What did Northern Virginia look like back in the day (60s, 70s, 80s)

[Anonymous]

Does anyone remember the Hot Shoppes at Tysons Corner? My mom and I used to go shopping at the mall after school and would have dinner there. Such wholesome, delicious food. I'd always get the fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, spinach, and chocolate milk.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:LOL no people did not have southern accents in Fairfax in the 70s/80s! This is a very transitory area thanks to the govt/military.

That being said, Reston Town Center was a field in the 80s!

Uhh yeah they did. Something like the Virginia tidewater accent is/was very common with certain white people in the entire region (including Fairfax but not exclusively Fairfax). Old virginia/old Maryland families.

+1
My family has been in NoVa for several generations and there is absolutely a southern accent among many of us.

PP and I was born in Fx County. I wrote a long post about growing up with true local kids - their families arrived in the Colonial era and operated small farms that dotted the roads. Their parents and grandparents attended Fairfax HS in the 30s-50s. When we moved to a new build in 1980, there was a dirt road behind our house, several abandoned cottages and one house with chickens in the yard.

Yes, these classmates of mine had what you’d think of as a Southern accent - but different from my DC-born grandmother and uncles (they sounded almost like Baltimorians). My dad purposely learned to drop his “working class accent” as a young man.

[Anonymous]

It was literally all farmland and also blacks/whites lived in different neighborhoods. Schools were segregated until 1965.

[Anonymous]

I lived in that area from the mid-50s to 70s growing up. Went to Giffords for good report cards and after I had my tonsils out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It was literally all farmland and also blacks/whites lived in different neighborhoods. Schools were segregated until 1965.

And airports

[Anonymous]

I remember one fall day in 1984 or 1985 my officemate Trudy had her car parked near Ballston so after work she took me to get pumpkins at a farm stand kind if place. It seemed far off but actually it wasn't, just that I was new to the area.
I know Meadows Farms is still on Rt 50 near 7 Corners, but I don't think it was that place. My recollection is a place right on the road, parking in front, on Rt 7 somewhere between Rt 50 and I 66. Whatever it was is gone now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One of the PPs here, but a few more observations I'll add.

- Until the 1970s, everything was very low-rise. Then the mid-rise office buildings in Tysons Corner and apartments kind of along 395 started going in.

- Arlington, I don't remember ever being a bad area, but it wasn't desirable. If you moved up in the world, you moved to McLean or Fairfax Station. Arlington has always been expensive though. My parents priced out a houses off Route 50 in the 90s (basic brick houses, nothing fancy) and they were in the mid-300K range even back then.

- However, when the Rotonda condos opened in Tysons Corner in the 70s, that was the "it" address to have if you were a Nova yuppie.

- Being a civil servant was a big thing, but the whole contractor industry didn't really start booming until the 90s, and then soared after 9/11. Before then, you could easily go your entire fed career and not encounter a contractor, particularly if you weren't in DoD.

- Don't let anyone tell you otherwise, it was always expensive to live here compared to most of the rest of the country. My grandparents bought their Great Falls split level in 1962 for around $40K, which was an insane stretch for them, and that's all they could afford at the time. They had wanted to buy in Arlington for a better commute to the District but couldn't afford it. A decade later their Great Falls house was already worth $150K and the neighbors started being diplomats, executives, etc. When my aunts and uncles started their families, all they could afford was way out in Gainesville or Sterling, and this was 30-40 years ago. Never in my lifetime has anyone thought that the DC area was cheap to live in.

- I don't remember anyone, family or friends, ever talking about the "lost cause" or revising history to justify the south. I certainly wasn't around it growing up. We all called it the "Civil War" and not the "War of Northern Aggression" and school taught that slavery was evil and that the south fought for the right to keep slaves. I remember some my cousins having confederate flag stuff like bumper stickers (mind you, I'm talking 30+ years ago), but it was never really in your face in public.

- Nova was very white, had some pockets of black (mostly in Alexandria), and that was basically it until the 1980s. There was a big Iranian influx after the Shah was deposed. But the thing I think has changed the most is not the demographics, it's the land use. This used to be a sleepy, rural region, and it's amazing to see it now be a bustling, diverse, cosmopolitain place. I think the changes have been positive, which leads me to my last point.

- Traffic has ALWAYS been the pits. Yes, it's gotten worse, but in my lifetime it's always been the bane of the Nova drivers' existence.

I'm going to edit you a little - please don't take offense.

