The Fair Lakes Shopping Center has been around for a couple decades. It didn’t come about until part of the Fairfax County Parkway was built to bring people out to that section of Fairfax.
Fair Lakes is a shopping center that is a string of big box stores attached at the hip, with acres of surface parking pavement in front of tem. The pavement almost acts as a barrier for people to walk to the stores. There’s a long access road that runs parallel to the vast parking lot and parallel to the big boxes. The parkig lots are all connected in front of the stores, but the distances are still vast, such that one cannot easily walk from a parking lot in front of Target to other stores on the same strip. The center is poorly planned in this regard, since one has to essentialy drive to all of the individual stores.
Fair Lakes has major big box retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, BJ’s, Petsmart, and Toys “R” Us lined up in a row, with some fast food restaurats sprinkled in. Most of the restaurants and fast food places are in their own isolated building across from the strip of stores, with paved surface parking separating them.
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