Renovations for Armstrong Elementary School are in the works, but it’s going to be a few years.
A 10-year forecast shows the renovation process spread out from fiscal years 2022-2026 in the Fairfax County Public School CIP.
Planning for the project is expected to start in FY 2022 with funding from a 2021 bond, with permitting beginning the next year.
The school first opened in 1986 and since then, according to county documents, there’s been no substantial renovations except for capacity enhancements in 1990.
The Hunter Mill District’s School Board Representative, Pat Hynes, noted in a newsletter that Armstrong, Crossfield and Louise Archer elementary schools are all planned for additions and renovations over the next 5-10 years.
Photo via Facebook
Lake Anne Hair Design at Lake Anne Plaza (11404 Washington Plaza W) is being sold following the death of longtime owner Randy Burr in January.
The hair studio has been in business in Reston for 30 years as a no-appointment-needed barber shop.
According to an obituary, Burr went to barber school at 17 and started the design studio in the late 1970s.
“[Burr]Â became a neighborhood fixture waiting to strike up a conversation or watch any tennis-match on TV,” according to the obituary. “He, a true optimist, was always genuinely willing to help others in any way he could.”
In a Facebook post after Burr’s death, Lake Anne Plaza wrote a short tribute:
Randy has been on Lake Anne Plaza almost from the beginning- cutting hair, making jokes, telling stories and waving at the passersby from his comfortable chair outside his shop. He will be missed by many.
Photo via Robyn Burdett Real Estate Group
This week on Then and Now, we’re going back to South Lakes to take a look at Lake Audubon.
With help from Fairfax County’s Historic Imagery Viewer, which offers aerial views of the county dating back to 1937, Reston Now has put together a look at how the lake has evolved from overhead and under the surface.
Audubon is the largest of Reston’s lakes in both it’s acreage — 43.5 acres — and it’s extensive watershed covering 1,558.5 acres.
While Lake Thoreau holds 26.5 million gallons of water, it’s southern twin holds 133.6 million gallons.
Lake Audubon and Lake Thoreau were conceived to be one lake, then named Lake Elsa. The lake was impounded in 1971 and was named for Reston founder Robert Simon’s mother.
But in 1979 the South Lakes dam bisected the property and split the lake, creating Lake Thoreau in the North and Lake Audubon in the south.
For years, the southern area closed off by the dam, but for years afterwards remained a dry pit. During the 1980s, the lake was filled in with water.
But while the lake shows very little change from above between 1997 and 2017, there were plenty of changes taking place beneath the water’s surface. In those years, several new species of aquatic wildlife was introduced to the lake, including:
- Redear Sunfish
- Black Crappie
- Brown Bullhead
- American Eel
In more recent years, the levels of contamination in the water continue to be a problem, caused in large part by the lake’s large surface area. According to a 2017 report on Reston’s lakes, Lake Audubon’s has faced increasing amounts of toxic algae that pose an ecological threat to the lake.
Increasing levels of toxic algae culminated with a warning to local residents to avoid contact with the lake, leading to a dredging project earlier this year.
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The Reston Community Center (RCC) is planning a concert and meet-and-greet with acclaimed pianist George Fu.
The event is set for Thursday, April 4, from 2:15-3:30 p.m at the CenterStage (2310 Colts Neck Rd). The concert will be free and appropriate for all ages.
A Facebook post for the event says Fu will be joined by Chelsea Wang, a classmate from the Curtis Institute of Music, for a four-hand piano recital.
The concert is part of the RCC’s ongoing Meet the Artists series. Fu was previously featured in the RCC’s Meet the Artists series in 2016.
Fu has worked with a variety of orchestras, including performing as a soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra, and is returning to Reston following a stint at the London Conservatory of Music.
Photo via Facebook
(Updated at 14:25) Almost two years after its ceremonial groundbreaking, the Hunters Woods Retirement Community at 2222 Colts Neck Road in Reston is planning on opening in two months.
According to an employee at Hunters Woods, the first residents will be moving in end of May.
The $72 million project will add 210 housing units. Of those, 91 will be for independent living, 80 will be for assisted living and the remaining units will be a mix of memory care and continuing care.
The new complex will also bring 200 new jobs to Reston, mostly in hospitality and resident wellness fields.
