u/GreaterRestonLiving

Somebody finally filed a plan for those parking lots behind Wegmans.

If you've wondered why nothing happened there since 2023, we break it all down on this week's show. The original developer sold. A Massachusetts company called WS Development paid $42.7 million last July for the undeveloped parcels and the two existing office buildings, and this month they put in a revised application for everything that's left. This is one reason for a long delay.

Just to be clear: the project doesn't get bigger. It was approved at 4.1 million square feet years ago and it still is. What they want to do is move the pieces around.

The short version is that housing gets pulled toward the Metro and a lot of the office space slides south. Two office towers go on Block D, around 775,000 square feet, with 75,000 of that as ground-floor retail, and there's a walkway cutting between them toward the back of the site. Block E swallows the parking- 1,504 spaces- all of it underground, which is the single best decision in the whole filing. Block G brings 450 apartments and a hotel of up to 200 rooms. Block H is the monster: 391 more units, 800,000 square feet of office, and 108,400 square feet of retail. The filing describes it as the new front door to the place.

There's about five acres of open space in there, too, centered on something they're calling Heafield Green, with a lawn, a performance stage, play areas, and a food-and-beverage pavilion. Anybody who's been to the concerts at Halley Rise can probably guess where those end up. A walking route called the Mews runs from the green to the Reston Town Center Metro station, and the roads eventually connect to Reston Crossing next door.

One casualty. There's a small garden in front of the two older office buildings, the one you walk past coming in from that side of the lot. The hotel goes roughly where it sits, and Kathy took the news poorly.

None of this is approved yet. County staff hadn't even accepted the application for review as of this week, and the developer held a community meeting on July 31, so there's still runway.

You can read all the details here. We walked through all of it with the renderings on this week's episode, and we covered Reston Crossing back in March if you want the neighboring piece.

What do you think about this revised plan?

Hi all... we took a break from discussing the newest developments in the area (less for us to argue about in this sub ;-) to hear this incredible story of how a Reston dad and his son built a serious lemonade stand that's open now in South Reston.

The best lemonade in Reston is only available this week at Gogo's Lemonade stand on the corner of South Lakes Drive and Ridge Heights Road. It's open today, August 8th, through Thursday, the 13th, from 11 am until 6 pm, so head over there now.

Diego (aka Gogo) was six when he asked his dad to build him a lemonade stand. He is 13 now, and this is his seventh year. This is a serious endeavor, where Diego has learned true entrepreneurship, along with purpose, logistics, and leadership, as he now has both paid and volunteer staff.

After he pays his staff and covers the lemons, what is left goes to Readers Are Leaders, the Herndon nonprofit that sends high school athletes into elementary schools to help kids learn to read, and his dad's roofing company matches the sales.

We had his dad, David Michaelson, on the podcast to tell us this quintessential Reston story. David also talks about living in Reston since 1981 and what he thinks of all the growth in Reston as a lifelong Restonian.

This was a super fun episode of the show, and Kathy is even volunteering at the stand on Sunday afternoon as a lemon tender, but you'll have to watch the episode to know what that means!

The mobile lounges at Dulles started running in 1962, meant as a stopgap until something better came along. Something better is finally coming along (we think?), and it costs $22.5 billion.

We spent most of this week's episode on the Dulles transformation plan, because the more we looked at it, the more the numbers and timeline seem incredible. Concourses C and D get torn down and replaced. Concourse E opens later this year (because it was already in the works for years). The AeroTrain gets extended, the mobile lounges get retired, and there is a proposed parking garage of around 32,000 spaces, which would be one of the largest anywhere. The Saarinen facade stays, which we were glad to see.

The master plan behind all this takes Dulles from about 27 million annual passengers today to roughly 45 million by 2045, on the runways it already has. Double the airport, and you double what flows through Route 28, Innovation Station, the Herndon-Monroe corridor, and Reston. More jobs, more people, more cars at the intersections you were just complaining to us about last week.

