Inside Eden Center

What a strip mall can be, part 2

Earlier this year I wrote about Eden Center, a strip plaza in Fairfax County, Virginia. It began life in the 1960s like any other strip mall, and would likely either be aging or long since redeveloped, had it not improbably become an informal center for the area’s large Vietnamese community in the 1980s.

Its history is very interesting, and a lot has bee…