At Reston Town Center, Will They Pave a Parking Lot and Put Up a Paradise (of Mixed-Use Bollardy Goodness?)

Forget golf courses. Forget garden apartment complexes. Apparently what really gets Restonians' goats is when there's talk about redeveloping an ugly surface parking lot.

As part of its ongoing consolidation of properties at Reston Town Center, Boston Properties is now purchasing the last surface lot at Reston Town Center for a cool $27 million. By our lazy quick count, that works out to about $150,000 for each parking space, which makes it reasonable to expect that Boston isn't just concerned about ensuring continued easy access to the Ruby Tuesday's FedEx store. Which, according to our BFFs at Patch, is exactly what's on the menu:

The parcel is commercially zoned for 250,000 square feet of office space. Boston Properties is evaluating a potential mixed-use development plan, which could include residential as well as commercial uses, CoStar said.

Reading the comments on Patch, you'd think they were talking about paving over Lake Anne and opening an Sbarro in the torso of the statue of Bob Simon. But this is a parking lot, and a parking lot that's soon to be surrounded by yet more dense buildings. It's actually a place that makes sense for that kind of development, which is a lot more than we can say for some other projects that have come over the transom.

Besides, we're old enough to remember when the original buildings at our gritty urban core were surrounded by a Disneyland-esque field of surface parking, minus the monorails to take you to Adventureland the Gap. It was beautiful, assuming you like the used car lot ambiance of say, Tysons, but the dwindling amounts of surface parking has added to the verisimilitude of an authentic urban experience as our Lil' Town Center grew up.

More annoying is the fact that Boston has hinted in the past that the days of free parking in the garages at our gritty urban core may someday come to an end, but it's not like you can just park for free in the middle of Times Square -- which is the only urban analogue that we can think of with more generic chain stores than RTC.

One valid question is what will happen to the rickety, lockjaw-causing carnival rides festivals that have used the parking lot. Well, we've still got four other "town centers" with surface parking lots, so why not spread the wealth around a bit? There's plenty of space in at least one of those lots, the end.