Speaking of which, thank you for that. The poll got out of hand in the best way. Reston Parkway and Sunset Hills won, though Wiehle and Sunrise Valley made a strong case, and about half of Elden Street got nominated. We chatted some about this on the pod in case you missed the earlier post.

We also talked about the new FCPS student ID cards. Every student wears one all day starting this school year, and bus riders tap on and tap off. We had our doubts, mostly about lanyards surviving a washing machine and about how little unsupervised space kids have left. Then somebody posted about their autistic son boarding the wrong bus last year and the hours it took to find him, and that reframed it.

Watch or listen wherever you get your podcasts, and tell us where you land on the Dulles timeline. They said two years. We think it is closer to ten.

We've lived here since 1996 and have driven Temporary Road a thousand times wondering when they might make it permanent...lol. Last week I finally looked it up, which turned into a much bigger rabbit hole than I planned. Some of what I found:

Temporary Road was never meant to stay. The name survived because of a small piece of paperwork nobody filed. The better part of the story is what happened years later when the county tried to fix it.

Sunset Hills Road has nothing to do with hills or sunsets. The name belonged to something that covered 7,200 acres of what is now Reston, and the family behind it left a lot more than a road name.

Wiehle Avenue is named for a Philadelphia doctor who bought 3,228 acres here in 1886 and tried to build a town where people would live and work in the same place. That is more than seventy years before Bob Simon. It failed, and the reason is genuinely sad.

Lawyers Road is exactly as literal as it sounds. Once you know what used to sit at the other end of it, you cannot unsee it on the map.

Jester Court is four lots off Lawyers Road, and it is my favorite one. The name comes from a chain of reasoning that takes three steps and ends on a holiday. Somebody has that on their driver's license.

All the horse names in South Reston. Colts Neck, Halter, Canter, Steeplechase, Bridoon, Cavesson, and about six variations on Fox. This was not a developer picking a theme out of a hat. Something real happened on that ground starting in 1928.

Baron Cameron Avenue is named for an actual person, and the county is named for the same man.

A few I could not crack: Soapstone, which is almost certainly about the quarrying but I could not find a source that says so outright, plus Glade, Twin Branches, and Colvin. If anyone actually knows, I would like to hear it.

One postscript that is less fun. The Robert Wiehle House at 1830 Old Reston Avenue, one of only three buildings left from the Town of Wiehle, took a tree through the roof in the July 5 storm. The owner told FFXnow that insurers stopped covering the property in 2025 because of its age. Nine days later, the Board of Supervisors approved 57 townhouses around the Bowman House next door, with commitments to preserve that one.

We went through all of it on our podcast this week if you want the actual answers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrMdAKMCUwU

So which street name have you always wondered about? I have a running list, and plenty are still unsolved.

RTC North comes up a lot without a clear summary of what it involves, so we went through the plan and pulled it into one place.

The short version: a 48-acre plan for the area just north of the core Town Center, roughly bordered by Baron Cameron, Fountain Drive, Town Center Parkway, and New Dominion. That's the land around the Reston Regional Library, the North County Government Center, the human services center, Sunrise Assisted Living, and the Inova ER.

What's proposed:

• Up to ~1.6 million sq ft of mixed-use development and as many as 1,000 homes, mostly along Fountain Drive (blocks 2, 4, and 6).
• A rebuilt Reston Regional Library. The current building is removed entirely and rebuilt elsewhere on the site, facing the new green.
• A new Embry Rucker Community Shelter and a relocated North County human services building.
• A future elementary school, sited across from Trader Joe's, drawn as a multi-story urban-style school with its own field.
• A recreation center and an athletic field, partly where the current library sits.
• ~10 acres of open space anchored by a 3.5-acre central green for concerts and events, with lawns, shaded walkways, restrooms, and a bike share spot.

We break the whole thing down block by block on our local podcast if you want the full walkthrough with the maps: https://youtu.be/JocIMAE7spc

Curious what people think: is a county-run public green actually a meaningful upgrade over what we have today? Overall, what do folks think about this plan?