Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  Til Hazel, who was born and raised Southern, took no little satisfaction in watching his native land of Northern Virginia approach and then eclipse the economic energy of that Yankee bastion across the Potomac, the District of Columbia. Lee’s personal command, after all, was not called the Army of Northern Virginia for nothing.

  Thus it was, with a firm faith in the inevitability of progress, that Hazel in the late 1980s turned his attention to the land he had acquired near the exit from Interstate 66 labeled MANASSAS. For, he came to see, right there next to the Manassas National Battlefield Park—Bull Run to Northerners—was a prime place for a new Edge City. It could contain as much as 4.3 million square feet of nonresidential space—the size of downtown Fort Lauderdale—plus 560 homes. It would do the local economy a lot of good.

  The last thing he expected was a fight.

  Abraham Lincoln, a century before, on November 19, 1863, had also focused his attention on a bloody battlefield. The address Lincoln gave that date—its opening words were “Four-score and seven years ago”—was in Gettysburg, of course, not Manassas. But his words echoed eerily exactly 125 years later, and eighty miles south, on Til Hazel’s development abutting the National Park on which soil Thomas Jonathan Jackson had first been described as standing against the Union “like a stone wall.”

  “In a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground,” Lincoln said. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract …

  “It is rather for us …” said the tall, gaunt man, “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.”

  II

  Present at Creation

  In the beginning all the world was America.

  —John Locke

  THE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON AIR is warm and thick, even at this altitude. Long gray wisps of mist snag on trees and rolling hills to the east, in the direction of Washington. From the walkway near the top of Tycon Tower, Til Hazel can point to just where he farmed, before the earth had moved.

  “You know, it’s a strange thing. We took very few pictures. One of the great disappointments is that I have no picture at all of our horses. The old team that I used to work and plow and everything,” says Hazel.

  “But as far as Tysons, let’s try to set the stage. Basically, 123 was a narrow two-lane road. There was a big hill over here and 123 snaked around. Oh, yes, it’s been leveled. The topo has dramatically changed.

  “In 1939, when I first saw it”—Hazel was nine—“Route 7 had a beer joint and it had the feed store. The beer joint—it seems like to me I remember one of those Coca-Cola signs that said ‘Tysons Inn.’ But around here, you wanted to talk about it, you just said ‘the beer joint.’ ”

  Hazel steps over a rope the diameter of his wrist, from which a window washer dangles, a hundred feet below. The brick precipice from which he dispenses history rims a Philip Johnson-designed skyscraper.

  “The famous orchard was right over here at the entrance to the mall. It was just on the other side of the Marriott.” Pointing, he leans far enough out over the parapet to make his companion queasy. “Apple orchard.”

  “Then you had a ninety-five-acre dairy farm that was foreclosed on during the war. It was on the market for $18,000 in 1945. Owned by a family named Ayers. That was the farm I tried to get my aunt to buy. She said to me—and I remember it vividly—she said, ‘Well, tell me, what in the world would I want with a property way out in the country?’ ”

  From the perimeter Hazel prowls, one can enjoy a vista from the National Cathedral in Washington, ten miles east, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, twenty-five miles west. What he points to as he walks this day are not those wonders, though. Instead, he is consumed by the hundreds of strange, sprawling, towering shapes below.

  The hill with all the tower cranes—that’s where old one-eyed Marcus Bles grazed his Angus cattle in the 1950s. “Bles bought the gravel pit, and his first moneymaker was gravel fifty cents a ton, and you haul it.”

  Only from this height is it clear that a hill existed where Hazel pointed. It is not that the rise is inconsiderable. To the contrary, it is the highest natural point in this part of Virginia. It is just that closer to ground level the landscape has been so bulldozed and banked, it is easy to think no contour of the land was left that had been put there by the Creator. On the slopes of that cow pasture and gravel pit of yore now rises the Tysons II Galleria, a $1 billion, fifteen-year office, retail, and hotel project that, all by itself, dwarfs many of America’s old downtowns.

