Tysons

For most of its history, Tysons Corner was a place to go through, not a place to go to. The roads that intersect here today—Route 7 and Route 123—carried people and products to and from Leesburg and points west and into Washington. Before Tysons Corner became a “concrete jungle” it was known as Peach Grove. It did not become Tysons Corner until the 1950s when a Maryland transplant named William Tyson purchased a large tract of land and became Postmaster of the Peach Grove Post Office. The crossroads kept its rural character into the 1950s, with a corner store, a beer joint, truck farms and peach orchards. Tysons was a quiet rural intersection flanked by a few small stores and a fruit stand operated by the Tyson ancestors.

Substantial changes came in 1962 when the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved the Tysons Corner Shopping Center. In 1963 the Tysons area moved from a country crossroads to a giant commercial urban area with the awarding of contracts at the interchange of Route 7 and Route 123. The shopping center was proclaimed to be the largest enclosed mall in the world when it opened in July 1968.

In recent years, the influx of technology companies into Northern Virginia brought many new office buildings and hotels to the landscape. The rapid growth of Tysons has been a topic of numerous studies to transform Tysons Corner into a high-density urban center. In 2008 the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to begin a 40-year plan—beginning in 2010 through 2050—that would urbanize Tysons around the up and coming four stops of Washington Metro’s Silver Line. Existing plans call for construction of a grid layout for streets around rail stations. The Arbor Row development was approved in November of 2012 and became a mixed-used area of office and residential high-rise condominiums and apartments, ground-floor retail, and underground parking within walking distance of Tysons Corner metro station. Later, in April of 2013, the County also approved Scotts Run Station South, another development containing seventeen buildings—to include six office and residential buildings, one hotel and ground-floor retail—situated near the McLean Station.

Prior to the opening of the Washington Metro Silver Line in mid-2014, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and the Tysons Partnership (nonprofit association that represents the area’s stakeholders) began rebranding the area as simply “Tysons”, dropping “Corner” from its name. By November 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau announced the name would officially change by the Summer of 2016.