Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  “The demander of space is like a voter,” explains Peterson. “Developers, what do they build? They build what they think they can sell. So they’re saying, You voter or consumer, what do you want, what would you pay for, okay? The consumer has got the option of going downtown. But the ultimate, okay, is Melpar. Melpar was the flag, the lawn, and set back from the road, but the big thing was to have a brick front. Why was brick a big thing? Because everything else anybody had seen was shitty old aluminum or steel.

  “Now you look at a building and if it’s brick, you say well now there’s a trade association that didn’t have enough money to have a building with precast concrete. Precast concrete is a step up from brick, yes. And then you go to marble, okay? But then marble, it’s not gutsy enough. Marble has a softer feel—like a library. But then there’s granite. It’s like the word, granite—it’s tough. So that is state of the art now.

  “But coming back to this, you build with what you think the people want and that then was Melpar. Trying to be the antithesis of the city. Total antithesis. Curvilinear as opposed to rectilinear. See, the whole thing in sales and marketing is making people feel good about themselves. Suburbanites live on country lanes. They picture themselves going home in their Porsche or whatever—it is down a lane with trees on it and they swing along. The other reason you don’t do the streets straight is if you line ’em up, cars is all you see. But if you make it go like this”—Peterson undulates his arms—“you can have one tree here and one tree here and one tree here and one tree here and as you drive down here you go along and what do you see? You see this tree and you start around here and you see this tree. So all you need is a little bit of open and you start swinging and you’re doing this and you get everything in here.”

  Peterson, at the time he was recounting this in 1989, was waving his arms toward the newest development he and Hazel had built. It was called Fair Lakes. At build-out, its 657 acres was scheduled to have more than five million square feet of office, retail, and hotel space—comparable to downtown Dayton or Wilmington. Nonetheless, it was by far among the most green and leafy and parklike of all the Washington area’s Edge City locations. Including, as it did, shops and homes, it was the state-of-the-art Machine in the Garden. “This is not the 1960s Melpar,” Peterson said. “This is the 1990s Melpar.” I asked Peterson why he hadn’t built an old downtown out there, a place with grids and blocks and sidewalks.

  “We could have made this all straight,” he responded, “but hell. You make it vroooom—you swing around. You want the mind to not know what to expect next. You want it to be eventful. You want it to be different.

  “Everybody when they come to the suburbs they want the trees and bunnies and birds, okay? And that’s why we put two swans out there and feed the damn ducks so all the frigging geese and ducks come around and people say, ‘Gee, I work out in a place where they have paths and running tracks, ponds, birds. Do you have a running track where you work?’

  “It comes back to what does the employee feel that his employer feels about him—he gives them ducks and ponds and paths and workout facilities. Heck, you have workout facilities in all these buildings. They never get used. But people like to say they have one. It’s like me. I’ve got a great big machine—I’m going to frigging work out? I use it to hang my pants on.

  “Employers have to go where they think they can attract the best employees they can afford. So they have to locate their facilities in a place and in a setting that’ll give them the most chance of having a successful business. All could have gone downtown. Some of ’em have moved out from downtown. The choice is always there. Power to the persons that are making the decisions. So that their overall life—real and perceived—is best.

  “We’re trying to make a person feel as though he’s going to drive in the country and his office just happens to be off in the woods next to the birds and the bunnies. Yes, a city in a garden. Here we had one goal—make the person feel they were with the birds and bunnies, they got residence, they got shopping, they got everything. Trees, ponds, lakes. Good access, right on Interstate 66, but swing in here, you get rid of those ugly, garish signs—now you’re going to get an earthy-toned sign. Then you get special permission from the highway department to put trees closer to the road. You’re going to take your bridges, see, and make ’em curved and put stone over here so they’ll feel as though they’re out in the country. If they would’ve let us, we would have taken the cobblestones on that so when you drove over, your wheels would go bllllmmmmm bllllmmmmm bllllmmmmm. Just like going over a bridge, yeah. Tried to get it. They wouldn’t let us do it. Those are the kinds of bullshit and baloney stuff you pick up.”

  Highly evolved indeed. But to hear Til Hazel tell it, all this was inevitable and inexorable.

  When Hazel returned to Virginia in 1957, his former Harvard Law classmates felt a small pang. Here they were, moving on to jobs of significance, like Wall Street. He was returning to that jerkwater county, Fairfax. He seemed so bright, too.

  Truth be told, his first job didn’t sound like much. It was spending endless hours amid dusty deeds to condemn land for a new road. It was not, however, just any road. It was to be built with funds from the brand-new National Defense Interstate Highway System. This road was going to serve as a bypass up the East Coast around both sides of Washington. It would be roughly a circle, sixty-six miles all the way around. It would skirt the city by a goodly distance—more than ten miles—so as to not be severed by an atomic bomb hitting the White House. (This was a defense highway.) That distance—beyond even Melpar—went through land that Hazel remembers as being “like Kansas.” By that he meant there was nothing there—as far as he could see. Anything—anything—would be a higher use than this void of pasture and forest that had not seen real prosperity since its conquest in the Civil War, nine decades earlier.

