Main Street Mall in Charlottesville is a rare success.

Comparing Alexandria’s pilot program to pedestrianize a single block of King Street with wildly successful pedestrian malls in Denver, Minneapolis and Boulder may be a bit premature, but without much press and with plenty of rain, businesses along King Street reported that the closure this weekend led to more business. BeyondDC can’t help but wonder, then, if a full-on pedestrian mall shouldn’t be in Alexandria’s future.

Such malls usually fail, it must be noted. Dozens of cities all over the country pedestrianized streets in the 1970s in a desperate attempt to compete with enclosed suburban malls, only to see their streets become devoid of users. But those streets didn’t fail because they were pedestrianized; they failed because the downtowns they were located in failed. The 16th Street Mall in Denver is a good example. It declined with the rest of them, but when downtown Denver began its renaissance in the 1990s after Coors Field opened, 16th Street improved right along with it. Still though, it takes a special set of circumstances to make a pedestrian mall work. The street must already be a popular regional shopping and entertainment destination and a welcoming place to loiter. It has to be the main street through a linear downtown – if downtown is a clump rather than a line, the pedestrian mall idea won’t work. There have to be very frequent storefronts, with several unique entrances on each block, as opposed to mega buildings with only one or two entrances.

King Street in Alexandria, unlike L’Enfant Promenade in Washington, Baltimore Street in Cumberland, or Fayetteville Street in Raleigh, does meet all three of those criteria. So a pedestrian mall there could seemingly work. But would we want one? A successful pedestrian mall would certainly make Alexandria a more unique and beautiful place, but is it worth the risk? Is the extra traffic on Prince Street and lost parking an acceptable trade-off? How far west should a mall go? Should it be a pure pedestrian mall or a transit mall like Nicollet Street in Minneapolis? The cat is out of the bag, Alexandria. It’s now time to answer these questions.