History
Although originally identified as the western terminus of the Orange Line in the 1968 plan, by 1978 Fairfax County was debating whether or not the initial terminus should be at the Vienna location or at an alternate location in Tysons Corner. After much public debate and public comment, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors endorsed the Vienna routing. The endorsement was made after determining it would cost an additional $59 million and take an additional five years to complete the line to Tysons.
On September 8, 1982, groundbreaking for the station occurred. At the time of its groundbreaking, the final facility was to have cost $17.6 million with parking for 2,000 vehicles. After nearly four years of construction, the station officially opened on June 7, 1986, as the western terminus of the Orange Line. Its opening coincided with the completion of 9.1 miles (14.6 km) of rail from the Ballston station and the opening of the East Falls Church, West Falls Church and Dunn Loring stations.
By 1993, officials in Fairfax City were looking to add "Fairfax" to the station name. In March 1999, the station name was changed to "Vienna/Fairfax – GMU. The station reverted to its original "Vienna" name on November 3, 2011, with "Fairfax–GMU" as a subtitle.
In 2011 Craigslist ranked Vienna as the nation's "most romantic" subway station.
Read more about this topic: Vienna (WMATA Station)
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“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)