By Matthew T. Eng, Offbeat NOVA
On January 2, 2022, a day before it snowed nearly a foot in the DC Metro area, the family decided to stretch our legs a bit and get some exercise. On the coldest days and months of the year, the best place to get exercise is the mall. Although Springfield Town Center is the closest to us, Tyson’s Corner has always been our go-to location. We go to the mall for exercise, diversion, and a little (light) shopping since my daughter was an infant. It’s warm in the winter and frosty cool in the summertime. It’s a great place to get some exercise and window shop. It’s also fun to feel nostalgic for the old days of the early to mid-1990s when going to the mall was a social event you waited all week for.
More on that later.
We parked in our usual spot across from the Macy’s and headed in for a lap on the two floors of the mall. As we rounded the corner of the American Girl store, I noticed that the L.L. Bean store was surprisingly sparse. Upon further inspection, my suspicion was true: the store was closing. A sign out front of the store read that the store would permanently close after the 17th of January.
“We’ll miss seeing you here, but we hope to see you outside.”
It was an odd feeling. Going to L.L. Bean was always a part of our mall experience. Our daughter especially loved playing with the toys on the lower level.
There’s a whole lot of speculation from L.L. Bean fans, local residents, and Tyson’s Corner Mall regulars. The most prevailing rumor was that either the rent was too high, or the mall rejected L.L. Bean’s plan to keep the store at just one level. Either way, it is gone.
In an official statement, L.L. Bean said “the decision was not an easy one:”
“Though we worked with the landlord to explore many options, we were unable to reach favorable terms in a way that would allow us to best serve our customers moving forward.”
Quote from L.L. Bean
They looked into everything from finding an alternative location to supposedly moving all of the merchandise to one floor, which would validate the idea that the rent was too high. One can imagine the staggering amount of monthly dues to a 76,000-square-foot store.
It is rather big news, either way. Many would consider L.L. Bean an anchor store next to two other large storefronts, Macy’s and American Girl (both still open– for now).
L.L. Bean opened the store in Tyson’s in 2000. It was the first of the retail chain’s stores outside of its home state of Maine. Part of what spurred the move was the high proportion of catalog orders. As of 2000, L.L. Bean reported that 85% of their sales were from catalogs. The store had an indoor trout pond and waterfall, evoking an early 2000s mall experience akin to waiting for your “portabella mushroom” group at your local mega-mall Rainforest Cafe. At the time, it was the sixth anchor of the burgeoning mall. In a grand twist of ironic fate, it seems most of the orders for L.L. Bean clothing and merchandise are back into the catalog sphere (at least in the sense of ordering online).
The only other location in the area is the 22,000-square-foot store in Bethesda, Maryland, despite the retailer actively looking for a new location in the DMV area. This news comes just before it was announced that the Bed Bath & Beyond just down the street from the mall is set to close at the end of February 2022. And of course, we can’t forget that the Disney Store inside the mall, by far our main reason for going to Tyson’s, shuttered in September. At this point, you have to ask yourself: What will be next?
In the same vein as seeing your childhood Pizza Hut turn into a 2-star Mexican Restaurant, there are already plans from the developer to change the space.
Retailer Macerich, the owner of Tyson’s Corner Center, plans to break the space into smaller pieces of the two-level shop. According to a report from the Washington Business Journal, at least three tenants have been identified to fill in the space for now, one of which will be Ireland-based retailer Primark (looks like a business model similar to the Japanese retailer Uniqlo).
Whatever the space will be, I will keep the memories of walking around the store in the early years of my daughter’s life. My local mall near where I lived growing up (Pembroke Mall in Virginia Beach Virginia) also announced that it was closing. Not a store — the entire mall. Of course, there are plans to turn it into something else. Progress is progress, and you see plenty of that in Northern Virginia. Without sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud, I am glad to walk in there one last time and take a few pictures. I only wonder what store (or stores) will go next at the mall. With the announcement of the opening of a LEGO Discovery Center at Springfield Town Center, my money is on the relatively small footprint of the LEGO store on the lower level of Tyson’s.
Malls, retailers, restaurants…they all have memories tied to them. Those from childhood are always the strongest, which is why seeing shops in malls, whether they be from your childhood or adulthood (Like the L.L. Bean) are tough. What else do we talk about with our friends or coworkers? The past. The future is always exciting to think about, but the past holds our collective subliminal feelings. You can call it nostalgia if you want, but it’s always there.
I’ll close with the final paragraph from Stephen King’s IT, which takes place in the fiction town of Derry in L.L. Bean’s home state of Maine. For a book that is an endorphin shock of childhood nostalgia and the fears of growing up, I think it is perfectly apt to end this article.
“But it’s nice to think so for awhile in the morning’s clean silence, to think that childhood has its own sweet secrets and confirms mortality, and that mortality defines all courage and love [. . .] Or so Bill Denbrough sometimes thinks on those early mornings after dreaming, when he almost remembers his childhood, and the friends with whom he shared it.”
IT, Stephen King, pp. 1116
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