I drove through Manassas on Virginia State Route 28 the other week, and found it very interesting. The area was built up in the 1950s and 1960s; there’s a now-disguised barrel-vault-roof Safeway along here, which serves as a sort of fossil record of a commercial corridor’s age.

There’s also a beloved family-owned diner/breakfast restaurant in an old bank building, which has operated since the late 1960s. Today, the area is heavily Latino, and a lot of these older commercial buildings are taquerias, Mexican restaurants, or Hispanic-owned businesses of some sort.

When I passed this building, I knew I was looking at something that had been modified from its original state:

You can probably guess what’s old and what’s new here. Sort of. Look at the roofline on the right side and the right half of the front. And between the two store mini-façades, and at the far left of the front.

And now look at the original building:

It is not the original building on the site, which I cannot identify. But this second image is the current building’s original appearance, more or less. I can tell that from the Prince William County interactive map and aerial imagery viewer. Good stuff.

It was El Taco for a long time, probably from the beginning. The building was subdivided a few years ago into a much smaller El Taco, and a Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins combo store. However, from what I could find the taco restaurant never reopened in its new, smaller space, and that portion of the building now sits empty.

The remodel reminds me of this, from an old strip plaza on U.S. 22 in North Plainfield, New Jersey. The middle storefront here, vacant when I took this photo, has not been remodeled. (This or the one next to it used to be a Chinese/Japanese buffet, back in the 1990s.) The other two storefronts in the photo have been remodeled, but the vacant one carries on what was once the appearance of the whole strip.

Change, continuity, churn, recombination. The roadside is alive if you know what to look for, and how to find wonder in the mundane.

Related Reading:

Have You Ever Lived in a Strip Mall?

The Architectural Public Domain

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