Author: Vic Socotra

Butcher Block

From the Arlington Star, 1980: Majority of Arlington’s Buckingham Sold to Condominium Developer By Carolyn Springs, Staff Writer BUCKINGHAM- Most of one of Northern Virginia’s oldest and largest community in Arlington has been put on the block and sold to a Windy City real estate developer who specializes in condominium conversions. The sale was announced […]

Conversions

Fairlington Condos Rumors Swirl at Buckingham From the Arlington Star, November 1979: BUCKINGHAM- Rumors are swirling about impending redevelopment of this sprawling garden apartment community by the Kinghoffer Corporation, of Columbus, Ohio. Residents fear imminent eviction from the garden apartments, which are located on choice pieces of land close to Washington and the burgeoning Metro […]

The Man and the Plan

“Buckeye” Kinghoffer From the Arlington Star, November 1979: Colonial Village, Buckingham, Big Pink, Hyde Park, Claremont. Within the last six months,   five major Arlington County apartment complexes have been sold to out-of-state buyers. The sales affect as many as 10,000 tenants, many of them elderly or recently arrived ethnic minorities who live on low to […]

Distilled

It is a strange morning, and it is not about the great events in the wide world. It is about one man who had no opinions about any of it, at least in a public manner. For a public figure, he was quite private. The word is that the twenty-four year old Free Safety of […]

1964 Long Live the Queen

Photo copyright Washington Post 1975 Big Changes Coming At Buckingham Frances and Larry Kettell are in the office on the second floor office in the Buckingham Shopping Center. Frances is a woman of a certain age with an aura of authority, and a fashionable frock. Kettell is a burly man who has worked outdoors all […]

Ghost Stories

The Omni Shoreham Hotel, Mother of Big Pink She was a bold woman, a social butterfly who was hard as nails, and she liked her martinis. Her speech was at time blunt and uninhibited and blunt. If you go looking for her as Frances Freed, nee Frances Webb of the United Kingdom, Boston and Park […]

Lets Talk

Friday night on a holiday weekend. Big times in Big Pink. I wondered if I could stay awake to watch Ghost Whisperer and make it all the way through Moonlight. I like the Vampires on the latter show, since they are exceptionally well groomed and live so much better than the real-life versions. Apparently if […]

Black and White

It was a fine Thanksgiving, rescued from the blues by the kind invitation of a friend to share the bounty of his family table, and the antics of the next generation of taxpayers, blissfully unaware of the responsibilities we are heaping upon their childish shoulders. Upon return, I got a note from another old pal, […]

Three Cheers

I am not cooking today, and that saddens me a bit. There has been a snap in the weather, and the glass will be dropping all afternoon, almost in sequence with all the other glasses across the country that will be dropping as we do the big holiday feast. Thanksgiving in Big Pink means the […]

Big Labor

Photo courtesy of the HeraldTriblog all rights reserved. It is not as much work as you would think to transform solid brick into air and rubble. I got a flash update on the computer around two o’clock from Steve, the Buckingham Beat Reporter. The prep work had been complete, and, one by one, the low […]