Virginia Rambler: This Was a Neighborhood

Driving around northern Virginia, I sometimes play a game: When I pass an office park, shopping mall, or modern subdivision, I try to imagine what was there years ago. This can occupy a lot of hours, as we have a lot of office parks, shopping malls, and subdivisions here. I never run out of places to wonder about; the DC metro area has an insatiable appetite for the "new." Every few weeks, I spot another "fallen soldier." Many of the fallen had been modest houses on (relatively) large lots, with massive shade trees and an assortment of sheds, garages, doghouses, swing sets, and stacks of firewood.

The time right after houses are bulldozed is the worst. The naked, deforested landscape is an open wound. Some county zoning boards actively try to ensure that at least the mature trees are spared. Agreements are sometimes reached, but in reality, it's easier for developers to denude the landscape and pay whatever small fines are incurred. Five hundred dollars for a 50-year-old oak? No problem.

In 2011, Alexandria's Lewin Park neighborhood joined the ranks of the fallen. Lewin Park was a subdivision built in the early 1950s. There were 24 lots, of which 18 were developed. (The remainder was forested land.) The circled red area in the aerial photo shows Lewin Park. See all the green? It will be gone very soon, and this stretch of land will look like those bare-naked buildings directly north of it. The homes are gone already.

Let's stroll down Lewin Drive and Arco Street--the only two streets in this former development--and see what was there before the bulldozers. First up is 6914 Beulah Street. This is a double lot. There was a modest house and garage, dwarfed by some stately shade trees. The soil, which is sandy, is good for planting, and the last inhabitants did so to great advantage. (Good soil is not a given in this area; there's a lot of "marine clay," and marine clay is akin to cement when dry and akin to a water-logged sponge when wet.)  

(Click on any picture to get a larger version.)

We became friends with Robert and Therese, the couple who lived in this house. In the summer, they'd sell produce and flowers from their yard. (The best part of this was that they're directly across the street from a large chain grocery store, whose produce leaves a lot to be desired.) Tomatoes, spaghetti squash, peppers, watermelons, cantaloupes, strawberries, eggplant, zucchini, and in the fall, pumpkins. Oh, and corn! Pick-it-yourself-right-off-the-stalk corn.

The Borg-like structure beyond the corn is part of the adjacent office complex. It's a "green" building, but not the kind of green you see in the cornstalks in the foreground. Ironically, the ground floor of the Borg building houses Walker's Grille, a restaurant that features sustainably farmed foods. (Did they die inside a little when this house was bulldozed and the fields went fallow for the last time?)

And here's a long view, to give you a sense of the scale of the trees (the house is to the right). The grass beneath the trees was softer than velvet. We never passed up an opportunity to kick off our flip-flops and revel in it.

This was the back porch, which Robert built. The baskets are for gathering the produce you picked; the scissors are for cutting fruits and vegetables from their vines. (Watermelons do not go willingly.) To the right is a scale and a handwritten price list. When Robert and Therese weren't home, you could weigh your goods and leave the money between the doors or under the mat.

On one of our last visits before demolition, Katie says good-bye to one of the trees in Robert and Therese's yard. The circumference of this tree was 123 inches.

This little gray kitten followed us around before seeking some shade on Robert and Therese's back porch.

The geese loved Robert and Therese's lawn, too. (In the distance is the parking lot for part of Metro Park II, the adjacent office park.)

Just beyond 6914 Beulah is the small, Civil War-era Tyler and Devers family cemetery. This is the path leading to it. We would never have known it was there if Therese hadn't told us about it. Just to the left of this path is the backyard of one of the houses on Lewin Drive. The family there (no relation to those buried in this cemetery) used to take care of the cemetery.

Here's the weathered gravestone of Alfred Devers (1831-1865), son of Thomas and Elizabeth. Alfred was a Confederate soldier. He died in July of 1865, just 3 months after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, also in Virginia. The inscription on his tombstone says "He sleeps in Jesus." In an upcoming blog post, I'll be telling you more about this secluded little cemetery.

But now, on to the rest of Lewin Park (in no particular order). This house, at 6912 Arco Street, is one of my favorites. It's on a corner, so it overlooks all two of the streets of Lewin Park. I love the wraparound porch.

The other entrance to 6912 Arco Street, on Lewin Drive.

Brick house set back from the road and flanked by trees, 6312 Lewin Drive.

6244 Lewin Drive. Robert and Therese, who lived next door, told me that just before the family moved out of this house, they had a multigenerational family reunion here. (Note that there's no sidewalk. This isn't common anymore in Alexandria.)

