27 November 2007

Distilled


It is a strange morning, and it is not about the great events in the wide world. It is about one man who had no opinions about any of it, at least in a public manner. For a public figure, he was quite private. The word is that the twenty-four year old Free Safety of the Washington Redskins is neither free nor safe.

Last night the word was that he had been shot, was in surgery for eight hours, and was showing signs of stability.

This morning he is dead. The channeled violence and aggressive play that could have guaranteed a life of ease may or may not have contributed to his demise. He was well-liked, and very talented. The legend this morning is that he was the victim in a burglary, and must have resisted, or frightened the intruder who shot him in the upper thigh.

His femoral artery was severed, and all the best medical attention in the world could not save him.

We will only know the story as it is agreed on, since none of us knew him. A family friend says the Sean Taylor expired in the night.

If he is not safe in his home, who could be? Was it his fame that attracted the robbers who would, in an instant, become his murderers?

What of the rest of us, in our homes? Big Pink is a proud tower that juts from the edge of the Buckingham neighborhood, inviolate on its seven-acre park-like campus.

I have been lost in its past, meeting and hearing Queen Frances Freed as she was in 1964, and unearthing more history and texture about the dream she brought into being on this land. The dream is being razed and cleared for something else that is coming. It is a two-part project; half of it is the accommodation of the property owner's desire to construct luxury town-homes, closely clustered. The other half is the worthy public goal of preserving affordable housing for the poor.

I can see where that will be, just on the other side of the Big Pink parking lot. The two large rental buildings will be further away from the Metro stop than the luxury town-homes, but that is the way of things, isn't it?
When I got home yesterday, there was alarm in the air at the concierge desk. Rhonda had worked the day shift, as befits her seniority on the staff. She mentioned that there was a meeting of a woman's group at the Barrett School that evening and she was too tired to attend.

Rhonda is on foot in the neighborhood, since she does not drive. She lives near Big Pink, in a manner that is antique; she walks to the store and walks to work.

Thus, she is of the neighborhood in a way that the rest of us are not.

I asked if the meeting was about security, and she said she did not know. She assumed it was, since the upper middle class residents of the Forest are probably as alarmed as the rest of us at the prospect of what the County has decided to do. The poor of Arlington are to be concentrated in Buckingham, and the activity on the streets show that things are already changing.

Rhonda gestured in agitation, her eyes flashing. “I saw seven police cars in three blocks the other night. I have been walking here for ten years and at the worst I never saw anything like that!”

It was a funny thing. The County had participated in the renovation of the garden apartments, and encouraged the developers to build the large new high-density apartment blocks that are displacing the Salvadorans. You would think that would be progress, and maybe it is.

Maybe the evil that has been all around us all along is just being concentrated though relocation. Distilled.

1954

Allie Freed had purchased more property than the parcels north of Route 50. The fall line of the Potomac, dropped from the edge of the Piedmont to the level of the Potomac can be seen just beyond the flanks of Big Pink, in the hard native rocks washed smooth at the bottom of Lubber Run.

He acquired a parcel on the Four Mile run south of Route 50, but it sat neglected as Buckingham surged to completion in 1942. Frances Freed, looking to the future, tasked her son Gerald to dream the same sort of grand dreams of his father.

“What will people want when this war is over?” she asked rhetorically. She already knew, and then she turned the idea over to her son Gerald.

He, in turn, enlisted the experts who had constructed Buckingham for something different; there would be a communal development a la Buckingham, of course, but there would be something else: single family units that reflected the American Dream.

They would be modest, by later standards, small Cape Cod houses of one and half stories, and two-story Colonial Revival-style houses. They rose between 1946 and 1954, in parallel with the exploding demand. Gerald used the latest assembly-line techniques to put up the all-frame homes in greater Washington. Claremont reflects the adaptive technology inherent in the use of rationed strategic materials.

The men who planned Buckingham were brought in to help Gerald; this was his first big project on his own. Legendary garden complex architects Clarence Stein and Henry Wright contributed gentle sight-lines and winding streets with efficiently-planned houses of traditional styles. In 1954, the last section of Claremont was complete, consisting of the ranch house design made famous in Long Island's Levittown.

The last block of Buckingham was completed as well, and the massive development of well-landscaped grounds and winding streets was finished, the culmination of Allie Freed's dream: low density living for the working people who served the capital.

In Claremont is his memorial. On the low land that Code says you cannot build on, Gerald donated the property to the County for a park named for his father. Allie S. Freed Park fronts on the Four Mile Run, and has a bridge and a paved trail. It is described in today's terms as “passive green space,” but of course there was nothing at all passive about how it came to be.

It was downright pro-active.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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