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What Were These Men Doing?

Mystery Photo Answered

Thank you to everyone who participated in the interactive portion of the Local History Center’s “Treasures from the Vault” exhibit at the Central Library last month.

In the exhibit we asked visitors to guess what these two Arlington County employees were getting ready to do.

Here are some of our favorite responses:

  1. Studying amphibians at Ballston Pond
  2. Feeding the local Loch Ness Monster
  3. Fixing bridge supports
  4. Search and Rescue
  5. Space travel
  6. Diving to the bottom of the Key Bridge to look for lost car keys
  7. Searching for Atlantis
  8. Repairing leaky pipes
  9. River cleanup
  10. Working on Metro’s Orange line tunnel under the Potomac
  11. Exploring underwater for new life or fossils
  12. Modelling jumpsuits
  13. Selling makeup (If you look closely you’ll notice an Avon label on their gear)

The correct answer:

These are two Arlington County Public Works employees gearing up to repair a water main break under the Key Chain Bridge.

 

Help Our Collection Grow

If you have any interesting photos that help tell Arlington’s story please consider donating them to the Local History Center or allowing us to scan them.

For more information, stop by our Research Room on the first floor of the Central Library. You can also call us at 703-228-5966 or email us. 

 

Our Back Pages: Arlington’s Own Declaration of Civil Rights

In observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we look back at a document from a few years earlier, for a glimpse of a still-segregated Arlington…

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law as various Civil Rights leaders look on, including the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library, photo by Cecil Stoughton .

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act of 1964– one of the most important pieces of Civil Rights legislation of the twentieth century. The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Likewise, the Act outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations, and ended unequal application of voter registration requirements.

In observance of this landmark piece of legislation, we would like to share a transcription of “The Negro Citizen in Arlington,” a leaflet that was published by the Arlington Council on Human Relations, a multi-racial, multi-faith organization that advocated for Civil Rights for all Arlingtonians. 

Published just a little over a year after Arlington became the first school district in Virginia to desegregate, this document is a powerful reminder that despite those four students integrating Stratford Junior High in 1959, segregation in Arlington was still far from over. Many institutions in Arlington remained segregated, and this document specifically enumerates some of them: from sit-down restaurants and movie theaters, to maternity wards, to playgrounds and pony rides for children.

Item six contains one of the leaflet’s most powerful observations: “It is the uncertainty about so many aspects of his life that is trying for a Negro in Arlington. Some years ago he knew exactly what his limitations were. He didn’t like being limited but he knew what to expect. Now he is tired of being unknowing about his status.” In the years leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, this was indeed the reality for many Blacks in the South.

This document powerfully evokes a time of both hope and deep uncertainty in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, when they had begun to affect positive outcomes on a local level, but those advances were tempered by lingering segregation, inconsistent statutes and enforcement, and the long historical shadow of Jim Crow.

THE NEGRO CITIZEN IN ARLINGTON

A Negro in Arlington, Virginia can, like any of the white residents of our community, call an efficient Fire Department if his house is burning. He can send his child to school and know that an alert officer will stop traffic if need be so that his son or daughter may make a safe street crossing. His wife can buy meat at the nearest super-market with the assurance that it has been inspected and is fairly weighed and priced. In most matters the Arlington Negro lives out his days with the same elements of risk and with the same measure of civic protection threatening him on the one hand and supporting him on the other as is the common lot of the rest of us in modern situations. But there are areas of his life where being a Negro makes a difference in his days. Believing that many people may be unaware of this difference, the Arlington County Council on Human Relations would bring the following facts to the attention of concerned people.

1.   If an Arlington Negro man wants to take his family out to dinner, he will have to go to the District of Columbia to find a restaurant of high quality where they may be seated. They would be turned away from all the better eating places in Arlington. If his family is in the mood for an informal meal, he may buy food to carry home at an Arlington Drive-in Restaurant but he cannot expect the kind of curb service which many white families enjoy at the end of a busy day. It is not clear to what extent restaurant restrictions are related to the legal ban on mixed seating in public and to what extent they are related to the prejudices of white patrons.

2.  If an Arlington Negro wants to see a movie, he must also go to Washington. He cannot walk to a neighborhood movie or go to any Drive-in Theatre in the Arlington area because they are all closed to Negroes. Nor can he go to a public bowling alley or skating rink. He cannot stop for his children to have pony rides at a pony lot.

3.  Highly qualified personnel direct the Arlington recreation program for Negroes but whereas the playgrounds and summer recreation programs for white children are located in the neighborhoods where white children live, only two small playgrounds are available for Negroes. Both of them are inadequate and the largest one, where full-scale ball games might be played, is in the southern tip of Arlington, inaccessible to the large number of Negro youth in North Arlington. Negro children live very near some of the large playing fields designated for white children. They can only watch from the sidelines. If friendly youngsters call out to them to join the games, they must ignore the invitation or accept it with the risk that they might be sent away, or, failing to leave, might be taken to the police station.

4.  A Negro man may rush his child to Arlington Hospital for emergency treatment or for hospitalization in the non-segregated pediatrics ward and he may go himself as an out-patient or as a bed patient in the Negro ward. But when his wife is ready to give birth to their baby, he cannot take her to the community hospital where white babies are born. He must take her miles away to a hospital in the District or in Alexandria. Perchance her baby can’t wait for the Washington hospital, the Negro mother will be attended as an emergency case in the Arlington Hospital but she cannot then be placed in the maternity ward. She will be put in the general ward for Negroes where she might be exposed to any one of a variety of infectious diseases. The general ward for Negroes actually becomes a receiving ward for all overflow patients because though a Negro may not be placed in sections of the hospital designated for whites, if the white sections are full, the white patients needing space are placed in the Negro ward. This ward is not as carefully controlled for visitors as the maternity ward is, making it the more unsuitable for post-delivery cases.

5.  Many Negroes in Arlington own their homes and home ownership is a thing of special pride to them. Many of Arlington’s Negro citizens are native residents of the county and live on property which was owned by their parents or grandparents. But when young Negroes marry, even though they are well educated and have good jobs, they cannot find, in Arlington, homes which they may buy or land where Negroes may build. There is little rental property available to them. So they must leave neighborhoods where they have friends, must leave churches where they have roots and responsibilities, and whether they like it or not, must live in Washington. Older Negroes sit precariously on their front porches in Arlington because they feel that expansion of public building in the past has been at the expense of Negro land and they ponder when some new expansion will take their property and leave them homeless.

6.  It is the uncertainty about so many aspects of his life that is trying for a Negro in Arlington. Some years ago he knew exactly what his limitations were. He didn’t like being limited but he knew what to expect. Now he is tired of being unknowing about his status.

The Negro knows that merit hiring permits him to apply for and, if he is qualified, to receive a Civil Service job in the Arlington community. He does not know to what extent racial prejudice may influence the decisions of the department head who is responsible for his promotions.

The Negro knows that by Federal Law his children are now guaranteed public school education on a non-segregated basis. He does not know how long it will be before Negroes in Arlington can expect that without individual court appeals, their children will all be accepted in neighborhood schools just as other children are.

These certain limitations and uncertain opportunities which daily confront Negro citizens in Arlington are felt by those who participated in the survey, to be a blight upon the county and a burden upon all of its residents. How change and improvement may best be brought about will be a matter of continuing concern to those persons of several races and of various faiths who compose the membership of the Arlington Council on Human Relations.

Local History: A Pentagon-less Arlington?

Calling All Local History Fans…

While answering a reference question, we came across this interesting passage describing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original plans for a War Department building in Arlington: 

…The new building in Arlington would not be the War Department’s permanent headquarters. Ultimately, the department would return to Foggy Bottom in Washington. “Now, my thought is that this new War Department building [in Arlington] would be built on extremely simple lines, and that when this emergency is over, and the War Department… reverts to a peacetime status, they will be able to come back here to their regular place,” he said…

As for the building in Arlington, Roosevelt said, it was perfectly suited for another pet project of his: He wanted a central home for the old files that now used up space in government offices around Washington. He had millions of records in mind, ranging from the individual files of three million Civil War soldiers to the public-land records charting the development of the great West to obscure State Department consular reports on the history of Mongolian ponies. “So I hope that this new building, when this emergency is over, will be used as a records building for the government,” Roosevelt said. – from “The Pentagon: A History” by Steve Vogel, p. 97

In other words, Roosevelt imagined a future where instead of the Pentagon, the area of Southwest Arlington would be home to the much smaller National Archives and Records Administration!

What do you think?

What would have happened to Arlington’s development – and history – if FDR’s vision had been carried out?

  • Would the smaller building have allowed the Queen City neighborhood, which was demolished to make room for Pentagon parking and car traffic, to have survived?
  • How would a smaller National Archives building have impacted neighborhood traffic patterns, or the planning of 395 and the metro lines?
  • Would Arlington and Arlington’s post WWII growth rate have changed?
  • What would have been the impact on military contractors, if the military headquarters had moved back to Foggy Bottom?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

 

Images of the Pentagon in the 1940s, from the Center for Local History collection:

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Our Back Pages: A Taste of Home

Vietnam in Clarendon

For a brief period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a small area of Clarendon became a hub of activity for America’s newest immigrant group, the Vietnamese – and even gained international fame.

The Vietnam Center was one of many Vietnamese shops in Clarendon.

For the first half of the twentieth century, Clarendon had been Arlington’s shopping and social center, with stores, movie theaters, offices and restaurants populated by people who used buses and trolley lines.

But in the 1950s, Arlingtonians starting spreading out and relying on cars to get around — Parkington (a large parking garage in Ballston) for example, was built in the late 1950s. These more auto-dependent shoppers bypassed Clarendon, which had little to no parking, instead shopping at malls farther west and south. Businesses started folding or leaving the area, and by 1970, Clarendon was a shell of its former self.

In the early and mid-1970s, the first wave of refugees from Vietnam came to the United States.

Many of these “first-wave” immigrants were middle-class and managed to leave Vietnam with their savings and valuables to help them start a new life. Arlington’s immigrant-friendly attitude made the county appealing to these Vietnamese, and the empty storefronts in Clarendon represented an opportunity. Rent was cheap at only about two dollars per square foot, and as immigrant numbers increased with the fall of Saigon in 1975 there was a ready-made clientele, homesick and unsure in a new county.

By 1979, the 3100 block of Wilson Boulevard (near Clarendon Circle) was the business epicenter of what was usually called “Little Saigon” but was also known as the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” “Mekong Delta” and “Saigon Strip.” These businesses, along with others on N. Hudson, N. Herndon and N. Highland Streets, sold products familiar to Vietnamese immigrants and provided services by Vietnamese businessmen who knew the language and culture. Vietnamese people came from as far away as Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee to Clarendon to get a taste of home.

Little Saigon’s importance was so vast that “Arlington” was spoken of as a specific destination by those in refugee camps in Southeast Asia.

It was not to last, however; metro was coming and it would change the face of Clarendon. The Clarendon station opened in December of 1979, and over the next five years, rents started to rise in this now prime real estate. Housing was also getting more expensive, driving recent immigrants farther west. Business owners realized they had to relocate or close; with the fall of Little Saigon in Clarendon came the rise of the Eden Center in Falls Church, further south on Wilson Boulevard near Seven Corners.

Today, the 3100 block of Wilson has many restaurants and shops, but the only sign this area was a little taste of home for thousands of Vietnamese refugees is Nam Viet Restaurant on N. Hudson Street.

The following Vietnamese businesses on the 3100 block of Wilson Boulevard were listed in the 1979 Haines Directory:

  • 3105: Pacific Oriental Department Store
  • 3107: Mekong Center
  • 3133: Far Eastern Food and Gift/Viet Nam Center
  • 3143: Kim Long [a general store]
  • 3147: Saigon Market
  • 3153: Vietnamese Custom Tailor
  • 3171: Kim Ngoc Food and Gift
  • The 1980 Haynes Directory added two more Vietnamese businesses:
  • 3103: Huong Que Restaurant
  • 3169: Saigon Souvenir and Jewelry

In the 2012 Haines Directory, no businesses with obvious Vietnamese links/names were listed for the 3100 block of Wilson.

 

Our Back Pages: The "Cracker Jack Box"

A Memory of German Prisoners of War in Arlington, Virginia

The following is an excerpt from an oral history with Walter R. De Groot, from the Center for Local History’s oral history collection.  

In reply to a question regarding POWs in Arlington during WWII:

INTERVIEWER: Where did they stay?

NARRATOR: They came from Arlington Hall.

INTERVIEWER: That’s where they were incarcerated?

War Bonds rally at Clarendon Circle, circa 1943.

War Bonds rally at Clarendon Circle, circa 1943. Rector’s Florist, seen in the background, is now the location of Spider Kelly’s.

NARRATOR: Well, they had some in camps around but I believe they were held, incarcerated, at [the] Arlington Hall area. They had a place over there. In fact, that takes [me] to the story when I was stationed in Germany in ‘54.

We as kids we used to take things from home like maybe cigarettes or candy or stuff like that and we’d go over to this prison camp. We kids called it the “Cracker Jack Box.” These prisoners in their off time didn’t have anything better to do and they would cut up tobacco cans and tin cans and they’d bend them and twist them and make them like something, like a horse or a bird or a carving. They would carve things. So we never knew [what we’d get] if we threw [something] and it was sort of like, “okay it’s your turn.” I’d go over to the fence and one of the prisoners would sort of meander over that way and let’s say I had gotten a few cigarettes. I would throw them over the fence and then he would show up and he’d throw something over the fence. We never knew what we were going to get. So that’s why it was called the “Cracker Jack Box.”

Now when I was in Germany I met a man who it turns out he had been incarcerated there and he had a young wife. Many of the young German girls spoke English. Why I don’t know other than they got that much of an education as a second language. But I had mentioned [this] to this fellow.   I said something and he said, “My wife does not speak English but I do.” And then we got talking about how did you learn to speak such good English and he said, “I was a prisoner in America.”

And I said, “Oh, where?”

He said, “Oh, you wouldn’t know this place. It was a little town called Arlington.”

I said, “Oh my goodness. You came from the”Cracker Jack Box”!

He said, “You know the town”!

INTERVIEWER: Isn’t that amazing? What a story.

Walter R. De Groot Oral History, Series 3, #193, Center for Local History Oral History Project

Read this entire interview, or view all oral histories in the Project.

 

What Went Up Came Down, 1997

1960s Courthouse Demolished Sixteen Years Ago

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At 7 a.m. on Feb. 23, 1997, the shell of the old Arlington County Courthouse came down in an impressive, yet controlled, implosion. Located across the street from the current courthouse and correctional center, the building was opened in 1960 with great fanfare, as it was a vast improvement over the original courthouse from 1898. However, the 1960 building had lots of asbestos and no sprinkler or fire alarm system, and a major fire in 1990 was its death knell. The county completed the current courthouse building in 1995, and the 1960 building was used by the fire department for training exercises until its demolition. The area is now a parking lot.

This series of photographs by County Photographer Deborah Ernst give a dramatic view of the implosion and the rubble it left behind.

 

Do You Know What Your Street Used To Be Named?

How Arlington made sense of its street names and paved the way for our first Federal building.

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Arlington street name directory

This document, from June of 1935, represents a unique moment in Arlington history– a time when many Arlingtonians had to re-learn the names of their streets and those of their neighbors.

In 1932, Arlington County had already begun a boom in population that would only continue over the next several decades. Between 1900 and 1930, the population of the once-rural area had grown by over 350%–from 6,430 to 23,278–despite the annexation of sizable portions of land by the city of Alexandria in 1915 and 1929.

New streetcar suburbs began popping up all around Arlington County–between 1900 and 1910 alone, plats for seventy new subdivisions were entered into the County Deed Books.

However, these new developments sprang up with little to no coordination or central planning, and by 1932, this was beginning to create problems. The developments formed what was, in effect, a confusing archipelago of small, unconnected towns, and street names were frequently repeated throughout the county. There were, by one account, as many as twenty-five different roads named “Arlington,” for example, as well as many roads known as “Washington,” “Virginia,” and “Lee.”

Visitors found the county difficult to navigate, neighborhood names had to be attached to mailing addresses to ensure that letters arrived at the right building, and some DC-area businesses even refused to deliver to customers in Arlington. There were also concerns about the Fire Department being dispatched to a house at the same address in the wrong subdivision.

The newly-established “County Board-County Manager” Government of Arlington decided very quickly to try to rectify this situation. One of the primary issues motivating them seems to have been the desire to see a Post Office in Arlington, as mail service to Arlington had been routed through Washington D.C. since 1925, and the Post Office Department had dictated that no Post Office would be allocated to Arlington until its street naming scheme was more coherent and logical. To this end, a Street Naming Committee was established, tasked with rationalizing the county’s street naming scheme.

Initially, the committee considered simply eliminating duplicate street names, leaving one street with each repeated name. The committee quickly decided that this approach was insufficient, and that a more general, systemic plan was necessary. Soliciting feedback from the county’s residents, the committee got a variety of proposals, from continuing DC’s alphabetical/numeric scheme to having the residents of each street vote on a street name.

Eventually, the committee decided on essentially the county’s current street naming scheme:

  • The county is divided into two sections, North and South Arlington, generally separated by Arlington Boulevard (US Route 50).
  • Numbered streets generally run east-west, parallel to Arlington Boulevard, and North and South designations follow numbered street names.
  • Named streets generally run north-south, and North and South designations precede named street names. These streets are generally named in alphabetical order from east to west, skipping the letters X, Y, and Z. When the end of the alphabet is reached, it is repeated with additional syllables– thus Oak and Quinn Streets are to the east of Oakland and Quincy, which are in turn east of Ohio and Quantico Streets.
  • Boulevards, Drives, and Roads are generally major thoroughfares with historically recognized names, most of which were not renamed. Generally, these are the only through streets, unlike numbered and named streets, which tend to be broken up at times and intended primarily for local neighborhood traffic.

The Committee’s recommendations were put forward for public comment, and were approved with several small amendments in August of 1934–thirty months after the project began. In 1936, Arlington County was assigned a local Postmaster for the first time in over ten years, and the next year, the Postmaster General of the United States of America was on hand for the dedication of the cornerstone of the new Post Office in Clarendon–the first federal government building in Arlington County.

For people researching Arlington before 1934, the street name change can present challenges. To this end, we have digitized this booklet, as well as creating a searchable PDF, so that researchers can more easily and quickly navigate maps and addresses of the area before the change.

What about you? Did you know the former name of the streets in your neighborhood? How much have they changed? How do you think such a radical change of street names would be handled if it were attempted today? Let us know what you think.

Our Back Pages: The Nearby Hideaways

Shirlington Shelter Map

Nuclear attack was a constant boogeyman of the Cold War.

In the 1950s and 1960s especially, American citizenry was encouraged to be proactive in protecting themselves from nuclear fallout (remember “Duck and Cover”?).

Arlington was no exception. In late 1960s, the Northern Virginia Regional Planning Commission, which covered the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax and Falls Church and Arlington, Fairfax, Loudon and Prince William Counties, developed a civil defense plan for a possible nuclear attack. These plans included a fallout shelter program, mapping shelters in regard to population centers and how to get people to those shelters.

The Northern Virginia Region Community Shelter Program, published in 1968, outlined these plans and processes, and also published maps of shelter locations for subsets of the region. The Arlington Edition of the map sectioned the county into color-coded zones so users could find a shelter in their area and contained tips on creating and stocking your own shelter. The above image shows the fallout shelter locations for Shirlington, and the image below lists the names of these shelters. The map itself has the following introduction:

“In case of danger from fallout from a nuclear attack upon this country, you and your family would need to know WHERE TO GO and WHAT TO DO. This Community Shelter Plan contains this information for every citizen. It is based on making the best possible use of the fallout protection now available. If you and your family take action, as this Plan recommends, you will have maximum chance for survival from fallout effects.”

List of Shirlington fallout shelters, 1968.

What about you?

Did you have a fallout shelter in your home or neighborhood? Do you remember preparing for “the Big One”? We want to hear from you.

 

From Marching Bands to Indie Rock: The Story of Gerald Lewis Recording

1979 Arlington County All-County Elementary Orchestra and Chorus album cover

In today’s music scene, it isn’t uncommon for those involved to wear many hats.

Artists crossover from performing to producing, find parallel careers in film, literature, and the visual arts with regularity. In earlier times, this phenomenon was less prevalent, excepting well-known performers such as Elvis and Frank Sinatra. Arlington’s own Gerald M. Lewis had a rich and varied career, being involved in many different aspects of music including performing, instruction, production, and recording.

From 1954-1979, Mr. Lewis served as a band director for Gunston and Stratford Junior High Schools, and Wakefield and Washington-Lee High Schools. At his home on 216 S. Pershing Drive, Lewis also owned and operated Gerald Lewis Recording. Housed in a mobile home adjacent to his residence, Gerald Lewis Recording was a mobile recording unit that offered him the ability to record performers and public events on location.

Operating from 1964-1991, a remarkably diverse customer base utilized Mr. Lewis’ recording service. Local Virginia and Maryland schools and churches recorded public events and concerts, including performances from high school marching bands and public speakers.

Local recording artists also took advantage of Lewis’ expertise. In 1985, Teen-Beat Records artists Unrest used the mobile studio to master their debut 7” single “So You Want To Be a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”/ “Zelda” (Side A) – “The Hill” (Side B), which was also the first Teen-Beat vinyl release. Unrest band member and Teen-Beat impresario Mark Robinson recalls, “He [Lewis] essentially was the broker for Teen-Beat to press our first record. He put the master tape together, sent it to the pressing plant, etc. I paid him, and he paid the pressing plant. I found his number in the Yellow Pages. He also recorded and pressed up the Arlington All-County Orchestra record that I was on back in 4th or 5th grade, so I knew that this guy knew how to make a record.”

In 1996, Mr. Lewis and his wife Elizabeth, a music teacher at Wakefield High School, moved to Tennessee where he continued to be involved in music, directing, arranging, and playing trombone for the Pleasant Hill Ensemble until his passing in March of 2008, at the age of 82.

What about you?

Do you have any memories of Mr. Lewis or his recording services?

A Garden to Remember

Photgraph by Pamela Powers

The Bon Air Memorial Rose Garden, located at the corner of N. Lexington  St. and Wilson Boulevard, was conceived by Nell Broyhill as a memorial for the many Arlingtonians who served and died in World War II.

In 1941, Ms.  Broyhill assembled a group of women from Arlington churches, civic groups and associations and formed the Arlington Rose Garden Association, now called the Arlington Rose Foundation. After ten years of fundraising they finally realized their dream when the rose garden opened on the grounds of what was then Arlington Hospital (now Virginia Hospital Center) in 1951.

Ten years later the garden was moved to Bon Air Park; the transfer was completed in 1964. Today the garden is maintained by the Arlington’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Resources. It contains approximately 135 different rose varieties and 2,500 plants on about one acre.

In the center of the garden is the famous Peace rose and the Veterans’ Honor ™ rose. The Peace rose is a yellow blend Hybrid Tea developed by Frances Meilland in France in 1935. When World War II began Meilland sent the rose to friends in Germany, Italy and the U.S. in the hopes of ensuring its survival. Called the Peace rose in the U.S. to commemorate the end of the war, it was formally introduced on April 19, 1945, the day Berlin fell.

The Veterans’ Honor ™ rose, a dark red hybrid tea rose, was created by Jackson and Perkins in 1999 to commemorate America’s veterans.

The Foundation sponsors an annual rose competition for growers. This year’s district competition, which includes 70 competitive categories, will be at held at Merrifield Garden Center- Fair Oaks location on September 22nd from  1 to 6 pm and September 23rd from  11am to 4 pm. See  www. arlingtonrose.org  for more details as well as for information about the Arlington Rose Foundation’s activities and rose advice.

Plans are also underway for a Bon Air Memorial Rose garden celebration day on Saturday, October 6. Along with docent-led tours, rose rooting classes and poetry inspired by roses, the legacy and unique gift that Ms. Broyhill bestowed to Arlington will be on prime display.

What About You?

What are your favorite memories of Bon Air Rose Garden? Or other wonderful rose gardens in Arlington?

 

 

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