(The view from my place at Big Pink. She Who Prefers Anonymity is still there, in her unit, but the Dirty Dozen is in the process of timed withdrawal from a changing place).
I was talking to an old pal from Big Pink, a happy residence for nearly twenty years on the edge of the Imperial City. Lovely lady, one of the old Dirty Dozen representatives of Big Labor, military retirees and various commercial activities oriented to the government customers. Adapting to retirement made me come to the realization that retaining city and country properties in the portfolio no longer made a great deal of sense. So, the last unit I owned there went on the market. I had lived in five units in the building, owning three of them, and sales were always brisk, rarely requiring much participation by external real estate professionals.
Given the uncertainties of the economy in these uncertain times, I naturally reached out to the old gang that remained in the building to see what the circumstances affecting sales might be. A very astute and lovely pal had some remarkable feedback, which we will get to in a moment. But if the news from America’s cities- notably San Francisco- about the remarkable presence of poverty and homelessness amid sky-high real estate- seems like something far away, I discovered it is not. In fact, homeless people are sleeping in the parking lot of the church across the street from the pool. More clever (and better resourced) people have discovered another way to beat the system.
Arlington has always fascinated me. When moving to the first DC job in 1986 from Honolulu, you can imagine the scope of the change. Our Realtor showed us some of the tiny houses in ArIington to calibrate our choices of housing, schools, and commutes to the Pentagon and other venues in the city. They were too expensive then for middling military folks, and staggering now, with the homes across the street ranging from three-quarters to a million apiece.
I wrote a book about why the county looked the way it did. called “Tales From Big Pink” in around 2003. I had embarked on a life change at the time, and was interested in the new environment that confronted each morning. Moving closer to the job downtown in the sticky morass of The Swamp was convenient, and eliminated the agony of the super-early morning commute, and the corresponding pain of the evening slog in the unbroken tide of automobiles back out to Fairfax in the evening.
Along the way, a search for a property distant enough to have some peace while maintaining a small footprint near the money machine seemed to make sense. I actually did research on the early years of Arlington, and it was interesting. The original shape of the District of Columbia was a perfect diamond, ten miles on each of the four sides, neatly crossing the wide brown swath of the mighty Potomac River. It was that body of slow-moving water that made the jurisdiction difficult to administer without the bridges that now cross the river. The District gave up trying to run its portion on the west side of the water, and offered what is now Arlington County back to the Commonwealth of Virginia. The state accepted it back into the dominion, and life went on, until wartime necessity caused a defensive line to be thrown up across favorable terrain, parts of which remain to this day.
The collapse of the Confederacy in 1865 left a legacy across the county, open farmland crossed by trenches and forts that were slowly settling back into the soil. It was at that point that my research focused. My initial searches began with the stately mid-20th century building in which I found refuge. It was the first of the Big Buildings that went up almost a century after peace returned. But my inquiries were drawn first to the remarkable impact of the New Deal. In addition to the many changes that came with Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression, Arlington had vacant land close in that could be adapted to a growing Federal workforce.
The lady who built The Chatham- Frances Freed- was the widow of Allie, the guy who adapted Ford Model T construction techniques to home construction. He applied the production line concept to building the rows of little houses that spread along Four Mile Run and north past us in Big Pink. They were put up like an assembly-line to accommodate all the New Deal employees who were hired by FDR to manage a vastly increased Federal footprint. The places Allie built were for profit, and even then the prices were significant. But now the $30K houses are worth a million bucks and we have homeless sleeping at the churches and trailer living in a gray world apparently ignored by the County.
I had been occupied in setting up The Farm for comfortable living, and the amazing change back up north in just a couple years took me by surprise. My pal was a key member of the Dirty Dozen long-term residents of Big Pink, and our world revolved around the pool in the long delicious summers with chilled drinks and tasty snacks in home-brought plastic containers to ensure broken glass did not get under foot. She has simplified life by preferring to remain a trusted source on the condition of anonymity as has become common in the last few Administrations.
She brushed her long hair aside as we looked at the storefront that had been Tracy O”Grady’s fabulous Willow Restaurant. Her decision to close the place after ten years was partially sparked by the simultaneously decision of the Fish & Wildlife Service to move out of the office building across the street and similar departures from the office suites above the restaurant. That caused the owners to demand a steep increase in rental costs that did not make business sense to Tracy.
Her husband Brian summed it up six years ago as the guests registered shock: “ It is a confluence of events really: vastly increased competition, a commercial vacancy rate in Arlington that has more than doubled in the last few years and a landlord who has unrealistic expectations about what the space is worth on a monthly basis. And don’t even get me started on what has happened to fine dining in the last ten years.”
We didn’t. When Willow closed, we moved over to the Front Page for a couple seasons but they couldn’t last against the same pressures that confronted Tracy and Brian. I took the hint and began to switch the base of operations from The Swamp to The Farm. Willow’s old space is still vacant after six years.
Looking at what had been Willow was unsettling. My pal shook her head. “It’s definitely the end of an era here. Like you, I have the same issue you did. No where to socialize. It was challenging for me to not have anywhere to go outside during the pandemic. I started walking everyday just to get out of the condo. I rarely see anyone that I know, except the same people living in their vehicles on route 50, and the street along the pool, in addition to the people sleeping on the pavement of the church parking lot across the street. 😃😃😃.”
“You know I can’t think in Emoticons.”
“Well, I will have to translate them for you tomorrow. Cycle John’s story is how it works to live in a very expensive place.”
“Who the heck is Cycle John?”
She smiled that sly decorous smile of ambiguity she has perfected over her years in Arlington time. “I will have to get to that tomorrow.”
She handed me her smart phone with a recent picture displayed. “Cycle Johns home. Note the water bottles are the tire!”
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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