04 November 2007

Whitey's



If there was ever a place that represented Arlington on the skids, it was Whitey's. The place anchored the northeast side of the corner of Pershing and Washington Boulevard where the old trolley tracks ran up to Lyon Village, the stop before the original Buckingham Village development east of Glebe Road.

The people fleeing the heat of the District to their cottages in Arlington would not have gone there, or at least not to sit at the bar and bemoan their fate. They might have stopped by for the Broasted Chicken, whatever that was, and the superb onion rings, and sat at the booths that ran down the middle of the main room and along the knotty-pine paneling of the far wall.

There was an aggregation of the usual bar trash on the walls: neon beer signs from the vendors, recollection of ancient political campaigns and Redneck humor. The ceiling was pressed tin, and the place next door was a feed store, if you can believe it, a remnant of the agrarian past.

Whitey's was a workingman's bar, the ultimate neighborhood tavern that had a place for bluegrass music on Friday nights.

I first wandered into Whitey's in the early eighties, and when I worked at the Bureau of Personnel, and made it a personal favorite when I could get away from the desk. It is the last place I ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer.

It was easier to stick with the beer. Don't go for an early lunch and expect the oil to be hot enough in the deep fryers for the rings to be good and crisp. Everyone in the kitchen was working on their hangovers, and it took until mid-afternoon to come into some kind of equilibrium.

It had been Whitey's since Frances Freed finished the last of the Garden Apartments in Buckingham. A sawed-off man named Alexander “Whitey” Joy took the place over and named it after himself. The construction guys at Buckingham and the soldiers from Arlington Hall and Fort Myer would have known it as "Tommy's," and later, "The Nebraskan."

There were tough guys who hung out there, vets and un-reconstructed construction guys, and early bikers who got their inspiration from Brando in The Wild Ones. Whitey put up with them until they crossed the line, and then they got “barred” from the bar.

Old photos of presidents dating to Teddy Roosevelt lined the knotty pine walls. A sign with red neon lips told you to   "Eat or Go To Your Room", and a large and somewhat surreal sailfish hung in the back. On one side of the room was a moth-eaten deer head on a wooden plaque, and on the other hung the stuffed hind-quarters.

It was a funky place, and you could get into a fight if you wanted, no problem. That, and the expansion into the feed store next door provoked the Yuppies who were filling up Lyon Park as the Skid began to turn around.

The stripper bars and the Adult bookstore across from the main gate at Fort Myer were torn down to make room for some anonymous office buildings. They are anonymous for a reason.

I had a project in one of them, which was a store-all for secrets. The facility contained a series of vaults, all double-doored to NSA standards and serious guards. What was done within them was up to whatever government agency had a need for short-term secrecy. No one talked in the halls outside the vault doors, and it was considered impolite to notice other people.

This was happening just as the Vietnamese wave of immigrants was cresting in Arlington, and using the available down-at-the-heels rentals in Buckingham and elsewhere as a launchpad for new lives.

The depressed conditions made the apartment blocks a natural destination for those fleeing a lost war. They came and they worked hard. They opened restaurants and mom-and-pop stores, and used the Buckingham neighborhood north of Pershing Road as the golden door to America.

The Methodist Church on the big empty block west of Big Pink has an alternate Vietnamese congregation, though they do not come from Buckingham any more.

The door from Vietnam was purely one-way. For twenty years there was no return, and no option but to stay in America and make the best of things. The new wave of migrants from Central America did not have the same sense of finality in the enterprise. There was a motivation to find work, send money home, and perhaps return to the village.

The issue of legal status was also very much an issue, and between the language and fear of deportation, the community was close-knit and closed mouth.

Salvadorans escaping from the twelve- year civil war began to pour into Buckingham at the end of the 1970s, so Ronald Reagan has his hand on this community. The Salvadorans were joined by Guatemalans and other refugees, both fiscal and political.

By the mid-1990s, North Buckingham was little Salvador.

They were not the only ones who were moving in. The traffic getting out to the wonderful homes in Fairfax and Prince William County was an oppressive reality. North Arlington's little houses offered an opportunity to put down roots, close in.

A small group of neighbors protested the expansion of Whitey's, since it came with closing hour chaos and wildly parked cars and piles of trash. The County made Whitey's cut back on the hours, and the nights when the band could play.

The decision was a stake in the heart for the institution, since patrons had to drive to get there, and the Yuppies made it impossible to park when they arrived. The neighborhood no longer supported the neighborhood bar.

Yuppies do that. I am perfectly happy with Big Pink, and the neighborhood around it. Whitey's closed in 2003, the year the long skid was finally over and the big bubble began to expand.

There is an upscale wine-bar in the old building now, bare brick and high-tech stainless hardware. It was a victim of Arlington's skyrocketing housing market, or more specifically, the demographic changes that go along with such things.

But there is change coming, and with the hundred new upscale town homes and the massive apartment blocks the County insisted on to accommodate the displaced residents, I am sure something interesting is on the way.

The new restaurant has left one thing from Whitey's: the old red neon sign still hangs out front. It is plain, and eloquent.

It does not flash or do anything remarkable. It just tells you to “EAT.”

I have not actually had the heart to do it, not in the new place. I have stopped in for a glass of wine, just to see that the past really is dead.

Except for the sign, it is.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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