Chapter 10: Washington – The Land

I: Manassas: Long Ago and Far Away

THIRTY MILES west of the U.S. Capitol, out Interstate 66, there is a small Virginia stream, name of Bull Run. Over a century and a quarter ago, in the brutally hot summers of 1861 and 1862, great armies clashed in the swale of this brook, testing no less than whether a nation conceived in liberty could long endure.

In the Second Battle of Manassas, in 1862, Robert E. Lee had his headquarters on Stuart's Hill, overlooking the field of blood. In 1988, 542 acres of this land, including that hill, had come into the hands of an organization headed by one John T. (Til) Hazel. Hazel was by far the most prominent developer in these parts. He had fledged his law career in the 1950s by condemning the land for the road that would come to be known as the Capital Beltway. And for thirty years he had been a key player in the economic and social revolution that culminated with eight Edge Cities blooming in Northern Virginia. One of them, Tysons Corner, drew astounded observers from around the world to its high-rises and intersections; it was bigger than downtown Miami.

Til Hazel, who was born and raised Southern, took no little satisfaction in watching his native land of Northern Virginia approach and then eclipse the economic energy of that Yankee bastion across the Potomac, the District of Columbia. Lee's personal command, after all, was not called the Army of Northern Virginia for nothing.

Thus it was, with a firm faith in the inevitability of progress, that Hazel in the late 1980s turned his attention to the land he had acquired near the exit from Interstate 66 labeled MANASSAS. For, he came to see, right there next to the Manassas National Battlefield Park—Bull Run to Northerners—was a prime place for a new Edge City. It could contain as much as 4.3 million square feet of nonresidential space—the size of downtown Fort Lauderdale—plus 560 homes. It would do the local economy a lot of good.

The last thing he expected was a fight.

Abraham Lincoln, a century before, on November 19, 1863, had also focused his attention on a bloody battlefield. The address Lincoln gave that date—its opening words were "Four-score and seven years ago"—was in Gettysburg, of course, not Manassas. But his words echoed eerily exactly 125 years later, and eighty miles south, on Til Hazel's development abutting the National Park on which soil Thomas Jonathan Jackson had first been described as standing against the Union "like a stone wall."

"In a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground," Lincoln said. "The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract . . .

"It is rather for us . . ." said the tall, gaunt man, "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."

II: Present at Creation

THE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON AIR is warm and thick, even at this altitude. Long gray wisps of mist snag on trees and rolling hills to the east, in the direction of Washington. From the walkway near the top of Tycon Tower, Til Hazel can point to just where he farmed, before the earth had moved.

"You know, it's a strange thing. We took very few pictures. One of the great disappointments is that I have no picture at all of our horses. The old team that I used to work and plow and everything," says Hazel.

"But as far as Tysons, let's try to set the stage. Basically, 123 was a narrow two-lane road. There was a big hill over here and 123 snaked around. Oh, yes, it's been leveled. The topo has dramatically changed.

"In 1939, when I first saw it"—Hazel was nine—"Route 7 had a beer joint and it had the feed store. The beer joint—it seems like to me I remember one of those Coca-Cola signs that said 'Tysons Inn.' But around here, you wanted to talk about it, you just said 'the beer joint.' "

Hazel steps over a rope the diameter of his wrist, from which a window washer dangles, a hundred feet below. The brick precipice from which he dispenses history rims a Philip Johnson-designed skyscraper.

"The famous orchard was right over here at the entrance to the mall. It was just on the other side of the Marriott." Pointing, he leans far enough out over the parapet to make his companion queasy. "Apple orchard."

"Then you had a ninety-five-acre dairy farm that was foreclosed on during the war. It was on the market for $18,000 in 1945. Owned by a family named Ayers. That was the farm I tried to get my aunt to buy. She said to me—and I remember it vividly—she said, 'Well, tell me, what in the world would I want with a property way out in the country?' "

From the perimeter Hazel prowls, one can enjoy a vista from the National Cathedral in Washington, ten miles east, to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, twenty-five miles west. What he points to as he walks this day are not those wonders, though. Instead, he is consumed by the hundreds of strange, sprawling, towering shapes below.

