Tyson Corner came from pretty humble beginnings. Known originally as Peach Grove, the area received the designation Tysons Crossroads after the Civil War. William Tyson from Cecil County, Maryland, purchased a tract of land from A. Lawrence Foster. Tyson was postmaster of the now discontinued Peach Grove Post Office from 1854 to1866. The Peach Grove Post office was established Tuesday, April 22, 1851.
Joel Garreau, an American journalist, scholar and author the 1991 book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, put our town in the glare of public scrutiny when he held us up as a prime example of an “edge city”.
"Edge city" is a term used to describe a concentration of business, shopping, and entertainment outside a traditional urban area in what had until then been called a residential suburb or semi-rural community. The term was popularized and established its current meaning when Garreau argued that the edge city has become the standard form of urban growth worldwide, representing a 20th-century urban form unlike that of the 19th-century central downtown. Other terms for these areas include suburban activity centers, mega centers, and suburban business districts.
Tysons Corner, in many ways already the second city of the Washington metropolis and poised to become much bigger, serves as a "downtown" of Fairfax County, with one quarter of all office space and one eighth of all retail in the county. The corporate headquarters of Booz Allen Hamilton, Capital One, Freddie Mac, Gannett Company, Hilton Worldwide, MicroStrategy, SAIC, Space Adventures, Spacenet, Sunrise Senior Living, and USA Today are located in Tysons Corner. Firms with offices in Tysons Corner include BAE Systems, Compuware, Ernst & Young, NorthropGrumman, PricewaterhouseCoopers. Xerox,and Vie de France.
Our community is at the cutting edge of urban redefinition and revitalization. Not a bad position to be in, is it?!
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