Hats Off: Small Change Consignment Goes Dark at Lake Anne After 37 Years

One of Lake Anne's longest running businesses, Small Change Consignment, is closing its doors on Saturday after 37 years. Owner Susann Gerstein, who started the shop in 1981 after moving to Reston from New York City, told Reston Now that the rent for the Lake Anne space rose precipitously in the last year -- something that has hastened the end of other Lake Anne businesses over the years.

Small Change Consignment joins the Lakeside Pharmacy and Cafe Jasmine as Lake Anne landmarks which will be long remembered for their constant presence in a rapidly changing Reston over the decades. As Gerstein says:

When we opened small change on November 21st 1981, my friends and I hoped to create a warm, welcoming space on beautiful Lake Anne Plaza, to recycle clothes, shoes, baby gear, maternity wardrobes, toys and children's books. We were young mothers ourselves and we hoped to build a sense of community and help families reduce the clutter of child-rearing, make some money back, and spend less on what kids need and outgrow.

Kathy retired in 1989, Margaret in 2002, and now I'm not just a mother of three but a grandmother of five, and I'm so grateful that our little shop has endured and prospered, providing quality name brand items to hundreds, probably thousands, of second and third generation small change shoppers and consignors.

Small Change closes its doors at 9pm Saturday.

Hats off.

Flashback: Sex Sells (Stucco Shacks)

"Hubba hubba!" was probably what the kids, or at least their gross uncles, would have said back then.

Set the controls of the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine to 1975, a freer, more liberated time when the fancypants advertising Mauve Men (and clearly they were men) whose job it was to sell planned community townhomes nowhere near towns knew how to move some stucco and plywood units, baby!

Of course the rest of the ad talked about all the resort-like amenities Reston had to offer, including pools (LOL), golf (double LOL), and all the things "vacations are made of," all for the low starting price of $25,750. Surprisingly, they didn't mention Reston's Sexy Past, but they did include this bit of unintended humor:

It's almost as if amenities have intrinsic value that contribute to quality of life in a built environment that, in turn, makes said built environment better to live in, and therefore capable of commanding higher prices in the marketplace, as evidenced by the premise guiding the primary focus of this advertising. Almost!

But we digress. Zipping back to ought-minus-100-plus-75, Don Draper Deep Russet Brown even managed to "close" the ad copy by making a Modest Proposal: "Take the money you were going to spend on your vacation and use it for a down payment on a house in Reston."

Still not convinced? Take a look at that top image again, and then read further:

Everything?

Here's the full ad, in all its glory:

Faith in Democracy Restored, Sort Of: $255 Per Vote, Fancy Signs, Not Enough To Buy Election

Walter Alcorn decisively won the shockingly expensive primary for the Democratic nomination for the Hunter Mill seat on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, garnering nearly 50 percent of the vote (which sounds great, until you realize he got just 5,385 votes in an election that represented an existential debate about the character of local representation in a fast-growing community and then sadness ensues). Laurie Dodd came in a close(ish) second with 2,847 votes, followed by Shyamali Roy Hauth with 1,746 votes. Comstock employee and banner enthusiast Maggie Parker got 1,010 votes, which, given the nearly $260,000 she spent on this election, works out to more than $255 per person who actually voted for her. Primary losers aren't allowed to run in the general election, so this all but assures that Alcorn will be elected to succeed Cathy Hudgins in November.

It was a privilege to have shared the primary field with a record number of diverse Democrats who believe cooperation, unity, empowerment, and inclusivity are critical to Hunter Mill's success.

— Walter Alcorn (@walter_alcorn) June 12, 2019

Between the massive amounts of money all of the candidates spent -- which, with the turnout only roughly half of previous low-turnout Democratic primaries in Hunter Mill, actually works out to more like $50 per person who showed up to vote in what wound up being the highest turnout in the county, and the hilarious First Amendment violations in one of the growing number of private "public" spaces in our community, it's hard to see this as a huge victory for the democratic process, but we'll take it.

How Much Is A Seat On The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Worth? Apparently At Least $420,000, Or $25 Per Vote

Totally normal thing to see atop a county-owned garage in a totally normal local election with totally normal local candidates.

Ahead of Tuesday's primary, the five candidates running for the Democratic nomination for the Hunter Mill seat on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors have raised at least an eye-popping $421,702, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. Banner-happy Comstock employee Maggie Parker is responsible for the lion's share -- nearly $260,000, more than $100,000 of which came directly from Comstock or Comstock-related individuals or organizations, not all of whom have, shall we say, left-learning affiliations.

