Lakeside Pharmacy, the last original business at historic Lake Anne Plaza, is under contract to sell. If the deal closes, the business will likely close this spring, a real estate source said.
The old-fashioned pharmacy that features a lunch counter and a post office has been on and off the market for more than five years. The buyers are investors who plan to lease the space to a retail tenant. It is unlikely it would return as an independent pharmacy because there are very few of those still in business.
Lakeside Pharmacy has been owned by Larry Cohn for more than 40 years. It is a place to get a prescription filled, but also a place to pick up various sundries — some of which shoppers cannot find at a chain store such as Target or CVS.
“I’ve always wanted it to stay like this,” Cohn said in a 2010 interview. “It’s not going to happen today.”
The pharmacy has housed a number of food service operations over the last several years. It is currently Cafe Lakeside, which serves lunch counter favorites such as ice cream and burgers.
The asking price started at close to $1 million five years ago, then was dropped to $695,000 and eventually was taken off the market. It was not currently for sale when the current offer was made, the real estate source said. The sales price will not be known until the deal closes.
The waterfront space that houses Lakeside Pharmacy is not slated for redevelopment as part of Lake Anne Development Partners’ (Republic Development) plan for the area.
Because the pharmacy is in the historic part of Lake Anne, it cannot undergo big changes. Nearby areas such as the current parking lot at Lake Anne Plaza, a grove of trees owned by Reston Association and Crescent Apartments are included in the plan, which includes 60,000 square feet of new retail space, up to 82,500 square feet of office space, and 1,037 residential units.
Lake Anne Fellowship House residents have been informed of Fellowship Square’s plans to build new housing on the site of the aging senior housing buildings.
“If all goes well as part of the county’s revitalization effort, we plan to build a new Lake Anne Fellowship building and have it up in around four to five years,” Fellowship Square Foundation president Charles Wortman wrote to residents on Dec. 4.
The nonprofit Fellowship Square, which operates senior housing at Lake Anne, Hunters Woods and several other Fairfax County locations, has been working with Cafritz Interests and discussing future plans with Reston planning and zoning and the Reston Association Design Review Board since last fall.
At Lake Anne, there are 240 units for the elderly and low-income located just across the street from Lake Anne Plaza, where significant redevelopment is also planned.
The Fellowship House redevelopment is planned in coordination with the overall Lake Anne revitalization, which will reconfigure and repurpose the area around the historic area as well as at the county-owned Crescent Apartments. Republic Development’s redevelopment plan for Crescent and the rest of Lake Anne includes plans for about 1,000 new housing units (181 of them affordable to replace Crescent), parking and a revitalized retail district.
Currently, 114 of the 240 units are subsidized and the rest are at market rate, says Fellowship Square board member John Thillman. Fellowship House’s buildings were constructed in 1970 and ’74, and suffer from a variety of aging infrastructure issues. Among them: faulty heating and cooling systems, narrow hallways difficult for wheelchair users to navigate and difficulty getting up to Americans With Disability Act Standards. The two buildings have a 20-percent vacancy rate and are losing about $10,000 a month, Thillman said.
Thillman said he plans on filing a rezoning application with the county by early February. The plans will have to go through rezoning because Fellowship Square wants to increase the number of units on the parcel to 425. One hundred forty of the units would be affordable senior housing, which would actually provide more units than currently offered at Fellowship House. The rest would be offered at market rate, said Thillman.
Fellowship Square plans to build the new senior housing on the flat part of its land at North Shore Road and Village Road. After that building is constructed and seniors moved, then all-ages, market-rate luxury mid-rises will be built on the hill where the current Fellowship House buildings stand.
“A building on this lower part of our site would provide for easy access by our residents to the proposed redeveloped Lake Anne Plaza and shops, as well as to a new grocery store proposed on the opposite side of Village Drive,” says the letter to residents. “This is a tremendous opportunity for us to keep affordable elderly apartments at Lake Anne and to finally have new and accessible apartments for our residents.”