  From the top of this tower, Til views a landscape that John Rolfe Gardiner referred to in his novel In the Heart of the Whole World. To be sure, Gardiner was being irreverent when he barely fictionalized this mall-centered metropolis. But then again, there is something about Tysons—the largest urban agglomeration between Washington and Atlanta—that evokes that from people. Over to the west is the megastructure with the curved white six-story entrance that causes everybody to refer to it as the Up Toilet Seat Building. Above Hazel, at the very pinnacle of the JTL Tycon office tower on whose edge he paces, jut two crowning brick arches. It is these arches that led this building to be variously dubbed the World’s Tallest Shopping Bag and the World’s Tallest McDonald’s.

  Directly below is the mall in which the arrival of Blooming-dale’s—seen in the early 1970s as the epitome of New York fashion, not to mention decadence—caused a sensation. When one pioneering diplomatic contingent from Beijing arrived in Washington, the first thing they wanted was not a tour of the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument. What they wanted was to get out past the legendary eight-lane Beltway that reputedly separates Washington from reality. They wanted to go to Tysons. They wanted to see “Broomie’s.” They wanted a stiff dose of America.

  As Hazel walks and talks this day, he points out what are literally the landmarks of his six decades of life. But he also marks the revolution in America that has crystallized in such Edge Cities.

  Hazel should know about this revolution, for he has done more to shape the Washington area than any man since Pierre L’Enfant, the Frenchman who designed the District of Columbia for George Washington. A comparison of Hazel to L’Enfant is by no means idle. Metropolitan Washington today is not only one of the ten largest urban areas in America. In the late 1980s, it was the fastest-growing white-collar office job market in North America and Europe for four years in a row. Its private-enterprise, high-information, high-education, post-Industrial Revolution economy made it a model of what American urban areas would be in the twenty-first century. Its growth, of course, was marked by this strange new Edge City form, not by the old ways of L’Enfant. As a result, it became an archetype for every city worldwide that was growing.

  Hazel, by being among the first to comprehend and enthusiastically clear the way for this kind of world, also became an intriguing model of the Edge City creator. Originally a lawyer and then a developer, by the late 1980s he had accumulated a personal fortune estimated at $100 million. The estate on which his family lived, an hour from the White House, spanned a fair-sized valley and four thousand acres of land—a respectable spread by the standards of Montana. To understand him was to understand how a whole new world had been shaped.

  John Tilghman Hazel, Jr., has a face you could carve into a jack-o’-lantern. Angular slabs dominate. They descend outward from his eyes and his nose in parallel diagonals, like corporal’s chevrons. His jaw is a meaty block. His crew cut—crew cut!—makes the top of his head as flat and square as its bottom, although less wide. The effect is like looking at the end of a barn with its peak razored off.

  Over the decades, Hazel has so successfully, rapidly, and visibly transformed entire Northern Virginia landscapes that his vanquished opponents have been reduced to describing him in satanic terms—no less than the Prince of Darkness and the Father of Lies. He is thought by them to symbolize rapaciousness and hypocrisy and greed. The
y hiss about the time he bulldozed one tree a day in a pristine wilderness, in protest of a government delay. They scream about the time that he clear-cut twenty-six acres rather than have it spared for a park. They point knowingly to his successful legal defense of a senior official charged with bribery at a time of rampant corruption. They rage about his legal wiles before the state supreme court, his capacity to frustrate and overturn the decisions of any government, any planning board that might dare to oppose growth. They speak in hushed tones about his connections to governors and senators. Why, a U.S. Representative even made a home on Hazel’s estate! Hazel is seen as invincible. He is the legendary despoiler of the soil, the destroyer of the planet, the raper of the land. He is vilified for the traffic, for the pollution, for the chaos, for the noise, for the Change. He has been, in short, elevated to the status of a monster.

