soundtrack as the photos zoom in and out.

Actually, all four houses are seriously beautiful. Just take a look:

Maybe someone at USGS can identify the source of these mystery globules.

Love this dining room. As an added bonus, the staircase would be an awesome place to recreate the climactic shootout in Scarface.

Fun Fact: The glass mauve-enclosed nerve center at Restonian World Headquarters looks exactly like this. (The clocks show the time in North Reston, South Reston, Reston Town Center and Herndon.)

Don't let anyone tell you the tall buildings at RTC have scared off the wildlife.

Phriday Photo Pfun: Pretentious Album Cover or Reston Architecture?

It's been a while since we've revisited this trope brilliant comedic bit: Below are photos of upcoming Reston buildings and high-concept album covers. Can you tell the difference?

Busted!

Oh, well. It was a good run, but it was only a matter of time until the mainstream media managed to out us -- and on the front page, no less! But how did they manage to figure out that we "prefer to hang around the house more and walk outdoors less"?

Water Falling From Sky Helps Refill Lake Anne, If Not Patience With Jet-Age Air Conditioning System

Good news for fans of golf and jet-age, tepid water-powered air conditioning systems: this weekend's rains added "about four inches" to the level of Lake Anne, helping eliminate that unsightly Ring Around The Tub Lake that had all our planned community neighbors gossiping at the last bridge club shindig. The shame!

Before the rain, the lake had been down by at least 16 inches, according to this press release from our BFFs at the Reston Association, which also acknowledged that the low lake levels helped "make the inside temperatures higher than usual in many of the homes" served by RELAC, which responded by adding a jet-age "auxiliary pump" to add more water to the system (pictured below).

Behold your rate hike at work!

Last week, the low water levels led to more than the usual grousing and finger-pointing about RELAC and the Hidden Creek Golf Course, which (successfully) went to court several years ago for the right to pump as much water as it wants from the lake to satiate the bourgeoise pretensions of its members irrigate its golf course. In a statement, the RA pointed out that it "has not been successful in our attempts to work with the golf course management." (It has since said it was told that Hidden Creek officials "cut back on irrigation during this time.") The RA is also organizing a task force to "determine the next steps to meet the long-term need."

Could that mean the eventual demise of our jet-age cooling miracle? If you read between the lines of this comment in an article by our BFFs at Patch, it sounds like the company that bought the system some years ago is losing patience with the whole situation as well.

[Aqua Virginia Chief Operating Officer Shannon] Becker says Aqua is frustrated too. The RELAC system - which may be the only one of its type remaining - takes up time and resources for the company. Low water levels, storm debris and pumps that can overheat and shut down are among the issues Aqua Virginia is facing, he says.

"We have two full time operators working on the system," he said. "That is out of the norm. We are in the water and sewer business. We are not in the AC business, and our operating metric is not typically two people to 300 customers."

"We are working with RA to make sure people are aware of issues and determine what we need to do to go forward."

The last attempt to ditch the system was in 2005, when a referendum was defeated 130-100. It's unclear why the other 70 or so homes required to use the RELAC system chose not to vote, but such is the miracle of Democracy In Action.

Flashback Monday: Reston's 'Eager Beavers' and the Crisis of Nought-Eighty-Eight

Grab your Debbie Gibson albums and set the controls of the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine to 1988. While the Cold War would rage on for yet another year, a longstanding, equally undeclared war in Reston was about to get hot.

On one side, the Reston Association, with its formidable arsenal of pickup trucks and snowplows and... other stuff with wheels. On the other? A family of beavers.

"Problem-solving prowess" is something we haven't heard since... our last resume. Still waiting on that call for an interview, BTW! But hold on tight, 'cuz stuff was about to get real.

First, in a daring gambit borrowed from the Cuban Missile Crisis, the RA must have used an earlier generation of aerial drones to obtain this damming (get it?) photo:

Then at the 11th hour, crisis was averted and a compromise was reached: the RA wound up building a culvert and spillway "to keep the water level in the dammed area stable but low." The beavers were allowed to stay, but some of their offspring were sent to Siberia, or at least Herndon "moved to another location."