“The remainder of the site will be developed into market rate residential units which will generate the financial ability for FSF to build the new affordable elderly building,” the letter continues. “And, in addition to our own residents’ community spaces designed into our building, our elderly residents will also have access to the recreation facilities and parking within the market rate part of the development. The market rate buildings will finally give us the financial stability to continue our mission of providing affordable elderly/disabled housing both here at Lake Anne and elsewhere in the Fairfax County/Metropolitan area.”
Thillman says he has only heard from three residents expressing concern about the plans.
However, several things have to happen for the project to move forward, says Thillman. There are two different mortgage holders for the six-acre property: The Department of Housing and Urban Development for the west side and the Virginia Housing Development Authority for the eastern half. Both will have to agree to consolidate and retitle, which could be a long — and possibly fruitless — process, says Thillman.
Redevelopment plans will also have to go through Fairfax County Planning, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and Reston Association’s Design Review Board.
After many years of sitting empty, the former Millennium Bank building at 1601 Washington Plaza will soon have a major new tenant — and many kitty visitors.
Remodeling crews are busy renovating the Lake Anne space for Just Cats, a veterinarian clinic for felines that is slated to open in March. It will be Reston’s first dedicated cat clinic.
The 6,600-square-foot building has been mostly empty since Millennium Bank moved out in 2009. Last year, Reston Tailoring leased part of the ground floor after leaving its space at Hunters Woods Village Center after 30 years.
Hampering the leasing process for the main part of the building was a large metal vault in the middle of the space, real estate agents say. Just Cats is working to get it removed.
The clinic’s founder is Dr. Elizabeth Arguelles, a Herndon resident who formerly worked at NOVA Cat Clinic (formerly known as Capital Cat Clinic) in Arlington. She says the area needs a dedicated cat clinic.
“At my former clinic, I would see clients coming from Reston and Leesburg,” she said. “There is a market and a need here. A cat-only clinic is a much better environment than a dog and cat clinic. Getting a cat to the vet is so hard. We try to make it as easy as possible.”
Arguelles — “Dr. Elizabeth” to her patients — said she is excited about opening at Lake Anne. She did not want to be located in a strip mall, and the the floor-to-ceiling windows of the bank building also appealed to her.
“Lake Anne has unique shops, and a cat-only vet is a unique venture,” she said. “Cats feel much more at home if they have light and can see out of windows.”
In addition to vet services, Just Cats intends to offer luxury cat boarding. Arguelles says boarders will not be in cages, but will be in cat condos with a view to the outside.
To learn more about Just Cats, follow their Facebook page.
Still have holiday shopping to do? Find some unique food and craft gifts and support local businesses Saturday at the final day of the Fall Farmer’s & Craft Market at Lake Anne Plaza.
This year, a large group of farmers from the Fairfax County Farmers Market at Lake Anne stayed with the crafters for a fall market.
The fall market has featured a variety of prepared foods not usually available at the summer market, including Uncle Fred’s BBQ and stands selling fresh empanadas and cooked seafood.
Crafts for sale include jewelery, pottery, textiles, and unique clothing from around the world.
The extended market has been a great success and will likely be a feature next year, organizers said. The markets will open again in early May.
Lake Anne Development Partners (Republic Development) says work is already underway on a preservation plan to “safeguard and strengthen the trees that will remain undisturbed on an estimated 30 percent of the property” where a new parking garage is planned for a redeveloped Lake Anne Plaza area.
The developers also said an arborist reports that pruning and other tree care now will ensure that “80 to 90 percent of the trees we want to preserve will be just fine.”
The parking garage is being planned as part of a land swap that was approved 6-2 by the Reston Association Board of Directors on Thursday. RA will give the developers 0.7 acres of wooded land adjacent to the current Lake Anne Plaza parking lot. LADP will give RA 1.1 acres of land off of Baron Cameron Avenue and hundreds of thousands of dollars in improvements to improve sustainability and pathways in Reston.