The hill with all the tower cranes—that's w3here old one-eyed Marcus Bles grazed his Angus cattle in the 1950s. "Bles bought the gravel pit, and his first moneymaker was gravel fifty cents a ton, and you haul it."

Only from this height is it clear that a hill existed where Hazel pointed. It is not that the rise is inconsiderable. To the contrary, it is the highest natural point in this part of Virginia. It is just that closer to ground level the landscape has been so bulldozed and banked, it is easy to think no contour of the land was left that had been put there by the Creator. On the slopes of that cow pasture and gravel pit of yore now rises the Tysons II Galleria, a $ 1 billion, fifteen-year office, retail, and hotel project that, all by itself, dwarfs many of America's old downtowns.

From the top of this tower, Til views a landscape that John Rolfe Gardiner referred to in his novel In the Heart of the whole world. To be sure, Gardiner was being irreverent when he barely fictionalized this mall-centered metropolis. But then again, there is something about Tysons—the largest urban agglomeration between Washington and Atlanta—that evokes that from people. Over to the west is the megastructure with the curved white six-story entrance that causes everybody to refer to it as the Up Toilet Seat Building. Above Hazel, at the very pinnacle of the JTL Tycon office tower on whose edge he paces, jut two crowning brick arches. It is these arches that led this building to be variously dubbed the world's Tallest Shopping Bag and the world's Tallest McDonald's.

Directly below is the mall in which the arrival of Bloomingdale's—seen in the early 1970s as the epitome of New York fashion, not to mention decadence—caused a sensation. When one pioneering diplomatic contingent from Beijing arrived in Washington, the first thing they wanted was not a tour of the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument. What they wanted was to get out past the legendary eight-lane Beltway that reputedly separates Washington from reality. They wanted to go to Tysons. They wanted to see "Broomie's." They wanted a stiff dose of America.

As Hazel walks and talks this day, he points out what are literally the landmarks of his six decades of life. But he also marks the revolution in America that has crystallized in such Edge Cities.

Hazel should know about this revolution, for he has done more to shape the Washington area than any man since Pierre L'Enfant, the Frenchman who designed the District of Columbia for George Washington. A comparison of Hazel to L'Enfant is by no means idle. Metropolitan Washington today is not only one of the ten largest urban areas in America. In the late 1980s, it was the fastest-growing white-collar office job market in North America and Europe for four years in a row. Its private-enterprise, high-information, high-education, post-Industrial Revolution economy made it a model of what American urban areas would be in the twenty-first century. Its growth, of course, was marked by this strange new Edge City form, not by the old ways of L'Enfant. As a result, it became an archetype for every city worldwide that was growing.

Hazel, by being among the first to comprehend and enthusiastically clear the way for this kind of world, also became an intriguing model of the Edge City creator. Originally a lawyer and then a developer, by the late 1980s he had accumulated a personal fortune estimated at $100 million. The estate on which his family lived, an hour from the White House, spanned a fair-sized valley and four thousand acres of land—a respectable spread by the standards of Montana. To understand him was to understand how a whole new world had been shaped.

John Tilghman Hazel, Jr., has a face you could carve into a jack-o'-lantern. Angular slabs dominate. They descend outward from his eyes and his nose in parallel diagonals, like corporal's chevrons. His jaw is a meaty block. His crew cut—crew cut!—makes the top of his head as flat and square as its bottom, although less wide. The effect is like looking at the end of a barn with its peak razored off.