Of course, beavers remain a scourge in south Reston to this day. So with the benefit of hindsight, the man homeowners association vs. nature skirmish was played to a draw. If only the RA had tapped into the best computing power available in the 1980s, they could have learned this valuable lesson ahead of time:

So It Begins: Parc Reston Demolition Marks Unofficial Start to Reston Redevelopment

Fans of stuff getting busted up real good should set up camp in the Macaroni Grill parking lot, as demolition is slated to begin on three of the buildings in the Parc Reston complex off Reston Parkway and Not Really Temporary Road. Fortunately, the 82 units in the three buildings to be demolished "have been vacated," sparing us some last-minute hilarity and hijinx.

The remaining buildings in the complex, which are all condos instead of rental apartments, will remain, giving their residents a front-row view of the construction of two 14-story residential towers connected by a fancy glass atrium. Behold the planned hawtness, which was approved by the DRB late last year:

Construction is slated to begin later in the year, according to our BFFs at Patch.

We doubt many tears will be shed over the loss of these buildings or the Fairway Apartments just down the road, whenever construction work on that massive redevelopment project begins there. But together, they mark a new stage for Reston, as for the first time large residential complexes are being torn down to build even larger, newer ones. We'll likely soon add the Crescent Apartments complex near Lake Anne to the list, once county officials announce the winner of its request for proposals to redevelop the county-owned property. (County officials now say that an announcement is planned for sometime in the third quarter.)

So get ready, folks. It's going to be a bumpy ride.

This Week in Crime: Don't Look, Ethyl!

It's been a while since we've delved into the county's weekly chronicles of stolen towels sad petty crime in our earth-toned community, but one nugget this week caught our attention.

Seems that at around 5 pm on July 8 in an otherwise calm neighborhood in South Reston, a gentleman was reported to be "walking through the neighborhood naked." Concerned residents called the police, and said gentleman "left in a vehicle" (presumably one without black vinyl seats, given the heat and his lack of clothing). Police set off in pursuit, and ultimately Got Their Man. The 44-year-old Reston resident was charged with indecent exposure, speed to elude, and disregarding a red light.

It would be Wrong to point out that this happened on Shadbush Court, wouldn't it?

Here's the main reason we posted this week-old story ActionMcNews coverage:

Boogity, boogity, indeed.

As the Silver Line Turns: Phase 1 Connected, If Not Completed

Hundreds of years from now, people will remember that magical spot outside of Tysons Corner where the last "trusses," whatever they are, of Phase 1 of the Metro Silver Line were connected today, linking an unending band of concrete, and maybe eventually some rails, all the way from West Falls Church to Reston. Here's the HISTORIC MOMENT, as captured by a Twitter person from WTOP:

It'll take a lot of Toll Road quarters to pay for that golden spike.

Union thugs! Oh, wait.

Meanwhile, what else has been going on? The Reston Citizens Association has asked Gov. McDonnell to use the state's $150 million share of the project to pay down the capital costs in an attempt to slow the inevitable toll rate hikes, and now that Loudoun has decided to be part of Phase 2, it's back to the same old, same old in our progressive neighbor to the west, the end.

Flashback Monday: Yet Another New Town from the 60s

You'd be excused for thinking that the entire "new urbanism" movement in the 1960s consisted of Reston and its Maryland doppelganger, Columbia, emerging fully formed from the heads of their respective developers. Not true! We've already visited a stunning example of urban planning from the same era in the Irish countryside, and now, we'll take a look at an even finer exemplar of the best of New Urbanism, ca. 1968:

Ladies and gentlemen, we give you Cumbernauld New Town, Scotland -- not to be confused with the Reston in Scotland, which we're sure is a lovely place with... thatched roofs and, um, kilts, and whatever else you get in Scotland. But this stunning vista marries the brutalist adornments we've come to know and love with the massive building-on-a-windswept field look that Reston Town Center had in its early days. This looks like a black and white photo, but we can assure you that it's not.

Of course, the British do warm beer snark better than we do, so here's what a Blighty "web logger" has to say about this:

For a long time I wondered what this picture reminded me of. Now I have it - it's like the colony where Ripley discovers the little girl in Aliens. A bizarre mix of hospital crematoria and the Royal Festival Hall on stilts, bear in mind that this building was under 10 years old when this photograph was taken.

Much like Lake Anne, the "grossery" was at the heart of this New Town:

Amazingly, it gets better much worse:

We have no idea what they were smoking going for in this bit of building, but it's basically a Bizarro Terraset reaching inappropriately into the sky, only without the Mole People. Also, we're pretty sure that building in the bottom right got cited by their HOA for a paint color deemed "not sufficiently soul-crushing."