In addition to housing, the Hunters Woods Retirement Community will include multiple dining venues, resident gardens, several fitness centers, an art gallery and a movie theater.
Photo via Facebook
A little over four years ago, residents of the Hunt Club Cluster near Lake Fairfax rallied to have a possible slave cemetery recognized to stave off potential development.
But what’s happened in the years since then?
In short: not much.
“The short answer is that we don’t have any additional information, including whether this was a slave cemetery,” Brian Worthy, a public information officer for Fairfax County government said in an email. “As far as I know, there are no preservation protections in place, and there no redevelopment proposals for this location.”
County records say the story of the potential cemetery is tied with that of Mildred Johnson, the matriarch of a prominent local family of Union loyalists. The Johnson family owned hundreds of acres of farmland in Fairfax, with one son fighting for the Union and Mildred Johnson herself sewing sacks for Union soldiers.
The Johnsons owned slaves, including one female slave held by the family for 20 years, and a plot of land 200 yards north of the log clubhouse is reported to have been the slave burial ground.
But while there’s no official recognition of the site as a slave cemetery, Worthy said the area is recognized in county documents as some kind of unmarked cemetery and thus would require study prior to redevelopment.
“The adopted Reston Master Plan acknowledges this unmarked cemetery,” Worthy said. “It states that any required surveys and studies should conducted if this site is planned for redevelopment, and the Master Plan recommends the cemetery be preserved. The county wouldn’t conduct any studies or survey unless there’s a development proposal on the table.”
File photo
A group of Reston and Herndon residents has come together to form a grassroots local dog-walking group.
According to the Meetup page for Herndon/Reston Walking With Dogs Morning Exercise, the 23 member group is open to the public — not just for people who own dogs, but for people who would like to walk with them as well.
“I would love to form a morning walking group for people who have or don’t have dogs,” the group’s organizers said on the page. “This would be an hour or so walk on the pathways in the surrounding area.”
The group was formed in late November, according to its Meetup page.
The group’s next walk is scheduled for this Friday (March 29) at 8 a.m. at the Foxclove Road trail. Sturdy shoes are suggested, and leashes are required.
The hike is estimated to be around an hour and a half.
Photo via Meetup
Most of the new developments around town profiled by Reston Then and Now are village centers with new residents cropping up around them over time, but North Point Village Center is a little different.
Fairfax County’s Historic Imagery Viewer shows how the village grew first with the center being placed later at it’s heart — filling in Reston’s northern frontier.
Not including the Reston Town Center, North Point was the last of Reston’s village centers. In the 1960s, while the other villages were under construction, North Point was a sweeping expanse of untamed wilderness.
Construction on North Point Village started in 1982, and in 1993 the North Point Village Center opened to the public.
The area has changed very little from overhead since 2002, but there’s plenty of turnover on the ground. In December Koko FitClub closed, and a new Thai restaurant opened two months later down the street.
A Reston Now poll earlier this year ranked North Point Village Center as Reston’s second favorite, behind Lake Anne.
Despite some noble intentions, fundraising to save the Lakeside Pharmacy icons is not going well.
The Reston Historic Trust and Museum’s GoFundMe — which started in August — has only raised $1,663 of its $15,000 goal.
The goal of the fundraiser is to clean and reinstall the icons, currently being held in storage, in a new exhibit about the 1960’s pop art aesthetic that was a core part of early Reston history.
Alexandra Campbell, a media contact for the Reston Museum, said despite public interest — Campbell said stories related to the icons are some of their most popular social media posts — the donations to the fundraiser have been slow to trickle in.
While Campbell said there have been a few donations to the fundraiser outside of the GoFundMe, Carolyn Flitcroft, elected chair of the board for the organization, said in an earlier interview that it can be difficult to rally support for a fundraiser that’s for something that seems less dire than homelessness or hunger.
Campbell said the Reston Historic Trust is hoping for a boost with a fundraiser next week. A triathlon hosted by New Trail Cycling Studio and Lake Anne Brew House on March 27 will give a portion of the proceeds to the Reston Historic Trust.
Despite the fundraising setbacks, the organization is moving forward with the permitting process to get the icons on display. According to Campbell, the deadline to get the permits scheduled for review in April is next week, so it’s all hands on deck as the group works to get the application finalized.