6248 Lewin Drive.

6251 Lewin Drive.

6908 Arco Street. It's set back from the road, but there was still enough space for a backyard.

Okay, so nature was reclaiming this one (6254 Lewin Drive). But on the positive side, all the growing things helped insulate the house and shade it. It doesn't look bad, just very....leafy.

This is the south end of Arco Street, adjacent to the Franconia-Springfield Parkway. Note the oil tank on the side of the house, still in use up till the time the owner moved out. (After the neighborhood was vacant, but before the bulldozers moved in, someone emptied the contents of the tank onto the ground--an oozy, smelly mess. Maybe vandals, or maybe the unhappy owner moving out?)

The parkway, from Arco Street. It's deceptively quiet in this picture. But actually the road is 8 or 9 lanes wide here and it often backs up at the intersection, where we have one of the longest traffic lights in the county. There's been talk of widening the road (more), in part to accommodate the increased traffic that's anticipated when the future office park is fully occupied. If this is done, they'd almost certainly sacrifice the "buffer" now provided by the woods on lots 13-18 of Lewin Park.

Beautiful old holly tree at 6254 Lewin Drive. Holly trees are popular in northern Virginia; they were a favorite of George Washington, whose Mount Vernon is less than 10 miles from Lewin Park.

A child's swing set stands idle at 6907 Arco Street.

I love the horsehead fence post ornament. You don't see many fence ornaments like this anymore. In fact, around this part of northern Virginia, we don't see that many chain link fences, either. Mostly we see 6-foot-high wooden fences. They provide privacy for the homeowner, but also isolation. And you can't put horsehead ornaments on them.

Two Afghan dog ornaments perch on a gate. I tried to Google this kind of decoration and came up empty. The only reference I found was http://tinyurl.com/afkjjjy. If you know what these are called or where I can find out more about them, please add a comment with the info.

The intersection of roads 1233 and 1234 (otherwise known as Lewin Drive and Arco Street). This sign was tilting; maybe it was weary.

Look at this long back yard....

No more mail for the Hartmans (6316 Lewin Drive).

Nobody to play kickball with.

Some of the houses were in better repair than others, but they were all someone's home. The Nichols family lived in this home, at 6915 Arco Street. Dave Nichols married Linda, the "girl next door," who lived at 6242 Lewin Drive.

Summer and winter pastimes (6908 Arco Street)

Suspended animation.

The north end of Arco Street. You could drive from Lewin Park straight to the office park.... but why would you want to?

This weathered sign, on the front lawn at 6254 Lewin Street, must be from an earlier effort to buy up all the Lewin Park homes. I'm told that for a while there were some "holdouts," and the developer couldn't proceed till all the owners were willing to sell.

A well-kept house with a tidy front lawn and an ornamental base for the flagpole. This house was "younger" than the rest (built in 1965 as opposed to 1950/1951). Behind this is one of the buildings of Metro Park II. Not exactly the view I'd want from my backyard. (6316 Lewin)

At the end of Lewin Drive; beyond the brick wall is a surface parking lot for the Inova Springfield Healthplex. (As soon as the houses were vacant, workers knocked down this wall and extended the parking lot onto what was 6324 Lewin Drive (see next photo.)

When did people stop putting awnings on houses, anyway? This cutie, at 6324 Lewin Drive, was another favorite of mine; the red-and-white striped awnings seemed cheery. (It's now a parking lot.... with, alas, no awnings.)

And at 6320 Lewin Drive, another house with a lovely, long porch. In the county tax records the houses of Lewin Park are described as "dilapidated houses on improved lots." Well.... I agree with the "improved lots" part, but most of these houses don't match what I think of as dilapidated.

6254 Lewin Drive: Note the object near the fence line.

Elvis has left the building.

6922 Beulah Street. This one too was getting swallowed by foliage... but look how pretty that foliage was.

6308 Lewin Street. Note the rope swing in the tree, at far right.

Lots 13 through 19 were never developed. Now there's a mature forest covering them. After the houses were vacated, neighbors continued to walk down the shady streets, drive through with their children, and jog past. A few enterprising people came to gather kindling and to cut up fallen trees for firewood. 

This is the brick wall that separated Lewin Park from the office park that is home to the Inova Springfield Healthplex. One day, when Mark and I were wandering around, an elderly gentleman came walking out of the woods here, startling me (what can I say? I heard him before I saw him and for a panicked moment I thought maybe it was a bear.... not that we have bears here in Alexandria, but still). This gentleman introduced himself as John Clapp. He lives on the edge of Old Town and enjoys taking the Metro to various neighborhoods to go to Roy Rogers establishments. (There's a Roy Rogers across the road from Lewin Park. It's a mile, maybe more, on foot. It's an ugly walk if you take the main road, but if you know where to cut over to Lewin Drive, as Mr. Clapp did, it was a lovely, bucolic little jaunt.) Mr. Clapp is worth his own blog post, and perhaps I'll write that one soon.

