26 October 2007
Rene Vaquez, 60
The Arlington Cops made a routine announcement yesterday.
The corpse at the bottom of the Route 50 retaining wall had a name. In life, it had been Rene Vaquez, a Hispanic man born in 1947, a long way from here, and only a few years after the big Garden Apartment complex was opened to much fanfare. Funeral arrangements are incomplete, since they don't know precisely where he came from, though they have an idea where he might be going.
It is all about mobility and affordable housing, of which Rene availed himself of the highest and lowest. His story, spare as it is, begins far away but as a temporal matter is sperated from the place of his death by the War. It punctuates the major building period in the Buckingham Development that sprawls above his last emcampment by the boulevard, and Rene's birth.
Buckingham would be the Golden Door that drew him- and me- toward this intersection on the National Boulevard, the mighty highway that was intended to drive from Milestone 0 west and south to eventually end on the beach in Southern California.
I know how I got to Big Pink. It is circuitous, but just as compelling as Route 50 when I look back on it. I found myself suddenly homeless and needed a place to live. I looked at some garden apartments around here, since I was staying at a succession of military transient quarters and using the trunk of my convertible as a wardrobe. The garden apartments that were available as rentals all uniformly smelled of cat urine in the halls and possibly worse. Rents were high, since they could be spread among too many people willing to sleep on the floors.
Big Pink was a Condo, and had standards set by the owners, even if many of them were absentee. The plant facility was decidedly gentile. There was a nice pool and a couple tennis courts and a gym and a cheerier concierge in the lobby, 24 x 7.
It was a no-brainer at the time, and I have been here ever since.
It must have been the same for Rene, though things did not work out so well for him, and I am treating it as a cautionary tale.
It did not occur to me why Big Pink was the way it was. As far as I was concerned, it was just a pleasant island on which I found myself washed up. It was much more than that, and it stood on the very intersection of America's past and future.
Allie S. Freed, the Buckingham developer, was a pioneer in process. He started with mass production of vehicles for the New York hack market. His Paramount Cabs went head-to-head with General Motors, who subsidized the Yellow Cab Empire. He did well, managing to rise to number three in the supply of taxis to the Big Apple, but he had another vision. He formed the Paramount Communities Corporation with two associates and turned his eyes to Washington, which had a huge problem with affordable housing.
Roosevelt's New Deal had attracted battalions of earnest Bureaucrats who worried about things like egg production. To meet their needs, The National Boulevard was intended to begin on the National Mall, sweep across the stately Memorial Bridge, and drive to the west.
The Cathcart farm west of Glebe Road included a hundred acres, and parts of two others made up the package that Paramount acquired. Freed applied mass production techniques to the Garden Apartments at Buckingham, and if he had lived, he would have seen over 1800 units in more than 50 colonial-revival buildings.
He didn't live past 1938, though, and it was his energetic wife Frances who took over the vision and made it reality. Blessed by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on a visit in 1937, she drove the project to completion on a grand scale.
Buckingham eventually encompassed over one-hundred and twenty acres. The ceremonial entrance was flanked by two gate-houses that flanked George Mason Boulevard just north of Route 50, the National Boulevard. The super-blocks of low apartments were set on carefully landscaped grounds, and the roads curved to slow vehicular traffic and provide scenic vistas for the pedestrians.
There is no coincidence about the intersection of the Garden Apartments and the National Boulevard, nor the former girl's school across from Big Pink that became the Army's code-breaking headquarters in the great war. Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower is part of that story. He was a charter member of the Army-Navy Country Club just down the road, and he participated in the great Army caravan across America that formed the basis for the creation of the Arlington Boulevard that sweeps past Alrington House on the bluff above Arlington Cemetery and across Arlington County past Buckingham and the massive front of Big Pink.
I hate to leave you with a teaser, but we will have to get to the two degrees of separation that link Eleanor Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Kim Philby, the Atom Spies, Rene Vaquez and me tomorrow.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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