Company town: Is Crystal City, part of Amazon’s “National Landing,” a “place”?

A version of this article recently appeared in The Deleted Scenes. We think it makes an interesting complement to our recent post on Crystal City’s urban re-emergence.

A few months ago my wife and I hopped on the Metro and visited a friend in Crystal City, one of the neighborhoods in the more urban part of Arlington County, Virginia. This is the area where Amazon has set up its HQ2, and, partly following Amazon’s arrival, the area has grown quite a bit.

It was growing before that too—cranes and construction noise are everywhere. A place that felt a bit soulless and empty, a little gray and windswept, as if tall buildings had replaced squat ones and then the transformation had ended, is feeling more like a real city. The area has a lot of potential. Here’s a good article detailing many of the changes here, pretty much all of which are improvements.

Crystal City is now one of the Arlington neighborhoods under Amazon’s “National Landing” branding. I’m not a “National Landing” person. Neither, I feel safe assuming, is the curmudgeon with whom I once had this exchange at a Greater Greater Washington meet-up:

When he mentioned “National Airport,” I was a little incredulous. “A conservative who doesn’t call it Reagan Airport?” “I don’t believe in renaming things,” he said. “It’s ‘the Redskins’. And it’s National.”

Of course, it’s not as though Crystal City is a name that descends from the misty origins of the Commonwealth of Virginia, either. It’s from the early 1960s, after a crystal chandelier in the new neighborhood’s first building, which was also named Crystal House. Well, apparently, the crystal chandelier came after the name, but the notion that the neighborhood was named after the chandelier is more fun.

There’s also a large underground walking network and mall, which has long been semi-occupied and underutilized. 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).

One local group is gathering ideas, and there’s plenty of nostalgia for more successful days, But as far as I can tell, there are no particular plans to redevelop or revitalize the underground mall. Houston and Montreal are two North American cities famous for their underground, indoor tunnels, connecting to various amenities and points in the city. Despite being an aging and sparsely occupied facility, the underground mall is also home to many small, independent shops—exactly the sorts of places that fill out the trendier and more chain-heavy retail and restaurants popping up in the neighborhood.

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.

Yet I also feel a little reticence over these “Look, we just built a city!” developments. A city is more than just an urban form; it’s a collection of residents, properties, business owners, and developers crafting a place together, over time. One element of urbanism is delivering walkable, amenity-rich, reasonably affordable communities under the current regulatory and financial landscape. A deeper sort of urbanism—familiar if you follow Strong Towns or New Urbanism—seeks to include ordinary people in the work of building places, at a smaller scale, in a more “fine-grained” and participatory manner. That’s the old policy landscape that once built the nearby Old Town Alexandria, for example. Crystal City is a different animal. It delivers a kind of urbanism at a large scale, as a kind of product.

But maybe it’s not so bad. I want to show you some pictures.

While we walked around, I snapped a bunch, and I thought about how it would be to live here for a few years. Forget the questions about long-term adaptability or solvency or what makes a city “real.” The fact is, I kind of like it. If we can build more places like this, instead of pushing the underlying demand for housing further out into the countryside, we’d be better off. The amenities are nice. Yes, it has that movie-set feel. In a way, it’s a company town. But then, DC is a company town—the ultimate company.

It’s easy (for me anyway) to overthink all this stuff and overlook the question of what it’s like to be an average person with a normal office job in this neighborhood. All the philosophizing comes after that. And most normal people who work and live somewhere never think deeply about urbanism or even necessarily about their “ideal” neighborhood.

But here it is, ideal or not.

Nothing is more movie-set than the movie theater, decked out with more retro glass blocks than any actual vintage theater of the era being imitated.

But you know what? It’s cool. It’s not a drab, obviously-built-to-a-price-point building. It’s something I’d actually enjoy walking by every day. It might even occur to me to go see a movie.

Just beyond that, there’s a little nicely done retail strip that resembles the sort of development that used to pop up along trolley lines—a hybrid between an urban commercial block and a suburban strip mall.

I confess that the Amazon supermarket creeps me out. The gated entrances, like a subway station with turnstiles, the “pay with your palm” gimmick like a carnival sideshow from the Book of Revelation, the Amazon brand…pies? Breakfast sausages?

If you’re curious, it’s pretty much a Safeway, an almost-full-service supermarket towards the lower end. Its prices aren’t terribly competitive, however. But there’s nothing wrong with it. It is the first ordinary supermarket the neighborhood has had since the old Safeway shuttered in 2005. Previously, the only grocery options within walking distance were Whole Foods and Costco.

Then there is this computer-skills center, free and open to the public:

There’s a little area along the old train tracks with trails, landscaping, and some semi-outdoor pop-up restaurants and seating. The food is expensive, but if you’re living here, you can probably afford it.

There’s a kiddie park, a dog park, and this art installation:

And here is the mothership itself:

Compared to the walkable radius that surrounds most Americans, this would all probably be an improvement. It’s all a stone’s throw from the Metro station, which will take you to downtown DC, to the rest of Arlington’s urban corridor, or to suburban Virginia pretty quickly. In a word, it’s nice.

The idea of working for Amazon, living in a neighborhood largely held up by Amazon, buying the Amazon brand at the Amazon store, and taking your kids to the Amazon park… Didn’t we decide company towns were a bad idea a long time ago? Doesn’t this represent a questionable blurring of the private and the public, of corporate largesse and civic investment?

Maybe. And yet. As far as “fake cities” go—mixed-use developments under the auspices of a single developer or property manager, like the Reston Town Center, Rockville Town Square, or Pike & Rose—it’s nice. 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?

I do find myself evaluating this landscape more like a consumer product than, well, a place. Small towns and legacy cities, with their uniqueness, and their sense of settledness, can inspire affection and excitement. When I walk around one of these reverse-engineered faux cities, I feel more like a judge at a contest. “They did a nice job on that façade. This street still feels too wide. Those bricks look like they’re going to crumble soon, maybe they should have gone for a higher grade.”

Sometimes, when you talk about the quality of old-fashioned construction, people will say it is just survivor bias—the bad ones are gone. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Old towns had this mechanism of keeping the best stuff around over time so that at any given moment, a large portion of the buildings standing will be of good quality and will therefore have some sense of belonging to the place. There really is some je ne sais quoi that’s missing.

But do we need that? Buildings may be art, but they’re also products. People need jobs and housing. Sometimes good enough is good enough. We appreciate fancy cars or expertly designed appliances, but we’re happy with a reliable Corolla or square Oster blender. What’s so bad about the housing and neighborhood equivalent of that?