RA Tongue-Twisters: Say 'Covenant Citations at Crumbling Stucco Soapstone Shopping Site' Three Times Fast

After citing the owners of the small "convenience center" on alien landing strip Soapstone Drive for a variety of violations, the Reston Association appears to be moving beyond its usual "write a letter and scare the beejeesus out of the homeowner" tactics, maybe. Give us some good blockquote, BFFs at Patch:

Reston Association has been trying to get the owners of the Soapstone Convenience Center to abide by RA covenants for several months now.

In July, it flagged the center, owned by C and R in Reston, LLC, for a long list of violations. Among them:

*Dead trees, soil erosion, refuse and debris exposed to view on the property consisting of, but not limited to: "Barrels, wood, plastic bags, plastic bottles, chairs, PVC pipe."

*The entire asphalt parking area is faded, cracked, and has holes and must be repaired or replaced; the asphalt pad to the right side elevation of “2303” building is weathered, cracked, disintegrating and must be repaired.

*The asphalt pad on the right side elevation of the “2335” building is cracked, disintegrating and must be repaired; the entire sidewalk areas located at “2303” and “2335’ buildings are discolored, cracked in several places and must be cleaned and repaired or replaced.

*Faded and cracked stucco on several buildings; fascia and trim that is faded, weathered, discolored warped, rotted and must be cleaned, repaired or replaced and painted.

*The pergola, screening and trash enclosure on “2335” building is faded, weathered, discolored, rotted, warped and must be cleaned, repaired or replaced and painted.

*Chimney flues that are faded, weathered, discolored, rusted,leaning and must be cleaned, repaired or replaced and painted; skylights full of debris; cracked landscape timbers and stucco planters; a cracked slate walkway and graffiti on the “2303” building.

Yeah, but other than that, are there any problems? Now that Soapstone has been resurfaced and painted with fancy suicide lanes traffic calming features and the neighboring watershed has been gussied up, it's time to go upscale! At great personal expense, we hired an architect to come up with a proposed, DRB-pleasing "new look" for the Soapstone Convenience Center. So long, dated stucco!

YOU'RE WELCOME. We especially like how the background in the rendering shows how the design would complement the natural splendor of planned changes at the nearby golf course.

But we digress. How have we left things with the current shopping center, RA?

RA directed the shopping center owners to clean up the violations by the end of August. At last check, the violations had not been remedied, and, in fact, neighbors complained when trees were removed from the property last weekend but most of the other violations remained.

The issue has since gone to the RA legal committee. Legal committee proceeds are private.

Addressing these longstanding issues isn't the worst use of our assessment money.

Flashback Monday: Selling Way-Out-Of-Townhouses in a Place Called Reston

Wow, this fancy cover of the June 1966 issue of House & Home magazine, which we assume is a lot like Cosmopolitan minus the sex tips ("5 Earth-Toned Negligees He Won't Be Able to Resist!"), really nailed the Reston dynamic from the get-go, didn't it? And, forty-odd years later, have we determined if our beloved beige community is just an "oversized subdivision with oversized problems?"

Well, no. But it's reassuring to learn through a Reston Historic Trust lecture duly attended by our BFFs at the Fairfax Times that even in its infancy, Reston was a bit of a tough sell to folks accustomed to bland subdivisions. We've seen the pop quiz Bob Simon subjected Reston's early sales staff to, but now we get to learn firsthand what it was like to sell way-out-of-townhouses to an incredulous public:

In its infancy in the 1960s, many early marketers who tried to sell the concept of the unique utopian village to prospective buyers initially had a rough time of it.

Sales of original Reston homes were transacted through Reston itself and not through traditional realtors, so the community had its own sales, marketing and public relations staff.

“It was my job to tell people why they wanted to drive 17 miles from D.C. and then two more miles down a dinky two-lane road to Reston; to live in a high-rise with no one else in it yet,” said Houston Park, an early Reston marketing and public relations staff member who spoke along with others last week as part of the Reston Historic Trust lecture series.

What could possibly go wrong?

Chuck Veatch, an even earlier resident of Reston, moved to Reston in 1964, only one year after it was established, and began trying to sell homes.

“The first model homes in Reston opened that year,” he said. “Our goal was to sell 80,000 homes by 1980, but we were trying to sell the concept of Reston, and homes that were a little more expensive, at a time that homes were sold strictly by a square footage standard. It was initially a tough sell.”

The speakers said that local real estate agents used Reston's inclusive nature, at a time when Virginia was still segregated and had no fair housing laws, as the opposite of a selling point, and sales remained slow for years. What turned things around for our favorite planned community? Bloomingdale's, that's what.

