The Bridge Over Route 123 Isn't The Only Way Into Tysons Anymore

For years, if you lived on the north side of the McLean Metro tracks and wanted to walk to Capital One Center, you had one option: an elevated pedestrian bridge over Route 123, the kind of crossing that made a five-minute distance feel like a small commute. Most people didn't bother. They drove, circled for a garage, and treated the Capital One campus like an office park you visited for a specific reason rather than a place you wandered into on a Tuesday evening.

That changed in November 2025, when a new north entrance opened at the McLean Metro station, built as a partnership between the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission, and Fairfax County. Capital One kicked in a $300,000 proffer toward the roughly $1.3 million project, with the rest coming from I-66 toll revenue. The result is not glamorous. It's a door on the station's north side, facing Capital One Drive, with bike parking attached. But it means the walk from the platform to the campus no longer requires the bridge, and that small change in geometry is the reason this fall on the Capital One Center campus feels different from the ones that came before it.

The entrance came first, then the calendar got crowded

Infrastructure alone doesn't pull people out of their cars. What makes this fall worth paying attention to, if you already live in McLean, is that the programming caught up to the new walk almost immediately.

Capital One Center's second annual Celebration of the Arts returns September 19 and 20, free and open to the public, presented with the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art and Capital One Arts. The event turns several blocks of the campus into an outdoor festival with hands-on art workshops, a local artisan market, and live performances, all built around the idea that you don't need a ticket to spend an evening there. Festival-goers can eat at Sisters Thai, Ometeo, Starr Hill Brewpub, Stellina Pizzeria, Wren Tysons, or The Naisho Room, all of which sit inside the same few blocks the festival closes to traffic.

Inside Capital One Hall, the calendar is just as dense. Season 6 of Broadway in Tysons went on sale this summer, with tickets to The Book of Mormon available now and single tickets for Mystic Pizza, The Wiz, and Legally Blonde the Musical having gone on sale August 14. Layer that on top of a concert slate that includes Blackberry Smoke on September 5, Kenny G on September 22, and Art Garfunkel on October 30, and you get a fall where there's a reason to walk over on more weekends than not.

Here's what the next two months actually look like, dated:

None of these require a car if you live within walking distance of the McLean Metro's north side. That's the part that's new, not the shows themselves.

The restaurant bench got deeper while most people weren't watching

The dining lineup at Capital One Center has quietly turned into something closer to a destination than an amenity attached to an office building. Sisters Thai opened its fifth and largest location, Sisters Tysons, at a street-level corner across from Starr Hill Brewpub, serving pad Thai, drunken noodles, and a rotating list of specialty cocktails. Stellina Pizzeria did the same thing on a bigger scale, opening its fifth and largest location on campus with cacio e pepe pizza and fresh pasta.

The more interesting addition is one most residents won't stumble into by accident. The Naisho Room is a reservation-only cocktail lounge tucked atop The Watermark Hotel, built around Tokyo-inspired nightlife and a 19 to 22 course omakase menu. It's not the kind of spot you find by walking past a storefront. You have to already know it's there, which tells you something about who Capital One Center is now trying to be: not just a place with restaurants, but a place with a hidden one.

Wren Tysons rounds out the newer additions, built around a dining concept that changes with the season rather than running a fixed year-round menu.

None of this reads like Church Street in Vienna or Mount Vernon Avenue in Del Ray, where a walkable strip built its identity block by block over years. Capital One Center built its version in reverse, opening a performing arts hall and a hotel first, then filling in the restaurants and the reason to walk there afterward. The Metro entrance is what finally let that plan work the way it was drawn on paper.

The rink comes back, but that's not really the point

Last winter, Capital One Center opened an 8,000 to 9,000 square foot synthetic ice rink at Metro Park, running from December 4 through February 28, with tickets at $16 for adults and $14 for kids, seniors, and Capital One employees. It included a 40-foot LED tree and drew comparisons to Pentagon Row's rink in Arlington. The specific dates for this coming winter haven't been announced yet, but the rink was built as part of Metro Park's year-round design, a plaza that runs pickleball courts in the warmer months and swaps to ice in the cold ones. It's reasonable to expect it back on a similar schedule.

The rink matters less as a single attraction than as confirmation of a pattern. Capital One Center isn't treating the campus as a nine-to-five office park anymore. It's building for a resident who might show up on a Tuesday for dinner, a Saturday for the arts festival, and a December evening for the rink, all without ever needing to find parking.

What this actually means if you already live here

If you've lived in McLean for years and mentally filed Tysons under work, not weekend, this fall is a reasonable moment to reconsider that. The friction that kept people away wasn't the restaurants or the shows. It was the walk. Now that the walk is direct, from the Metro's north entrance straight onto Capital One Drive, the calendar has enough happening on any given week that showing up doesn't require planning around a bridge crossing or a parking garage.

That's a small, specific shift, but it's the kind of thing that changes how a neighborhood actually gets used, block by block, season by season. I've watched McLean absorb changes like this before along Old Dominion Drive, and the pattern tends to hold: infrastructure removes the friction first, and the businesses and events follow once people start showing up on foot.

If you're curious how these changes ripple out to home values in the parts of McLean closest to the Metro, or if you're weighing a move and want someone who tracks this kind of detail block by block, Thomas Cauley can walk you through what's actually happening on your street. You can also browse current McLean homes for sale or read more about the neighborhood on the McLean neighborhood page. And when you're ready for a clearer picture of where your own home stands, go ahead and Request a Free Home Valuation.