Tysons’s small retailers don’t fit into grand development plans spurred by Silver Line

[mahatmakanejeeves]

The article is mostly about a store near the new Greensboro Metro station in Tysons Corner. It's part of a chain, "MVC Late Night Video," which sells adult things.

The interesting part is that Eugene Delgaudio's Public Advocate is located right next to an MVC Late Night Video store in Bailey's Crossroads. Public Advocate is at 5613 Leesburg Pike #17, Falls Church, VA 22041. MVC Late Night Video is at 5625 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, VA 22041. Take a look at Google street view.

Tysons’s small retailers don’t fit into grand development plans spurred by Silver Line

By Paul Duggan July 4 at 5:32 PM

To reach the pinnacle he’s at today in the retail world, John Kenney, Northern Virginia’s leading purveyor of sex toys and porn videos, has conquered many obstacles. ... You don’t build a chain of 13 (soon to be 14) “couples boutiques,” as Kenney calls his stores, by folding to pressure from obscenity prosecutors, hostile zoning boards or angry neighbors inveighing against sin.

Again and again, local governments and citizens groups pondering ways to get rid of him have been stymied by the First Amendment. In Old Town Alexandria, for instance, no amount of fulminating by preservationists in 2009 could stop his Le Tache Couples Boutique from leasing space on King Street near a tavern where some of the Founding Fathers slept. ... But now, in Fairfax County, Kenney, 58, has met a foe he knows he can’t defeat.

He says his 5,600-square-foot Tysons Corner emporium — once the second-most-profitable sex-toy and porn-video boutique in the Kenney empire — will not survive the high-rise redevelopment expected to result from the advent of Metro’s Silver Line. ... The property Kenney rents has been sold, and the new owner intends to build skyscrapers.
....

The clerk, a woman named Kat, says Internet porn and on-demand TV shrunk the XXX-DVD market but didn’t kill it. ... She says a lot of DVD buyers don’t have credit cards or aren’t wired to the outside world. ... “Some are just old-school,” says Kat, 29, who declined to further identify herself “because my family is totally conservative Republican.”