Edge City

by Joel Garreau

  Once again, the earth moved. But this time the shudder was an emotional and political Richter reading far above anything Manassas had felt in a century.

  In the torrent of abuse directed at Til Hazel during the ensuing weeks, “double-crossed,” “defrauded,” “cheated,” and “deceived” were among the more printable words. Hazel swore that when the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation—the largest shopping center developer in the United States—approached him with the idea of putting one of their five-anchor, 1.2-million-square-foot behemoths next to the battlefield, it was a bolt out of the blue. A mall was the furthest thing from his mind at the time. Although, truth to tell, he’d always felt a little uncomfortable about whether the market was really ready for office parks this far out into the countryside. When the idea came up, he said, he decided that the mall was needed as a “catalytic agent” to attract corporate offices on the remaining acreage at William Center. “That’s been the history of malls all over the country,” he said. “They bring along offices.” And besides, his spokesman pointed out, it was a done deal. There would be no chance to challenge the decision, no public hearings. No additional action by the county supervisors would be required. The head of the National Park Service could write as many letters as he wished saying that the new plan “does not even resemble the good faith agreements we thought had been made.” They would be beside the point. The language of the rezoning that the county had gratefully accepted two years before had been very carefully crafted by Hazel’s pre-eminent legal arm. There was nothing in there about “corporate parks” or “malls.” All it had been written to say was that permission was hereby granted to develop 2.9 million square feet of nonresidential space.

  Hazel thought that said it all. Little did he know. He had rumbled a deep sleeping fault in the American psyche, a revolt against everything about growth that Americans had come to despise. If there was any one piece of paper that said it all, it was not the boilerplate in the legal documents. The mark that something different was afoot was the brand-new sticker on the bumper of Charlie Graham’s truck. It read:

  “Have a Nice Day. Shoot a Developer.”

  This was no small deal. Charlie made his living as a carpenter.

  As it turned out, there were historic dimensions to that tension between Graham’s chosen profession and his bumper sticker. Graham was the kind of independent cuss who carried a Civil War-replica .58-caliber black-powder Minié-ball Spring-field rifle into battle re-enactments. Even though he was yet another Fauquier County Virginian, he wore the Union uniform of the 116th Pennsylvania. The Harvard historian William R. Taylor described such romantics at the end of his 1957 work Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. The Charlie Grahams of the 1980s were those young, mustachioed, skilled small-business entrepreneurs who made so much of America tick. As Taylor described them, they were the direct psychological descendants of the Southern yeomen whom Thomas Jefferson revered and saw as the foundation of the Republic. They were “ardent and impassioned,” “strongly partisan to liberty,” “vigorous and more natural than the gentleman planter,” possessing “a great natural intelligence” and a “chivalric sense of honor.” At the same time, they were just plumb ornery—and of precious little comfort to those in positions of authority. In this way, in short, they were the reincarnation of the original Virginia Cavaliers, said Taylor. Those Cavaliers, of course, were the men who saw the land of America in 1607 as the Garden.

  Poor Hazel. In hindsight there is a kind of awful inevitability to it all. The women who saw themselves guarding the flame of Western civilization would take him high. They would succeed largely by not playing the game of dollars and numbers he played, by the rules he knew. They would appeal to the truths recognized by the heart, a practice he viewed as underhanded and dastardly, if not immoral. Meanwhile the swashbucklers, the Cavaliers—of whom there were more than a few feisty enough to have become United States senators—would take him any way they could get him.

  Hazel, the Pilgrim lawyer, had it all correct, legally. But he had it all wrong in the terms that turned out to matter—those of human emotion and the American Zeitgeist. He made the same two errors as the Union at Bull Run a century and a quarter before. First, he gravely underestimated what he was up against. Second, he was blind-sided by the counterattack.

  But that is only hindsight. In the early days of the struggle, there seemed to be no possibility that he could lose. When the battle cry of freedom rose once again, it sounded as forlorn as ever in its time. The first day that the plans for the mall were announced, the sound of the opposition seemed hollow. “It would destroy the battlefield,” the newspaper quoted a lonely “civic activist”—one Annie D. Snyder—as saying. “We’ll fight it with everything we’ve got.”

  What is it about malls? Is it not in fact curious that it took the idea of constructing a mall—specifically a mall—to elicit such a reaction to the idea of building on hallowed ground? In a way, Hazel had a point when he failed to anticipate the reaction his switch would ignite. Office buildings place just as much steel and concrete on the landscape as malls do. Just as much asphalt is laid to get to them. What’s the big deal about shifting the ground to a mall?

  Opponents answered the question by trotting out traffic studies. The mall would attract gridlock at different times from office buildings—on weekends, when tourists came to enjoy the serenity of the battlefield, not just nine to five. True. But so what? Since when do dry traffic studies arouse feelings of sacrilege? That explanation hardly seemed to satisfy.

  Biblical explanations were offered. Perhaps we Americans are more tolerant of the places where people make money than we are of the places where they spend it. Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the temple, it was observed. He did not throw the fishermen out of the boat. But again, does that explanation satisfy? Since when has shopping been seen as sinful in this country? Some anthropologists view the shopping bag as the most human of archeological artifacts. Other vertebrates, they point out, wouldn’t believe the effort humans put into gathering material from all sorts of places to bring it home and share it with others of their species. Most sensible creatures eat it where it lies.

  No, it seemed to be something about that symbol, that place—the mall—that was getting to us.

  Maybe it worked like this. The force that drove the creation of Edge City was our search deep inside ourselves for a new balance of individualism and freedom. We wanted to build a world in which we could live in one place, work in another, and play in a third, in unlimited combination, as a way to nurture our human potential. This demanded transportation that would allow us to go where we wanted, when we wanted. That enshrined the individual transportation system, the automobile, in our lives. And that led us to build our market meeting places in the fashion of today’s malls.

  In theory, at least, the malls exemplified our devotion to individualism. The major way analysts distinguish one from another is by how many unusual shops each has. The most upscale malls are those which strive successfully to deliver something different. Something special. They offer goods and experiences not available elsewhere—an impossibly chic boutique, a special art exhibit on the weekend, an expensive antiquarian bookstore. The more downscale malls are those with little individuality, where the goods and chain stores and events are undistinguished and indistinguishable from those available anywhere else. What does that say? That the moment we have a little extra money, the first thing we do—once again—is strive toward expression of our individualism.

  Perhaps that is why the malls at the centers of our Edge Cities so frustrate us. The very moment they succeed in finding a way to help us express our individuality, their distributive function denies it—by spreading it nationwide. The crossed tusks of Banana Republic were transformed from a distinctive statement of San Francisco hip to a mall cliché in a period measured in heartbeats.

  Long after the battle for William Center was over, Robert C. Kelly, Til Hazel’s spokesman
, was still groping to explain how he managed to run himself into a buzz saw. Kelly, being a thoughtful man who took pride in his ability to get along with people, finally explained it to himself this way. Developers, he said, are agents of change. That is what they do. That is what they are for. That is their social and economic role. They look for ways to convert land profitably from one use to another.

  And, Kelly concluded, that is what the American people at last began to rebel against. The Change.

  Fair enough. Kelly was on to something. But perhaps he did not push his logic far enough. He didn’t take the next step. What, then, was the problem with the Change?

  Maybe it was the way the change was so impersonal, driven only by the relentless logic of the marketplace, which is wildly efficient but incapable of quantifying the human ecology of a place, its sense of home, the intangibles of our culture. Maybe that’s why when we see the bulldozers, we cringe. Maybe deep down we see the problem as the Change denying—even attacking—the specialness of our lives. We see it as attacking the very individuality and individualism that we had been building this stuff to achieve in the first place. Each piece of the new world we build caters to our dreams of freedom. But right now, the totality does not make us feel like individuals. It makes us feel like strangers. Strangers in our own land. We look around and recognize nothing. It is all changing so fast, we cannot find our own place in the universe. Not even our old house or favorite hangout. It alienates us. Sometimes we barely recognize ourselves.

  Now that would be a contradiction in our souls. That would explain a lot about our reaction to Manassas. It would also explain why our heart sinks when we see a threat to other landscapes that we love.

  We see those places as distinct. As one of a kind. Just like each of us. And to the extent that they are removed from the face of the earth—especially to be replaced by a symbol of homogeneity like a mall—well. It would be the symbol of the mass, of the ubiquitous, of the ordinary, destroying the singular, the irreplaceable. And just to that extent would we see the singular and the irreplaceable in our own lives, in our very selves, diminished.

  Maybe that is also why we cling so tenaciously to whatever history we can. Maybe that is why we are rallying to save sad Art Deco movie houses and Main Streets with old Kresge’s. This is us, we say; this is our time. Time is the only thing we have. Time is the measure of our lives. These places are our memories of a time when our identities were clear. And you’re taking that away.

  Perhaps that is why the idea of violating Manassas—the symbol of a place where our ancestors died to define us as Americans, our basic sense of self—made something snap. And if that is true, it would offer a new reason to believe that we may be at a turning point.

  Perhaps if we can reach down into ourselves to understand truly what we value, we can hope to move forward. If we understand and involve ourselves in our built environment and the way it reflects our lives, maybe we can break through to higher ground. Then we may find a means of measuring Edge City on a scale in addition to its exchange value, its worth as real estate. We may be able to assess the way it nurtures the individualism and freedom to which it was meant to speak in the first place.

  It’s a long shot, to be sure. But if we are coming to the point where we can appraise Edge City in terms of how it nourishes our relationship with one another, as well as our relationship to the land, it would mean that the world of the immigrant and the pioneer is not dead in America. It has moved out to Edge City, where gambles are being lost and won for high stakes. Of course Edge City is cracked and raw right now, and subject to a lot of improvement. But if it is really the sum of our hopes, then maybe someday it will be seen as historic. As historic, in its way, as our most revered battlefields. For Edge City, then, would be seen by future generations as the creation of a new frontier.

  It would be a new frontier being shaped by the free, in a constantly reinvented land.

  The first mass meeting in opposition to the William Center mall, on Friday, February 5, 1988, did not make strong men quake. Yes, an American flag hung upside down in distress from the Groveton Road overpass, and yes, 227 people gathered at the visitors’ center of the National Battlefield Park. Yes, they reached deep into their wallets to finance the impending legal battles. But the take? Fifty-six hundred dollars. Heartwarming, but beside the point. There were not many ways to challenge the legalities of the mall. With the news full of budget deficits and draconian spending cuts, the idea of the federal government stepping in to buy the land at a projected cost of $50 million or more seemed ludicrous.

  Hazel’s machines soon ground at the earth with breakneck speed. Quartz lights turned the night into death-pallor day as crews worked round the clock, double shift, blasting dynamite as late as 1:30 A.M. to tunnel a sewer under Interstate 66. Legions of belly-dumping earthmovers wheeled at speeds akin to tanks on flank attack. An antebellum-style house disappeared one night; all that was left were the surrounding trees. Dust clouds as if from brigades on maneuver rose to the sky. Wetlands were banked. Chain saws roared. If Hazel thought the land was not “particularly pretty” in its original state, when it was planed of all its green it made people sick. Hazel chastely claimed that the delirious attack of the heavy equipment was normal—just meeting contract schedules. Could he help it if that drove the cost of condemning the land higher and higher, to unthinkable peaks?

  The frenzied destruction backfired. The national and international media knew a great story when they saw one. The red, raw ground, the bulldozers running roughshod, probably over Confederate bones—it was agonizing. And galvanizing. The National Park Service likened it to “booking a roller derby in the Sistine Chapel.” The idea that in a matter of weeks that portion of the battlefield would be completely gone drew high-powered action. Some of the country’s leading preservation groups, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Parks and Conservation Association, took on Manassas as a cause célèbre. Tersh Boasberg, a nationally recognized preservation attorney, was retained. Jody Powell—the high-profile and savvy former presidential press secretary with the politically useful Southern drawl—came on board as a tactician and spokesperson.

  It was he who sat by Annie Snyder in the congressional hearing room and delivered the impassioned speech that made the big fat tears run down Annie Snyder’s cheeks.

  “On that little hill, Mr. Chairman, history is palpable. Today you can see it and feel it …” As Powell orated, the network cameras were zooming in tight, filling screens nationwide with Annie’s face. Her blue eyes filling to overflowing. Her face scrunched up as she fought unsuccessfully to control her lower lip. “You can see it and feel it, a blood-soaked piece of Virginia countryside.” In countless living rooms around the country, viewers discovered that they, too, seemed to have something in their eyes.

  Those who knew Annie well knew that she could, in fact, get emotional about the way her husband dealt with dirty dishes. But, as always in human affairs, that was beside the point. What mattered was a woman like Annie puddling up before U.S. congressmen on national television, over a battlefield and a landscape that she clearly loved so deeply. It was not something the citizens of the Republic saw every day. The signatures on petitions from around the country rolled in by the tens of thousands. Events did turn.

  In some ways, the war for Manassas and the future of our lives will never end. But Friday, October 7, 1988, will probably be marked by future historians as the decisive battle, even if it didn’t seem that way at the time. That is when Senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas—the kind of Cavalier that The Almanac of American Politics described as “challenging” and “the town iconoclast”—got up in the well of the Senate.

  Bumpers, the respected chairman of the National Parks and Forests Subcommittee, gave a long, impassioned, and very Southern version of history that night. It was late. The sense of the Senate was that everybody desperately wished to be someplace else—especially home campaigning in the election season
that marked the end of the Reagan years. Nonetheless, an astounding number of senators remained on the floor to listen to history.

  “[Longstreet] sent out a couple of brigades to see what the strength of the Union was right here.” Bumpers pointed to the Civil War maps behind him. “And this occurred on the William Center tract, bear in mind. He found out that the Union was there in strength. He pulled those brigades back and deployed all thirty thousand of his men in woods. Those woods are still there. You go down there right now and you will see where Long-street had his men deployed behind all those trees down there …

  “Sixteen thousand men in about forty-eight hours either lost their lives or were wounded in this battle. It was perhaps the third bloodiest battle of the war. Lee, after he won this, thought France and England would recognize the Confederate States. But they were not quite ready. They said you have not won a battle in Northern soil. So Lee took his troops to Antietam.”

  The Battle of Antietam began three weeks later, on September 17. It was the most awful battle of our bloodiest war.

  “I told you about these hospitals. They are our Confederate troops buried on this property around the hospitals … I believe strongly in our heritage and think our children ought to know where these battlefields are and what was involved in them. I do not want to go out there ten years from now with my grandson and tell him about the Second Battle of Manassas. He says, ‘Well, Grandpa, wasn’t General Lee in control of this war here? Didn’t he command the Confederate troops?’

  “ ‘Yes, he did.’

  “ ‘Well, where was he?’

  “ ‘He was up there where that shopping mall is.’

  “I can see a big granite monument inside that mall’s hallway right now: General Lee stood on this spot.

  “If you really cherish our heritage as I do, and you believe that history is very important for our children, you will vote for my amendment. I yield the floor.”