  The land was considered so vacant, Hazel recalled, that the highway engineers saw no significance in the way the new highway would cut across two little farm-to-market roads, Routes 7 and 123, just east of their corners, named after a nineteenth-century landholder, William Tyson. It didn’t register on them that the resultant triangle would instantly become a place easily driven to from any direction in the region. This superhighway was designed to get people from Maine to Florida. Local traffic? What local traffic? No commercial development was even imagined at any interchange. The only reason the triangle got created the way it did, reported Hazel, was that the engineers located their superhighway along the most geometric curve they could lay down to a point five miles distant where the Potomac narrowed. That seemed the best place to build a bridge.

  When the die was cast for this prototypical and enormous Edge City, nobody knew the Beltway would become known as Washington’s Main Street, or that an international airport, Dulles, would be built a dozen miles west. One of the area’s earliest real estate speculators, Frank Kimball, himself started buying up property in 1959 only after he could not convince his employer, the Marriott Corporation, to view the place as a credible location for a hamburger stand. It was too far out.

  This was land Til Hazel came to know better than anybody. Decades later, he would still take great; pride of craft in his work as a young lawyer. By the time the alignment of the Beltway was in place in 1960, he recounted, his decisions were never appealed, either by the highway department or the owners. His word had come to be viewed as that of authority. When he put a value on a piece of land, it stuck.

  No small accomplishment. It was a time when many other values were coming unstuck:

  In 1954, General Foods Corporation moved its headquarters out of Manhattan to White Plains, in Westchester County.

  In 1955, the first McDonald’s restaurant opened in Des Plaines, outside Chicago.

  In 1956, Southdale Shopping Center, the world’s first climate-controlled shopping mall, opened outside Minneapolis.

  In 1965, William Levitt, of Levittown fame, started building houses outside Paris.

  I
n the early 1960s, at the same time as the completion of the Beltway in the Tysons area, Hazel was spotted as a comer by the courthouse crowd. The Byrd machine was still the juggernaut of Virginia political power. Its power lay with large landholders, and its conservatism was so deep that even issuing bonds to build roads was viewed as a newfangled, hence suspect, idea.

  The population of Fairfax County by 1960 had tripled in only one decade, to more than a quarter of a million. Subdivisions erupted like mushrooms after a warm rain. The first rezoning of the rural land around Tysons for commercial purposes began in 1962.

  In 1966, a federal grand jury gained nationwide attention when it indicted fifteen people under the recently enacted Fed eral Racketeering Act on charges of conspiracy to exchange bribes for rezonings in Fairfax County. Among those indicted were county supervisors, planning officials, developers, zoning attorneys, and one former state senator so prominent he was referred to in press accounts as a “civic leader.”

  Hazel, who that year had just started his own full-time law practice, took the defense of the grand old man, Andrew W. Clarke. Clarke was charged with being the kingpin of a scheme to distribute some $52,000 in bribes. Hazel pled him innocent. Next, he got the federal counts dismissed. Any alleged conspiracy ended four days before the passage of the Federal Racketeering Act under which the indictments came, he argued. Thus no federal laws had been violated. Then, to the outrage of the prosecutor, he succeeded in getting Clarke excused from trial on state charges. The grounds were failing health. Clarke had, in fact, suffered three strokes, and died in March 1968. But he did so while vacationing in Florida. Several of his fellow indictees ended up vacationing in Lewisburg Penitentiary. This bottom line escaped the attention of no one. Both Hazel’s friends and enemies saw he was going to be a legal force to be reckoned with.

  Little did they know. By the time the population of Fairfax had passed half a million, in the early 1970s, Hazel was blamed and credited with being personally responsible for the presence of 100,000 of them. He was the John the Baptist of development, making clear the way. With righteous prowess did he ceaselessly pursue the rezoning of farm and forest into quarter-acre lots attracting more and more people. He had become the pre-eminent force for growth, the legal sledgehammer systematically destroying on the anvil of the Virginia courts all attempts to slow it. Hazel knew the Old Dominion had always been shaped by this moral certitude: a man may not have taken from him the value of his land, save by due process of law.

  At the time Hazel was really beginning to roll, however, America, near the end of its second decade of unprecedented growth, was changing profoundly. The Apollo program was sending back photographs that altered people’s dreams forever. Our planet, from the perspective of the July 1969 moon landing, looked like a precious little marble, lonely in its vast black void. The idea of Spaceship Earth brought people to understand that the planet really was a closed and finite system. It did have limits. The first Earth Day, in April 1970, rallied national attention to the perils of unrestrained economic development. In 1972, a report entitled Only One Earth, by Barbara Ward and René Dubos, was presented to the United Nations World Conference on the Human Environment. It argued that man’s foremost allegiance had to be to his planet.

