(By Alison M. Rice, New York Times, 18 December 2012)
To see
Merrifield, Virginia today, with its sleek white Target, its narrow 1920s-style
streetscape of specialty food shops along Glass Alley and the rest of the $542
million mixed-use Mosaic District is to nearly forget this unincorporated
area’s former life as an uninviting industrial suburban crossroads. But Gerald E. Connolly has not forgotten. Mr.
Connolly, who is a second-term member of the United States House of
Representatives and a former local official for this corner of Northern Virginia,
is familiar with Merrifield’s past and present. He remembers thinking to
himself, “What a waste of land,” after being elected in 1995 to the Fairfax
County board of supervisors. “We have this aging movie theater that’s
surrounded by acres of surface parking,” Mr. Connolly said.
Devising a
solution required some imagination. When Mr. Connolly and others first began
talking about redeveloping Merrifield, the area was known for its clogged
traffic, fast-food restaurants, a dilapidated auto repair shop with quirky
decorations, an industrial equipment rental business, a multiscreen movie
theater and a huge regional post office.
That is slowly starting to change. The auto body shop and fast-food
restaurants have vanished, swept away into a long-anticipated $120 million road
project designed to smooth the car-choked intersection at Lee Highway and
Gallows Road, used by 80,000 vehicles a day. The Lee Highway Multiplex, which
was the site of a gang-related incident in 2005, is now gone, its land sold
after its owner, National Amusements, scrambled to respond to a debt crisis
with its bankers.
A street
grid populated with more modern buildings is beginning to emerge in the Mosaic
District, which is the core of the new town center plan, and beyond. “There’s
more to be done, but you can see the final result in your mind’s eye without
too much effort,” Mr. Connolly said. The
company behind the latest stage in Merrifield’s evolution is Edens, a private
retail developer based in Columbia, S.C., that owns more than 130 shopping
centers. “This was the right project, in the right place, at the right time, by
the right developer,” said Barbara Byron, director of Fairfax County’s Office
of Community Revitalization. “The vision that they presented was exactly what
the county was looking for as the Merrifield Town Center.” Edens found Merrifield, which is about 15
miles from Washington, enticing. “There are very few sites left in the country
that are undeveloped and that have the density and strength of a permanent and
daytime consumer base within a 10-minute drive time,” said Jodie W. McLean, the
president and chief investment officer for Edens, who found the local market
statistics — 10 million square feet of office space within a mile and an
average household income of $173,338 within a five-mile radius — irresistible.
The result
was the 31-acre Mosaic District, which opened this fall with shops and
restaurants, an Angelika Film Center, a 150-room Hyatt House hotel, and 73,000
square feet of office space. While much of the retail has been leased, the
offices are still awaiting the first tenants. Named Mosaic to refer to the many
different Northern Virginia neighborhoods that encircle Merrifield, the project
is divided into four geographic districts: fashion and retail; film and dining;
market, which includes specialty food shops; and residential. Eventually, the LEED-certified development
will include a total of 500,000 square feet of retail and 1,000 residential
units. The housing will be built by rental apartment developers AvalonBay and
Mill Creek Residential, with townhouses for sale built by the home builder EYA
of Bethesda, Md. A handful of the residences will be designated as affordable
housing for qualified applicants. All
those components add up to the largest development that Edens has ever done. “We
spent a long time understanding the consumer,” said Ms. McLean, whose team drew
up profiles of what they see as crucial Mosaic District visitors, from the baby
boomer mom whose youngest child is leaving for college soon to young, single
women who love to shop. Based on that research, Edens decided that the district
would need to become a destination that offered convenience and a unique
consumer experience. So Edens built a
one-acre park and erected a supersize outdoor movie screen overlooking the park
for public events to serve as a gathering place for the surrounding community.
To be more
accessible to drivers than nearby Tysons Corner Center, a large regional mall
with its own traffic problems, Edens specifically designed the district’s
parking for speedy entry and exit. And
to provide an experience, not just transactions, to shoppers who always have
the Internet for low prices and fast shipping, Edens carefully vetted
restaurants and retailers to find distinctive shops and restaurants. “Consumers
want to spend time where it feels unique and special,” said Ms. McLean, whose
firm wants the district to become at least a twice-weekly visit for its core
customers. As a result, the mix of
retail and restaurant tenants is an untraditional combination of national
retailers like Anthropologie and tiny local shops like the upscale Dawn Price
Baby store and Artisan Confections, a chocolatier. But to capture them, Edens
had to overcome the area’s formerly downscale image and lack of identity. “When Mosaic approached us, we had just begun
to think about opening a second store,” said Cary Kelly, owner of Ah Love Oil
& Vinegar, which sells more than 30 different varieties of olive oil and
balsamic vinegar. “I thought, ‘Merrifield? Where is that?’ But we were really
impressed by the product mix, the intentional aspect of it, and the big
emphasis on local businesses.”
In the
Mosaic District, Edens grouped its tenants by type, clustering specialty
grocers such as MOM’s Organic Market close to a butcher, fish market and wine
shop, for example. “Mixed use has relied on food of all kinds as its primary
anchor, from Whole Foods to Harris Teeter and restaurants of all types,” said
Maureen McAvey, a retail specialist with the Urban Land Institute in
Washington. “As bookstores closed, food has become even more important” to
retail development. As the district
comes together, though, one piece remains stubbornly hard to fit: walkability.
Intended as a pedestrian-friendly town center and less than a mile from a Metro
station, Mosaic is still best reached for many visitors by car or bus, rather
than on foot, because of traffic on nearby roads. “You have to retrofit what you already have,
and Gallows Road and Lee Highway were already in place,” said Linda Q. Smyth,
who represents Merrifield on the county’s board of supervisors. She remembered
just how insufficient Merrifield’s infrastructure used to be, recalling that
“we had pieces of street that faded into nothing.”
Such a mixed
bag of infrastructure takes time to convert into a walkable neighborhood.
Elected officials say recent road improvements intended to divert traffic away
from known Merrifield bottlenecks should help. So should many of the
residential projects under construction in the area, which will expand the sidewalk
network and create the new street grid, they said. But some people are not interested in waiting
to see what happens. At EYA, sales are running ahead of projections. The
builder had expected to sell 48 of its town homes in the district in 2012, but
as of mid-December, the builder had already sold 71, at prices starting in the
$600,000s. “They want walkable living and there’s some sense of being an urban
pioneer,” Preston Innerst, EYA’s vice president of sales and marketing, said of
the Mosaic District buyers. “They see a lot of upside potential, and they like
the feeling of being in on the ground floor before it really takes off.”
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