Reston @ 50: Business and Government Entities in Reston

Simon and the planners of Reston set aside about nine hundred acres for industrial development to support Simon’s idea of making the town a place where residents could both live and work.  Known as the Reston Industrial Center, the new district was located south of Lake Anne Village along Sunset Hills Road.  The first part of the district to be developed, Issac Newton Square, received its first tenants in November 1964. They included Air Survey Corportation, HRB-Singer Inc., Motorola, and Hazelton Laboratories.

In addition to private companies, planners hoped to attract a federal government agency headquarters to Reston, thus creating even more employment opportunities in the town.  More than three hundred acres were set aside in the master plan for possible government use. The hope became a reality when in 1966 Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall announced that the United States Geographical Survey (USGS) would move its headquarters to Reston. By 1973, USGS occupied a one million square-foot building housing almost 2,500 federal employees on the western end of Reston.  

The October 1984 opening of the Dulles Toll Road (State Road 267) was a landmark event in the resurgence of business interest and investment in Reston.  The Toll Road gave Reston and localities to the east, such as Tysons, McLean, Arlington, Georgetown, and Washington, D.C., better access to each other.  This access provided impetus for large companies who did business with the federal government -- primarily technology firms, such as Sperry, Tandem, GTE, Telenet, SBS, Comsat, and MCI – to locate facilities along this new business corridor between Washington D.C. and Washington-Dulles Airport in Chantilly.  These and many others chose land in Reston upon which to build during this land boom.