A Box in Two Stories

The defunct Gaylan's sporting goods chain enlivened low-rise suburbia

Back in June, I wrote this article for Strong Towns about a large, two-story sporting goods store in Fairfax, Virginia. Unfortunately the store had recently moved and was vacant. This is what it looks like.

I wrote:

There was a time when a building of this size and scale would have been a much more commercially or civically dynamic space….Thinking about the empty sporting goods store’s “urban train station” resemblance, I also recalled two vaguely similar urban buildings: Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market (which began life as part train shed, part market) and Cleveland’s West Side Market (which was always a market).

The interior of the store, as you can sort of see from the photo, has windows, and as noted has two floors. It’s an unusual building for a big-box store, and it has a certain grandeur to it. These were originally built as Gaylan’s, a sporting goods chain that in 2004 was acquired by Dick’s Sporting Goods. They were the chain’s standard building, and there are still many of them standing.