Photo via Reston Historic Trust
Back by popular demand, Reston Then and Now takes a look at Hunters Woods Village Center — the people’s choice with 38.8 percent of the vote in last week’s poll.
Like with some of the other village centers, Fairfax County’s Historic Imagery Viewer shows wild spurts of growth from the 1970s through the 2000s before tapering off.
The center was first approved in 1965 as the second village center, following the success of the Lake Anne Village Center. According to a comprehensive history of the site by Northern Virginia Digital History Archive, the development was designed to be a mix of residential, retail and professional uses that would as one of several village centers that would be just as accessible by foot or bike as it would be by car.
Construction began in 1971, and by 1972, the first stores started opening. The grand opening was celebrated with an Elizabethan-themed fair.
But problems began to emerge for the center within the decade. By 1978, the surrounding area saw robbery rates 25 percent higher than the rest of Fairfax County and a series of sexual assaults in the area diminished the utopian allure. Despite the crime wave, rents continue to go up, and local leaders began to recognize that the development was not as ideal for business as initially imagined.
While the aerial photography showed the site continuing to grow, behind the scenes there were several changes in ownership and — as was the case with other village centers — competition from newer shopping centers across Reston and Herndon that were starting to draw customers away.
By the late 1990s, it was widely recognized that the Hunters Woods Village Center was not the vibrant community hub it had once been hoped to be. In 1997, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a $14 million redevelopment plan.
Between 1990 and 2002, most of the original buildings were demolished and replaced with more modern retail, including Safeway as an anchor tenant. The Safeway is still there, though it recently lost its SunTrust bank. The site has remained largely stagnant since then and changed hands in 2010.
Its addition to a rundown of potential spots for new residential development in a 2017 list put together by the Fairfax County Department of Planning and Zoning means that changes for the site could be on the horizon.
A play about two women’s rivalry for the affections of a mutual lover is coming to Herndon’s NextStop Theatre (269 Sunset Park Drive) next month.
“Fallen Angels” dramatizes sexual desire and frustration as two housewives prepare to meet with an “exotic” former lover. The show originally opened in London in 1925 and was considered amusing but scandalous for its depiction of sex and adultery — both subjects that were seen as obscene and disruptive.
Ticketing in advance is recommended, as ticket prices may increase as seating fills. Tickets range from $35 to $50. The show will run Thursday-Sunday from March 14 through April 7. Student and group tickets are available at a discount.
Photo via NextStop Theatre
As the winter starts to thaw, stands hawking Girl Scout cookies are starting to crop up nationwide. But rather than randomly stumbling on them, a new app can help Restonians with a sweet tooth track their dealers.
Your best bet for cookies today (Monday) will be Troop 524 setting up outside the Giant at 2425 Centreville Road in Herndon from 4-6 p.m.
More options throughout the area start showing up later in the week. On Wednesday and Thursday, Girl Scouts will be selling cookies at:
- Wiehle-Reston East (1862 Wiehle Ave) from 4-6 p.m.
- Lucia’s Italian Ristorante (2531 John Milton Drive) from 4-6 p.m.
- Safeway (11120 South Lakes Drive) from 5-6:30 p.m.
On Friday, there are more than 20 locations within a five-mile radius of the Reston Town Center scheduled to be vending Girl Scout cookies. Keep an eye on the app or the online tracker to find one near you.
Photo via Facebook
Reston is built on planned village centers. Sometimes they work. Tall Oaks didn’t.
This week on Reston Then and Now we return to the Lake Anne area where Fairfax County’s Historic Imagery Viewer shows us the rise and fall of Tall Oaks Village Center and the plans that indicate how the area hopes to recover.
Like much of Reston, the site was open fields in aerial photography up to 1976. The development opened in 1974 as the smallest of Reston’s five village centers. According to the Washington Business Journal, the location enjoyed a brief golden age with 240,000 square feet of retail by 1990.
But gradually, Tall Oaks faces more modern competition. Between the 1990s and the early 2000s, Reston Town Center, North Point, Spectrum and a range of other retail options expanded throughout North Reston.
The first big blow was losing Giant in 2007, and two replacement stores failed within a year of opening in 2009 and 2011, leaving the location without an anchor tenant since 2011. Curves, Domino’s and 7 Eleven all vacated their locations as well.
