14 May 2009
Watershed
(Author Alex Haley)
Great forces were in motion in the year of 1966. They manifested themselves on the world stage, and in local politics, and even in the real estate market.
The Civil rights protests under her office window must have given pause to the Queen of Buckingham. Frances Freed had already laid the foundation for what she saw as the great change coming. She presided over what the magazines once called “the largest garden apartment complex in the United States,” and a place that had favorable mention by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in her daily newspaper column.
It was a social experiment from it very beginning. Industrialist Allie Freed was a confident of the FDR, and an official in his cabinet. Buckingham was one of the first projects financed by private capital under the terms of the Federal Housing Administration's Insured Mortgage System. However, the participation of the government was limited to insurance of the mortgage.
The last of the six Buckingham sections was completed in 1954, and ten years later the stout concrete pillars of Big Pink began to soar skyward. Frances had another dream. She intended to marry the idea of the park-like campus with larger, more efficient structures like those near her residence in the District on the edges of Rock Creek Park.
All the commotion below her window must have made her think about what was next; the market was clearly shifting, the mortgage on Buckingham nearly paid off. Perhaps it was time to move on. She began to consider changing the access of the neighborhood.
Where Big Pink looms over Route 50, near the Arlington Hall Station, it was clear that the old World War Two complex of wooden buildings would only be a temporary home for the newly-established Defense Intelligence Agency.
Mass transit would probably follow the old trolley lines from Rosslyn, on the Potomac, up past the Courthouse and Clarendon and Ballston. She thought the next high-rise building should anchor the northern flank of Buckingham. This would be a real gem of a development, with all the bells and whistles, incorporating the lessons-learned from the Big Pink project.
The new building would feature in-unit washers and dryers, and have enough space for the residents to park in a garage.
Of course, that meant that existing parts of Buckingham would have to be razed. But that is progress, after all. Nothing is forever.
The marching and counter protests by ACCESS and the Nazis and the Klan must have been disconcerting for a social progressive, and by the end of the year she must have determined that the law would be obeyed, and that qualified renters, regardless of race, would be permitted to rent in her kingdom.
It was not a stunning development; she was, after all the very paragon of practicality. But if you consider how the year began, and how it ended in Arlington, it is enough to see the dam holding back the forces of change begin to crack.
The bookend to the Arlington Civil Rights marching was not far away.
The administrative offices of the American Nazi Party were on Randolph Street, near the Buckingham Swim Club. There was a bookstore, too, and those locations had provided the public face for George Lincoln Rockwell’s political movement.
They were not the inner sanctum, though. That was further out in the little county, at 6150 Wilson Boulevard, in the Dominion Hills neighborhood.
It was wet the last time I was up at the site, which is the highest point in the County. It is not far from the old District Line; in fact, SW-8, one of the stones placed to mark the boundary in 1791 is only a couple hundred yards away, and worth a look if you happen to be in the area.
The old farm lane that leads up to the top of the hill is still there, but paved now. A very large tree has toppled across it, just as one was on one of the attempts on Rockwell’s life.
The road there begins to climb to the heights, and the County has placed a chain across the entrance.
There is a splendid little regional park on top of the hill now. It has one of those mechanized batting cages and miniature golf. There is a pavilion that can be reserved for picnics and other wholesome outdoor activities.
That is not how the property looked in the Spring of 1966. Author Alex Haley took a cab to the place at the request of Playboy Magazine, and here is how it looked to him that April:
“The car turned into a narrow, tree-lined road, slowed down as it passed a NO TRESPASSING sign (stamped with a skull and crossbones) and a leashed Doberman watchdog, and finally pulled up in front of a white, 16-room farmhouse emblazoned at floor -- and second-story levels with four-foot-high red swastikas...”
There is high drama in the interview, and high irony. Haley was the first African American to rise to be pinned as a Chief Petty Officer in the US Coast Guard, and its first designated journalist.
He confronted Commander Rockwell, who continued to use the title of rank he had earned before being thrown out of the Navy for his radical racist views.
Swinger, libertarian and soft-core porn entrepreneur Hugh Hefner had dispatched Haley to interview the American Fuhrer in his Arlington lair; Rockwell consented to the interview on the condition that the interviewer not be Jewish, but said nothing about race.
You can still find the interview on-line if you look for it. It is hard reading today, and it was pretty amazing then.
It was around that time that people began to say they read Playboy for the articles, if you can imagine.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com