Over the decades, Hazel has so successfully, rapidly, and visibly transformed entire Northern Virginia landscapes that his vanquished opponents have been reduced to describing him in satanic terms—no less than the Prince of Darkness and the Father of Lies. He is thought by them to symbolize rapaciousness and hypocrisy and greed. They hiss about the time he bulldozed one tree a day in a pristine wilderness, in protest of a government delay. They scream about the time that he clear-cut twenty-six acres rather than have it spared for a park. They point knowingly to his successful legal defense of a senior official charged with bribery at a time of rampant corruption. They rage about his legal wiles before the state supreme court, his capacity to frustrate and overturn the decisions of any government, any planning board that might dare to oppose growth. They speak in hushed tones about his connections to governors and senators. Why, a U.S. Representative even made a home on Hazel's estate! Hazel is seen as invincible. He is the legendary despoiler of the soil, the destroyer of the planet, the raper of the land. He is vilified for the traffic, for the pollution, for the chaos, for the noise, for the Change. He has been, in short, elevated to the status of a monster.

His friends and allies tell a strikingly different story. They speak of him as being a real gentleman, a man of cordial, even antique manners, a man of his word. They tell glowing stories of his generosity. They talk of how he graduated from Harvard Law and was now chairman of the Harvard College Fund, the university's major fundraising arm; how he helped steer Northern Virginia's George Mason University from its origins in a strip shopping center and an old elementary school to its current glory, when one of its economists has won the Nobel Prize and its performing arts center is making those of the old downtown nervous. They describe him as that rare individual who has a grand vision for the entire region, from its airports to its seaports, from the Blue Ridge to the Chesapeake Bay. If there are problems as a result of all this growth, say they, the fault ;is not Hazel's. It is the fault of those petty, selfish, and parochial minds, from the bureaucrats to the bleeding-heart ankle-biters, who stood in the way of building everything for which he foresaw the need—especially the roads.

But of all the things said about Hazel, the most startlingly incongruous is about his relationship to the land. For this is what his allies repeatedly volunteer: they say what authentically distinguishes him as a developer and as a seer is his uncanny feel for the land. Yes, the land. The way he understands the land. They insist this is true.

And, indeed, he is devoted to Alaska. He repeatedly returns there, frequently with his wife. On the coffee table in the waiting area of his office, with his name on the address labels, are, in addition to Harvard Magazine, such periodicals as Alaska, Virginia wildlife, Smithsonian, The Nature Conservancy Magazine, Ducks Unlimited, and Antiques. They appear to have been read.

Compared with his depiction as an arrogant and reprehensible despoiler and exploiter by his legion of detractors, there can be no more profoundly and diametrically opposite a characterization of this force behind the bulldozers. Yet it is true that he never seems more comfortable or animated than when he is recounting the most particular details of the fruits of his farm. He easily remembers on exactly what dates corn was planted in which fields. He takes more pride in his farm having won the state corn championship for highest yields four years in a row than he ever expresses in his stylish office park. He knows what the expected harvest dates are, how much water there is in a given field, how likely it is the tractors can negotiate that, and what the odds are of frost. This day he knows that he has exactly 1020 cows—mostly Angus with a few Hereford crosses—with six hundred calves just weaned, another four hundred to go, and an additional six hundred in the feed lot. He is proud that the calves have come in at 750 pounds.

Hazel is, in short, a man of contradictions, as is the Edge City world he has created. And the contradictions he embodies illuminate a great deal about both the America that will soon be and the America from which he came.

The world into which Til Hazel was born, on October' 29, 1930, was later so eradicated by the new one he helped create that today that place is difficult to imagine. Hazel was born not where his family lived, in Virginia, but across the Potomac River in the District of Columbia. That is because, as he is fond of saying, "it was either that or the kitchen table." His Virginia homeland was then so rural and backward that it had no hospital of its own.

