01 November 2007

Remember the Titans

TC Williams Titans Football Team, 1971

I walked by the demolition area on the way to pick up the Mercedes after work. The windows of this segment of the Buckingham I area are blown out, as if by blast. Refrigerators stand in a group, rectangular white soldiers, behind the chain link. The destruction is methodical, almost assembly line, just the way they were built.

I doubt seriously that I would be driving a German motorcar if the regional mega dealer did not have a campus just north of the Buckingham Neighborhood. I don't know about you, but being able to drop the car for maintenance near a Metro stop has a certain appeal, and living close-in at Big Pink has an imperative that was appealing at the time, and now seems to be quite compelling.

There is a Japanese dealer just a little further up Glebe Road, but we all have our standards, right?

It makes me shudder to think of living out in the County, isolated with all the other suburbanites in our fine houses, connected to the broad concrete roads that were clogged before they were completed. There was no alternative to driving, even to the strip malls for the minor incidental need.

I crossed George Mason to what had been Buckingham III. It is flat, of course, the last of the low brick apartments gone months ago. The new luxury townhouses are advancing south from the corner at Henderson Road. George Mason Drive used to dead-end there, but the County wanted to increase traffic mobility and punched it through the property of the K.W. Barrett school just about the time the Army abandoned the Henderson Family Mansion in 1951 as the officer's club for Arlington Hall.

The County took it on as a recreational center thereafter, and coincidently the mansion burned to the ground in the hurricane of 1954.

There was a lot of spontaneous combustion in Arlington in those days. The Colonial manor houses that had survived time and war were particularly vulnerable to sudden unexpected accidents. The Abingdon Plantation House dominated the heights above National Airport; another grand house at the nose-end of Arlington Ridge above the Pentagon went unexpectedly, making way for the development of a dozen apartment complexes.

It was all curious coincidence, like the disappearance of the old earthworks of Civil War times. They used to say that the developers had their own archeologists on staff to ensure that anything that a preservationist might consider of interest was bulldozed on the spot to prevent costly and time consuming litigation.

Fort Marcy is a fine old military earthwork just off the GW Parkway. The Fort was only saved by one determined woman. She heard the sound of diesel engines, and drove her Cadillac into one of the Caterpillar earthmovers, jamming it up until a court injunction arrived.

Here in Buckingham, the traffic began to whiz north on the new boulevard years ago, changing the complexion of the area completely. It was unthinkable to allow a child to play outside the inner courtyards, since it would have been an invitation to vehicular manslaughter.

Pedestrians like me are more than a little nervous. The width and curves, and the adamant concrete curbs of the decorative roads were not designed for the sort of kamikaze driving that is practiced these days.

Newcomers are not used to a road system only slightly improved from Colonial times, and drive too fast for the curves. It is a little scary, and you have to be on your toes. It is not at all what Allie Freed had in mind when he laid out this historic neighborhood.

Nor did he have in mind the knot of men gathered under one of the trees in the “historic” area of Buckingham that is going to be preserved as low income housing. I think the proper term is “affordable,” which puts a different spin on it, but that is part of the other story I will get to in a minute.

I had to reason to think that the men would bother me. We were all enjoying the fine late fall sun, and no one seemed to be intoxicated. I still moved to the other side of the street and walked along the chain link fence that guards the construction site.

It is funny. The four-story townhomes are oriented sideways to the street, increasing the possible density, and located so close together that it appears the cars from the garages will have to back out into the drive across from them to get out. I have no idea what we are going to do with that many new BMWs.

Ike and his fine national road system is responsible for what happened, in part, but the other social pressure came from the real end of the Civil War.

I blinked a little when the bill for the service job was presented. Obviously some of the parts had been manufactured on the Euro standard, and I am convinced that between the collapse of the currency and $100-a-barrel oil, this is the last gasoline car I will ever own.

It made me happy to get the car back on a precious last convertible day, and when the porter delivered it to me, I immediately put the top down, and wheeling out onto Glebe, I realized I was not ready to take it directly back to the underground garage under Big Pink.

I drove around the block and south toward Route 50, though the oldest part of Buckingham. The strip mall at Pershing seems ripe for something to happen. The concrete and asphalt is buckled and needs work. There is talk that that Hispanic Market is not long for this world, and a Starbucks may replace the Dollar Store under the annex where Frances Freed had her offices, back in the day when she was the Queen of Buckingham.

I got to Route 50 and took the service drive west past the Cathedral and the Red Cross. Traffic was snarled on the big road, and I decided to keep going past Big Pink and stop at the drycleaner in the Arlington Forest strip mall my so I would not finish the week wearing the second-string shirts.

I swing the car up into the loading zone in front of the Thai restaurant that replaced the drug store and walked into the store.

Fat Eddie, who isn't anymore, is the pater familia of the Forest drycleaners. Things were slow, and he was alone with Pablo in the shop. I don't know where Chris, the heir apparent was, or crazy Helen and the women at the presses she rules with an iron hand. The family has been running the place since 1967, so I figured he might have some answers to the questions that had suddenly appeared with the bulldozers.

Eddie seemed inclined to talk, though it is a bit of a challenge since he is a little cock-eyed. I have found it is easier to look at his nose rather than try to track his gaze. It turns out he is an actual native, a rare thing in a town were everyone is from someplace else. He was actually born in Buckingham, at one of the units at Glebe and Henderson, and the news about the Spooks who used to work down the road from Buckingham was nothing new to him.

He went to Yorktown High, class of '62, and he did the tough transition years when Arlington went from Old Dominion Virginia to international city. The movie "Remember the Titans" tells the story- or a version of it- of what it was like when Northern Virginia was really conquered.

It is a lot easier to handle it the way Denzel acts it, the integrated football team from Alexandria that goes on to defeat racism and win the State championship. The inspirational way is a lot more satisfying than the mean-spirited nastiness of what actually happened. It had the best and worst of America in it, and it is real story of titanic good and banal evil.

In a goofy way, Ike Eisenhower is responsible, or at least the things his Administration did. Brown v. Board of Education sounded the clarion that ended one phase political Civil War, the part that unconstitutionally disenfranchised the Freedmen through public policy all across the old South.

Desegregation of the Military in 1948 started it, the Supreme Court decision ratified it, and Ike decision to send the troops to Little Rock confirmed it. Little Rock begat the confrontation of the Federal institution against the local Jim Crow, and that lead to the whole dramatic cataclysm of the 60s.

Every time you turned around someone was being shot down. The Kennedy brothers, of course, and Dr. King's murder finished off the old central cities and confirmed White Flight.

It all seemed quite out of control, and the generation that I blush to be part of took merry advantage of protesting some real evils to protest everything.

Eddie goes back to the time of the Titans, and once I got him started, he wouldn't shut up.

He remembers Frances Freed, and her jerk son, and the long black limo in which she used to cruise the neighborhood. He remembers her driver, Mickey, who had a penchant for the ponies and was always broke.

He particularly remembers the Cohens, who were the first family to move into The Forest. He said they forced the strip mall to be located 100 yards back from Route 50, behind a tree-line, so motorists on The National Boulevard could not see it and be tempted to stop. They even put up a sign that said it was a “restricted area,” like Arlington Hall across the road.

He remembers Frances Freed, and her last great act of innovation, which was to construct Big Pink to her personal specifications, and a direct contradiction to the vision of her husband.

That was 1964, one of the years everything was changing. Eddie even remembers the Arlington Nazis, which is about as strange as it gets.

We'll have to talk about that sometime.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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