Pass through the vivid pagoda-style archway on Wilson Boulevard in Seven Corners and you’ll invariably find a bustle of activity—shoppers of every ethnicity queuing up for fresh tofu, pork buns, banh mi, Vietnamese coffee, jewelry and electronics from snug, neon-lit storefronts, and emerging from the Good Fortune Supermarket with bags of imported curry paste, mustard greens, jasmine rice, fish sauce and fresh seafood.
A new food hall, Pop Up District, is slated to join the fray in late 2024 or early 2025.
Named after the bygone Eden Arcade market in Vietnam’s most populous city, the Eden Center took shape in 1984 as a hub for the diaspora. Many of its early tenants were immigrants who fled war-torn Vietnam and at first landed a few miles away in Clarendon (known for a time as “Little Saigon”), only to have their small businesses displaced by rising real estate prices.
So it’s understandable that some of those same merchants were wary when the Falls Church City Council in 2021 began exploring potential improvements to the tangle of roads and aging commercial buildings around Seven Corners. The Eden Center, with its melting pot of mom-and-pops, was right in the bull’s-eye of the 10-block area under review.
“The familiar sights, sounds and smells are what brings people here,” says Binh Ly, 34, a first-generation Vietnamese American and organizer with the Viet Place Collective, a community group formed to advocate for the protection of Eden Center and its small businesses. “A lot of them have been displaced—if not once, then multiple times in their lives. With that sort of trauma, it’s so important that there is a space like this.”
After gathering feedback from the Viet Place Collective and other community groups in a series of public forums, the Falls Church City Council in 2023 adopted its East End Small Area Plan, which lays out a framework for future public and private investments in the area. The plan envisions a walkable, mixed-use district with Wi-Fi-equipped playgrounds, structured parking, a cultural center, a public square for special events (including a popular annual Lunar New Year celebration), new housing and other amenities.
Forty years after the first Vietnamese tenants gave the Eden Center its name, the plan also includes strategies for protecting the mall’s small businesses and cultural heritage.
But with another milestone on the horizon—2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War (or, as Vietnamese people call it, “the American War”)—many shopkeepers remain leery of gentrification and how it might play out long term.
“Vietnamese businesspeople [created this place],” Ly says. “What’s important is…the collection of businesses. In the future, if there were to be redevelopment, we’d want this business community to thrive.”