It also turns out the long-standing stereotypes perceptions of Reston vis-a-vis its more affluent neighbors to the north and its more, shall we say, rustic, ones to the west, came honest early:

John Siddall, another early Reston marketer, remembers the outside perception of Reston at that time.

“Reston in the early years was a young, intellectual community made up of 30 and 40 year olds,” he said. “And there was a perception that the people in Reston were weird. Some thought we were communists, and even the rest of Fairfax County thought we were a strange group of folks.”

Communists? What would give anyone that idea?

On the YouTubes: We Watch the Reston Association Videos So You Don't Have To, Learn That Reston Station Office Building Construction Has Begun

The weirdly angled Bridge to Nowhere spanning the Toll Road before ending in midair opens this, the festive holiday edition of the monthly Reston Today video. Dulcet-toned Andy Sigle dons a hard hat and hands us over to Reston Station construction superintendent Dave Mesich, who announces that the parking garage has finally sprung forth from the bowels of the earth to reach the "plaza level." Soon, the Sleestacks will see daylight for the first time. Soon. "We'll be ready when that train rolls in," Mesich says, and presumably so will they.

There's more! The addition of a fifth tower crane to the site -- which is especially impressive if you like cranes and/or are a three-year-old boy, means that Comstock has also started construction on its 16-story office building. Parallelogram, here we come!

But it wouldn't be the holidays without a special treat, and here it is: a "sneak peek" of the parking garage we'll soon be jockeying for spaces in. Behold!

"It resembles most of your typical parking garages," Mesich admits, "but with LED lighting." Sweet!

There's some other news as well, mostly about a survey of Reston apartment residents and a community-wide survey that will go out to all of us next year, which will help the RA set budget priorities and prepare for the influx of new residents. And with that we fade to credits, another four minutes and 41 seconds of our lives over, ticking down like the sands in the hourglass as we celebrate the approach of a new year with bright lights and festive celebrations that serve to mask the never-ceasing passage of time. Happy holidays!

Unruly, if Well-Dressed, Mobs: When Restonians Agitate

We Restonians are a peaceful bunch for the most part, the descendants of gentle people from the far-away 1960s who left the city to settle in earth-toned townhouses that weren't technically in a town. But take away our bookstores sense of social justice, and we get a bit piqued.

First, we have the tale of how a group of Restonians are rallying to avert the "fiscal cliff."

Dozens of Virginians gathered on Saturday to rally for an end to the Bush tax cuts for the top 2%. The activists gathered at Reston Used Bookstore to hear from community members on the issue before going door-to-door to urge neighbors to contact Congressman Wolf. Those gathered expressed concern that middle class taxes could go up over $2,000 a year if leaders in D.C. don't compromise and put the middle class before millionaires.

We're sympathetic, but we doubt too many members of the 2 percent are hanging out at a used bookstore. Or Lake Anne, for that matter. Or even Reston. Try heading north of Rt. 7, is all we're saying.

Another Confidential Restonian Operative shared this shocking firsthand account of what happened when RCC's online registration promptly melted down on its first day this past weekend.

There are middle-aged ladies in pajamas standing in long lines at RCC-Hunters Woods this morning. RCC’s new-fangled registration system went into complete fail. They changed from a lottery system to a first-come, first-served (because that's just so much more egalitarian) as well as launching a sparkly new online registration gizmo. December 1 at 9 a.m. marks the start of resident registration. The online system promptly crashed, and all those affluent middle-aged mothers and fathers desperate for good-value swim lessons were forced to dash over to RCC and register in person, along with masses of other Restonites who don't want to miss out on choice seats at Arena stage.

There are no words.

And finally, and somewhat predictably, a fancy online petition to save the Barnes & Noble already has 157 signatures, the end.

Bookpocalypse Now: Barnes & Noble 0, Purveyor of Containers 1

Well, the rumor that was first surfaced by our BFFs at Patch over the weekend has been confirmed: The Barnes & Noble in Reston's Spectrum Center is closing after the holiday season. Much to our surprise, it is not being replaced by a purveyor of frozen yogurt, artisanal cupcakes or salad. What's really surprising is that it's being replaced at all, given that Spectrum owner Lerner recently revived its longstanding plans to redevelop the big-box center into the usual bollardy mixed-use highrise goodness -- plans which were approved by the county's Planning Commission last month.

In case you're keeping score at home, B&N is being replaced by The Container Store, which sells… containers, we guess. And after the departure of Books a Million, Bretanos at RTC, and the independent bookstore at North Point, Reston's only remaining bookstore will be its first one -- the used bookstore at Lake Anne.

