03 November 2007

The Skids



History is a lot easier when everyone in it is dead. They cannot talk back at you, though I feel sometimes their yelling, muted by the tomb. It is harder when the participants can talk right back at you, even if the language is different.

Frances Freed is the key to Big Pink, its quirks and its gentility. I knew it the moment I walked into the marble-floored lobby, and first saw the light that poured into the little efficiency that was going to be my home.

I had looked for something “affordable” in Arlington, and what was available in 2001 was shop-warm and smelled of cat urine and worse in the halls.

Big Pink had been through some times, and come through with at least its skin intact.

There are some units that have not been touched since the initial construction was completed as one of the first high-end apartment buildings in Arlington, state of the art, plenty of parking, E-Z access to Route 50 and the Federal City.

It was complete just in time for the capital to burn with the assassination of Dr. King, and the dark time in Washington, when it was worth a suburban life to get too far from the shadow of the Capitol Dome.

Frances was still alive the first time I came to Washington. I got lost in Arlington on my way to the big demonstration downtown against the War; not that I was, particularly, but I certainly was eager to see what all the excitement was about. It was May of 1970, and there were 100,000 people in town to express displeasure with the shootings at Kent State, and the incursion into Cambodia.

My friend Larry was there, though I did not know him then, and I could have been at the Show, too. College seemed to much more attractive.

Big Pink would not have welcomed me then. Carl Albert, representative from McAlester, Oklahoma, was in position to be Speaker of the House that year. He was a Cold War Liberal, rock ribbed and down to earth, he knew value, and he rented a three bed-room unit in the building that overlooked the Capital. From the upper floors you can see the Washington Monument.

State Department installed the security cameras in the building to provide additional safety, since frankly, the Buckingham neighborhood was on the skids and it was not nearly as safe as it had been.

Arlington's population declined by 30,000 residents in the 1970s. The reasons were not any different than those elsewhere. Middle class families did not fit well into the Garden Apartments, which were built to smaller expectations than the new ranch homes strewn across Fairfax and Prince William County, and with the central city burned out, it was easier to create a new alternate society outside the Beltway.

That is not to say that Arlington as a whole hit the skids. The prim homes north of Route 50 stayed, entrenched. But south of the highway, down to Alexandria, did not vote and did not get much public money. There were tacky dives across Washington Boulevard from Fort Myer, peep shows and worse.

I remember the open-air drug mart at the bottom of the hill from the Nauk neighborhood, and walking from the north end of Alexandria to Old Town was a good way to get robbed.

Frances did her bit; with the success of Big Pink, she thrust up the Hyde Park building at the northwest corner of the Buckingham track, bigger, taller and more elegant than Big Pink, the final flower of the her version of the dream.

Hyde Park was going to be closer to the Metro, the visionary subway system that opened its first segment in 1976. It had washers and dryers in the unit. Frances was committed to fixing the little quirks that had been exposed in the construction and commissioning of Big Pink.

In between the two proud towers the Buckingham neighborhood was bisected by roads that now carried harried Spooks from Arlington Hall swiftly north and west to homes in the distant suburbs.

The garden apartments began to adapt to new realities, and with the loss of the war in Vietnam, accommodate a whole new class of residents.

The wars overseas came home, in a way that the people in the suburbs could understand only dimly. They abandoned the vision of Allie and Frances Freed, and of FDR and the New Deal.

It did open up a golden door of opportunity, right in the shadow of Big Pink.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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