  This all began to fit into people’s heads in ways that had profound consequences. By the late 1960s, wealth might have flowed like a mighty stream for a generation of Americans. But, better fed, better housed, and better educated than ever in history, they were nagged by fears that something had gone terribly wrong. The grammar school nuclear air-raid drills had blunted the idea that change equaled progress. Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962; it turned out that pollution endangered not only the continent’s fertility, but the very song of its birds. In January 1969, an underwater oil platform ruptured off Santa Barbara, California; the televisions of America were filled with the beaches and sea birds of one of America’s most beautiful—and richest—communities covered with deadly black goo and highly articulate outrage. It became the symbol of greed damaging nature, both wild and human.

  As our attitudes shifted rapidly around the value of the patriarchal family and of religion and of authority, important questions were asked about the point of all this growth. In pursuit of “standard of living,” were we sacrificing “quality of life”? Where did humans fit in the scheme of things?

  The answers that penetrated the national consciousness came from the new studies of biology. They emphasized our interdependence with our soil, our air, our water, our forests, our farms, and our food. They showed the importance of instinct. They did so rationally and testably—scientifically. They demonstrated that man’s genetic potential included a grammar of behavior as powerful as his sense of language. They resonated with the words of the emerging computer revolution. They showed that we were “hard-wired”—unalterably connected—to our nature, the nature that sprang from our evolutionary, planetary experience.

  The ideals of progress thus began to come uncoupled from the Industrial Revolution’s premium on the behavior of the worker bee. New ideas of human improvement—our most enduring values, those which surrounded the advancement of freedom, liberty, individualism, and progress—became linked with the flowering of human potential. Yes, man could be improved, even perfected, but only in harmony with nature, of which he was a part. The potential of our future, in this view, flowed from our connection to our futures as human animals. What, came the question, was the “carrying capacity” of our habitat?

  In 1972, the widely cited Club of Rome report on limited resources fanned Malthusian fears of runaway population growth. In 1973, the first oil shock hit, giving Americans a cram course in the costs—economic and sociologic—of their way of life. Not one American in a thousand in the 1950s knew that the word “ecology” referred to the study of energy flows within a closed system. By the 1970s, ecology had come to express the belief that change specifically did not mean progress. Drastic change within a closed system—Earth—or any change that could damage a species was viewed as wrong.

  No culture can truly survive which ignores the human spirit and human values, this argument proceeded. Such values and spirit rose from what was natural. Progress, therefore, could not encompass exploiting and polluting our earth. It was not progress to cut down our trees and erect buildings so ugly and wasteful that human beings could not flourish within them.

  “Human beings dwell in the same biological systems that contain the other creatures but, to put the thought bluntly, they are not governed by the same laws of evolution …” wrote Barry Lopez in his National Book Award volume, Arctic Dreams. “Outside of some virulent disease, another ice age, or his own weapons technology, the only thing that promises to stem the continued increase in his population and the expansion of his food base (which now includes oil, exotic minerals, fossil ground water, huge tracts of forest, and so on, and entails the continuing, concomitant loss of species) is human wisdom.

  “Walking across the tundra, meeting the stare of a lemming, or coming on the tracks of a wolverine, it would be the frailty of our wisdom that would confound me. The pattern of our exploitation of the Arctic, our increasing utilization of its natural resources, our very desire to ‘put it to use,’ is clear. What is it that is missing, or tentative, in us, I would wonder? … It is restraint.”

  Enter Til Hazel.

  At the height of his Edge City building powers.

  Hazel genuinely believed in everything he did. But what made him a legend in his own time was his capacity to drive his opponents mad. As one colleague put it, he had the remarkable knack “to reduce the most complex issues to a single, pungent sentence that rallied his friends and pissed off his neighbors—I mean, enemies.”

  Hazel once boasted that what he did for a living was “crack open watersheds.”

  He meant it. In 1970, a ban on sewer hookups for new developments was put in place because three treatment plants were overloaded. Hazel attacked, saying the government h
ad to build more sewer plants. Meanwhile, the hookups resumed.

  In 1971, an attempt was made to mandate affordable housing at a time when 40 percent of the county’s policemen were forced to live outside the jurisdiction. Hazel attacked, calling the measure an “unlawful, imprudent intrusion into the rights of private business,” an attempt to “put off on the private sector the public problem.” It was overturned.

  In 1972 a new county board took office. Elected on a platform of skepticism toward growth, the members tried to suspend land rezonings to give county planners time to draft a five-year strategy. Hazel attacked. He crushed the moratorium in the courts. Then he rubbed it in. To his foremost antagonist, Audrey Moore, he sneered, “I think your approach is bankrupt—morally, socially, and financially. This county has an obligation to provide for the people.”

  In 1973, the county attempted to slow growth by not hearing rezoning requests or approving site plans. Hazel attacked, arguing that the government had an obligation to undertake these functions. The result were frenzied proceedings round the clock and well into the morning, night after night, as the county worked off the backlog.

  In 1975, Hazel again triumphed. The county had attempted to limit growth to places where public facilities, such as roads and schools, already were in place. Hazel attacked, arguing that not providing such services everywhere was “arbitrary and capri cious.” It was an exercise in “discriminatory zoning” to restrict new homes to those “costing $100,000 or more.” This one went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; when the Court failed to back the county, once again Hazel prevailed. Once more he rubbed it in. Said he, demurely, “You’d have thought we were out to rape the county.”