Edge City
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James A. McClure, the reserved Idaho Republican who has one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate, got up in opposition to the Bumpers amendment. But he actually added fuel to the greater argument over the land. Said he:
“There is not a single battlefield free from development pressures. We are not just talking about Manassas, we are talking about what is going to happen to every one of the other elements of the National Park System where battlefields are involved … A cable franchise in Frederick, Maryland, proposes construction of a 160-foot microwave reception and transmission tower on Red Hill, less than one mile from Bloody Lane, the center of the Antietam Battlefield.
“Does it sound familiar in the context of this debate?
“A 100-foot microwave tower threatens the Bolivar Heights Battlefield associated with Major General T.J. (Stonewall) Jackson’s siege and capture of Harpers Ferry, the site of the largest surrender of U.S.—led troops. Such a structure, within five feet—I repeat, five feet—of the park boundary will impair not only the battlefield but also much of the skyline about historic Harpers Ferry.
“Sound familiar in the context of this debate?
“Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park’s greatest need is to establish a legislated boundary, as land immediately adjacent to the park is scheduled for development.”
He went on and on. Cold Harbor, threatened by development from an expanding Richmond. Kenesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park in Georgia. Vicksburg, Chickamauga-Chattanooga, and Stones River. “The list,” he acknowledged, “is overwhelming.” Where will this all end?
In context, he was asking a budgetary question. “This will not be an acquisition for spare change. By this action we are signaling other landowners at other sites that the way to obtain federal funds is to destroy, or threaten to destroy, resources which the federal government has authorized for acquisition but which have not filtered to the top of the annual appropriations process; or, as in the case of Manassas, resources which are not even within the boundaries of an established park.”
Of course in the context of our futures, he was asking a more profound question, perhaps more profound than he knew. Where, indeed, will this battle over the land all end?
Then again, maybe McClure did have an inkling. In what was meant to be his clinching argument, he said, “Perhaps the most significant battle of the entire Manassas Battlefield with respect to the William Center tract is that being fought now, not the ones that were fought there 125 years ago.”
With that, he sat down, and the Senate came to a roll-call vote.
Adams.
Armstrong.
Baucus.
Boschwitz …
It was not at all clear what the result would be.
… Thurmond.
Trible.
Warner.
Wirth.
The votes were tallied. The vote was 50 to 25 in the U.S. Senate to save the battlefield.
Senator John Warner of Virginia, the Republican who had tried to find some wiggle room between the two absolute positions of this battle—who had tried to write legislation that amounted to a compromise on the cheap—voted against the bill. But the instant the vote was tallied, he got up to save his soul: “Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to vitiate [cancel] the roll-call vote.”
The acting president pro tempore: “Is there objection? Hearing none, it is so ordered.”
That was the passing of the amendment. At that moment on October 7, 1988, the people of the United States of America redeemed their heritage.
On October 12, the Senate passed the tax bill to which the amendment was a rider. A Reagan veto seemed likely. Two days later, the battlefield measure survived conference with the House.
On Friday, October 14, George Bush, in a speech in La Jolla, California, tried to cast himself as a modern-day Teddy Roosevelt, distancing himself from the years of controversy over Ronald Reagan’s restrictive environmental policies.
“In George Bush you will have a president committed to conservation,” he said. Bush promised to “strengthen and preserve our parks” under a new program called America the Beautiful, and to seek new Clean Air legislation. He vowed to pursue reductions in acid rain pollutants, stop ocean dumping of sludge and medical wastes, enforce the Superfund restrictions, convene an international conference on the environment, back new parkland acquisition in the California locale in which he spoke, “take a very close look” at his earlier opposition to restrictions on offshore drilling in the area, back urban “greenways,” propose using oil and gas tax revenue funds to finance new park acquisitions, and create a new National Endowment for the Environment.
The fate of the Manassas bill, however, was still a cliff-hanger. Negotiations between key House and Senate conferees over the tax bill in which it was embedded broke off. It appeared almost certain that a tax compromise could not be worked out before Congress adjourned at the end of the week. By October 21, the headlines read BILL TO BUY MALL SITE NEARS FAILURE.
Nonetheless, at 1 A.M. on the twenty-second, in the legislative equivalent of seconds left to play as both houses rushed to adjourn, the bill did pass. On Wednesday, November 2, it reached the White House.
On Friday, November 11, without fanfare or even comment, Ronald Reagan signed it.
November 11, 1988, was one and a quarter centuries, less eight days, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.
“The moment the ink from the president’s pen was dry,” reported John F. Harris in that Saturday’s Washington Post, “ownership of the property transferred from the developer, Northern Virginia’s Hazel/Peterson Cos., to the federal government as an addition to the adjacent 3800-acre Manassas National Battlefield Park.
