I wrote recently about Crystal City, a neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia, that was built up in the 1960s and ’70s but is seeing quite a bit of new construction; this is where Amazon has its new headquarters. It’s kind of a boring neighborhood, but it’s also a perfectly serviceable one. Read my thoughts on it here, with some photos!

I also photographed and wrote about the Crystal City Shops, an underground mall and path system, in a follow-up piece:

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.

Today, I want to show you one particular business down there, which struck me because it’s conceptually so simple, and common in other countries, but in America so rare. Take a look at this:

This is like one of those little sushi bars in Japan, nestled into a tiny little space in a train station or something. Imagine how much more lively and interesting American life would be—and how much more opportunity there would be for the kind of people who want to start a simple business—if we had a thousand times more businesses with this sort of footprint. This sort of commercial space, and regulations which encourage them and which reduce barriers to operating in them, are economic resources for ordinary working people.

But I do want to talk about this place specifically. How many places in America can you walk right from the hallway or street to a chair at the sushi bar, sit down, order, and eat? Seriously—how many individual establishments exactly like that exist in this country? My wife has seen one. I have never seen one other than this. I’m sure there are a decent number, but it isn’t terribly common.

And it was actually quite good—at least on par with the average sushi restaurant in a strip mall. I paid about $23 for this, with miso soup included. It was made quickly and everything tasted fresh.

It seriously looks very nice. It doesn’t have the technique or finesse of fancy sushi, but who cares? That bottom right fish is escolar, a very fatty fish. They even sizzled the top to soften it up a little!

I asked the guy working the counter how long this place had been down here. He wasn’t the owner and didn’t know for sure, but he guessed at least 20 years. Not bad. From the business side, this is a small space and a small menu, making it easy to coordinate/manage/keep running over time. From the customer perspective, it’s quick and simple.

I don’t really know quite how to describe it—the feeling that you can just decide to go grab lunch here on impulse. You don’t even have to enter a door. There’s no friction. It’s a private business, but there’s no almost barrier between it and the public outer space. (Well, technically the mall is a private space, but these underground tunnels sort of function as streets.)

It’s such a cool little moment to sit there. It reminds me of something I wrote awhile back, about an old auto garage, and I think I wrote the same about old motels: “One of the fun things about driving these older commercial strips is spotting the early buildings that still survive. Despite being car-oriented, they were small and close to the road, such that they interface in some way with the street.”

What I was getting at is how the buildings are still scaled to people. You can walk right up to one of them and touch the outer wall or walk along the side of it. There aren’t the massive retention walls, drainage ponds, truck bays, acres of parking, that island off the building and make it feel somehow off limits to you.

Whatever that is—the friction of getting close to something—is reduced or eliminated by devolving size and scale. There’s an ability to feel impulse or serendipity with small-scale commerce.

I’m writing about this little sushi bar as if it’s some kind of wonder, and I sort of do that with a lot of things. But I guess what I really want is for these things not to feel wonderful or unique or special. We’ll have succeeded when these things are boring.

There has to be a word for this—we urbanists have to coin one if there isn’t already—for something that’s inherently common in a conceptual sense, or has no reason not to be, but has been rendered artificially scarce.

And this little walk-up sushi bar is one of the best examples I can think of.

Related Reading:

Keep On Trucking

That Damned Elusive Parking Spot

Set In Brick

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