Does McLean need a fresh look?
By Monty Tayloe
As a real estate agent and lifelong McLean resident, Kip Laughlin has been showing prospective home buyers around McLean for decades. Most of them know McLean as one of the most affluent communities in America, home to diplomats and world leaders and powerful businessmen and the reclusive CIA.Still, when they see the town for the first time, Laughlin says they are usually less than awed.
“They're underwhelmed,” Laughlin said. “McLean looks like a bunch of buildings that fell off the back of a speeding truck.”
The reaction is essentially the same sentiment expressed by McLean Planning Committee Main Street committee head Doug Potts at a forum last week.
“McLean needs a fresh look,” Potts said.
Dissatisfaction with McLean's landscape of interconnected strip malls has been a recurring theme in the history of the town, but plans to change it have always fallen through.
“I first attended meetings about fixing up downtown McLean in 1974,” points out Laughlin, who owns a building in the central business district.
One of the main barriers to a large-scale revitalization in McLean has to do with history. McLean went from being an area of large parcels dominated by dairy farms to an area of small parcels, each owned by a different entity. It can be hard to get may owners to agree on a large-scale project.
This time, things are supposed to be different. Most of the property in McLean's Central Business District has been consolidated under one owner, Dan Montgomery, and he's interested in a change.
Last week, the McLean planning committee held a public meeting to announce the results of its efforts to gather public input on the revitalization of central McLean. According to the planning committee's results, there seems to be broad public support for the concept of creating a “main street for McLean,” though the idea is not without its detractors.
“Some of the charm of McLean is that it's still like a small town,” said business owner Amy Burns.
In addition, many McLean residents disagree with the negative characterizations of their town.
“I like being able to pull right up to my nice convenient strip mall,” said resident Amy Windsor.
“If I wanted to live in Clarendon, I would have moved there,” one resident said at the meeting.
Still, if real life circumstances follow the public feedback as recorded by the MPC, the area around Giant and the Old Dominion Shopping Center would become a pedestrian-friendly shopping area with convenient parking and buildings rising to between two and six stories.
The new “downtown” would include a mix of uses, but the public response at the workshops indicated that the new shopping area should accommodate the local businesses that currently reside in the business district.
“That's what the results say. We'll see if it actually happens,” said Don Burns, a local business owner.
To some, the revitalized McLean wouldn't include the Old Firehouse building, at least in its current form.
“The firehouse is all we have from old McLean,” said a disappointed Carole Herrick, a local historian who has argued for the building's preservation.
How the public feedback will find its way into the final project will be determined over the next few months, as the MPC takes the forum results to landowner Dan Montgomery.
“Next up is the developer's opportunity to talk about what he wants to do,” Potts said.