The usual anecdote about Tysons Corner has something to do with a forlorn, disoriented pedestrian.
”If you`re on the street, it`s like somebody will say, `Are you lost?”` said Patrick Kane, president of a consulting firm that has studied the awesome agglomeration of offices, hotels and shopping malls that has achieved fame as the nation`s Mecca of Sprawl.
”Currently, walking . . . is hazardous to your health and not recommended,” said Sterling Wheeler, a Fairfax County planner who is directing a separate study of Tysons.
And Warren Almquist, coordinator of still another Tysons study, this one by the American Institute of Architects, gave up after attempting to explain how to walk across the street from a major office building to a shopping mall. ”When you`re outside, after hearing the traffic and dodging the cars, it seems too far to even try,” he said.
Indeed, even from 200 feet up on a gallery atop Tycon Tower, one of Tysons` tallest buildings, this corner of Virginia whines and rumbles like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Memorial Day weekend.
The view offers a picture of three square miles of compacted, extruded and squared-off construction materials, contained in and around a rough triangle formed by two major expressways and two cross-county arteries.
Here and there, a ragged stand of trees huddles together like an encampment of Confederate soldiers after a rout by the Yankees in one of the fabled Civil War battles that took place not far away.
It is midmorning of a warm, sunny spring day. The eye roams far, seeking a pedestrian. At last, a figure is spotted. It does not move. It is at a bus stop. And that in itself is a rarity in this monument to an auto-dominated society.
Tysons Corner is one of the most reviled, derided and puzzled-over patches of land in the country. It is the workplace for about 70,000 people and home to about 11,000, but to some observers it offers a dark vision of the future of suburban America as a sterile, gridlocked nightmare.
With 20.5 million square feet of commercial space, it is for its land area the largest concentration of suburban office space in the country, with more capacity in that category than all but about 10 big-city downtowns
(Chicago has about 120 million square feet).
And its 4.5 million square feet of retail space makes it the second-biggest suburban shopping complex on the East Coast, next to one in White Plains, N.Y.
These numbers give it fair claim to the title of the nation`s most representative Edge City, a sobriquet given by author Joel Garreau in his 1991 book of that name to major suburban office-hotel-shopping nodes of the Schaumburg-Oak Brook variety.
But unlike Schaumburg and Oak Brook, Tysons Corner isn`t a city. Though along with its offices and shopping centers it has 5,700 dwelling units, mostly in apartment buildings, it is not a municipality.
It is an area of Fairfax County that takes its name from an intersection of county roads where about a quarter-century or so ago there was nothing but a general store and a gas station surrounded by fields and forests.
That changed in the mid-1960s when the Capital Beltway, the expressway encircling Washington, D.C., came through. Shortly afterward, a massive shopping center opened where the Beltway met the two county roads, and the development chase was on.
”Less than five years later, the whole thing looked like it was dumped on by offices,” said Wheeler.
That process gathered further momentum in the 1980s after the building of another expressway leading to Dulles International Airport. Halfway between Washington and the airport, Tysons was a magnet for high-tech companies, especially defense contractors known locally as the ”Beltway Bandits.”
The madcap development was not overly constrained by niceties of planning and design. ”This is about as pure an expression of market demand as you`ll ever want to see,” said Almquist.
The result is a hodgepodge of buildings with little relation to one another. At the extreme, there is a county courthouse dubbed the ”Up Toilet Seat Building” because of the evocative six-story ovoid outline that adorns its facade.
Aesthetics aren`t really the issue, however. The problem from the planning point of view is that buildings are self-contained, intentionally turned inward and away from each other in plan and style, said Wheeler.
With buildings designed like fortresses surrounded by parking lot moats, sidewalks that often stop in the middle of nowhere, wide roads with few designated crossings and a conspicuous absence of public open space where people might want to congregate, Tysons demands car use.
”There`s no walking between buildings. It`s all driving,” said Nancy Condon, a public relations official with the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac), whose headquarters is in Tysons. Employees can jog on trails around the building, however, she noted.
That kind of encapsulated environment is typical. Another building has a 40-foot tree indoors so no one is forced outside to enjoy nature.
