13 May 2009
 
The Laundry Room

(Basement Laundry Room)
 
It is a chicken-and-egg thing, and I wish I had time to slow down and have some eggs this morning. Unfortunately, I have to be someplace else and there is nothing to be done about it. To make an omelet you have to break eggs, right? No time.
 
So no eggs and no chickens this morning, though I do have time to wonder which came first, the idea of the social laundry or the necessity and expense of the washing machines forcing central locations where people had to gather.
 
The Buckingham master plan had no place for messy disorganized clothes-lines. It would have ruined the whole park-like concept of open sight lines. No washing machines in the individual units, of course, the rooms were designed for smaller Americans who lived in the years of the Great Depression.
 
So, with stay-at-home Moms, the laundry rooms in the basements of the Buckingham neighborhood were hotbeds of social activity, washing and folding and talking.
 
There have been some great topics discussed there in front of the Maytags. There was the Stuff No One Was Supposed to Know that happened at Arlington Hall, where many of the men (and some of the women) worked at matters of great secrecy.
 
The Buckaroo had advertisements for Language Clubs for people who had served overseas, in the State Department, or in the organizations that pretended to be the State Department. And later, after the war, the spate of growth in single family houses.
 
It was a completely different vision than the one that created Buckingham. Frances Freed had turned development of some of the property south on Four Mile run over to her son, and he had produced the Claremont neighborhood.
 
It is the very embodiment of the Veteran’s home: simple slab, small lot, small rooms.
 
The pressure to develop larger homes further out across the Arlington County line was growing. The Freed Real Estate empire began to look west, toward Fairfax, and up. That is where Big Pink came from. It was a sort of testbed for the idea of exploiting the location close to Washington with higher density housing.
 
As Frances noted in an interview with the Post in the early 1960s, “The mortgage on Buckingham was nearly paid off,” and she wanted to stay up with the times. Property values were soaring, and she had a vision of Buckingham turning into a forest not of trees, but of soaring buildings.
 
Vlastimil Koubek was enlisted to do the design in 1963. The Czech-born architect was an acolyte of the International Style, and Frances worked with him closely. She specified the details, the unique color of the dusty mauve brick, the rich look of the lobby and the wood-paneled concierge desk, while he provided the clean lines and big glass of the eight -story building.
 
The rooms were bigger than Buckingham, and you can feel the sense of space conveyed by all the glass. It was the first thing that struck me when I washed up at the building seven years ago. It is quite remarkable.
 
The building was planted on the forest edge of the Buckingham neighborhood, the last bit of property to be developed, and which had served as a green buffer for the neighborhood from the increasingly congested Route 50 to the south.
 
The amenities were superb, but Big Pink carried over some of the baggage of the past. There was not enough garage parking for all the residents, and that had been a problem in Buckingham as well. Americans were getting used to the idea that all adults needed a car.
 
And there were still central laundry rooms. Oh, they were better than Buckingham, to be sure, more refined. Not located in dark basements that had to accessed from outside, like Buckingham. Those had always been a problem there, and the buildings were well-maintained by the Freeds, but it was still a journey to do the sheets.
 
There are two of them on each floor, located near the junction of the north-south wings that join the main structure. There are two washing machines and two dryers in each one.
 
Theoretically, you can always find a place to do a load of wash, but let’s face it, the tide was beginning to run out on communal facilities.
 
When Frances was experimenting with a new model for Buckingham, she couldn’t quite break out of the past. Her suite at the Shoreham Hotel on Rock Creek Park was luxurious, but did not have a washer and a dryer.
 
The laundry was taken care of by servants in a central facility in the basement of the hotel. Dry cleaning was sent out, as is still the custom.
 
America had not completely arrived at the suburban ideal, where every home was its own castle, complete with its own automated laundry where you could wash your under things in comfort and privacy.
 
You can see the problem today. When the women are in the laundry rooms, many of them prop the doors open for safety. You cannot see your door from there, and locking up with a laundry basket in hand is a hassle. Of course you could leave the place unlocked, this is a safe building, but still….
 
The coin machines still served a large segment of the population, and if the laundry rooms at Big Pink were too small for the residents to gather and talk, they certainly were elsewhere. Big Pink was two years old when the ACCESS marchers began to demand that Frances integrate the neighborhood.
 
At the Econowash laundry a two miles from here, men were washing brown shirts and muttering about change. In Buckingham, the residents were certainly talking about that, and how the new ranch-style houses out in Fairfax and south in Springfield all had their own washer-dryers.
 
And no civil rights marchers at all.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com