24 October 2007

Salvador is Missing



Rain, thank God. The earth smells rich this morning.

It is the first rain in weeks, and maybe the draught may be starting to break. It has killed the grass, and it is doing no good for the trees of the County. At least we have no howling dry wind as they have had in San Diego County. If we did, and there was a spark, the county would go up like tinder.

There must be a reason I washed up here, and not back in the town by the Bay I loved so much when I lived there.

Arlington County, Virginia, is known as the County of Trees. We are proud of the greenery, since we occupy one of the smallest and most densely populated counties in the country. By right, we should never have been an entity created this small. A few little towns would have sufficed in the Goliath of Fairfax County, but that is not how it worked out. We are a political accident, but the new chain link fence that has gone up around the garden apartments just across the road is no accident.

Someone has kidnapped all the Salvadorans, or they have fled in their old imported pick-up trucks, no moving vans required. A chain link fence surrounds Little Salvador, which is also known in tax records as Buckingham Village I, II and III.

The Salvadorans and other immigrants, legal and not, have been packed into the Village for years. The smells are of central America, as you walk along, charcoal pollo on the grills in the common areas, and the smell of fried plantains drifting out of the open windows.

I have got a moderate case of the NIMBYs. Not enough to have me on the street, though if I had known about what they were planning I might have been.

 “Not in my backyard,” is what the acronym means, and it refers to the all-American practice of opposing the legal exercise of other people's property rights if you don't happen to like what they are doing.

I am pretty sure I didn't like what was going on across Big Pink's back yard, but at the time I had little money, and the Spanish enclave kept mostly to itself. I moved in long after the Salvadorans had replaced the earnest Federal workers who were the first in the   big blocks of garden apartments to the east. The complexes had become shabby, where they had not been converted to condominiums and given the residents a stake in their appearance.

If there were more people packed into the small apartments than was usual, that seemed to be their business. If their lives were spent more outdoors as a consequence, they were there before I was. If auto repair was a curbside neighborhood activity, so be it.

Like the issue of women in combat, it was a done deal, something that happened off the main stage when no one was looking.

Suddenly, the chain link fence was up and there was no one on the inside. The windows gaped empty, like accusing eyes and the doors stood open.

All the meetings have been held and the residents told to move. If we heard abut it in Big Pink, we probably didn't understand, since the evictions were delivered in Spanish. When they went, they went after work in their trucks, no moving vans required.

Every parcel of land under the green leaves has been developed. For anything new, something old has got to go.

There are just about 200,000 of us, packed into the western diamond that remains of the original District of Columbia, which was returned by a weary Federal Government to the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1846. I don't know what would have happened had it stayed as part of the Federal Enclave; as part of an enemy state it was devastated during the Civil War, and ditches and earthen defense works still remain from the conflict, if you know where to look for them.

Arlington is comprised of about twenty-six square miles, and you can see the edges of it, if you go out on the balcony of one of the upper floors of Big Pink. The high-rise developments parallel Route 7, the Leesburg Pike, and the western point of the diamond is in a little park just beyond the green water tower that thrusts up above the trees.

There is never going to be another Big Pink, which towers eight floors above the foliage, anchoring the south end of the Buckingham historic neighborhood. That is not to say that they have quit throwing up great towers in the County, but the Master Plan is restricting them to the narrow corridor along the Orange Line of the Metro.

Big Pink gets a grandfather clause on that, being the legacy of the last of the first, the legendary Allie Sheed's wife Frances. She took over the land development when he died, and it was under her stern gaze that the garden apartments that became Little Salvador were built, and the rosy brick of our building selected. We are the last island in the trees away from the high-density corridor.

But of course the Salvadorans and the Guatemalans are gone, much more suddenly than when they arrived.

The question is not even where they went, since I have a pretty good idea. Out West, in Fairfax and Estern Loudoun County, where great sprawling blocks of townhomes are rising incongruously out of the pastures.

I stumbled on the Master Plan yesterday. It was approved months ago, and there is not a damn thing we can do about it except watch them build. The question is about what- and who- is coming next.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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