Here's the sign that the developer plunked down on Robert and Therese's lawn. "Liberty View"?? Really? You'd think they could have named it after the neighborhood it's displacing, or give a nod to the generations of former landowners here. The area was first developed in the 1700s, when England's George II issued land grants in this region. 

Note that the sign above mentions the Springfield Metro. It's true; the Franconia-Springfield Metro station is just a mile or so from Lewin Park. You might think "oh, how wonderful for the people who live here; they can walk to public transportation." But the proximity to the Metro is part of what makes this irresistible to developers and county zoning boards--office workers can commute here. Lewin Park is 2.5 miles from the Fort Belvoir army base. The Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) plan of 2005 precipitated the move of more than 60 Department of Defense agencies and activities to Fort Belvoir (adding 19,000 military and civilian jobs). Contractors working for those agencies need nearby office space, and the Lewin Park land is an attractive location. 

I acknowledge the practicality of repurposing this area. And I'm aware that when Lewin Park was built, it displaced something else, which might not have been a popular decision at the time. In addition, I know that most, if not all, of the owners of the Lewin Park homes felt that their ship had come in when they sold those homes. They were offered as much as $1.4 million for homes valued at as little as $270,000. Some of those homes were last purchased for as little as $27,000. And a few had been in the same families since they were built in 1950, probably for even less money than that.

So it's not the homeowners I feel bad for. What saddens me is the loss of the way of life. Modest houses on large, tree-lined lots, where kids had clubhouses in the backyard and swing sets in the front yard. Houses far enough apart that you didn't need 6-foot-tall wooden fences for privacy. Lawns spacious enough to play croquet, or to practice batting a softball without fear of taking out your neighbor's window. A place to live where a homeowners' association wasn't scolding you regularly for infractions large and small. Where you not only knew your neighbors but might well have grown up and married one of them. 

In Fairfax County, we are concerned about the lack of affordable housing. But at the same time, we're repurposing what affordable housing we have. New affordable housing may be built as a compromise, but it won't look like Lewin Park. The small house on the large lot has been replaced by the large house on the small lot, the bunch-of-townhouses-on-the-large-lot, or, together with neighboring houses, the office park that brings jobs for which none of the area residents are qualified.

The population of Fairfax County has mushroomed since Lewin Park was built. In 1960, the population was 200,000. In 2000, it was 1 million. All those people need a place to live, and they need places to work. And they need access to public transportation; the roads simply can't accommodate the volume of traffic. Some people (not me) might argue that having a few small homes on large lots in such a prime location is a luxury we can no longer afford--a sort of "land hording," if you will--and that we should sacrifice the neighborhood for the sake of progress. But I miss those modest houses on the tree-lined streets of Lewin Park, and I regret that in no time at all, no one will know that this was a neighborhood.

UPDATE, APRIL 2024

Inova, a large northern Virginia healthcare provider, is building a hospital next to the existing HealthPlex. The site will obliterate Lewin Park (see map of new hospital complex below; approximate boundaries of Lewin Park are in pink). I suppose this is better than the mixed-use complex that was planned when the Lewin Park homes were bought. But when neighborhoods like Lewin Park go, they're gone forever. 

Notes

Here's a diagram of the lots in Lewin Park. (Still to come: a key that gives street addresses for the lot numbers on this diagram.)

Disclaimer
I did my best to provide the addresses for the houses pictured. But when I took the pictures, I was often trying not to be intrusive (or get chased off by a neighborhood dog... or landowner), and my notes are sketchier than I thought. There's no way to verify details now, since nothing remains of these houses. If you're aware of any factual errors, please let me know and I'll correct them promptly.

Lewin Park: The Sequel
Check back soon for Part 2 of This Was a Neighborhood, which will feature more photos, pre- and post-demolition.

Acknowledgements
Some of the details come from the Fairfax County Department of Tax Administration's Real Estate Assessment Information Site and from Zillow.com. Population figures are from www.censusscope.org. I also referred to the minutes of the Fairfax County Planning Commission, March 2011 and a 2008 Staff Report on the 2008 BRAC Area Plans Review. 
     Kudos to Friends of Accotink Creek, who posted a "Ghosts of the Accotink" feature about Lewin Park on their website: http://www.accotink.org/Ghosts_of_Accotink.htm.
     For a glimpse at the future Liberty View, see http://www.atlas-cap.com/portfolio/liberty-view.php and http://www.monumentrealty.com/index.php/liberty-view-at-springfield




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