An Empty Big-Box Store Is a Lesson In "Commercial Density"

The other week I visited a shopping center I usually only go to once a month or so: East Market at Fair Lakes. Right in the middle of Fairfax County in Virginia’s D.C. suburbs, it’s mostly a standard shopping center. One half of the complex consists of an apartment building across from a Whole Foods and a small block of stores, producing the impression, but not the function, of a street.

The other half of the center, which precedes the Whole Foods/apartment section, consists of two attached, two-story big-box stores and the expected ocean of parking. This half was built between 1997 and 2002, according to Fairfax County’s aerial photography records. A Flickr contributor who photographs and identifies old retail locations recalls it being built around 1998. (Here’s a shot of the store’s interior when it was open, taken from the second floor.)

It was this big-box section that caught my attention last week. One of the two stores, built as a Gaylan’s sporting goods store and converted in the mid-2000s to a Dick’s Sporting Goods after an acquisition, was empty. Dick’s had moved to Fair Oaks Mall, a middle-tier mall a little over a mile away that is itself the subject of a possible major redevelopment project.

The absence of any cars in the parking lot, or people walking to or from the store, really highlighted what a massive building it is: It comes in at 101,000 total square feet, according to the shopping center’s owner. The arched roof and the imposing stone (faux stone?) columns out front give the building a certain, slightly unusual grandeur, almost like an old urban train station.

Which got me thinking. There was a time when a building of this size and scale would have been a much more commercially or civically dynamic space. These massive retail structures, with their big-box tenants increasingly buckling under the “retail apocalypse,” present a major challenge for municipalities. While not cheap, one possibility is to break them down into smaller spaces.

Antique malls are one example of this. I wrote previously, for example, about a large one located in a former JCPenney, in a New Jersey mall on its last legs (now shuttered and set to be demolished.) This single store was home to nearly 150 individual antique stalls at the time I visited, and the facility had over 200 stalls in total. I wrote: “Here was the retail version of a road shoulder reclaimed with café tables, or a vacant asphalt parking lot hosting a pop-up festival. Here was commercial density. It is almost as if this white elephant of a department store has been upzoned.”

Of course, a stall in an antique mall is mostly a little bit of passive side income. (Passive in this case, anyway; the antiques were just there, labeled with the stall number, and a central cashier rang them up and took note of whose stall the sale came from. Basically, an in-person version of eBay.) Those 150 dealers were not making a livable income operating out of that building, though perhaps some of them were trial-running a possible full-time business, using the mall as a sort of small-business incubator.

But still thinking about the empty sporting goods store’s “urban train station” resemblance, I also recalled two vaguely similar urban buildings: Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market (which began life as part train shed, part market) and Cleveland’s West Side Market (which was always a market). The Reading Terminal Market building weighs in at 78,000 square feet, 40,000 of which is the actual sales floor. It houses approximately 80 vendors. The West Side Market, only a 45,000 square foot structure, houses 100 vendors. An American Planning Association article describes shopping at the West Side Market as an “authentic and human experience,” and notes that the structure “acts as a visual landmark and a beacon drawing people not only to the market, but to the commercial district surrounding it.”

Unlike the antique vendors in that old department store, the vendors in these urban markets can make serious money. Some are holding down secondary locations or feeling out whether they’ve got a viable business, but many operate solely out of their market location. They’re less “vendors” than full businesses that have located in a market rather than a storefront. During one visit to the Reading Terminal Market, I saw an Italian meat vendor grinding and filling fresh sausage. This isn’t like bringing a cooler to a farmer’s market and going home when you sell out.

Amish markets also consist of individual vendors, with customers paying each one individually rather than checking out at the end of the shopping trip. They’re usually set up to resemble supermarkets, but each department is a distinct, independent business. Instead of the meat department, for example, there’s Lancaster County Meats. My local Amish market in Germantown, Maryland, which anchors a mid-sized strip mall, describes itself thusly: “Lancaster County Dutch Market of Germantown is a collection of vendors born and raised in the central Pennsylvania area that share a common interest: great, fresh food at an affordable price.” It’s a hybrid between a suburban supermarket and an old-fashioned market.

Why does this all matter, and what does it have to do with an empty sporting goods store? It matters because there’s a meaningful difference between a large store that employs some general retail workers, and spaces which house lots of individual productive enterprises—even if their profits are relatively small. There are few or no “employees” in these places, except security, building management, and janitorial staff. The business of the business is conducted almost entirely by lots of individual small business owners and entrepreneurs.

Strong Towns talks a lot about “value per acre,” a novel way to think about how productively land is used. This all illustrates the same idea, but on an even smaller basis. How productively is an individual building's interior being used?

It’s also a good example of why there’s actually nothing wrong with “big buildings,” per se. A very large building—even in a city—can be beautiful, lively, productive, fine-grained, human-scaled. And, rather ironically, this hulking shell in suburban Virginia makes uncommonly efficient use of space, with its second floor. So the problem with big-box stores isn’t that they’re “big,” or that they’re “boxes.” It’s that their business model lacks the characteristics that make places resilient.

The Strong Towns movement is about confronting the realities facing our cities and towns following decades of unproductive growth. We are a worldwide community of advocates and local leaders looking to do things a better way, and we want to equip you with the tools to ask a better set of questions about how to secure a prosperous future for the place you love. Are you ready to take action? Join the movement today. Together, we can do this.

Addison Del Mastro writes on urbanism and cultural history. He tweets at @ad_mastro and writes daily at Substack.