Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  He was a buzz saw. During his heyday, he never lost a zoning case in the Virginia Supreme Court. But his real skill was in grinding his opponents’ noses in the dirt. He described the county’s attempts to limit growth as “pie in the sky.” When he blew up a moratorium on new sewer connections in Tysons Corner, he ensured his adversaries would never forget by forcing the county to refund his clients $400,000 in taxes he felt had been unjustly levied while their bulldozers had been stilled.

  “We’ve got a tiger by the tail,” he said in the mid-1970s of his struggles. “We’re going to hold on till we tame that tiger or it gets the best of us. It’s war. How else would you describe it?”

  If he brought no little arrogance to his vision, it was because he was creating no less than a new world. He was bringing civilization to the “howling wilderness” into which he had been born. He was bringing it the benefits of modernity, the world of the Machine, so that never again could Yankees sneer, “Beyond the Potomac, it’s all Alabama.”

  It was ironic that he, a Southerner, was now taking the position of the Pilgrims on progress—that civilization should overwhelm the land, in contrast to the Virginia Cavaliers’ view of the untouched land as Paradise. But, then, he had not studied at Harvard for nothing.

  So, in the pursuit of progress, he plowed his old world under—in the most literal sense.

  Hazel was firmly in the tradition of the men who had pushed the railroad across the American frontier, at the cost of the buffalo and the Indians. Or of William Mulholland, who brought water to Los Angeles, at the price of turning the blooming Owens Valley into a desert. Or, in our lifetime, of the builders of the Alyeska oil pipeline across the Brooks Range that allowed the loading of North Slope crude into fragile supertankers—like the Exxon Valdez. A close associate of Hazel’s was once asked if he thought Til believed in God. “I don’t know,” came his response. “I don’t know. He might not. That would imply a higher Being.”

  The more Til drove environmentalists out of their minds, the more he was seen as the Machine that would annihilate the Garden. To the extent that he was seen as destroying the very pastoral benefits that had attracted people to Fairfax in the first place, he was stigmatized as a monster, seeking the almighty dollar at the most outrageous, amoral costs to society and the planet.

  Yet, objectively, there was not a great deal of evidence that Hazel was motivated primarily by avarice for material goods. Surely the Oldsmobile of several years’ vintage was not a display of opulence. Nor were his suits, puckered at the shoulder seams and so antique that when a lapel pin fell off, one could see a tiny circle of a darker hue around which the suit had faded.

  Granted, Hazel was the kind of man who, when the air conditioning became too fierce in the Oldsmobile, tabbed down the electric window to let in warm air rather than turn down the chill. But as a greedhead, Hazel hardly fit the Donald Trump mold. This was a man devoted to his children and to his longtime and only wife. There was never any suggestion that he had given or taken bribes. It seemed to him a mystery, in fact, why anyone ever went that route. Beyond the immorality of it, as a practical matter it was lazy and sloppy and stupid. The system could so clearly be made to work on the side of everything that he viewed as righteous that he could not imagine why anybody thought corruption was necessary. In fact, if he indulged any personal vices, attempts to discover what they might be were markedly unsuccessful.

  Nonetheless, his enemies took it as an article of faith, as obvious beyond any suggestion of doubt, that he was a liar of proportions beyond the merely monumental. He spoke in evangelical terms of the glories of covering the planet with subdivisions and malls and office parks and asphalt. His opponents, seeing this as an attack on the very underpinnings of the planet and of nature, and of man in nature, assumed that he could not possibly mean what he said. It was alien to their system of belief. The logical conclusion, then, if he was not a monster, was that he was a fool or a liar. And they knew he was no fool.

  Not one person in a thousand who opposed him could imagine that he might be principled. Much less did they attempt to imagine what those principles might be. His response was iden tical. He could not comprehend that they might be serious about finding social worth in leaving the land alone, untouched, without regard to the needs of man.

  Their morality, he concluded, must be hideously twisted.

  The 1980s, for Hazel, were a voluptuous expression of that old adage “Don’t get mad, get even.” Fairfax passed Washington, D.C., in population—600,000, 700,000, 800,000—becoming one of the larger local jurisdictions in America, with an annual budget of $2.3 billion and more than ten thousand employees. As one of the nation’s five wealthiest counties, Fairfax became a template for America’s future: five formidable Edge Cities rose there. Ah, vengeance was sweet. Fairfax was no longer a bedroom satellite. It was the New Dominion, with an economy and a power to make both the rest of the state and the District of Columbia quake.

  In this decade Hazel’s legal firm became pre-eminent at ensuring that the economic engines of progress could continue to build this new world. With its mortal lock on the state supreme court in Richmond long established, the firm extended its reach to the legislature, becoming the state’s most powerful lobbying outfit. Hazel himself was spending little time as an attorney, though. He no longer represented developers. He’d become one. Everything from traditional subdivisions called Franklin Farm to a “new town” called Burke Centre came out of his partnerships. At one point, he had major projects at half the exits on Interstate 66 from the Beltway to the exit in the next county marked MANASSAS.