With such car dependence, traffic tie-ups are a local legend. Parking lot conditions prevail at peak hours along the main roads, and some of the worst crunches occur at lunchtime as workers scramble to do errands or grab a bite. ”If I want to go to the bank, I go at 10 or 2 or some odd hour,” said Condon.
Things are not much better on the expressways around Tysons. With the only mass transit to the area provided by a handful of buses, some 98 percent of trips to Tysons during peak hours are by car.
This helps create the rush-hour traffic jams that clot expressways and major secondary roads all over northern Virginia. Tysons` image suffers accordingly.
”Tysons is a great example of what`s gone wrong,” growls Al Eisenberg, a county board member in neighboring Arlington County. ”It`s a classic example of transportation not keeping pace with development. It has to be the most inefficient land-use planning in the U.S.”
With substantial housing in Tysons, one might think the traffic problem would be lessened with people taking short trips from home to work. But county planners say few people who live in Tysons work there. They are getting in their cars to go somewhere else.
And there is virtually no moderately priced housing to accommodate the lower-paid workers in the offices and malls. The Rotonda, the largest multifamily development in Tysons with 1,168 units, is one of the highest-priced apartment complexes in the county, with $200,000 to $400,000 condos being sublet for rents averaging $1,500 a month.
Many people like working in Tysons because of the amenities in their new buildings, said Kane. But liking Tysons itself is a different matter.
Condon only reluctantly admitted to working in Tysons, preferring to be identified with posh McLean next door (home of the Central Intelligence Agency).
”It`s certainly not very attractive,” she said. ”They came in and raped and pillaged the land, and there`s no trees except for the
landscaping.”
There`s also no lack of people wringing their hands over these problems and recommending solutions.
KRS Associates, headed by Kane, recently completed a federally funded transportation study that recommends forming up to three concentrated, multi- use centers in Tysons anchored by major mass transit stops.
Such centers, with far greater development density than exists in Tysons, would include offices for 10,000 workers; 4,000 to 5,000 housing units; and medical, recreational, shopping and educational facilities.
Creating these urban concentrations that people would be able to walk around in is the key to making mass transit work and alleviating traffic, Kane said.
”People think that density creates traffic,” said Kane. ”But it`s spread-out density that creates traffic. Concentrated density actually reduces traffic.”
Wheeler`s county study is not complete, but he agrees with Kane that creating denser, pedestrian-friendly subareas in Tysons must be part of the answer.
”We need to have an environment where you don`t have to go in your car to cross the street,” he said.
The study by the northern Virginia chapter of the American Institute of Architects envisions scenarios good and bad, ranging from a garden spot to a gridlocked ”Blade Runner” environment with citadel buildings overlooking a degraded urban jungle.
But the need for high-density, mixed-use development in centers connected to public transportation is emphasized throughout the report.
The chances for that kind of evolution aren`t promising, however.
Plans for extending a rapid transit rail line to the area are in the speculative stage. Funds for the purpose are uncertain, and some proposals skirt Tysons.
Zoning restrictions make dense, multi-use development difficult, and there`s no guarantee that anyone wants to build to that pattern. With the glut of office space in the D.C. area, no one much wants to build anything, and public sentiment is anti-growth.
Moreover, county planners suggest that the business community isn`t much interested in making a people-friendly place, whatever the traffic
ramifications.
Defense contractors own a quarter of the land in Tysons and half the land zoned for future development, and they don`t want pedestrians walking between one building and another because they think security would be compromised, Wheeler said.
For similar reasons, they don`t want affordable housing, said Kane. ”I talked to one developer who said: `Housing? I don`t want those kids hanging around my parking lots!”` he recalled.
Because there`s no municipality, there`s little chance for voter pressure for change. And the county, acutely aware that Tysons generates almost 10 percent of its total property tax revenue and one-third of revenue from commercial property, isn`t about to take any steps to upset Tysons` corporate community.
”We can`t go forward until we get something that every interest group buys into,” said Wheeler.
That`s a formidable challenge. But the alternative, Kane argues, is obsolescence. The Tysons that Washingtonians escaped to will become so congested and people-unfriendly that it will be the nightmare they escape from, he contended.
”If it continues to go on the course it is now, then in 15 years we`ll be talking about the next Edge City farther out,” he said.
