Flashback Monday: A Children's Treasury of Photos of Reston's Once and Maybe Future Visitors Center

Set the controls of the Earth-Toned Wayback Machine to 1982, when a fancy tent, evocative of a tasteful circus, rose near Lake Newport to celebrate the opening of the new Reston Visitors Center, a property which has been in the news of late for some reason we can't recall.

Not to be confused with Reston's original jet age visitor's center, which presumably fell to earth from outer space, this swank spot offered would-be Restonians sweeping lake views as they considered their future lives, livin' large in a place with no Town Center, no big box stores except maybe for that Memco/Hechinger's thing, and no midscale chain eateries. Unthinkable!


Visitors were greeted by a bright, airy reception area, a space made possible by the (then) unrotted trusses holding the roof up.


Lots of flowers and an old-timey desk, with a disconcertingly crappy modern office chair behind it. An unintentional, if appropriate, metaphor for Reston's confused melange of 70s and 80s architecture following its early ambitious efforts. That, and the overabundance of track lighting.

Or maybe fuzzy red office chairs were on sale at Memco.


Here folks take in Dr. Evil's HOA-Brand Shrink Ray a scale model of the New Town.


Photos of model homes, we're guessing, on display. We hope that royal blue carpet is still in the building, and that it conveys.


And finally, the exhibition that folks came from near and far to see: The Hall of DRB Violation Fame. What you don't know is that checkerboard quilt was actually commissioned to commemorate the color scheme of one particularly unlucky soul's party wall, the end.