A Space for the Centuries
Vienna Is Preparing to Create a Traditional Town Green, a Lasting Focus For People Watching, Web Surfing and Just Soaking Up the Village Vibe

By Lisa Rein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 25, 2006

The tree-shaded icon of the first American settlements is coming to the middle of Fairfax County, between Tysons Corner and Interstate 66.

When the Vienna Town Green is completed, shoppers at Whole Foods or Starbucks, or people just passing by, will be able to get out of their cars with their coffee, strollers or books -- or their laptops, because the area will have wireless Internet access. They can then walk down Maple Avenue to a landscape of pathways, fountains, benches, flowers, restrooms and an amphitheater.

Just don't call it a park.

"It's a little more formal than that," said Cathy Salgado, Vienna's director of parks and recreation, who is overseeing the project. "It's a traditional green. When you go to Europe, you see things that have been there for centuries. The idea is for this to last centuries."

Right now, the 2 1/2-acre parcel at 144-152 Maple Ave. E. looks more like an abandoned lot, although it is green. Last month, wrecking crews tore down a two-story commercial building from the 1930s. The last of its five tenants -- a bridal shop, flooring and mattress stores, the White Tiger restaurant and a Presbyterian church -- found new homes.

While the town waits for landscape construction firms to bid on the job, a temporary lawn of sorts is growing on the dirt. The green will stretch across that patch and an adjacent parking lot. The back yards of two historic buildings, also part of the green, will run from Maple Avenue to Church Street, ending at the old Washington & Old Dominion Railroad depot.

Vienna officials, who have seen open space in the 4.3-square-mile town gobbled up by development, started to kick around the idea of a green a decade ago. Salgado said they figured that their town of 15,000 might be enveloped by the sprawl of Northern Virginia and that it needed a certain something. With its Halloween parade, seven parks (including one for dogs) and abundance of mom-and-pop stores, they thought that certain something could give the town a Norman Rockwell feel. Vienna has its share of historic buildings, but there was never a place to sit and appreciate them.

"We realized that what we need to do is hold on to what we've got," said Mayor M. Jane Seeman.

The project will turn on its head the traditional notion of how a community develops: Colonial-era towns rose around their greens, and many Northern Virginia communities have built a town center first and counted on development to follow. Vienna's green will be reclaimed from the growth that established the 116-year-old town.

As planning simmered over the years, two lots the town considered suitable were lost to private buyers. Then, six years ago, the Maple Avenue site went on the market. It was almost smack in the center of town, flanked by the popular W&OD trail, the Presbyterian church, a one-room white clapboard library built in 1897 and the historic Freeman House. The town paid $2 million.

An Alexandria landscape architect was brought in to design the parcel to evoke a simpler era, when the community's stores and restaurants were its focal point.

According to the designs, a 17-foot-high granite fountain and a plaza of brick pavers are planned as a buffer from Maple Avenue and will provide a platform for reviewing stands for the town's Halloween parade.

Steps will lead gracefully down to pathways flanked by flowers and red maple trees. A sloped lawn will unfold around an amphitheater built for summer concerts. There will be benches and bike racks, flowers and lights set into planting beds. White clapboard restrooms are intended to look like the historic library.

There will be no signs. "A traditional town green didn't have signs," Salgado said as a pair of bikers pedaled by on the W&OD trail.

Construction is estimated to cost $1.5 million, of which $200,000 came from a federal neighborhood initiatives grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

"It's very powerful to create public space right in the heart of the town," said Elizabeth Lardner, the landscape architect who designed the concept.

Unlike the plazas where shoppers rest at malls, she said, the Vienna green will be a "true public space owned by the public."

Lardner said the green would be laid out to allow different groups to relax in different spaces -- "a place where you could have a reviewing stand for the Halloween parade and throw a Frisbee on a Thursday afternoon."

And in December, Vienna's holiday tree will have a new and very public home, moving from a small triangle in the middle of traffic a block away. "It was looking kind of ragged, that spot," Seeman said.

Salgado said the construction should take six months. Officials have picked a dedication date: Mother's Day, May 13, 2007.

Virginia will hold major celebrations that month of the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement.

Jamestown celebration organizers have asked each community in the state to mark the event with its own contribution to history, a perfect time to unveil Vienna's "historic" town green.