Crystal City Underground is going under https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2024/04/30/crystal-city-underground-closing.html
Some random reactions:
*Underground retail is shitty retail,
*Shitty retail is cheap-rent retail,
*There's no real model for sustainably-cheap-rent retail in new development,
*Landowners can do as they please with their property,
*Residents who fought for keeping the Underground will feel betrayed.
For a region that’s a bit structurally immune from zaniness and fun, losing the Underground (and the puppet store, cobbler, weird DoD knick-knacks store, etc) seems like a squandered opportunity.
A Somerville Underground would be unstoppably awesome somehow.
Wow, I remember being amazed by it as a kid when we visited DC as a family while my mom had a continuing ed class in Crystal City. It was much less magical when I returned as a college student. Honestly I'm a bit surprised it lasted this long.
@eheisman i think it was sustained only because longtime residents viewed it as something of a unique amenity, that with the right mix of uses could somehow be something different and contributing. No one ever really cracked the code
@bikepedantic Crystal City Underground re-opens as the future of retail in 10 years, when the number of Code Orange and +100º F days makes going outside between April and October untenable.
The frustrating lesson, as always: Love development, hate developers.