Don Alexander Hawkins is an architect and historian of Washington, D.C.

Rosslyn, Virginia, sits on a bluff above the Potomac River overlooking one of the most beautiful cities in the world or, as Team Trump calls it, “The Swamp.” President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign recently leased a floor of elevated office space here for its semi-headquarters. (The primary HQ will be Trump Tower in New York.) For the several years between now and the 2020 election, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and his colleagues will be able to look down upon the people of Washington in real time.

They had a lot of empty space to choose from among the many tall office buildings that make Rosslyn look more like a modern city than Washington does. It got that way by not being included in the District of Columbia—the result of political decisions that propelled the two neighboring cities in vastly different directions over the centuries. After all, Rosslyn wasn’t always this glossy—far from it.


Arlington County—formerly known as Alexandria County—didn’t used to be independent from the capital. In 1790, President George Washington needed congressional votes to pass Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s financial program. He secured one of those votes by promising Alexandria’s congressman—a member of the powerful Lee family—to include his town within the new District of Columbia. That meant that Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had to rejigger the plan for the District, swiveling the Constitution-mandated 10-mile-square around until it encompassed the little town and 25 square miles of its hinterland, making Alexandria County part of D.C.

This constitutionally, legislatively and judicially confirmed three-party contract existed for over 50 years until some Alexandria businessmen and politicians determined in 1846 that it had been a bad deal. Most importantly, Alexandria’s major business, the slave trade, was being outlawed in the District. By way of a hastily organized and barely advertised referendum, the leaders authorized themselves to unilaterally withdraw from their binding contract with the District of Columbia and Maryland. D.C. lost a voteless population and, thanks to its new county, Virginia gained a seat in Congress.

Among the unintended consequences of the county’s separation from the District was that the Virginia edge of the Potomac River suddenly became the border between two different police jurisdictions. Gambling barges and floating houses of prostitution soon found moorings along the Virginia riverfront because the Washington police would not tread on Virginia soil to reach the boarding ramps for the bobbing pleasure palaces. There was no effective municipal government or police force on the Virginia end of the Aqueduct Bridge, the new shortcut from Georgetown, so eventually, the river-borne vice spread into Rosslyn, whose largest legitimate business was a brewery.

The county was a local embarrassment for more than half a century, from the 1850s until 1904, when a few leaders began to express the will of a growing middle-class population in opposition to the local crime machine. Their efforts at restructuring the government culminated in the 1920s, when the progressive county-manager form of governance was instituted and the county began about 40 years of prosperity and population growth. In 1920, Alexandria County’s name was changed to Arlington County—in honor of Arlington House, which George Washington’s step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, had built on the hill behind Rosslyn as a private memorial to the first president that could be seen from across the Potomac. Arlington Cemetery had also been created on Custis’ property during the Civil War.

Over the years, Rosslyn’s pool halls, saloons, brothels and gambling houses were replaced by lumber and coal yards, auto repair shops and oil storage tanks. The Aqueduct Bridge was replaced by Francis Scott Key Bridge in 1923, and Rosslyn’s ugly reputation improved, but it didn’t rise above the level of pervasive seediness, as typified by the pawnshops that still lined its streets into the ’60s. The most popular restaurant in Rosslyn for many years as it was rebounding was “The Pawnshop.”

Some small amount of city planning took place in the 1950s. One plan called for Key Boulevard to cut through a lumber yard to connect it with Fort Myer Drive. At that time one of the lumber yard’s owners, William P. Ames, wanted to replace the small frame chapel that he and some fellow Methodists attended nearby. One result of the county’s negotiations with Mr. Ames was that, instead of a street going through his property, a church was placed there, with a gas station as a kind of perpetual endowment built underneath it. So now, when you turn right off Fort Myer to go up Nash Street, you are confronted by the Arlington Temple United Methodist Church, with a steeple and cross up above, a sanctuary in the middle, and a couple of sets of gas pumps down below.

