1950s Suburb Evolves With Time

One of the most pressing issues for the area around Pimmit Hills is increasing traffic gridlock at Tysons Corner. Planners are hoping to extend Metro through Tysons on its way to Dulles International Airport, but the plan is expensive and controversial, and some question whether the development envisioned around the planned Metro stops, with its increased population density, would eventually alleviate or contribute to traffic.

For now, public transportation options for residents of Pimmit Hills include Metrobus, which runs throughout the community, and the West Falls Church Metro stop, about a mile from the border of the neighborhood. While residents can easily walk to Tysons Station shopping center for groceries, they feel that it's unsafe to cross the busy, six-lane Route 7 to the larger shopping center directly across the street. And though some residents walk to Tysons Corner just a few blocks away, the route along Route 7 and across I-495 is pedestrian unfriendly, Ewing said.

The community was built without sidewalks, street lights or a complete sewer system, according to county records. Though the community quickly gained a full sewer system, intermittent sidewalk construction still has not reached every block. "We ultimately want one hundred percent coverage," Ewing said.

Kwitchoff says the lack of continuous sidewalks does not stop walkers. "That's one thing people like about this neighborhood -- it's a great walking neighborhood." There are many informal walking groups and dog-walking friends. There are a number of small, county-maintained parks with jungle gyms interspersed through the streets, plus the adjacent Pimmit Hills Shopping Center, Tysons Station which includes several service stores, Trader Joe's and wireless- and sporting-goods stores and the regional county library.

The community is focused on making crosswalks at edges of the community safer. "We want to protect pedestrians and not cater to vehicular flow," Ewing said. "We want to make it safe for people to walk around and not put their lives in danger." The citizens association met last month with the county supervisor to get help making the crosswalks "more visible -- to get cars to slow down and stop," Ewing said. Possible solutions include fines for not stopping for pedestrians, crosswalks, florescent signs and highlighted crosswalks.

Membership in the Pimmit Hills association is $12 a year, mostly to cover the costs of printing and delivering the Dispatch, which has been published since 1952. One recent achievement is welcome signs recently erected at the Lisle Avenue and Pimmit Drive intersections with Route 7. These carved and painted wooden signs cost the association about $9,000. "They were something Pimmit Hills had wanted to do since the 1960s," said Kwitchoff, who found sketches for proposed signs in the citizens association records. "But it was so daunting dealing with all of the county bureaucracy just to put a sign up."

That is, until Joan Naleppa became first vice president of the citizens association last year. Naleppa, who bought her home in Pimmit Hills for $13,500 in 1963, ran the gantlet at the Fairfax County government center and with the Virginia Transportation Department. "I had a rough time, since we had no common ground" on which to erect the signs," she said.

The association was able to pay for the signs out of a fund left over from the 1960s plan to build a neighborhood swimming pool. "When we moved in, there was a swimming pool proposed for Olney Park," Naleppa said. But the pool never got built and the money "sat in a CD for years," Kwitchoff said.

The signs were erected this year, and Naleppa turned over her spot on the board late this summer. "It's her great legacy to this neighborhood," Kwitchoff said.