What's weird about this all is that even with the imminent demise of the printed word and all the antiquated, industrial-era business models still desperately clinging to it challenges of the bookselling industry, what with all those fancy "Kindles" and whatnot, B&N didn't choose to leave -- it was apparently pushed by the Spectrum's owners.

David Deason, Vice President of Development at Barnes & Noble, said the company wanted to stay in Reston and was willing to pay more to do so.

“We tried extremely hard to come to an agreement with the property owner to extend the lease at our Reston location, but despite our offering significant additional rent, the property owner was unwilling to agree to an extension," he said in an email. "We regret that we will be closing this location at the end of February, 2013.”

Who knows, maybe the Lerners just like containers.

It does make us wonder exactly how long Lerner plans to wait to begin redeveloping Spectrum, assuming the project wins final approval from county supervisors. We figured they wouldn't have restarted the approval process if they didn't have plans to get rolling soon, but it's unlikely that the Container Store would have agreed to move all its fancy containers into a new space without a multi-year lease.

Of course, all this just gives us an excuse to enjoy some of the details from the site plans for the Spectrum redevelopment (ginormous PDF file):

SOLD. They had us at that fancy trashcan with the swinging lid. Though what is that roundish item in the middle of the top row? A pair of calipers to check the BMI of people before they're allowed to sunbathe in the (semi-) public areas?

Here's a fancy 3-D isometric rendering of the project, apparently rendered using the same hardware as this game from the 1980s. Note the low-rise building at the right -- that's where the rocket-shooting robot lurks the existing Harris Teeter building, which will continue to offer free cookies to hungry shoppers, minus the surface parking.

Finally, here's the view of the development from the existing Fake Downtown vibrant urban core. Of course, we all know what's missing from this lovely, urbane streetscape:

TICK.

As the Silver Line Turns, or Apparently Doesn't

This would be funny, except that it isn't:

Metro may have to spend millions more than anticipated to operate the new Silver Line because trains will have to travel farther east than planned, according to two people with knowledge of the problem.

Transit officials originally expected eastbound Silver Line service to end at the Stadium-Armory stop, according to the two sources. But officials have since concluded that the tight turning space near the station would make it difficult for trains to reverse course there. Instead, trains will travel five additional stops to Largo before turning around to head back toward Virginia.

The change could cost Metro $4.5 million a year more to operate the line, according to the two people familiar with the problem and the plan to deal with it.

Way to sweat the small stuff, Metro. We're not exactly reassured that their preparation for the eventuality that their fancy trains might, on occasion, need some way to turn around doesn't appear to be much more detailed than the plans we submitted for Phase 2 of the Silver Line.

So maybe we'll drive instead, and use those accident-riddled fancy Lexus Express lanes on the Beltway. How hard could it be to make sense of a variably tolled, limited access median highway with traffic lights and T-intersections?


This is why we try to avoid leaving Reston if we can help it, the end.

Flashback Monday: With a Steamshovel at Sunset, Our Gritty Urban Core Sprung Forth from the Earth

Last time on Flashback Monday, we witnessed the early days of Hunters Woods Village Center. Now let's set the controls of the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine to 1988, when a Reston newsletter used this extremely dramatic photo to illustrate the fact that ground had been broken for another, slightly more successful retail mecca: the Reston Town Center, which promised to "unify residential, commercial, cultural and retail life." Alrighty then!

Here's what the senior development manager for the project had to say about this mixed-use nightmare vision back in ought-take-away-twenty-plus-eight:

"Twenty-five years ago, Reston wasn't ready for it. Even D.C. wasn't ready for it."

But was Tysons ready for it?

We digress. For us, the biggest surprise was that the developers 1) didn't go Full Ugly, and 2) that their lofty predictions actually kinda-sorta came true. Check it, Mr. 1988 Developer:

"The first phase undertaken by Phase 1 Associates sets the stage for residential growth to occur later."

Old folks like us Long-time Restonians may remember that Phase 1 was initially surrounded by fields of parking, an ersatz block of a Potemkin city connected to nothing. Little did we know that the residential development would actually come in time, followed by flash mobs and baffling cultural landmarks and occasional semi-nudity and all the other things we've come to expect from an authentic urban experience. And frozen yogurt. Lots of frozen yogurt, with the occasional purveyor of artisanal cupcakes thrown in for good measure.

And, as this photo suggests, it all began with an arcane digging ceremony at sunset. Who knows, maybe the Necromonicon was involved, the end.