  Hazel seemed even more ubiquitous than that. He contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to political campaigns, especially those of conservative Republicans. He backed ventures from George Mason University, to the promotion of pari-mutuel race tracks (Virginia is horse country), to the Fairfax Symphony, to toll roads, to a football stadium aimed at removing the Washington Redskins from Washington, to the creation of a private academy, to a magazine called New Dominion, to a new outer Beltway, to a social club with an abundance of dark wood paneling on top of that singular Tycon Tower.

  His brother, William A. Hazel, built his own earthmoving empire of twelve hundred employees. Brother Bill owned more heavy equipment than many African nations. The Hazel clan shared thousands of acres in a valley farther out Interstate 66, in Fauquier County. With their beautiful herds of Angus, the arrangement was about as suggestive of TV’s Dallas as one finds in the East. The displays of wealth, though, were mercifully not all that vulgar. The sweeping drive to Til’s red brick Georgian mansion resembled either an English formal garden or an interstate interchange, depending on your perspective. The house may have been larger than America’s first supermarkets, but Til’s library—the whole thing, including the floor-to-ceiling columns—was finely sculpted walnut. In the kitchen Hazel had installed a Vermont Castings Resolute wood stove, of which he was particularly fond. Vermont Castings was a totem of self-sufficiency to the environmental crowd. But Til had one too. It was one of the few things about which they could probably agree.

  For it seemed that what Hazel was doing in realizing his dreams was burying his past. It was like watching Scarlett O’Hara vow she would never be hungry again. “The problems we have are ones of prosperity!” was the ammunition he shot back relentlessly at his critics. He could not believe that did not end the argument. If any public opprobrium ever got to him, Hazel was far too tough to reveal it. But there was one thing that seemed to mystify him a little. Why were people not more grateful? For all he’d done.

  One Fauquier County neighbor of his, to be sure, recalled the blackberries. There was a hedgerow, a bank, that gave her great joy as she walked by it of a summer’s dawn. It had three colors of morning glory, and twines thick with goldenrod and blackberries. The berries were there just for the picking. In a nearby field, there were great rosy puffs of the Virginia wildflower called Joe Pye, and wild sunflowers. There was Queen Anne�
�s lace and wild asters and wild rose. The hedgerow was home to bluebirds. It had taken half a century to grow.

  Hazel’s crews came in and bombed it all with herbicides. Then they strafed it with weed eaters and bush hogs.

  The neighbor tried to be rational about all this. It was, she accepted, Hazel’s land. And the highly productive pastures that replaced her idyll had their own logic. But why, she asked plaintively, could they not have spared the blackberries and bluebirds at the edges? Were they not symbols of the beauty of Virginia?

  She could no more begin to understand Hazel than Hazel could her. For Hazel really did have an intense feel for the land. He did know it, in his way, better than just about anyone: he knew it in the fashion of a Confederate general.

  He saw how it could be used.

  When Rebel commanders looked out over the land, they saw it as a place to hide divisions and funnel opposing forces for massacre. They saw high ground as a place to marshal artillery, streams as lines of defense, and thickets as snares for foot soldiers.

  And so exactly did Til look out on the land. He saw it as no different from coal or oil; it was a natural resource. That was why the most fervent swear word in his vocabulary was “waste.” Save an unspoiled 101-acre woodland that he wanted rezoned as an industrial site? He saw that as a waste. Surround houses with ten-acre lots? He also saw that as waste; the land could have supported forty families in affordable, quarter-acre comfort.

  When he looked out over the land, he saw it as starkly vacant until the brilliance of the human mind was brought to it, to find its most ingenious use.

  He sincerely did not comprehend how people could see things differently. He could understand the value of places that should be kept open for ball fields, or jogging trails, or picnic spots—for human use. But the idea that land should be left untouched, in and for itself, without reference to human use, because of some oddball idea that there should be reverence to an abstract notion of the land—well, it was beyond him. He was the bringer of civilization. Didn’t they understand what “howling wilderness” was? His father certainly had. Did they not understand “civilization”? What did they have against the works of man?

  The narrow view, he realized, would be to see his opponents as liars and fools, rich people caring only for themselves who wanted to pull up the drawbridge after they had achieved their dream of a nice home, without regard to any higher needs of civilization. But Hazel, especially as he grew older, was not the kind of man to organize his life around such poisonous formula tions. He would do what he knew to be good, and let the chips fall—for those of narrow mind—where they may.

  It was with this attitude that he turned to one of his most ambitious projects. It continued his inexorable march out Interstate 66, cracking open watersheds and converting farmland into things he knew would be used by thousands—like malls.

  It never occurred to him that there might be anything peculiar lying in wait for him around his newest five hundred acres in Prince William County. After all, as he would point out in one of those memorable phrases which made his opponents so crazy, “It’s not a particularly pretty piece of ground. One of the worst we ever owned.”

  No way did he expect a confrontation in which Americans would end up fighting the same battle they had been fighting since the first settlers arrived, with the same sort of implications for the globe. No way did he imagine that he would open a gulf between those who believed in him and those who did not, which would turn out to be as large as any since the North and the South had fought on this very land, 125 years earlier, over issues that were in many ways similar.