That's a lot of money for... not a lot of voters, at least historically. Looking at county voting records, Hunter Mill district turnout in the 2017 and 2018 Democratic primaries hovered around 15 percent (last year, only a small number of district voters were in the boundaries of the 10th Congressional district, but the percentage of voters was still right around that level). The Hunter Mill board seat wasn't up for grabs either time, so let's be generous and assume all the fancy banners, mailers, and filthy "web logging" about this primary bumps up turnout a little and 20 percent of the eligible voters in Hunter Mill actually Pokemon Go to the polls on Tuesday. If our slide rule calculations hold up, that means for each of the 16,950 expected voters, the candidates will spend at least $25 per vote -- and $15 of that will be from Parker's campaign alone.

It's almost as if a giant developer someone has a financial stake in the outcome of the election! Almost. Actually, we'll give Parker and Comstock credit for falling squarely in the DGAF camp, taking naked advantage of the grey area involving privately owned and operated "public spaces" and providing only the curtest of responses to voter questionnaires. No one can claim to be surprised about what they're voting for, that's for sure, but we're still shocked at the cynically brazen tactics.

Meanwhile today, Fairfax County Chair Sharon Bulova all but threatened legal action against Comstock to allow other candidates to campaign on Reston Station property, saying the company's actions are "clearly wrong and cannot be tolerated."

I recently learned that Comstock has engaged in some shocking conduct at the Reston Station Plaza. Allowing one’s own employee to engage in such highly protected activity in a public area, while excluding other candidates from doing the same, is wrong and cannot be tolerated. pic.twitter.com/gyNq0Zpjhe

— Sharon Bulova (@SharonBulova) June 7, 2019

Unfortunately, since it's the close of business on the Friday before the election, Comstock can claim it didn't receive the letter until the 11th hour and promise, through their director of marketing, that they'll work hard to make sure that First Amendment activities are protected in "the future," once they have their candidate on the board and it doesn't really matter any more.

Filthy neighborhood "web site" Nextdoor took space away from its constant stream of urgent alerts about kids ringing doorbells and distressed furniture sales to post an informal poll, although it only had 70 respondents late Friday afternoon, so take the results with a grain of salt:

Like we've said before, we've always taken comments about the current supervisor being a puppet for developers with an equally large grain of salt. After Tuesday, we may no longer be able to say the same.

No Carpentry Squares Required: More Quadrilaterals, Weirdly Elevated Tree Coming To Reston Station

Now that, at long last, the fancypants, actually-designed-by-a-real-architect parallelogram rhombus looming over Reston Station’s “civic plaza,” if by “civic” you mean “allowing banner-sized ads for employees running for public office,” finally has an anchor tenant, it’s time to think big! No, we don’t mean a CVS or a hotel or a new burger place or even a pizza joint, but more fancypants office buildings on the other side of the Toll Road that, in the true spirit of Reston’s aging housing stock, eschew 90-degree angles! Give us some exciting unpaywalled blockquote, BFFs at the Washington Business Journal:

The new building, pictured on the left, would complement the existing building at 1900 Reston Metro Plaza. The new building will be developed on part of Commerce Metro Center.

Designed by the same architect — Helmut Jahn — this fancy glass boi looks like it’s leaning across the Toll Road to embrace its transit-oriented bestie. But it’s… different. Different enough that we had to Bing.com search “Types of Quadrilaterals” to accurately describe the new building and its pals. Turns out the new building is actually the parallelogram, or maybe a rhombus, while the existing one, what with its tapering angles, is technically an isosceles trapezoid. You’re welcome! (We can’t tell what the other proposed buildings on the south side of the Toll Road are, except maybe the less well-known Blocks With Weird Growths category of irregular "quadris," as the nerdy kids in Geometry class maybe called them, once).

So yay! We’ve said before that we’re happy with anything that doesn’t look like an off-the-shelf piece of airport access road architecture, and these are actually… nice!

But wait, what’s that in the top right of the new parallelogram?

A giant tree, or a tree-like An Art, suspended in a glass trapezoid about 10 stories above the Toll Road? A bit on the nose, Comstock, but okay!

But What Does It All Mean? Our BFFs at Reston Station had this to say in a comment to an article at Reston Now:

Much more is coming! The Reston Station neighborhood will include additional dining options (including upscale), as well as entertainment, retail and service offerings to compliment the office, residential and hotels being developed by Comstock. The Reston Station neighborhood covers nearly 40 acres stretching from Sunrise Valley Drive to Sunset Hills Road and when fully built, Reston Station will be one of the largest mixed-use and transit-oriented neighborhoods in the DC region. And with a Metro Station in the middle of the neighborhood, it will be unlike any other neighborhood currently being development at any of the Silver Line stations.

Comstock’s earlier bets on building on spec — a relative rarity in commercial development — seem to be paying off, and already a new, sadly square, office building on the north side of the Toll Road is well underway. And if this weekend’s color scheme is any indication, maybe they’re teasing us again with possible tenants.

Here’s hoping it’s a mustard company!