Walk into the Barnes & Noble at The Crossing Clarendon this month and the escalator is new, the elevator is new, and the store itself is upstairs now, tucked into roughly half the square footage it used to occupy. Look through the glass at street level and you'll see a different kind of shelf space taking over: taps, a whiskey still, and what looks suspiciously like an ax-throwing lane. A few doors down, construction crews are finishing out a Chinese noodle counter with room for 84 people to sit down and order the same cumin lamb burger Anthony Bourdain praised on television back in 2007.
None of this happened because Clarendon ran out of parking lots to build on. It happened because one address on Clarendon Boulevard got cut in half and filled twice. That's the story worth paying attention to this year, and it's not confined to one storefront. A few blocks away, the county's oldest farmers market just squeezed twenty more tents into a parking lot it's used since 1979. Clarendon isn't spreading out. It's being poured into the same footprints a second time.
One Bookstore, Cut In Half, Filled Twice
For roughly two decades, Barnes & Noble occupied the full two-level space at 2800 Clarendon Blvd inside The Crossing Clarendon. The store closed for renovations in May 2025 and reopened on May 6, 2026, now consolidated onto the second floor alone, a space of about 14,041 square feet, which is close to half its original footprint. A new elevator and escalator carry shoppers up to what the company describes as a smaller, more curated selection of books, games, and gift items. Author Sam Kean cut the ribbon that morning.
What happened to the ground floor is the more interesting part. It's been subdivided into two entirely different businesses. Three Notch'd Brewing Company, a Charlottesville-based craft brewery already sold at several Arlington bars, is taking the larger share at 10,160 square feet, with plans for a full taproom, a kitchen, a whiskey distillery, and an ax-throwing area. CEO George Kastendike has talked about the brewery's approach to sharing a building with its old tenant:
"The best thing that we can do up there is be an awesome neighbor, and just see if there's a fit for Barnes & Noble customers to take in our experience, and vice versa."
The remaining ground-floor space went to Xi'an Famous Foods, the New York City chain known for hand-ripped noodles and the cumin lamb burger Bourdain featured on "No Reservations." An architect on the project told a local reporter the team was targeting an August opening, with roughly four months of buildout. It's one of only a handful of Xi'an Famous Foods locations in the D.C. area with actual seating rather than delivery and takeout only.
Three Notch'd and Xi'an Famous Foods aren't isolated additions to a shopping center that had empty storefronts sitting around. They're both occupying square footage that a single tenant used to hold by itself. A few blocks over, Buffalo & Bergen, a New York-style deli, is set to open at 1028 N. Garfield St, one more concept landing on the same handful of Clarendon blocks rather than on any newly built retail. Clarendon's growth this year has mostly looked like division, not expansion.
The Same Math At The Farmers Market
The FRESHFARM Arlington Market at Courthouse has run every Saturday since 1979, which makes it 47 years old this season. This spring, in partnership with Arlington County, the market expanded its footprint by 4,000 square feet and added close to 20 tents, all within the same Courthouse parking lot it's always used. The added room made space for eight new regular vendors, including Ben's Produce and Country View Creamery, two Amish farms from Brogue, Pennsylvania, and Chris' Marketplace, a Bethesda seafood and prepared-foods business known for its crabcakes.
Here's the number that puts the expansion in perspective: even with nearly 20 more tents this year, market organizers still turn away more than 60 vendor applications every single year. The market didn't grow because demand was soft. It grew because the old footprint had been maxed out for years and there was nowhere else in Courthouse to put a market this size except into the same lot, more tightly packed.
That's the same logic playing out at The Crossing Clarendon. Neither story is about Arlington running out of things to do. Both are about existing addresses being asked to hold more than they used to.
Where The Week Actually Lands
If you live in Clarendon or Courthouse, the market calendar alone can carry you through most of the week without a repeat stop:
- Wednesday: Rosslyn FRESHFARM Farmers Market, 1800 N. Lynn St., 2 to 6 p.m., running through October.
- Thursday: Ballston FRESHFARM Market at Welburn Square, 901 N. Taylor St., 3 to 7 p.m. On the first Thursday of the month, it becomes a larger Mega Market with live performances and a beer and wine garden.
- Saturday: The Courthouse market runs year-round, 8 a.m. to noon in the main season. Cherrydale, at Dorothy Hamm Middle School, and Lubber Run, at 4401 N. Henderson Rd, run the same morning hours through the fall.
- Sunday: Columbia Pike's market at Pike Park runs 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. year-round. Westover runs nearly year-round with hours that shift by season, and Fairlington runs seasonally from May through November.
Add the Clarendon Boulevard stretch, where a bookstore, a brewery, and a noodle shop now share one address, and there's a version of the week where you don't leave a half-mile radius and still hit something new every single day.
What The Split Actually Signals
None of this is about Clarendon adding acreage. The Crossing Clarendon didn't get bigger. The Courthouse parking lot didn't get bigger either. What changed is how much use each square foot is being asked to carry. A shopping center that used to have one anchor bookstore now has three tenants splitting the same ground floor. A market lot that's held vendors since Jimmy Carter was president added its biggest chunk of new space in years, and organizers say they still can't keep up with vendor demand.
For anyone who already lives here, the practical version of that story is simple: parking pressure at Courthouse on a Saturday morning isn't going away, and the corner of Clarendon Boulevard and Fillmore is about to stay busy later into the evening than it did when a bookstore was the only tenant on that ground floor. The neighborhood isn't building outward. It's filling in, twice over, on the ground it already had.
The Shively Team pays attention to changes like this because they say something real about how a block gets used day to day, not just how it's zoned on paper. If you're curious how shifts like the one on Clarendon Boulevard tend to ripple into property values nearby, or you just want a second opinion on which Saturday market is worth the parking headache, reach out to The Shively Team.