The contractors started arriving in large numbers in the 80s with Reagan because the philosophy at the time was that the government should do less on its own and procure more from the private sector. The primary reason there is a TJHSST now is that the Republican Board of Supervisors thought it would help attract contractors to office parks in Fairfax, rather than Arlington or MoCo, if Fairfax could tout its special "science and technology" school. To be sure it just kept exploding in the 90s, especially along the Dulles Toll Road and Route 28.

Agree that NoVa mostly felt very White/Black until the 80s, but there were Black neighborhoods scattered throughout the county, including in Falls Church as well as Alexandria. By the mid to late 70s there were a significant number of Korean immigrants, along with the Vietnamese who arrived after the fall of Saigon and the Iranians who arrived in the years leading up to and after the overthrow of the Shah. Most of the Hispanics I went to school with in the 70s were the children of well educated Cuban refugees - it wasn't until the 80s that Central/South Americans from El Salvador and other countries began to arrive in large numbers.

No offense taken at all, I agree with what you wrote. You are very right about the scattered black pockets, which were probably established by freed people post slavery, and your other observations about the demographic changes are spot on.

Virginia had de facto redlining, racial covenants, and housing segregation long after DC and MD. Virginia essentially forced its black residents to move to Maryland, as their kids could be safer and get a better education. The racial composition of NoVA prior to the 1970s was very intentional.

I'm not sure this holds up as a historical matter. Racial covenants were declared unenforceable in 1948, but persisted in deeds well into the late 1960s before being declared illegal in the Fair Housing Act, which was federal legislation equally applicable to Maryland and Virginia. So not sure the big increase in Black residents in suburban Maryland was due to people moving from Virginia to Maryland so much as people moving from DC to Maryland and Black Americans generally feeling like Maryland, having not formally been part of the Confederacy, would be more hospitable.

Relatedly, will echo those who note the teaching about slavery and the Civil War in NoVa public schools was slanted and biased towards an uncritical "states rights" perspective and lack of reckoning with the conditions under which slaves lived for way too long. Having said that, never heard the Civil War referred to as the "War of Northern Aggression" until classmates came back from schools like UVA and Duke and reported this was how some classmates from further south referred to the war (this is from the early 80s).

I moved to Virginia in the 80s and apartments were hard to find. I put in applications all over Annandale, Alexandria and Fairfax. One complex near FFX hospital told a black couple in the office ahead of me that they had no available apartments and didn't take their application. The couple hadn't even left the office and the woman who worked there took my application and was describing the open apts. They didn't even try to hide it. Also back then you found apts by driving to the offices and submitting an application. It took so much time because everyone did it on the weekend and so many people were looking for apts. Also contractors were a big part of the area in the 80s. Everyone I knew was a contractor and almost no one I knew was a fed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I lived in that area from the mid-50s to 70s growing up. Went to Giffords for good report cards and after I had my tonsils out.

I moved Giffords! Born in 1970 at Fairfax hospital, youngest of 3. We moved into a brand new suburb in 1974. It was so much fun. Every house had 2-6 kids. So much outdoor fun.

[Anonymous]

^ loved

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I remember one fall day in 1984 or 1985 my officemate Trudy had her car parked near Ballston so after work she took me to get pumpkins at a farm stand kind if place. It seemed far off but actually it wasn't, just that I was new to the area.
I know Meadows Farms is still on Rt 50 near 7 Corners, but I don't think it was that place. My recollection is a place right on the road, parking in front, on Rt 7 somewhere between Rt 50 and I 66. Whatever it was is gone now.

Meadow Farms. It’s still there right off the road. Across from my former childhood pediatrician (I’m 55 now).

[Anonymous]

nothing at all like it looks now. its sad.

[Anonymous]

America was at its best in the 50’s and 60’s. What I’d give to go back to that time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:nothing at all like it looks now. its sad.

Agree completely

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does anyone remember the Hot Shoppes at Tysons Corner? My mom and I used to go shopping at the mall after school and would have dinner there. Such wholesome, delicious food. I'd always get the fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, spinach, and chocolate milk.

Yes!! We used to do the same. My go to meal was the fried chicken (with the orange slice on top), mashed potatoes (no gravy), corn, and a slice of French apple pie (apple pie with a sugar icing on top and raisins inside the pie filling). My sister always got the same meal with the strawberry pie. It was the best. Thanks for that memory.

[Anonymous]

It looked less developed, more open space/fields/farms. There was small town charm. The urban areas were still urban but the places on the outskirts were more rural.