26 November 2007

1964: Long Live the Queen


Photo copyright Washington Post 1975

Big Changes Coming At Buckingham

Frances and Larry Kettell are in the office on the second floor office in the Buckingham Shopping Center. Frances is a woman of a certain age with an aura of authority, and a fashionable frock. Kettell is a burly man who has worked outdoors all his life. He is the Overseer of the Buckingham plantation, and she is he Queen. He lives in the neat Cape Cod cottage on Glebe road, the only exception to the uniform blocks of garden apartments that are now complete over nearly 120 acres of prime Arlington real estate.

The Queen resides at the The Shoreham in the District. Her driver brings her to this office on Glebe each business day.

From the windows of the office, Frances can see the low brown brick blocks stretch along Glebe Road from the office north to the field of wildflowers near the Ballston shopping area, and south to a verdant swath of woods that stand as a barrier to the noise of increasingly busy Route 50.

The County has aggressively widened the old two lane National Boulevard into a major east-west route heading for Fairfax City- a proto-expressway in segments near Arlington Hall, where the Defense Department had just announced the establishment of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The last of the Georgian-styled garden apartments- Buckingham Village sections I-III- were finished a decade ago; the property south of Route 50 on the Four Mile Run had been developed as the Claremont area of modest single-family homes by Gerald, her only son.

The low-lying area of Claremont, the part on the hundred-year flood plain that could not be built on, had been donated to the County in exchange for the right to build the houses. The County graciously named the park for Allie, and would serve as the only public memorial to the man from New York who transformed the County into communal properties for workers of moderate means.

Gerald sensed the change in the preferences of the buying public. They wanted space, and they wanted privacy, and they wanted distance from the rising social pressures of the District. The last segregated high school in Fairfax- W.T.Woodson- is being constructed in Fairfax. The last black-only high school, Luther Jackson, is complete. Arlington County has announced its intention not to comply with Richmond's rejectionist position on the races.

Fairfax will resist integration.

Gerald would drop his children off at the office in Buckingham before continuing west on Route 50 to investigate the possibilities of vacant land outside the Beltway. He had his eye on the fields east of the Star Petroleum tank farm.

The kids would often ride with Frances in the big Caddy, and look out at her subjects in Buckingham. The last undeveloped parcels in the Freed empire was the seven acre strip along Route 50 that served as a barrier against the increasing road noise, and the pie-shaped vacant lot between the churches on North 2nd Street.

A reporter from the Post was coming. John Willmann was a staff writer who specialized in the volatile Washington real estate beat. He was a thin man in a dark suit and white shirt. His glasses were thick black frames, and he wore a hat with a thin brim that he removed in respect as he walked up the stairs of the white brick building whose second floor is occupied by the headquarters of the Paramount Communities.

Willmann is onto something in the real estate market, seeing that something profound was in progress in the wake of the shooting of JFK in Dallas. There was an edgy electric feeling in the air, and it was reflected in cash and cars and houses. The suburbs were exploding in acres of new single-family homes. This is an opportunity to drum up interest in the other trend, the erection of apartment blocks similar to those in the District in close-in Arlington.

Frances agreed to speak to him in her capacity as Mrs. Allie S. Freed, in her capacity as head of the Paramount Communities Corporation and several other commercial entities that own and control Buckingham.

The long black Caddie is downstairs. Driver Mickey is checking with his bookie on likely horses at Aqueduct on a pay phone near the florist.

Frances is gracious, and does a photo op for the reporter, pretending to gesture at a drawing with her veteran general manager, Lawrence F. Kettell.

"We are aware that the 1960s is the era of the high-rise apartment so we have started construction of an 8-story, 246-unit modern concrete-brick-and- glass building on our property at Arlington Blvd. and N. Pershing Drive."

"Let's face it. The land that my husband assembled nearly 30 years ago has increased in value as our Nation's Capital area has pushed out. Our garden buildings, most of them only 2-stories high, are occupying close-in land that might, conceivably, be sold for $25 a square foot. We will complete the new Big Pink high-rise and then decide what comes next. I have hired Vlastimil Koubek to design it, and it is being built by H R H Construction.

"The Buckingham mortgage has been paid off and the next phase of our program may be to plan razing-before many years-some of the low, Georgian-styled buildings and replace them with a few towering structures that have elevator service and all those other extras that people seem to want these days. Our site is like an estate and it offers a park-like setting."

Kettell leaned forward, emphasizing his agreement. “We are keeping up with the times. We have modernized Buckingham, and updated the kitchens. Some are now on their fourth new refrigerator, three times as big as the original. Our occupancy rate is 99 percent, and our annual turnover only 15 percent. We paid $250.000 for complete new wiring so the tenants can have their own air conditioners. Our maintenance staff keeps things in good condition. Let's face it: Buckingham is a great value. The rent for an efficiency starts at $74 and ranges up to $162 for our biggest unit, a three-bedroom duplex. That is only twice what it was when we opened the first units in 1938.”

Frances smiled, serene. "I'm always meeting someone who tells me that he or she once lived here. One of our illustrious alumni is Milton Elsberg. He once lived in one of our 196 buildings. He also started his first Drug Fair store in our Buckingham shopping center. We have 27 stores, you know, including a theater."

“We have a vision for what Arlington needs. I have lived all my life at the Shoreham Hotel in the District, and that is the sort of elegance we would like to bring here. The owner, Bernie Bralove, is my friend and landlord." She smiled enigmatically.

“You see, we have been faithful to my late husband's dedication to provide moderately priced family rental housing. He was broken up by the unemployment and the breadlines of the 1930s. The automobile business was in the doldrums. But be was a man of vision and ideals. He decided that housing should be a major industry, and it could provide needed jobs and better living conditions. He talked about his plans with FDR, for whom he served as the director of the Committee for Economic Recovery and Social Progress."

“He had a vision of applying mass production techniques from the auto business to building. He found the property and put together the deals for the farms here. He got Henry Wright to design the campus. Hank was chair of the Columbia University School of Journalism. Allie got the project underway with Allen Kamstra and Al Lueders, Allen just passed away, bless him.”

“We were not the very first FHA-approved rental housing project in this area, since Colonial Village beat us out by a few months due to the delays caused by my husband's passing. But our development was considered a model by the Federal Housing Administration. They sent such a succession of professional visitors that we became something of a school for housing. Eleanor Roosevelt was a great supporter and used to come here often. As you know, she asked me to serve on the board of governors for her Institute for Cancer Research.”

"There are no thoroughfares in our project. Streets were designed to protect young children.”

“We have always tried to keep people and automobiles separate on our campus. I gave my daughter the Cadillac that had been custom-built for my husband before his death. We drove that one right through the War and into the 1950s when we finished construction."

"Oh yes, we were talking about Buckingham and the Big Pink high-rise, weren't we? Well, you can say it will have a heated swimming pool for year-around use, a roof sun-deck and social rooms. And there will be good landscaping and open spaces, just like we have in the original Buckingham."

"I shouldn't be doing this at my age-heavens, I turned down many opportunities on other projects. But this is Buckingham and we've got to keep up with the times, don't we?"

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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