Now for some deja vu:

This looks eerily like Hunters Woods in the bad old days, right down to the apocalyptic wasteland sort of feel limited foot traffic. Of course, maybe our Scottish planned community brethren would have done a better business serving drinks to people instead building a "fish and chicken bar," thank you, be sure to tip your waitress, we'll be here all week.

Indecision 2012: Will Fairfax County Decide the Presidential Race? And If So, Will Reston Decide Fairfax County?

We're used to electoral maps like this one from the 2010 congressional elections, where Reston was an archipelago of liberalism surrounded by an ocean of Right-Thinking Fairfax County residents. (If you want "health care," move to that big swath of blue across the Potomac in Maryland, pinko!) Back in ought-10, though, we just helped re-elect a gaffe-prone congressman. This year, Forbes believes Fairfax County will decide the next president.

That will make a few densely populated counties in each swing state the main battleground for the fall campaign, and the most important will be Fairfax County in Virginia.

Virginia is one of the states deemed too close to call, and this year it looks poised to be the kingmaker because of the way the other swing states will split. As Helene Cooper put it in the New York Times on May 4, “With Virginia, Mr. Obama can lose Ohio and still win re-election. With Virginia, he can lose Florida and still win re-election.” But without Virginia, Obama looks doomed — as Romney may be if he loses the Old Dominion’s electoral-college votes.

The way the electoral system works, though, it isn’t just a handful of swing states that are likely to decide which candidate wins in November, it’s a handful of counties within those states. In the case of Fairfax County, its 1.1 million residents represent one in seven of all Virginians, and so it bulks very large in the determination of which slate of electors will get the most votes. In 2008, candidate Obama attracted 310,000 votes in Fairfax, which was more than his margin of victory in the state. No other county in the state contributed even a third of that number.

But all is not well in Fairfax County. The folks strapping bombs to dolphins defense industry is running scared ahead of proposed military cuts, and Forbes thinks that could tip the balance in Romney's favor -- or at least reduce the massive 60-39 margin Obama won here in ought-eight enough to tip the state back into the red column:

Studies indicate that Virginia will be hit harder than just about any other state, with 87,000 jobs disappearing in 2013 and 115,000 in 2014. Reporter Patrick O’Conner warned in the Wall Street Journal on July 9 that the prospect of widespread layoffs in the military-industrial complex “could undercut Mr. Obama in battleground states heavily dependent on military spending, particularly Virginia.”

Which brings us back to Fairfax County. Nobody seriously believes that Romney can carry a county that went over 60 percent for Obama the last time around. There are too many government workers and liberals in the county for that to happen. However, with hundreds of thousands of northern Virginians worried about their defense jobs in a second Obama Administration, it is quite possible Obama will receive less votes in the county — maybe enough less so that Romney can accumulate a majority statewide, winning Virginia’s 13 electoral-college votes.

Defense contractors are turning up the heat on the White House by threatening to send out notices to hundreds of thousands of defense workers on election eve warning of potential job losses if budget cuts take effect.

That doesn't sound unethical at all!

Washington Post web-logger Tom Jackman asked local politicians what they thought of all of this, and shockingly, the Republican agreed and the Democrat disagreed. The mind boggles.

Just think -- the reliably D-voting Reston electorate might be the only thing keeping Mitt Romney out of the White House this fall. But if fearmongering by defense contractors this line of reasoning holds true, it may take more than the measly 2-1 margin Obama won in Reston the last time around to cancel out the "real Virginia" rest of the state. Better start lining up those Priuses to drive seniors to the polls!

Frankie Goes to Richmond: RELAC Don't Do It (Build a Fancy Cooling Tower), Get Some Sort of Rate Increase (We Think)

Do you like legal thrillers? Then put down that boring John Grisham novel, because we've got 197 pages of the most exciting legal maneuvering ever -- case PUE-2011-00130 before the Virginia State Corporation Commission, in which RELAC, everyone's favorite jet-age, lake-powered cooling system, sought another rate increase, which (we think) they got, at least on an interim basis. Legal documents are confusing! But they're chock full of fun tidbits like this:

Spellbinding stuff. We can TOTALLY see Julia Roberts in the role of "Q."

