Lyon Village Has Its Grocery Store Back. Here's How the Rest of the Corner Has Changed

On March 1, 2024, a work crew stood at 3115 Langston Blvd and unscrewed the letters G-I-A-N-T from the storefront one at a time. ARLnow reported that a few people stopped to watch. One woman walked up to the locked entrance, looked inside, went back to her car and drove off. A tipster told the outlet what her husband saw at the Starbucks next door the day before, the supermarket's last day after 60 years.

"My husband was at the Starbucks there and he said people were crying."

Even the crew's foreman asked the reporter what would replace the store. That answer took 30 months to arrive. Sprouts Farmers Market cut its ribbon in the same space at 6:45 a.m. on Sept. 25, 2026, and opened its doors at 7.

Through those 30 months, the shops that held this center together were its two oldest independents, and they are still the reason the corner looks the way it does.

Thirty months with a dark anchor

Giant's last day was Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024. Signs on the closed store sent shoppers to the company's Virginia Square location at 3450 Washington Blvd, about a mile away. Around the same time, the center's owner, BMC Property Group, gave ARLnow a short statement through its president, Christopher Jones.

"We are exploring a number of options but have nothing to share at this time."

There was little public news for more than a year. In April 2025, ARLnow reported the vacant Giant might become a Sprouts. The grocer confirmed the plan in May 2025. By July 2026 it had set the Sept. 25 date and started hiring, and construction was visible on the property.

The choice of chain is a bigger change than it looks. When ARLnow covered the opening, Sprouts had about 500 stores nationwide but only four others in Virginia, in Leesburg, Manassas, Herndon and Haymarket. Before September, none of the chain's Virginia stores were in Arlington. This one is about a 20-minute walk from both the Clarendon and Courthouse Metro stations.

What's actually on the shelves at 3115 Langston

Sprouts is a different kind of store from the one it replaced. ARLnow's walk-through after the opening found the interior signs promising "organics in every aisle," and said the store delivered on that. The details that matter for a weekly shop:

• Hours: 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily.
• Produce: A large corner of the floor, from organic apples and mangoes to lion's mane mushrooms, gold beets and dandelion greens.
• Bulk bins: Dry goods sold by the ounce, including quinoa, basmati rice, black-eyed peas, polenta, oatmeal, chia seeds, nuts and dried fruit.
• Ready to eat: Whole organic roasted chickens for $15, oven-ready dishes like bourbon salmon and Cajun butter shrimp skewers, a Boar's Head deli, grab-and-go sandwiches from $5 and wellness bowls from $9.
• The weekly deal: $5 sushi every Wednesday.

The bakery is smaller, with bread, pies, cookies and muffins. Sprouts also told ARLnow that this store will give food that can no longer be sold but is still edible to the Capital Area Food Bank.

That mix overlaps with the center's neighbors more than Giant's did. A store built around prepared entrées and a deli counter now sits a few doors from a shop that has sold subs and prepared Italian dishes in the same plaza since 1980. Which brings up the rest of the center.

The tenants that outlasted the gap

Here is the center's main roster as most recently reported, by when each business arrived:

The CVS and the Starbucks round out the roster. ARLnow listed both among the center's tenants when the Giant closed and again in July 2026.

The two oldest businesses were there before the grocery left and are still there after it came back. Big Wheel Bikes has fixed bicycles at this spot under one name or another for 47 years. The Italian Store opened in the plaza in 1980, a story the Arlington Public Library recorded in an oral history with owner Robert Tramonte. Its official site describes a family-run market known for hard-to-find imports, made-to-order subs, New York-style pizza and prepared entrées.

Both are destination shops. People come to them on purpose, not on the way to something else. Through the gap, the businesses that came and went were the newer ones. Cold Stone opened in the standalone former bank building near Spout Run in August 2024, five months into the vacancy, after a delay from its first spring target. BGR, which arrived in 2010, served its last customers on Christmas Eve 2025, nine months before Sprouts opened.

The supermarket brings the foot traffic. The two independents from 1979 and 1980 are what has kept this corner recognizable for decades.

The burger corner at 3129

BGR: The Burger Joint closed its space at 3129 Langston Blvd on Dec. 24, 2025, after more than 15 years in the center.

One headline from this spring caused some confusion about it. In April 2026, ARLnow reported that The Block Oven, a Lebanese restaurant, was moving into a "former burger joint" on Langston Blvd. That space is at 2515 Langston Blvd, where Burger7 used to be. It is a different building farther down the boulevard.

The next business to open at 3129 will have a grocery anchor a few doors away, something the center went without from March 2024 until this September.

Across Langston Boulevard, a taller neighbor on paper

The biggest change near this intersection has already been approved, on the other side of the street. Arlington County's project page for 3130 Langston Boulevard lists the Walgreens site as Approved under the site plan review process. The parcel covers 1.68 acres between an I-66 exit ramp and Kirkwood Road, directly across from the shopping center. Today it holds a one-story Walgreens and a parking lot built in 1998.

The applicant, Rooney Properties, LLC, asked to rezone the site from C-2 service commercial to C-O-2.5 mixed use. The plan is a 12-story building with 296 homes and 8,602 square feet of retail on the ground floor. That retail would be a short walk from the Sprouts entrance.

The shopping center has a long-range plan of its own, with nothing scheduled behind it. The Langston Boulevard Area Plan, adopted by the County Board in November 2023, names Lyon Village Shopping Center as a place for possible mixed-use development. ARLnow described the plan's idea of the site as an "activity hub" with 12- to 15-story apartment buildings. One rendering shows apartments rising over a grocery store near the intersection. The plan describes what the county would welcome, not what anyone has proposed.

For now, the corner looks much as it did before Giant left. The grocery box is lit again, the bike shop opens its doors in the morning, and there is a line for subs at 3123. If you want to see how this corner fits the neighborhood around it, our Lyon Village neighborhood page has more, and our summer look at how Lyon Village's ten-minute walk got denser covers the blocks toward Clarendon.

Changes like a new anchor, an approved tower across the street and the close of a 15-year restaurant all affect how a Lyon Village home is valued and presented. If you're wondering what this corner's next few years mean for your property, Riggs & Co can go through it with you. Request a Strategy Consultation.