  Never did he believe that the very bones of those soldiers might rise up against his bulldozers, or that on land already filled with thousands of ghosts from over a century before, Americans would once again engage in a struggle over who they were, how they got that way, where they were headed, and what they valued.

  It was easy to miss the small sign as the highway crossed a stream on approach to the land where Hazel’s bulldozers began their great roar.

  All the sign said was BULL RUN.

  V

  But What About the Land?

  Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.

  —Attributed to Daniel Hudson Burnham, 1902

  IN THE LATE 1500s, what most fascinated Englishmen about the New World “was the absence of anything like European society; here was a landscape untouched by history—nature unmixed with art.”

  By the early 1900s, H. G. Wells and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright were telling us we would soon mix nature with our artifacts to create extraordinary new cities. They would be surrounded by lawn, served by individual transport, crowned by skylights and atria, permeated by indoor trees and light, the climate would be controlled, and the potholes and puddles banished.

  And we did it. Just as they said. We built Edge City.

  Nagging questions remain. One is whether this world we are building will be a marvelous new synthesis in which all our urban functions will be artfully combined with nature in a “land in which to live, a symphonious environment of melody and mystery,” as Benton MacKaye, the father of the Appalachian Trail, envisioned it over half a century ago. Or whether nature is about to be smothered by “a wilderness not of an integrated, ordered nature, but of … structures whose individual hideousness and collective haphazardness present that unmistakable environment we call the ‘slum,’ ” as MacKaye caustically feared.

  Precisely parallel is whether our polarized attitudes toward the price of change and progress will ever find a compromise of profit to all. The question is whether the forces of preservation and the forces of growth can ever somehow be resolved. Can the Garden-like aspects of what we are doing be encouraged while the hellish scourge restrained that despoils the land, crowds the schools, devours open space, jams traffic, and leaves nothing but a fast-food crisis for the soul?

  It is no great mystery, of course, why the compromise is desperately needed. The battles of our last four centuries are coming to a head today because one of the most explosive building cycles in our history has been pursued at a time of competing demands on all our land.

  There is little slack left in the system. Our dreams conflict. There is less “someplace else” to go. Few landscapes in the Lower Forty-Eight are not in some important sense man-made. Wildernesses continue to flourish, to be sure. But today, even apparently untouched landscapes are usually deliberate human artifacts. These wild vistas exist because one set of people, through purchase or government fiat, stepped in and prevented another set of people from using the land as they thought best. Even setting aside a landscape to remain pristine has become a choice of man, a function of his intelligence, of his benevolence; it is his creation. It becomes a land dedicated to a different kind of harvest. “The crop they raise is serenity, an article hard to come by in Megalopolis,” wrote Jean Gottmann thirty years ago.

  The noise of this conflict is greater than might seem justified, though. After all, if you housed every household in the United States in that beloved suburban “sprawl” density of a quarter-acre lot each, that would still take only around twenty-three million acres—1.22 percent of all the land in the United States even if you leave out Alaska. If you housed all these people at the moderately dense levels of such a leafy and bucolic planned community as Reston, Virginia, you could bring the amount of land in America covered by housing down under 1 percent of that in the continental states. In fact, right now, 70 percent of all Americans live on 1.5 percent of that land. The U.S. Census says that by the turn of the century, 75 percent of all Americans will live within fifty miles of a coast. It is easy to demonstrate that it is possible to build every single road and office and warehouse and vacation home this country will ever need—even at shockingly low densities, compared with that of the old downtowns—and still have more than 90 percent of everything else left for farm and wilderness.

  Why then do all sides in the debate over the land seem
so overwhelmed and embattled? Why does it have to be this way?

  Because, of course, that is not what anybody perceives as the reality. Those who wish to build anew see themselves facing kamikaze opposition to sewers and roads and landfills and power plants and the works of man in general, opposition that drives their costs to astronomical heights, which they know is a moral outrage, which they know people can’t afford. But they feel in a helpless bind, given all the alternatives they have been denied. They feel squeezed on one side by what they know human beings will buy, on a second by the laws of zoning and government regulation, and on a third by their economics and the biases of banks.

  Those who wish to protect the land, meanwhile, continue to demonize developers. They cast them as rapacious despoilers, because they see the disappearance of the wetlands and forest and prairie that they treasure. Worse, they are mourning the blight of entire landscapes, for it takes only a little bit of modern development forever to alter a vista.

  I conclude from all this noise that the only way we will ever arrive at a new and higher approach to our environment—the man-made environment every bit as much as the natural environment—is if we all somehow achieve a new and higher level of cooperation. “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts,” wrote Aldo Leopold in The Sand County Almanac, the twentieth century’s Walden.

  Wisdom, of course, is rarely in oversupply in the human condition. But Tony Hiss reported on a heartening amount of it in The Experience of Place. He neatly stated the challenge:

  The places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become. These places have an impact on our sense of self, our sense of safety, the kind of work we get done, the ways we interact with other people, even our ability to function as citizens in a democracy.