Way back in ought-10, RELAC won a 56 percent rate increase from the SCC, in exchange for a bunch of promised service improvements and a fancy website or something. RELAC again filed for a rate increase late last year, asking for $108,775 in increases, saying it was running a "negative return" on its Reston operations. Anyhoo, following a hearing last month, the SCC entered an agreement allowing an "incremental revenue requirement" of $78,000, which translates to an unmetered service rate of $52.61 for residential customers and $67.10 for commercial customers, and $13.02 per 1,000 gallons and $6.51 for 1,000 gallons in excess of 10,000 gallons, all "pending a final order in this proceeding." Fairfax County was involved in the case and chose not to oppose the rate increase.

Richard Kennedy of Waterview Cluster was the sole witness at the June 5 hearing. Here's part of what he said:

I have two issues that I want to talk about . First is the exorbitant cost of the system, and the second is the service we get from Aqua . To put this issue of cost in perspective, 1 want to tell you what my personal costs are for electricity and gas heat for the year, and that's $1,918 . That's for electricity and gas, and that includes the electricity that I need to run my fan for RELAC .

With Aqua's rate increase request, my RELAC rate for about five months of air conditioning service would be $1,950, or slightly more than my yearly cost for electricity and gas heat for my home, and I really submit, is that reasonable? I don't think so .

Turns out that another Waterview Cluster resident has developed an online system that tracks the outdoor temperature and the temperature of the chilled water delivered to his home by RELAC. As home projects go, that beats the hell out of the IKEA bookshelves we just put together.

It also turns out that RELAC has also decided not to add the fancy cooling towers it won approval for from the DRB earlier this year after all. Here's the BLOCKBUSTER CONFESSION from the SCC hearing:

Shorter version: YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

To be fair, RELAC officials did say the cooling towers could be installed "at a future date." And at some point (probably now), RELAC customers will get higher bills for their fancy chilled lake water, the end.

On the YouTubes: We Watch The Reston Association Videos So You Don't Have To

Is this the long anticipated jet-age improvement to the RELAC "air conditioning" system? Sorry, it's just the opening B-roll footage of this month's edition of Reston Today.


Unfazed by the heat, Andy Sigle is our dulcet-toned Virgil, guiding us through the underworld of the Reston Station parking garage, which is now more than 50 percent complete. More specifically, we are introduced to the "elephant stand," an "engineering marvel" designed to create a massive five-lane entrance for the parking garage while still holding the weight of the various assorted parallelograms above it. We're told that the contraption was inspired by the stance circus elephants get into when they perform tricks, only with fewer metal bull hooks. We're not structural engineers, but we're pretty sure it's not made of marzipan -- even though it was "fabricated in Germany."

"We often hear that living in Reston is like living in a park," Sigle continues, now taking us on a whirlwind tour of Reston's 14 pools. Through the magic of B-roll video, we visit three of Reston's underutilized pools -- Newbridge Pool, Golf Course Island Pool, and Shadowwood Pool. Then we learn about the Reston Kids Triathlon on August 12. And then get ready, because stuff's about to get real.

"So now you've raised the family and finished the day job. What's next?" we, as the audience of this video, are asked, taking a passive viewing experience and turning it inside out, forcing us to contemplate our own fleeting mortality. Surprisingly, the answer isn't "a sad, lonely descent into existential emptiness, and ultimately, the end that awaits us all." Because this is Reston! You can sit on an advisory committee! SRSLY.

Which brings us to the end of another irretrievable 5 minutes and 14 seconds of our lives. Happy summer!

One Way to Handle the Heat, Loss of Power, Uneasy Feeling That Our Civic Institutions Are Crumbling: Cookies! (Reader Tips)

What do you do when the temperature is in the low hundreds and the power's been out for days? You could use the last remaining moments of battery power in your fancy "smart phone" to post angry screeds on a fancy "web log," or you could adapt to your surroundings. First stop: that car which you can't drive because you have no gas and the gas station has no power. Sure, it's probably a little too warm to use as an al fresco living room, but that's okay!

Confidential Restonian Operative "Mary Anne" shared these fancy photos of what we'll boldly predict will be the Next Big Thing after the nation's infrastructure crumbles when the next freak 15-minute storm results in days of lost power: Car baking!