  His friends and allies tell a strikingly different story. They speak of him as being a real gentleman, a man of cordial, even antique manners, a man of his word. They tell glowing stories of his generosity. They talk of how he graduated from Harvard Law and was now chairman of the Harvard College Fund, the university’s major fundraising arm; how he helped steer Northern Virginia’s George Mason University from its origins in a strip shopping center and an old elementary school to its current glory, when one of its economists has won the Nobel Prize and its performing arts center is making those of the old downtown nervous. They describe him as that rare individual who has a grand vision for the entire region, from its airports to its seaports, from the Blue Ridge to the Chesapeake Bay. If there are problems as a result of all this growth, say they, the fault is not Hazel’s. It is the fault of those petty, selfish, and parochial minds, from the bureaucrats to the bleeding-heart ankle-biters, who stood in the way of building everything for which he foresaw the need—especially the roads.

  But of all the things said about Hazel, the most startlingly incongruous is about his relationship to the land. For this is what his allies repeatedly volunteer: they say what authentically distinguishes him as a developer and as a seer is his uncanny feel for the land. Yes, the land. The way he understands the land. They insist this is true.

  And, indeed, he is devoted to Alaska. He repeatedly returns there, frequently with his wife. On the coffee table in the waiting area of his office, with his name on the address labels, are, in addition to Harvard Magazine, such periodicals as Alaska, Virginia Wildlife, Smithsonian, The Nature Conservancy Magazine, Ducks Unlimited, and Antiques. They appear to have been read.

  Compared with his depiction as an arrogant and reprehensible despoiler and exploiter by his legion of detractors, there can be no more profoundly and diametrically opposite a characterization of this force behind the bulldozers. Yet it is true that he never seems more comfortable or animated than when he is recounting the most particular details of the fruits of his farm. He easily remembers on exactly what dates corn was planted in which fields. He takes more pride in his farm having won the state corn championship for highest yields four years in a row than he ever expresses in his stylish office park. He knows what the expected harvest dates are, how much water there is in a given field, how likely it is the tractors can negotiate that, and what the odds are of frost. This day he knows that he has exactly 1020 cows—mostly Angus with a few Hereford crosses—with six hundred calves just weaned, another four hundred to go, and an additional six hundred in the feed lot. He is proud that the calves have come in at 750 pounds.

  Hazel is, in short, a man of contradictions, as is the Edge City world he has created. And the contradictions he embodies illuminate a great deal about both the America that will soon be and the America from which he came.

  The world into which Til Hazel was born, on October 29, 1930, was later so eradicated by the new one he helped create that today that place is difficult to imagine. Hazel was born not where his family lived, in Virginia, but across the Potomac River in the District of Columbia. That is because, as he is fond of saying, “it was either that or the kitchen table.” His Virginia homeland was then so rural and backward that it had no hospital of its own.

  Today Arlington County, where Hazel grew up, is one of the more urban places in America. It is more densely populated than Dallas or Denver or Cincinnati. It has one of the largest office buildings in the world—the Pentagon. Its airport, Washington National, is busier than Houston Intercontinental. It has two mirror-finish Edge Cities, each the size of downtown Milwaukee, and 8700 hotel rooms. Its public school students speak more than forty-nine languages, including Arabic, Vietnamese, Farsi, and Urdu. It has ten snazzy subway stops. And, of course, it has half a dozen hospitals.

  In 1930, none of that existed. Arlington was a dozen crossroads punctuating fields and forests in which Hazel’s relations hunted wild turkey. Segregation that was “very distinct,” as the old saying went, was the rule. Most of the roads were dirt. Hazel’s father told him vivid tales of the cavalry at local Fort Myer shipping out to fight Pancho Villa. Across the river it was an era when a motorist caught in the rain with his top down could pull under the porte cochère of the White House and be invited in to shake hands with the president. America itself was still a land of unthinkably vast spaces. For a quarter of a century to come, the southwesternmost baseball team would be St. Louis.