LADP was chosen by Fairfax County in August to redevelop the aging Crescent Apartments’ site, as well as areas surrounding Lake Anne Plaza. They need RA’s wooded parcel to build a 120-space parking garage, which is crucial to revitalizing the retail area at Lake Anne.
Republic CEO David Peter said on Thursday the company investigated 11 other Lake Anne-area sites for potential parking and found none of them as suitable as the RA land.
RA’s decision was met with outrage by many citizens who spoke at Thursdays meeting. They said preserving mature trees should take precedence over development. After the decision, Diane Blust, chair of RA’s Sustainability Committee, resigned her position.
In a statement, LADP thanked RA for its “thorough, thoughtful review and approval of the proposed land exchange. There was a lot to be considered, and we appreciate the balanced process the Board afforded all stakeholders.”
The statement continues:
We are at least three years away from construction on the exchange parcel, but work is already under way on a preservation plan to safeguard and stregthen the trees that will remain undisturbed on an estimated 30 percent of the property, perhaps most importantly many of those that ring Washington Plaza.
Leading arboricultural consulting firm Zimar and Associates, which has done preservation work at the World War II Memorial and Monticello, has already visited the site and made recommendations on a years-long root pruning plan, immediate pest protection and irrigation and moisture monitoring that will improve the health of the trees and ensure a high level of success. “I’m very confident that 80-90 percent of the trees we want to preserve will be just fine,” says company founder and noted arborist Don Zimar.
Additional environmental safeguards will include capturing 100 percent of stormwater runoff from Lake Anne Village Center and the nearby Crescent Apartments—runoff that currently is discharged into Lake Anne without treatment, to reduce pollutants. Lake Anne Development Partners will also provide additional funds in escrow to the RA board for adding and preserving tree canopy.
Lake Anne Development Partners is committed to an exciting and sustainable revitalization that will respect and renew the Lake Anne Village Center not only for the existing merchants, but for all of Reston.
More:
- Reston Association Mulling Land Swap
- RA Asks for Tree Care as Part of Land Swap
- First Look at Plans for Lake Anne (Reston Patch)
- Morning Poll: Parking or Trees?
- Letter: No Other Parking Site Will Sensibly Benefit Lake Anne
- You Don’t Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone
- Reston Association OKs Land Swap
Diane Blust, chair of the Reston Sustainability Committee and a member of Reston Association’s Environmental Advisory Committee, resigned her positions last night in the wake of the RA board’s decision to move forward with a land swap that would remove mature trees in order to build a parking garage at Lake Anne Plaza.
“There’s really no sense in continuing to try to work within a system that is so clearly out of touch with sustainable development,” she told Reston Now in an email.
Blust has been a committed environmental advisor to Reston, working for years to ensure best practices to keep Reston environmentally conscious.
The RA Board voted 6-2 Thursday night to enter into a non-binding letter of intent in which Republic Land Development would give RA a 1.1 acre parcel of land off Baron Cameron Avenue in exchange for a 0.7 acre wooded parcel adjacent to Lake Anne Plaza where Republic intends to build a 120-space public parking garage. Republic will also offer other concessions, such as money for tree care and replanting and trail improvements.
Blust said at the meeting that RA and the citizens “got here through bad management.”
“It is no secret that the environmental management was not brought into this deal until late,” she said.
While Republic was chosen by the county in August to redevelop Crescent Apartments and surrounding areas, the land swap deal was not made public until weeks later, she said.
“Alternatives were taken off table when someone agreed to put that garage on land owned by all RA member,” she told the board. “I ask you to reject this land swap. It is in violation of RA policies on open space and natural areas. If approve it you will give up a natural area for a drainage ditch on Baron Cameron. We’re gonna be responsible for maintenance of trees on that land. Reston will be negatively impacted by garage.”
