04 December 2007

Digging a Hole



I have altered my usual route to the office. Instead of taking Henderson, on the far side of the Culpepper Assisted Living Center, I turn right on Pershing.

It probably adds a couple hundred yards to the commute, which would be a laughable distinction to someone living in Loudoun County, but it is fairly significant for me in this little slice of Buckingham.

As you well know, Pershing is named for Black Jack, my Grandfather's World War One Army Commander. His street was the main east-west thoroughfare through Frances Freed's sprawling garden apartment complex. Buckingham was a self-contained world then, except for the old Glebe Road that pre-dated it; Pershing was the main thoroughfare to the junction at Glebe that provided a logical center for the village's commercial service area.

There were twenty-nine separate entities at the crossroads, back in the day. They were arrayed in classic Arlington commercial style: low sleek one-story buildings faced with gray fieldstone in the sleek art deco mode. The only two-story portion of the commercial area is the incongruous English Cottage addition on the north side of Glebe; though the Tudor-style half-timber architecture has been painted over, you can still see it was distinct, a quotation from the British-inspired design of the neighborhood as a whole.

That is where Frances had her office, and after a holiday haircut from Ben the Moroccan at the Spa on the first floor I ventured up the stairs to see what has replaced the offices of the Paramount Communities, Inc.

The stairwell is wide and solid, and the treads shout out an incongruous sense of permanence. At the top of the stairs, the hallway leads to the restrooms and a fire door out over the roof. To the left are a series of offices, each hosting a low-budget enterprise.

One of them would be the perfect headquarters for Socotra Enterprises Worldwide, LLC., I thought, a down-at-the-heels private detective agency.

At the moment I passed, there was a worried looking family in the hall outside the immigration law firm. A driving school promised immediate certification. A Punjabi fashion house was padlocked, and across the hall a little shop with an impassive woman behind a counter offered curiosities and beauty products from South Asia to no one.

All the way at the end of the hall, overlooking the alley where the long custom Caddy limo used to park, is what used to be Frances Freed's office. The walls have plenty of glass, in small panes, and I could see that the suite used to be an inner-sanctum, rather than just the last in a series of dreary cubes.

I imagined the old roll-top desk was in there, though of course it was not, and the reporter from the Post was waiting to hear the vision of the future from Frances and her construction boss. Peering though the glass outside, I could see that there was a clear view of the Overseer's little Cape Code House, so the Frances could observe his industry first hand.

The developers can't do anything with the little house, since it has been designated as historic. The Herald TriBlog says they will gut the little place to a shell and install treadmills for fitness for the subsidized residencies behind it. I thought the crossroads

There are still around thirty different activities at the crossroads, many with the same functions as when Frances created them. Of course the names have changed, and they reflect the waves of immigration that have passed through Buckingham.

The Ravi Kabob Pakistani restaurants (there are two) hark back to the Punjabi era, of which little except the food remains, and the Asian and Hispanic places each serve the tastes of the ethnic peoples who live, or lived here.

The Herald is the only entity that is following what is happening to the crossroads, and chief correspondent and editor Steve was off enjoying the winter holidays with his family. He covered a zoning meeting in which developers presented dramatic plans to replace the Chicken and Mexican restaurants with a four-story mixed-use structure, with something similar rising over the lot where the drug-store stands.

The developers presented street-level renderings in pretty pastel. The real life guys leaning against the Hispanic market wall waiting for day labor have been replaced by Starbucks-swilling androgynous phantoms.

The planning board was stunned, according to Steve. They said the whole concept was outsized and incompatible with the rest of Buckingham.

But of course, that is precisely why I have started driving down Pershing, and stopping periodically to take pictures of the destruction.

The Buckingham I development is now half gone, though you cannot see it from most approaches. Paragon Construction has left a concealing arc of the old buildings along George Mason Drive and Henderson. Only from Pershing can you see the shape of what is to come.

It is a negative image at this point, and I mean that in a positive sense. The pile-driver has driven great beams of steel down into the red Virginia soil, and the earthmovers are scooping the soil up into trucks to carry it away to someplace that needs it.

They are carving out the space for the underground garages that will serve the residents of the new high-density building that will rise on the property. For the moment, the building site resembles Flanders in 1916, all mud and craters, but order and concrete will soon be imposed.

The grinding sound from the machines begins at dawn, and the first scrapings are starting now, deep-throated noise that is rending the earth.

There is nothing at all out of scale about the proposed new buildings at the crossroads. They are changing it right now, across the parking lot from Big Pink.

As the earthmovers started their engines, the BBC in London told me that there was a huge development in Iowa yesterday, something about the first actual voting in the permanent presidential campaign. I have been in such a hole that I have managed to tune it out.

I can't make much sense of the news, except that for the first time in my life I feel a little sympathy for Hillary Clinton.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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