Today we’re in Vienna, Virginia, a D.C. suburb with a fairly traditional main street corridor, along which today’s building is located. It’s a pretty basic neighborhood-sized strip plaza, with a bunch of small stores and restaurants.

But if you’re familiar with this series—in which this is the 30th entry!—you’ll know that there’s a little more to it. “What Do You Think You’re Looking At?” features a building with a long or interesting history, and which generally began life as something different from what it is today.

This one is nothing too exotic, but it did not begin life as a little strip mall. Any guesses? Here it is—the part we’re interested begins around the Chopt storefront (the first raised façade about 2/3 to the right) and ends past where I was standing when I took this picture of it.

You are looking at a medium-sized former supermarket which once anchored this L-shaped strip mall. The supermarket closed in 2013 and the space was subdivided, making the strip mall a larger collection of smaller businesses. There is no major anchor store now. A local news site quotes a Vienna official on the fairly simple project: “They are basically just subdividing the space and giving the façade a face lift.”

Interestingly, the same article observes, “The future of the former Magruder’s site [the supermarket] mirrors a trend in Vienna in recent years wherein sites that held large businesses have been divided into smaller spaces.”

This is good—it’s what I like to call “commercial density,” i.e. more enterprises per unit of land. All things being equal, it’s a positive trend in using suburban spaces more productively. And it’s also just kind of cool.

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #4

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #7

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