During the federal government’s expansion following the Korean War, Congress opened up competition for leasing office space outside of Washington on lower-priced land. Rosslyn was so unattractive in so many ways that it had a great price-to-location ratio. Rosslyn instantly qualified as developable real estate, and its prosperity depended upon getting a lot of office space built in a hurry.

Enter the Pomponio brothers. A young Arlingtonian and his even younger twin siblings made the space that the government needed, both right across the river in Rosslyn and just downriver in the Arlington railroad yards that were suddenly transformed into Crystal City. The Pomponios acquired control of underused properties and built 15 of the stubby buildings known locally as high-rises in Rosslyn during the ’60s. The federal Heights of Buildings Act of 1910 had given D.C. a unique character at the cost of real estate value. The land across the river was not only far cheaper than in the District, but it was unconstrained by federal height limits. County planning policies incentivized developers to plan expansively.

Unfortunately for the Pomponio brothers, the constrained financial conditions of the ’70s introduced closer inspection of the books to the process of development. Ultimately, all three brothers spent time in jail for their imaginative interpretation of tax law. But the threesome had helped boost Rosslyn and Crystal City into becoming major regional office building enclaves—all before the brothers were 40 years old.

For many years, Arlington’s planners required developers to widen and improve the streets in front their properties. When different projects were underway on both sides of a street, drivers often had to swing back and forth across the centerline to get onto a paved surface. When finished, Rosslyn’s widened streets helped get auto traffic through the new canyons of concrete and glass, but they offered little to pedestrians. The planners’ solution to dull utilitarian streets was a system of skywalks connecting buildings above the level of the traffic. Separation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic had become an unchallenged article of faith among modernist planners early in the 20th century, and Rosslyn’s characterless streetscape was ripe for the experiment on a pretty large scale. Concrete pedestrian bridges ultimately connected scores of Rosslyn’s second floors during their heyday, but people just didn’t like them—or use them. Many were removed early on, but many stayed in place until their sites were redeveloped after 2000. There are still a couple of the pedestrian bridges in place to help people get to Arlington Gateway Park, lying between Rosslyn and Key Bridge—and surrounded by many lanes of traffic.

The automobiles for whose convenience Rosslyn seemed to be developed needed to be housed on a large scale, and so most every office building built a garage to store its own population’s vehicles. But after hours, the garages of office buildings were usually deserted. Deep Throat selected the garage beneath a pair of office towers at 1401 Wilson Boulevard for meeting Bob Woodward in 1972 and ’73. He probably figured that a deserted garage in Rosslyn was going to be even more deserted than its equivalent in D.C. He was right.

Arlington planning came of age in the mid-’70s when the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor was designed to accommodate Route 66 and Metro. Both circulation routes were threaded through the county to serve Rosslyn and four other newly urbanized centers on their way to Falls Church. Rosslyn became a major transit hub for Metro and street transportation. One Metro line also served Crystal City, whose quantity of enclosed new office space exceeded Rosslyn’s.

In the 1980s, a pair of aluminum and glass airfoil-shaped office towers by the architectural firm Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum should have led the way in construction of higher quality architecture that acknowledged its position in the regional landscape, but most developers were slow to follow their lead toward better-quality design. The increasing price of land eventually brought better architecture into the development mix. Developers justified the necessary rise in price-per-square-foot of rental space by the up-to-date overall appearance and feeling of specialness in the lobbies that a design-oriented architectural firm could provide. Much of the recent construction in Rosslyn has been first rate, and projects on the boards are even better, but market fluctuations have always held Rosslyn development on a shortish leash, and several projects are currently looking for optimistic buyers.

Rosslyn has been competing from behind with Crystal City and its neighbors for over a half-century, but now that Crystal City has won the contest for an Amazon headquarters, Rosslyn is no longer in the same league with its nemesis. Development activity in the next few years is going to be centered on South Arlington at the newly minted National Landing mixed-use neighborhood. In the future, Rosslyn’s leasing agents are likely to tout the convenience of its five-minute drive time to National Landing as a great amenity. Rosslyn will continue to improve, for sure, but cheap office space will still be available for any presidential campaign that wants to look down on Washington in 2024.