  In 1930, Herbert Hoover was president, and though the stock market crash was three months old when Hazel was conceived, it was not yet clear that the Depression was at hand. Not until the second half of 1930 did “people feel the ground give way beneath their feet,” as a contemporary economist put it. By the time Hazel was two, 24 percent of the work force would be unemployed. Birth rates—that statistic which probes most deeply into people’s personal lives—had plummeted.

  Thus Hazel’s character was shaped in a world far different from the one he ended up building. It had different hopes, different fears, even different referents. “The War,” for example, was automatically understood to mean the Civil War. His mother’s grandfather was a Confederate soldier. Her family’s roots were in nearby Southern Maryland, which even in the 1930s took pride in its Rebel sympathies. The foremost historical site in Arlington, looking out across the Potomac toward the Capitol in the distance, was the mansion of Robert E. Lee.

  Hazel’s father’s father, William Andrew Hazel, wound up in Fort Laramie with the Seventh Cavalry only a few years after its last conflict with Indians at a place called Wounded Knee. When William returned from the West after the turn of the century, he stuck with what he knew, and became the stable manager for the delivery wagons of the Chestnut Farms Dairy. Hazel remembers riding his horse, Honeypot, in the 1930s in the median of that novelty, one of America’s first concrete roads.

  These were rough-and-ready days. In the 1920s a group including Til Hazel’s grandfather decided that an area down by the river had become infested with squatters, riffraff, and various perpetrators of crime. So they got together secretly one night and “blew the place away,” as Hazel related it.

  It was a considerable departure for a Hazel when Til’s father, John T. Sr., decided to become a surgeon. His brothers were lucky if they finished high school. John Sr.’s father opposed his continuing education. It was not trivial in the 1920s that John was making as much money keeping books at Chestnut Farms as was his dad tending horses.

  John Sr. paid no small price for being the first to better himself. He was able to complete his medical education only by signing up with the Public Health Service. That outfit moved the twenty-six-year-old father to Boston only weeks after Til, the firstborn, arrived. On John Sr.’s return to Arlington, he had to move his little family into the home of his prosperous father-in-law.

  The mid-1930s saw John Hazel, Arlington’s only surgeon, making good money by the standards of the South and of the Depression. But all that meant was that he could finally build his family their own house—if he kept his office in it. And John Sr. did not think that things were looking up. When he looked into the future, he saw war. He would
talk about it to his wife, Ruth, and Til could hear. John Sr. had vivid memories of hunger from his days growing up. If those meager days were before the Depression and now there were breadlines, what would war bring? He became worried about barest subsistence. He worried that his family would starve. He plotted to meet gravest disaster—to make sure his wife and children could raise their own food.

  “Today he’s a fairly senile man,” Til recounts, “but he remembers having an overcoat and a car when East Boston was full of people with no work and no food. It’s a very real thing.”

  The solution was land. John Hazel bought land from his father-in-law. He started with twenty-nine acres, but his “subsistence” farm in time came to 110 acres—a sixth of a square mile. It was a lot of land for one family by the standards of the East.

  This land was even farther out than Arlington. It was in the next county, Fairfax. In distance, the “next county” meant something in Virginia. At the time of first founding, county seats were flung purposefully far so that one would be within a day’s horse ride of each settler.

  The farm was in an area known as McLean. John Sr. sent away for hundreds of pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture on subsistence farming. The result was bacon for the family from home-butchered hogs, and cottage cheese Til’s mother made from their own cows’ milk. Gardening was serious. Putting up food for the cold time was an important part of life.

  For all his desperate concern, though, John Hazel, Sr., had absolutely no time himself to raise crops. He scarcely had time to raise sons. He was a driven man, working long hours. Church was never very important to the family, Til recalls. “Dad was so involved in medicine that it was like Sunday was the same as any other day for him. That was the day he made rounds. The only difference was he didn’t schedule any operations on Sunday. He operated every other day of the week.” For two years, just as Hazel became a teenager, his father was gone completely, working at the Mayo Clinic.