I was in Greater Greater Washington recently with a piece on Crystal City! (It’s actually an edited version of this piece—I didn’t know it had been accepted by GGWash and published it.) I added a new bit on the Crystal City underground path system/mall, however, so more on that below.

My editor liked this bit, especially the last sentence:

In a lot of ways, Crystal City has historically been like the urban version of an exurban bedroom community. You’re there for the commute/home size/price tradeoffs, the amenities are nice, and everything is shiny and new. The prices are high, which means demand is high and future prospects are good. In another 10 or 20 years, this will probably mature into a more interesting, textured place. You can hardly expect something built overnight to be amazing. All of the places in America that we really love were built over time, organically, with layers. In other words, a place like Crystal City has promise.

The whole piece is basically about how boring, cookie-cutter, good-enough places with some semblance of urbanism are good. Or at least fine. It’s a thousand times better to put up more bland-looking apartment buildings and overpriced restaurants in Crystal City than it is to rip out hundreds of acres of trees in Prince William or Loudoun County to put up a new Walmart/Home Depot shopping center and subdivisions of “single-family detached houses” that are five feet from each other.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, this is almost 40 miles west of Crystal City, which sits a few miles from downtown D.C.

I write:

Supermarket, drug store, restaurants, bike docks, a park, daycare, proximity to jobs and transit, pretty good walkability. Within the constraints of the way we finance and build today—within the constraints of the economics of the region—how much better can you do? How much more can urbanists ask for before we become elitists or philosophers instead of advocates for ordinary, decent places to live and work?

Give it some time. It’s fine.

So the underground mall—now called the Crystal City Shops:

Redditors describe it as having been half-dead 20 years ago. It first opened in the 1970s, in several stages, one of which included old-fashioned stained glass and cobblestones. Comics, puppets, and other quirky businesses have populated the mall over the years. It was once connected to the neighborhood’s Safeway, which closed in 2005 (leaving the neighborhood without a supermarket until the recent opening of an Amazon Fresh).

It’s fairly large and still has a number of businesses, though it certainly isn’t what the original developers imagined. I just made another visit to the underground mall, which I’ve seen much less than the above-ground neighborhood, and which I’ve pretty much forgotten exists, even though it connects to the Metro station for Crystal City which I use once in awhile.

It doesn’t seem like there are any long-term plans for the underground shops—I did some searching for the original article and came up with nothing more than local groups remembering its heyday or hoping that it would be revitalized. It’s likely it will just eventually empty out and be completely redeveloped. Or maybe just empty out. (One of my colleagues over at Resident Urbanist, Kristen Jeffers, thinks the same thing is happening with the underground mall by the L’Enfant Plaza station in D.C., which is even a little older.)

I believe the spots without numbers are already empty.

But I wanted to show you more of it, and I wanted to see it again. I know I’ve been down here, but I can’t even remember when!

Here’s the view from the Metro station exit: one way goes to a hotel and theater, and part of the mall. The other way is more shops.

It reminds me a lot of Montreal’s underground network.

Part of the mall dates from the colonial/festival marketplace craze, and it was designed to look like an old village or Main Street or some such:

Here’s the rather famous puppet store!

I took a photo of this painted glass across from the store, and the owner, who was working there, called to me and said he painted it himself.

We chatted for a minute. He’d been down there over 20 years, but he wasn’t sure how much longer. It’s pretty empty down here, he said, looking around. Couldn’t argue.

There’s this atrium area with a bunch of seating.

This is not bad at all. Urban areas in America lack, or feel like they lack, this kind of thing. Comfortable, clean, well-lit, well-kept spaces where you can just exist and not spend money. The bathrooms are plentiful and well kept too. I might grab a coffee and sit here with my laptop for a couple of hours if I lived nearby. The only remarkable thing about this is how unusual it is.

The businesses down here are mostly small independent shops. It has a relaxed, old-school vibe. It reminds me of Beltway Plaza, an old mall in Greenbelt, Maryland reinvented by a ton of largely immigrant small business owners.

Underground malls, like pedestrian malls (car-free downtown shopping districts) were a fad, and never really became mainstream, unselfconscious pieces of the American urban environment.

But maybe they should have. At least this one is still kicking.

Related Reading:

A City’s a City No Matter How Small

Tear Down This Mall?

Put a Lion In Your Cart

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