With planners that treat the neighborhood like a blank canvas for art installations, Crystal City, the future home of Amazon’s HQ2, has the potential to be a vibrant neighborhood.
A building in Crystal City that will soon hold part of Amazon’s HQ2 Julie Tremaine
After a protracted (and much-maligned) nationwide search for the location of HQ2, Amazon announced yesterday that, after more than a year of consideration, the company will be splitting its new headquarters between Long Island City, New York and Crystal City, Virginia. The talk since then about Long Island City has been mostly about the more-than-a-billion dollars in tax incentives that New York is offering the company, and how the already well-established area of Queens will handle the intake of an estimated 25,000 employees and their families.
The talk about Crystal City has been, well, different. Besides concern over housing supply, there hasn’t been a lot of conversation about impacts to neighborhood. And that, it seems, is because people don’t consider Crystal City, a generally overlooked part of Arlington that’s just across the Potomac from Washington, D. C., as a “neighborhood” at all.
Initially, Amazon HQ2 in Crystal City will be spread across several buildings Julie Tremaine
Crystal City mostly comprises residential high-rises and commercial space. Quite a lot of the latter has been vacant in recent years, since many government agencies that were its tenants moved out. Critics of the area would say that it doesn’t have much to entice people to spend their non-work hours there. That’s a problem that Amazon and developer JBG Smith hope to address with a multi-year redevelopment and rebranding project called National Landing, to create more housing, more nightlife and more of a community feel.
A public basketball court/art installation on Crystal Drive Julie Tremaine
The truth is, though, that Crystal City has a lot to offer, besides an easy commute and proximity to Reagan National Airport (though improvements to both, including more Metro stops and a bridge directly to the airport, are part of Amazon’s deal). You just have to look a little deeper, both literally and figuratively.
The mall underneath Crystal City has restaurants, shopping and a theatre Julie Tremaine
It’s true that, in the middle of the day, Crystal City can feel a little bit like a ghost town. That’s because everything is happening underground. The Crystal City Shops is a subterranean mall that houses convenience-oriented chains as well as independent stores like a chocolate shop, a camera store and a dress boutique. There are also medical offices, a yoga studio and hair salons. Synetic Theater, an innovative physical theater company that rose to fame over a silent performance of Hamlet, opened their performance space there in 2010.
Those underground spaces are also where other kinds of art are happening, too. Art Underground is an initiative by Crystal City to add all kinds of visual art to the space, including the Gallery Underground, which hosts rotating art exhibits, and the FotoWalk, which is a 150-image rotating gallery along the walkways that connect the underground shops, restaurants, office buildings and hotels. There’s also an Art Walls Tour, with a downloadable map, that details Crystal City’s many public art installations. As part of the attempt to woo Amazon, Crystal City ramped up the public art installations, which may have actually had something to do with their winning bid.
This street-level mural is part of the Art Walls Tour Julie Tremaine
And then, there’s food. An Amazon-owned Whole Foods has already gone in. Amid the many chain restaurants – everything from the oldest school eateries like Morton’s Steakhouse to the millennial-beloved cashless pioneer Sweetgreen – there are moments of true personality that shine through. Aboveground, Queen Amannisa serves the hard-to-find Uyghur cuisine that’s having a moment of discovery in America. Highline RxR – which stands for rest and relaxation – is a leisure-oriented restaurant with 30 beers on tap, pinball machines and weekly evening events.
The Crystal City Water Park Julie Tremaine
Places like the Crystal City Workout Park, with its sand volleyball courts, and the Crystal City Water Park that has a whole block of fountains and plenty of places to sit and enjoy them, were basically empty on a recent Wednesday afternoon. But when HQ2 comes to town, that’s going to change – and people will look back fondly on when it was easy to claim an Adirondack chair and enjoy the silence.
For a lot of years, I sat behind an editor’s desk and used my vacation time to travel. Now, I’m a freelance writer who’s road tripping – and tasting – my way across the country, from Dollywood to Disneyland and everywhere in between. I’ve written for outlets like Bloomberg,…
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