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damontEarlier this month, the Staples down the hill closed its foors for good. About a week after the closing, I was passing by there when someone else came up to the front doors and looked confused as to why the store wasn't open (it was during what had been normal business hours). I had to make it very clear that the store was not just closed for the day, but shut down permanently, and pointed out the sign stating where the three closest still-open locations were.
Got me to thinking about that shopping center. It's probably about as old as I am, built when the first housing developments went up in Chantilly in the early-mid 1960s. When we moved here, we lived on the edge of suburbia. A mile and a half west and you were out in the country. 20-plus years later that's not the case anymore. And as the money migrates west to the new outer suburbs, the shopping options in our area change somewhat.
That small strip mall nearest my house, the one that had the Staples, is a bit of an odd bird nowadays. It has no grocery store, and hasn't had one for more than half the time we've lived here. Where the Staples was, had been a drugstore when we moved here, and when it closed, Staples took over. The store next to that, now a Dollar Tree, was a Total Crafts before that chain shut down, though I think there had been one changeover in that spot shortly after we moved in. The store next to THAT has been an auto parts store the whole time. There's the Obligatory Asian Restaurant which has changed multiple times over the years. There's a hair salon, a nail salon, a vacant spot where a carpet store had been for nearly 20 years, and a mediocre pizza-and-such delivery joint.
Back in the 1990s, there had been a small "mall" area, an enclosed walkway with stores on both sides, though there were only 3 or 4 stores on each side. There was a donut shop and a cleaners and maybe one other store on the side (perhaps that was the shoe repair shop?) that eventually got torn down. The teardown happened when they enlarged the other big store -- which had been a smaller grocery store for our first 6 months here, then was vacant for a year or two, then was an Amish marketplace for maybe 3 years before falling vacant again -- the center owners remodeled and made that store bigger to accommodate a Food Wombat (Food Lion to most, long story from college which I may have told somewhere in the archives). But that store didn't last either, first being rebranded a Bottom Dollar but then shutting down when that experiment failed. Now it's a SteinMart.
So it's odd in that many of the stores have managed to stick around for a very long time, whereas others haven't.
Got me to thinking about that shopping center. It's probably about as old as I am, built when the first housing developments went up in Chantilly in the early-mid 1960s. When we moved here, we lived on the edge of suburbia. A mile and a half west and you were out in the country. 20-plus years later that's not the case anymore. And as the money migrates west to the new outer suburbs, the shopping options in our area change somewhat.
That small strip mall nearest my house, the one that had the Staples, is a bit of an odd bird nowadays. It has no grocery store, and hasn't had one for more than half the time we've lived here. Where the Staples was, had been a drugstore when we moved here, and when it closed, Staples took over. The store next to that, now a Dollar Tree, was a Total Crafts before that chain shut down, though I think there had been one changeover in that spot shortly after we moved in. The store next to THAT has been an auto parts store the whole time. There's the Obligatory Asian Restaurant which has changed multiple times over the years. There's a hair salon, a nail salon, a vacant spot where a carpet store had been for nearly 20 years, and a mediocre pizza-and-such delivery joint.
Back in the 1990s, there had been a small "mall" area, an enclosed walkway with stores on both sides, though there were only 3 or 4 stores on each side. There was a donut shop and a cleaners and maybe one other store on the side (perhaps that was the shoe repair shop?) that eventually got torn down. The teardown happened when they enlarged the other big store -- which had been a smaller grocery store for our first 6 months here, then was vacant for a year or two, then was an Amish marketplace for maybe 3 years before falling vacant again -- the center owners remodeled and made that store bigger to accommodate a Food Wombat (Food Lion to most, long story from college which I may have told somewhere in the archives). But that store didn't last either, first being rebranded a Bottom Dollar but then shutting down when that experiment failed. Now it's a SteinMart.
So it's odd in that many of the stores have managed to stick around for a very long time, whereas others haven't.
