I recently drove to the City of Fairfax (or Fairfax City, or Old Town Fairfax) to walk around and take some pictures. Fairfax City is geographically in Fairfax County, but it’s one of Virginia’s few independent, incorporated cities (though, go figure, it’s also the county seat!)

There are not that many actual towns in Northern Virginia. If you live in the region, you’re definitely familiar with Northern Virginia’s sprawl. If you don’t, well, it’s the dominant pattern here. From an airplane, here’s what much of the area looks like:

Parts of Arlington and much of Alexandria, across the river from D.C., feel urban. Once you get more than a few miles from the city, there isn’t that much. Falls Church, another independent city geographically in Fairfax County, Clifton, downtown Manassas, and a few small villages in Loudoun County are about all there is in terms of main streets/downtowns/street grids. This contrasts quite a bit from my home state of New Jersey, which is chock-full of small towns, each with their own distinct small classic downtowns and residential gridded streets.

It’s easy to basically miss the fact that there is an Old Town Fairfax, because if you’re shopping or driving through, you’ll probably be driving through the part of Fairfax City along U.S. 50, the old east-west access route into Washington, D.C, locally named Fairfax Boulevard. It’s not much of a boulevard—it’s a fast, six-lane highway, and almost everything along it is designed to be accessed by car. Back in July, I walked almost its entire length, and, from my pedestrian point of view, was understandably rather critical. (Someone in the city government actually came across the piece, and liked it!)

To be fair to the whole place, however, I wanted to feature the Old Town area of Fairfax City too, and that’s this piece.

Fairfax is interesting. While the settlement itself goes back to the 1700s, most of the modern street grid, not to mention most of the buildings, are midcentury or even later. Some of what’s there today is infill, but a surprising amount of it is completely new construction, including the streets. Yet it still kind of fits together; it’s a little more complicated than a simple grid, but it is a coherent street network.

There are also a lot of recent downtown-adjacent residential streets, lined with townhouses and small apartment buildings, trees, and nice sidewalks. They’re leafy and quiet, but very close to the downtown businesses or to a nearby neighborhood strip mall. You could easily do in-town errands by walking, if you wanted to. 

You can also get some nature; there’s a trail network accessible from the town’s streets. (There’s even a trail which emerges on U.S. 50, which will probably induce you turn to back around.) This photo was taken a couple of minutes’ walk from the streets pictured below.

In other words, at the same time that the familiar Levittown-style development was going up around the edges of downtown Fairfax, the downtown core was also expanding, along a relatively walkable street network. Here are a couple of those newer residential streets.

That neighborhood strip plaza sits pretty much right in town, which you would usually take to mean that it had once been one or two urban blocks. I had assumed that myself, but I’m glad I checked the old aerial imagery. It turns out, the plot was actually forested until it was developed in the late 1960s or early 1970s! For whatever reason, the original pre-war build-out of downtown was quite small, and the era of peak suburban expansion left enough unbuilt land for downtown to grow in recent years.

The strip plaza is a bit old-fashioned—the Safeway even retains an old logo and some old artwork near the entrances—but it’s a useful neighborhood shopping center.

It is, not surprisingly, the subject of many ongoing redevelopment discussions, but as far as I can tell no actual proposal as of yet. It’s also home to one interesting business with the potential to bring some traffic to town. One hopes if and when the plaza is redeveloped, they can afford a spot in the new building, or elsewhere in town. It’s Chubby Squirrel Brewing Company, a microbrewery with a small food menu. My wife and I like it a lot, and it’s the kind of fun, casual outing that can keep you in town if its in walking proximity to other activities or businesses. (I don’t believe Chubby Squirrel brews on site, possibly because zoning would not permit that. More on that here, from last Thursday’s post!)

Here’s are a few shots of the original historic downtown, with mostly older buildings. It’s pretty typical architecture for small towns or small cities, and as I always can’t help but notice, you can hardly distinguish a lot of small-town main streets from a lot of neighborhoods in cities.

And here’s some of the newer commercial/mixed-use development in downtown. There’s a fountain with a grassy sitting area, and this large building with restaurants at the bottom level, with a large courtyard and outdoor seating area.

It’s built with minimal setbacks—i.e., right up to the sidewalk—and somewhat hidden garage parking. Whatever brief inconvenience this causes to a motorist trying to park is more than offset by the pleasant and fairly large walkable area it creates. If anything, the streets here could still be a little narrower.

As is often the case, these older towns in desirable regions look a little old fashioned but are quite expensive, and have traded most of their original economic purpose for simply being bedroom communities for the nearby city. I’m not sure there’s much urbanists or land-use folks can do about that, in terms of how classic small towns are in some ways artifacts of a different economic era. That’s a strong trend with lots of higher-level causes than anything to do with urban or land-use policy per se.

But this kind of development is popular, and it’s more efficient than sprawl. We should seek new development along these old templates. The irony is that many classic towns resist that, preferring their main streets and downtowns to be open-air museums or quaint historic districts, rather than living and evolving urban fabric. (My New Jersey hometown is one such place.)

It’s heartening to see so much construction within the city limits here, and to see new streets that mimic and connect with the old ones. Even a lot of New Urbanist developments, starting fresh in a new self-contained space, often fail to do this. They’re valuable and doing a much better job than the standard alternative, but new construction in places that are already built is a good thing.

I think when a lot of people criticize “density,” they’re really criticizing either traffic, or the aesthetics of sprawl: another clogged intersection, another big-box store, etc. Whatever negative images “density” is supposed to raise were not raised by anything I saw in Old Town Fairfax. Some residents surely feel differently, and that’s their prerogative. But not enough to freeze the town in time. 

Related Reading:

What Does Waterford Mean?

The Rest of Vienna

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of nearly 200 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this!

Share