But work is underway on a new project to for Tall Oaks. The redevelopment will convert the area into a largely residential neighborhood with 156 homes with more limited retail. The Reston Association recently voted in favor of vacating an easement it held in the Tall Oaks village to facilitate the redevelopment.
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Normally, Reston Then and Now covers places that only exist as forests and fields in the earliest aerial photography in Fairfax County’s Historic Imagery Viewer. But this week, the intersection of Hunter Mill and Hunter Station roads has a history that predates that aerial photography.
During the Civil War, the intersection was a major crossroads for Union and Confederate troops moving through the area. According to a historical marker at the site, Confederate Brig. Gen. Wade Hampton’s cavalry brigade passed through the site in 1862 en route to Antietam in Maryland. Several Union and Confederate generals are recorded to have passed the site throughout the war.
The intersection was a critical junction of the railroad, a north-south road, water resources from Difficult Run and farmlands to provide food for troops. Several skirmishes took place in the nearby area, including the killing of Rev. John Read from Falls Church. Read was an abolitionist and supplied information on Confederate activities to the Union. He was kidnapped in a raid and executed in the forest just southeast of the crossroads by Confederate guerillas lead by Col. John S. Mosby.
The area around Hunter Mill road was its own town at one time, called Hunter’s Village, which sprung up around the route of the Washington and Old Dominion rail line. The locality contained a post office, a general store, a train station and a military hospital. The station itself was a bare-bones facility — a flag stop where passengers could step out to flag down a train.
The farmhouse at the site may have been built in 1935, and by 1937 it shows up in the first aerial photography of Fairfax.
Until recently, a little house at the intersection of Hunter Mill and Hunter Station roads stood mostly isolated — all that was left of the old Hunter’s Village — with some other properties dotting the surrounding area. Passenger service on the line ended in 1951. Freight service ended in 1968 and the railroad was abandoned.
By then, new subdivisions and a new power station started to encroach onto the site. The farmhouse was squeezed between growth spreading out from Reston to the west and Tysons to the East.
The farmhouse on the site was demolished late last year to make way for a new residential development. The site remains a popular stop on the bike and pedestrian Washington and Old Dominion Trail.
For more Reston Then and Now stories, check out our recent coverage of:
Photo via Google Maps
The Reston Historic Trust and Museum has new leadership and is pushing into 2019 with an ambitious effort to save local art.
Carolyn Flitcroft, elected chair of the board for the organization in late January, said the Trust and Museum is hitting the ground running with a campaign to preserve the quirky pop-art iconography from the Lakeside Pharmacy.
“The main thing is we’re working on a fundraising effort for the [Lakeside Pharmacy Icons Exhibit],” said Flitcroft.
Flitcroft said that discussion of that preservation will start at a meeting on Thursday, after which Flitcroft said the group plans to begin discussions with the Fairfax County Board of Architectural Review.
With only $1,185 funded of the $15,000 goal on project’s GoFundMe, there’s still a long way to go to fund the icons’ cleaning, repairs and reinstallation.
After that, Flitcroft said the organization plans to work on an exhibit looking at the effects of Title 9 on women playing sports in Reston.
The museum, at 1639 Washington Plaza, is open from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and admission is free. A current exhibit shows the history of Reston in the Civil Rights era.
But Flitcroft said the Reston Historic Trust and Museum also faces challenges with visibility.
“It’s a small organization,” Flitcroft said. “It’s hard to compete with a lot of non-profits that deal with very physical things, like hunger and homelessness. So it can be a challenge to compete for donations. There’s people in Reston that don’t know about Lake Anne, much less the museum.”
Over the last few years, Flitcroft said the museum’s director Alexandra Campbell has been pushing to give the museum more of a social media presence. Part of that effort has been making the public more aware of programs focusing on more recent issues, like the arrival of the Metro.
“A lot of our programs are about what’s happening now,” said Flitcroft. “Not all historical. We try to keep the community involved with what’s going on. It’s not only about things of the past.”
Flitcroft has been on the board for five years and has experience working in other local non-profits, like Giving Circle of Hope.
“I’m excited,” said Flitcroft “There’s a lot of energy and we’re gaining more visibility in the community. I’m very excited.”
Photo via Charlotte Geary, headshot courtesy Carolyn Flitcroft
