[slashedzero]

Manassas is an example of white flight (which is a big theme of the communities in NoVA period). Mike O'Meara refers to it as "deviltown" for a reason: it's pretty much been abandoned by its residents.

Though many communities in that region suffer from it, I think Manassas has had very very bad urban planning. Very little is walkable, there's no character to the town, and you see very little green space. It's a case of suburban decay.

[bane]

The downtown of Manassas is nice enough, but almost nobody thinks of that as "Manassas". Locals almost all call that strip of old Sudly Rd. from 66 to 28 "Manassas" even though I don't think it's part of the municipality in any meaningful way and hence grew without plan or structure. I think probably the only groups with any say-so in the direction it grew were the Battlefield protectionist groups.

But all that was very much a product of the Western expansion of 66. Most of the older folks in the area remember when 66 didn't come out that far and Manassas was just the 234/28 intersection and 28 East to Manassas Park.

When something was done, we end up with bizarreness like two entirely different roads called "234", one that goes through the main strip of town, and the other that goes through countryside and bypasses the commercial center entirely...which no doubt hasn't helped the commercial interests of that area at all.

I know from growing up out there that the anti-battlefield people put a really bad taste in lots of big commercial company's mouths. For example, just a few miles away near Haymarket, the Walt Disney company was even going to open up a theme park and were basically driven out of town.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_America

also

http://www.deadmalls.com/malls/manassas_mall.html