When my wife and I went to our new favorite restaurant on its second-to-last night of service—the owners retired, it was wonderful and bittersweet, and I wrote about it here—the section of the parking lot near the restaurant was unusually full. There was a line out the door to get into the restaurant, which explained why those prime spots were taken.
We had to drive further down the strip plaza it was in, to the quieter, less crowded far end. There’s a large storefront there which is now a “Fun Land.” It must have been some kind of anchor store originally—these smaller neighborhood shopping centers would usually have had a supermarket or some kind of smaller discount department store.
There were a couple of buses parked outside and a huge group of kids was going in. The place looked fun! They had even added a garage door to the front that could pulled up so you could see the inside. It’s a pretty good use of a large space.
I was curious, obviously, what it used to be. Google Street View showed it vacant across the years. From whatever its last tenant was to the arrival of the Fun Land was quite a few years.
I did some Google searching and I was able to find this news item from 2013, “Sully Station Plaza to Fill Long-Vacant Anchor Store,” with the subhed “Good Fortune supermarket is coming soon to the plaza.” Good Fortune is a Chinese grocery chain. There’s another one in Eden Center, a heavily Vietnamese shopping center about 25 minutes away in Falls Church.
It says the space had been vacant for about three years, and then adds:
Good Fortune will fill the space abruptly vacated by the Grand Village Asian supermarket in October 2010—just one year into their lease. Before Grand Village rented the space, the store was occupied by the Safeway grocery store, which decided not to renew its lease.
A Safeway, which had probably been there for a long time if not from the very beginning, in 1988. Then two international supermarkets which didn’t last long, and now an indoor arcade/amusement park.
The location is a little out of the way for a supermarket, which might explain why Safeway let this store go. Lots of these mid-sized anchor stores in smaller shopping centers are now this sort of thing: indoor pickleball courts, trampoline parks, etc. It’s a creative use of brick-and-mortar space which is somewhat obsolete now.
It’s a pretty grand facade for a shopping center, too. Here it is from 2023 in Google Maps:
It’s in this space in the middle, here. I’m wondering if the location is also just a bit out of the way, coming right after the interchange, and being set back from the main road a bit, and visually separated with landscaping.
I don’t like to think of these secondary uses of retail space as a downgrade or as a making-do. I like to see it as innovation, creativity, and taking space that was designed for a handful of common uses and adapting it as times change in little ways.
Related Reading:
“Excuse Me, Where’s the Car Aisle?”