Mmm. Be sure to share with the angry mobs utility contractors!

As the Silver Line Turns: Common Sense 5, Reactionary, Right-Wing Thinking 4 as LoCo (Barely) Opts in to Phase 2

After months of handwringing, intense pressure from well-funded outside groups, and giant inflatable pigs, the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors finally voted to remain in Phase 2 of the Metro Silver Line, ensuring a vital lifeline between the $14 chicken breasts at Wegman's and the rest of the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area. Way to go!

The narrow 5-4 vote underscores the divisiveness of the project on the all-Republican board. And like another major decision last week, the swing vote came from an unexpected source:

In the nine-member, all-Republican Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, there were only four sure “yes” votes to fund the Silver Line extension to Loudoun. Five were needed. Supporters of the project were hoping for a ”yes” from an unlikely source, Ken Reid (R-Leesburg), who once actively campaigned against Dulles rail.

And on Tuesday morning, Reid did vote “yes,” contrary to the wishes of many conservatives in Loudoun who felt that it would be too costly, not bring sizable economic benefit to the county and would tie Loudoun to the, er, questionable operations and financial skills of Metro.

It was a big shift, given that Reid was a co-founder of notollincrease.org, along with Chris Walker, the developer who built the One Dulles Corridor Building in Reston. And he got a lot of heat from local activists. And as with the labor agreement, well-funded partisan groups also turned on the pressure with statements like this:

A group opposed to Loudoun County’s participation in the extension of Metro’s Silver Line sent the county’s Board of Supervisors a letter warning members that they would be targeted in future election for voting in favor of the project.

Donald Ferguson, a former aide to Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio (R-Sterling) and now executive director for American Tradition Partnership, signed the letter, which does not threaten to sue the county, but points to its success in litigation.

“ATP has one purpose,” Ferguson wrote to supervisors. “To make sure there are consequences for politicians who want to use taxpayers, mom-and-pop business owners and employers as nothing more than punching bags and ATM machines. We can’t be shut up or shut down.”

ATP is also based in Washington, not Leesburg, and could care less about Loudoun County, its traffic, or what future growth will look like there.

So it's nice to see some elected local officials remember that they're not in place to serve national partisan interests. And it's even nicer to know that Wiehle Avenue is no longer doomed to be the gridlocked terminus of the Silver Line.

Speaking of Reston, the RA board issued a statement expressing its support for the decision. Can you spot the slight in this otherwise vanilla statement?

Finally, in a Restonian World Exclusive (tm), we have obtained grainy web cam footage of the conversation in the Loudoun board chambers shortly before the vote. Seems a propos, given the timing:



Hopefully this will be the last time we have to write about LoCo until our next forced excursion to Brambleton, the end.

Flashback Monday (or Tuesday): Lake Anne's Earliest Tennants

From last week's presentation on the early history of Reston at the Reston Museum, please to be enjoying this schematic of the "J Building" (so named for J.J. Walker) at Lake Anne Village Center, ca. 1965. It's interesting for two reasons: 1) It lists the original tenants of the Village Center, and 2) it provides concrete evidence that the Village Center was 100 percent occupied at one time.

Some of the tenants remain well known to this day -- Lakeside Pharmacy, the Community Center, the long-lamented Safeway, etc. Others provide an interesting glimpse of what the heck they were smoking the early days of Reston, including:

• Gallagher Dry Cleaning. When customers asked for extra starch, did they smash a watermelon with a sledgehammer?
  
• The Quay Club. Sounds fancy! And exclusive! And given the era, also that a bowl in which couples tossed their car keys upon arriving might have been involved, if you know what we mean and we think you do.
  
• Something called "Scandinavian" (the second word was cut out of the presentation slide). Was this a purveyor of fancy minimalist furniture that has since been sourced for the Mad Men set, or a merchant of fine meatballs and turtle soup?
  
• "Lawyers." Just as the best barber shops are simply called "barber shop," if you want to initiate a hostile takeover of a Fortune 500 company, look no further than the firm called "Lawyers."
  
• "Restaurant." Clearly, the earliest Restonians eschewed the whole trendy ethnic cuisine movement. We're guessing folks who worked at "Lawyers" had lunch here a lot.
  
• Something called "Youngland." NOT. GOING. THERE.

If you love you some hawt PowerPoint action, click here for a good time the entire presentation.