“ ‘We’re done,’ said Robert Kelly, a spokesman for Hazel/Peterson Cos. ‘My understanding is we’re supposed to leave the property in an orderly fashion … and we’ll be doing that.’ ”
Harris noted that Hazel would make a fortune on the taking. The federal government ultimately paid $81 million for the William Center property. Hazel had bought the land for $11 million two years before.
But it was a wonder nonetheless, and the next morning Annie Snyder led fifty of her resistance fighters into the promised land. They marched onto Stuart’s Hill for the first time, the land on which the frenzied workings of the machines had just been stilled. Soon, signs around the perimeter of the once but not now future William Center were posted by park rangers. They encircled three model homes, a stretch of four-lane divided road, water and sewer work, and bulldozed site preparation throughout most of the eastern section of the 542-acre place. The sledgehammers drove the message home. U.S. PROPERTY, the signs read.
The few early stalwarts of the Save the Battlefield Coalition had long before promised one another—back when they most needed promises to each other, for other promises were so scant—that if they ever won this battle, on the first Saturday afterward they would have a ceremony of thanksgiving. If the bulldozers were ever stilled, to thank the Lord for the miracle—which at times had seemed as improbable as the parting of the Red Sea—they would gather one more time to honor the spirit of the place.
That Saturday, November 19, dawned foul. As they gathered near the site of one of the houses that had been used as a field hospital during the war, the air was dank and chill. The drizzle was steady.
But that did not dampen the spirits of the coalition. They had survived 104 degree heat the previous July when they held a massive rally at the battlefield. It featured a March of the Ghosts, in which specters with astonishing resemblances to Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson, and J.E.B. Stuart had prowled the land as drums rolled and bagpipes keened. A little rain and cold would not disturb them. And, they laughed, they finally had few tactical considerations. It’s not as if they had to worry anymore about the television cameras shorting out. This was for the faithful.
That is why, as the small crowd of 140 began their hymns and their praye
rs while the rain continued to fall, they wondered exactly how it had happened. When the engine roar came from the north, they murmured to each other, Where in the name of God will this all end?
If they thought the war was ended, they were wrong.
The roar came from a small, single-engine plane. It passed over them again and again, across the lowering skies, its low-altitude buzz a never-ending pain. It would not go away. It seemed it would always be there. As indeed it would resonate into the future.
The Cessna pulled a banner behind its tail, through the cold mists over the battlefield of centuries. Once again it proclaimed defiance. Endless defiance. It promised that the war was not over among the Americans. The battle would be fought again that had been fought this year, for it was the same battle that we had fought on this very ground twice, a century and a quarter ago. The same battle we’ve been struggling with since we first landed permanently on these shores, in 1607 and 1620.
It came down to who we are, how we got that way, where we’re headed, and what we value. Whether we will ever resolve the difference between what we can do and what we should. Whether the land belongs to us, or we belong to the land.
Behind that little buzzing plane was this reminder: THE TAKING OF PRIVATE LAND IS UN AMERICAN.
11
THE LIST
Edge Cities, Coast to Coast
THE FOLLOWING is a select compilation of Edge Cities in North America.
Although this is one of the more thorough such lists at this writing, the nature of the beast doubtless makes it incomplete. Edge Cities are a function of growth; they change. In a time and place of rapid expansion, as in the Washington region of the late 1980s, the number of Edge Cities swelled from thirteen to sixteen in two years. By the same token, while the area around Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport does not qualify as a mature Edge City in the early 1990s, that is probably not a permanent condition.
The definition of an Edge City is the five-part test described in Chapter 1:
A full-blown Edge City is marked by:
• Five million square feet of leasable office space or more.
• Six hundred thousand square feet of retail space or more.
• A population that increases at 9 A.M. on workdays—marking the location as primarily a work center, not a residential suburb.
• A local perception as a single end destination for mixed use—jobs, shopping, and entertainment.
• A history in which, thirty years ago, the site was by no means urban; it was overwhelmingly residential or rural in character.
This definition requires some judgment calls on the part of the observer. A few Edge Cities listed below are so dispersed across the geography as to challenge the definition—Boston’s intersection of Route 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike, for example. In other places, several Edge Cities are packed to gether, as along northern Interstate 680 in Contra Costa County and along the San Diego Freeway, in Orange County, California. Where one begins and the other ends is debatable.
Some other centers cry out for consideration because of their history or the overwhelming size of their office population, even though they may not meet all the other elements of the definition. Merrifield, Virginia, site of the world headquarters of Mobil—the second largest oil company and sixth largest industrial corporation in the United States—is some distance from major retail.
This list, then, is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive. It is intended to spur the reader to go out and look at some of these places, make critical judgments, and arrive at personal conclusions.
While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the list, experience, alas, demonstrates the unlikelihood that perfection has been achieved. Readers who wish to suggest changes may write the author in care of The Edge City™ Group, Broad Run, Virginia, 22014–9501.
