Flashback Monday: 'Seemingly Undauntable Neo-Suburbia'

Here, of course, is a scale model of the first stage of Reston's fake downtown, which, like the final product, seems built, Disney Main Street USA-style, to 7/8 scale. But buy a thesaurus and check out this elitist New York Times article dating back to 1986 about the exciting new project:

Developers are adding a new kind of city-like high-rise Main Street to Reston's 11.5 square miles of seemingly undauntable neo-suburbia, where curing streets named Stirrup Road, Trotter Lane and Gallent Fox Court weave among timbered 'executive campuses' filled with more office space than in downtown Richmond, the state capital.

In planning an urban, straight-line street grid that seems deliberately antithetic to the pseudorustic theme set by Reston's Colt's Neck Road and Polo Fields Court, the well-financed owners of one of America's most successful 'new towns' may be setting a new national pattern for what could be called a 'new city.'

In places, a drive past the eye-catching architecture of these new workplaces... can give the motorist the illusion of threading his way across a trayful of intimidatingly oversized, high-cholesterol petits fours. Here and there, the roadside confections are interrupted by emulations of buttoned-up concrete missile launching bunkers.

We'll come up with something funny to say just as soon as we figure out what those three paragraphs mean. We did laugh, though, when the article referred to the Town Center as "Reston's Times Square," albeit with fewer hookers and polyglot hot dog vendors.