Reston celebrates its 62nd birthday with gusto

By Gene Powell, staff writer

While Lake Anne Plaza and Reston Museum hosted Celebrate Reston!, Public Art Reston hosted ChalkFest at Town Center this month. The event drew amateur as well as professional artists in a celebration of art and Earth on "eARTh Day." Penny Hauffe's entry "Growing Greener" was one of the winners. Photo by Public Art Reston

Reston celebrated its 62nd anniversary on April 18 with music, author readings, walking architecture and history tours, and a boisterous afternoon crowd that at times filled Washington Plaza at Lake Anne.

The annual celebration started in 2004 as “Founder’s Day,” marking the 90th birthday of Robert E. Simon, the real estate entrepreneur who established the planned community in 1964. Its name combines his initials, R-E-S, with “town.”

“Celebrate Reston” was presented by the Reston Museum and hosted by Lake Anne of Reston (LARCA), a condominium unit owners association, and the Reston Community Center, with the publicly funded center shouldering much of the event’s costs.

The name was changed to “Celebrate Reston” two years ago to “make the event more inclusive,” said Lisa Watts, festival organizer and executive director of the Reston Historic Trust and Museum.

The annual celebration was broadened this year to include live art, 30-minute tours and an exercise display, to establish it as more than an author-focused event, Watts said.

Occasional gusty winds presented a challenge to vendors and displays, momentarily overturning at least one blue sun shelter tent, but skies were mostly sunny.

This year’s program included a presentation, “All Men Are Created Equal: America’s 250th Anniversary and the Founding of Reston,” by Kenneth Plum, who retired in 2024 after a total of 44 years of service in the Virginia House of Delegates.

Mindshift Gym’s refurbished fire truck was the centerpiece of a jungle gym and obstacle course, and the Fairfax County Park Authority’s mobile nature center, a large van dubbed “Wonder Wagon,” was on display near the entrance to the celebration.

Performers included George Mason University’s Fife and Drum Corps, the Reston Community Players, the Foley Irish Dance Academy and Bach to Rock. Reston’s Used Book Shop and the Reston Museum featured talks by local authors Chuck Cascio, G.G. Eddins and Alexandra Campbell.

Simon, who lived in the Lake Anne area for more than a decade late in his life, died in 2015. A lakeside bronze statue of Simon sitting on a park bench stands in the plaza, the original center of the new town. The Lake Anne Center Historic District was added in 2017 to the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places.