The symbols in this list match the symbols in the maps. A triangle means the old “central business district”—usually thought of as “downtown.” A black circle means an Edge City. A gray circle means an emerging Edge City. A clear circle means an Edge City that is expected to be built, according to local plan.
National sources include Salomon Brothers, New York; Robert Charles Lesser and Company, Los Angeles; The Office Network, Houston; the Urban Land Institute, Washington; academic geographers and demographers noted in the Acknowledgments, and personal observation. Local commercial real estate sources are listed in the Notes. For references to Edge Cities in Europe and Asia, see Chapter 7.
ATLANTA
Downtown (Five Points)
Midtown
Buckhead (The Lenox Square Mall area)
The Cumberland Mall-Galleria area (at the 285 Perimeter beltway and Interstate 75)
The Perimeter Center area (at 285 and Georgia 400 in north Fulton County)
The Gwinnett Place mall area (off Interstate 85 in Gwinnett County)
The Perimeter and I-85 area
The Hartsfield-Atlanta International Airport area
AUSTIN
Downtown
The Northwest area (centered on Loop 360 at the Mo Pac Expressway and Research Boulevard-Route 183)
BALTIMORE
Downtown
Towson
Hunt Valley
Columbia
Demonstrating how independent Edge Cities can be, Columbia, with ties to two metropolitan areas, is also considered part of the Washington region.
White Marsh
Owings Mills
Security Boulevard
Baltimore-Washington International Airport
BOSTON
Downtown
The Kendall Square-MIT area
The Alewife T station area (in north Cambridge)
Quincy-Braintree (at 128 and the Southeast Expressway)
The Massachusetts Turnpike and 128
The Burlington Mall area (at 128 and Route 3)
Peabody-Danvers (I-95 north)
Southern New Hampshire
The Mass Pike and 495
The Framingham area (the Mass Pike between 128 and 495)
Foxboro (495 and 95 south)
CHARLOTTE
Uptown
This, confusingly, is what the old central business district is locally called.
Southpark
CHICAGO
The Loop (and environs)
The Schaumburg area (including Hoffman Estates and the Woodfield Mall area near the Northwest Tollway)
The O’Hare Airport area
“The Illinois Research and Development Corridor,” (including the area around Oak Brook, Lisle, Naperville, Aurora, and the East-West Tollway)
The Lake Shore Corridor area (around the Edens Expressway and the Tri-State Tollway)
CLEVELAND
Downtown
The Chagrin Boulevard and Interstate 271 area (east of Shaker Heights)
The Rockside Road and Interstate 77 area
DALLAS-FORT WORTH
Downtown Dallas
Turtle Creek—Oak Lawn (Midtown)
The North Central Expressway area (from north of Downtown to Beltline Road)
The Dallas Galleria-LBJ Freeway area
Also known as the Blade Runner Landscape.
Las Colinas
The Stemmons Freeway-Love Field area
The far North Dallas-EDS area
The Richardson—Piano area (the North Central Expressway area beyond the LBJ)
Downtown Fort Worth
DENVER
Downtown
The Tech Center area (including the Greenwood Plaza area)
Cherry Creek
DETROIT
Downtown Detroit
The Southfield-Northland Mall area (off I-10 nearest Downtown)
The Southfield-Prudential Town Center area (I-10 northwest of Northland Mall)
The Southfield—Telegraph Road area (I-10 at Interstate 696)
The Troy-Big Beaver Road area (off Interstate 75)
The Auburn Hills area (off Interstate 75)
&n
bsp; The Farmington Hills area (at Interstate 696)
The Dearborn-Fairlane Village area
The Ann Arbor-Route 14 area
Downtown Windsor, Ontario, Canada
FORT LAUDERDALE
Downtown
The Cypress Creek area
HOUSTON
Downtown
The Galleria area
The Greenway Plaza area
The Sharpstown Mall-Highway 59 area
The Texas Medical Center-Rice University area
The Westheimer—West Belt—Westchase area
The Katy Freeway—West Houston Energy Corridor
The U.S. 290—Northwest area
The Greenspoint—North Beltway—I-45 area
The Clear Lake—NASA area
FM 1960
This is not a radio station; it is a reference to an Edge City that is growing up around a highway that fairly recently was a farm-tomarket road.
The Woodlands
KANSAS CITY
Downtown
The College Boulevard-Overland Park area
The Country Club Plaza area
The Crown Center area
The Kansas City International Airport area
LAS VEGAS
Downtown
The Strip
The Strip, while not having much in the way of leasable office space, is so much the center of people’s perception of what Las Vegas means that it is something of an Edge City paragon. How many visitors to Las Vegas discover that downtown even exists?
LOS ANGELES
Greater Los Angeles now covers five counties: Los Angeles County at the center, Ventura County up the coast to the northwest, Orange County down the coast to the southeast, and Riverside County and San Bernardino County inland. It includes: