09 November 2007

All Fall Down



The George Schultz Foreign Training Center, AKA Arlington Hall Station

If we are short on anything in this tale of Buckingham, it would be sex.

There, I've said it. It is the reason we are all here, of course, and more so for some of us than others. Based on the number of baby carriages and children running around the parts of the original Community, there is plenty of it still happening.

I will have to address that shortfall in the Director's Cut of this book; the one with the breathless and provocative scenes that proves I can deliver on actually human emotion better than, say, Tom Clancy, whose machines have more erotic appeal than his people.

Sex is something that comes in the moment, the glance, the caught breath and widened eyes that say, “Yes, now.”

That is not the way of most human affairs that have any staying power. Allie S. Freed put down hard money in 1935 to start the Buckingham, and the first anchor apartments on Glebe Road did not show up for two years. Remember, that was at the tail end of the Depression, just as the war overseas was starting to generate top-quality jobs, and men were eager to work.

By the time the Defense Intelligence Agency plopped down at Arlington hall, filling the vacuum left by the establishment of NSA, it was already scheming to leave. These things take time, and the story of the fall of Buckingham is one that takes place in parallel time continuum of the military and civic planners.

Most of us live in real time; which is morning by morning. I know, generally, where I am supposed to be. My planning horizon generally goes from check-to-check, with the outer reaches of the whole month and mortgage.

It comes as a surprise when on some morning a chain link fence has embraced a part of the neighborhood, signifying the imminent arrival of the bulldozers.
 
The destruction of Buckingham I-III has been argued about for more than a decade, the rapacious developers on the one side, and those strange beings known as “community activists” on the other.

We in Big Pink are of the community, but separate from it, and clueless.

Those clever ones that have the clues work on an entirely alternate calendar. For example, I once had a small part in a long fight to erect a massive new wing for the Defense Intelligence Agency. It was intended to actually afford room for all the Spooks who reported to the Agency, since the last vestiges of their Arlington presence remain.

The project, from good idea that had to be defended against the Congress across the Future Years Defense Plan, took nearly ten years to execute.

The relocation program is still not complete. For reasons of delicacy and security, I will not disclose where they are. It is a curious thing, that I have to be circumspect to you, since the People's Liberation Army of China operated a restaurant across the street for years to keep an eye on them.

The restaurant has lately been a victim to re-development, though of course it is possible that the new construction on the block is a new, wholly owned subsidiary of the PRC.

In any event, although DIA remained at Arlington Hall until 1983, the plans for the new building and re-location were well known for at least five years before the fact. Things take that long.

At the same time, the new Interstate that slashes across Arlington, bisecting north and south, was in the planning stages since the 1960s. Ditto the Orange Line of the Metro.

The things that were going to kill Buckingham as what it was, and turn it into what it is today were no secrets to anyone in the know. Like the locations where the Spooks live, it is only a mystery to the taxpayers.

Frances Freed was an optimist. The Hyde Park complex began to rise in 1971, and when complete, would have occupied the ballfields and wildflowers where the Harris Teeter Grocery now stands. It was complete just in time for the market in rental real estate in Arlington to fall apart.

The inventory of new homes in the Counties beyond the Beltway was expanding. The roads were improving. Everyone knew that the government activities at Arlington Hall were going to go away.

The County happily contributed to the blight. The Buckingham neighborhood had once been self-contained. Now George Mason Drive was designated as a parkway north and south through all Arlington. A quiet drive to the back of the neighborhood first punched through to Park, to connect with Carlin Drive, and then all the way through to Wilson and beyond.

Henderson punched north to Glebe Road, and the County filled and paved over the Buckingham pool complex where Quincy Road now runs into Ballston. The place had outlasted its time; the Klan had protested there in the sixties over the inclusion of minorities, and the whole issue seemed better as asphalt.

Certainly it was quicker.

Traffic was moving fast on the roads, the apartments too small for the new nuclear families. Frances Freed's tenure as Queen of Buckingham was just about over.

The things that held Buckingham together were splitting it apart. It remained a rental community through the end of the 1970's under her ownership, but the sharks were circling. The savvy investors knew what was coming, and they smelled profit.

The Klingbeil Management Group, Inc. of Columbus, Ohio, had been eying Buckingham complex for years, and purchased the lot from Paramount Communities in 1981.

Klingbeil immediately spun off the profitably units of the dream, including the current Glebe Road Apartments, the glittering Hyde Park, and the venerable Big Pink.

Buckingham Venture, an affiliate of Chicago-based Stein and Company Real Estate acquired both the big buildings and seventy-five percent of the apartment units.

Everything was rental then, but that was going to change. A new concept in real estate development was transforming the market, and the developers loved it. Under the Condominium construct, the new owners sold the apartments to the people living in them, and turned over responsibility for maintenance and management to the inmates of the asylums.

The scheme was to flip all of Buckingham into private ownership in three phases, but the recession that came along with the Oil Crisis caused the market to collapse. Only Hyde Park, Big Pink and the first parcel of 372 apartments were sold successfully.

The remaining thousand units Venture were sold in 1983 to Hall Management Company of Southfield, Michigan. A third of these, which became Buckingham Village, was divided between Hall Associates and the Klingbeil Company.

That same year, DIA pulled up stakes and the vast campus at Arlington Hall was mostly vacant, the “temporary” buildings having assumed historic significance even as they drooped into the earth.

Buckingham slid into the bottom of the income levels of Arlington County, and the demographics began to assume the character that they became in 2000; 45% Hispanic, 35% Caucasian, 11% Asian and rest assorted.

The Army remained at Arlington Hall, though its heart was not in it. INSCOM consolidated its headquarters there, and in the way of things, reorganized as a simulation of progress.

Five multidiscipline intelligence groups became brigades, and reflecting how the Service Intelligence Agencies had come down in the world, shed collection and analysis as primary missions. Other agencies would perform those functions elsewhere, ending the national role that Arlington Hall had fulfilled since 1942.

With it's primary customer now the Army itself, INSCOM relocated to Fort Belvoir in 1989 as a cost saving matter. The western side of the campus was given to the National Guard Bureau, and the Spooks were gone.

Surplus government property must be offered to other government entities before disposal, and the old Girl's school was an attractive parcel, though still configured as a wartime intelligence complex. State was willing to take a gamble that the attractiveness of the property, close-in and on Route 50, which crosses into the District just south of Foggy Bottom four miles to the east.

The State Department consulted with the Virginia State Historic Preservation Office in 1989 to determine the impact to the Arlington Hall Historic District if the National Foreign Affairs Training Center were to occupy the property.

The Office determined that new construction would change the character of the historic district, though if the new construction was “compatible with the existing structures,” that was good enough.

Historic and disintegrating Buildings “A” and “B” were demolished, though the proud colonial central building was retained and rehabilitated to the Secretary of State's exacting standards. The old headquarters area is now surrounded with additional security fencing, much more impressive than it was in the old days when it was the center of the Cold War SIGINT effort.

Permission to redevelop was contingent on maintaining some of the “historic character of the campus.”

Remember that thought. You will be hearing it again in Buckingham Village.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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