Today Arlington County, where Hazel grew up, is one of the more urban places in America. It is more densely populated than Dallas or Denver or Cincinnati. It has one of the largest office buildings in the world—the Pentagon. Its airport, Washington National, is busier than Houston Intercontinental. It has two mirror-finish Edge Cities, each the size of downtown Milwaukee, and 8700 hotel rooms. Its public school students speak more than forty-nine languages, including Arabic, Vietnamese, Farsi, and Urdu. It has ten snazzy subway stops. And, of course, it has half a dozen hospitals.

In 1930, none of that existed. Arlington was a dozen crossroads punctuating fields and forests in which Hazel's relations hunted wild turkey. Segregation that was "very distinct," as the old saying went, was the rule. Most of the roads were dirt. Hazel's father told him vivid tales of the cavalry at local Fort Myer shipping out to fight Pancho Villa. Across the river it was an era when a motorist caught in the rain with his top down could pull under the porte cochere of the White House and be invited in to shake hands with the president. America itself was still a land of unthinkably vast spaces. For a quarter of a century to come, the southwesternmost baseball team would be St. Louis.

In 1930, Herbert Hoover was president, and though the stock market crash was three months old when Hazel was conceived, it was not yet clear that the Depression was at hand. Not until the second half of 1930 did "people feel the ground give way beneath their feet," as a contemporary economist put it. By the time Hazel was two, 24 percent of the work force would be unemployed. Birth rates—that statistic which probes most deeply into people's personal lives—had plummeted.

Thus Hazel's character was shaped in a world far different from the one he ended up building. It had different hopes, different fears, even different referents. "The war," for example, was automatically understood to mean the Civil War. His mother's grandfather was a Confederate soldier. Her family's roots were in nearby Southern Maryland, which even in the 1930s took pride in its Rebel sympathies. The foremost historical site in Arlington, looking out across the Potomac toward the Capitol in the distance, was the mansion of Robert E. Lee.

Hazel's father's father, William Andrew Hazel, wound up in Fort Laramie with the Seventh Cavalry only a few years after its last conflict with Indians at a place called Wounded Knee. When William returned from the west after the turn of the century, he stuck with what he knew, and became the stable manager for the delivery wagons of the Chestnut Farms Dairy. Hazel remembers riding his horse, Honeypot, in the 1930s in the median of that novelty, one of America's first concrete roads.

These were rough-and-ready days. In the 1920s a group including Til Hazel's grandfather decided that an area down by the river had become infested with squatters, riffraff, and various perpetrators of crime. So they got together secretly one night and "blew the place away," as Hazel related it.

It was a considerable departure for a Hazel when Til's father, John T. Sr., decided to become a surgeon. His brothers were lucky if they finished high school. John Sr.'s father opposed his continuing education. It was not trivial in the 1920s that John was making as much money keeping books at Chestnut Farms as was his dad tending horses.

John Sr. paid no small price for being the first to better himself. He was able to complete his medical education only by signing up with the Public Health Service. That outfit moved the twenty-six-year-old father to Boston only weeks after Til, the firstborn, arrived. On John Sr.'s return to Arlington, he had to move his little family into the home of his prosperous father-in-law.

The mid-1930s saw John Hazel, Arlington's only surgeon, making good money by the standards of the South and of the Depression. But all that meant was that he could finally build. His family their own house—if he kept his office in it. And John Sr. did not think that things were looking up. When he looked into the future, he saw war. He would talk about it to his wife, Ruth, and Til could hear. John Sr. had vivid memories of hunger from his days growing up. If those meager days were before the Depression and now there were breadlines, what would war bring? He became worried about barest subsistence. He worried that his family would starve. He plotted to meet gravest disaster—to make sure his wife and children could raise their own food.

"Today he's a fairly senile man," Til recounts, "but he remembers having an overcoat and a car when East Boston was full of people with no work and no food. It's a very real thing."

The solution was land. John Hazel bought land from his father-in-law. He started with twenty-nine acres, but his "subsistence" farm in time came to 110 acres—a sixth of a square mile. It was a lot of land for one family by the standards of the East.

This land was even farther out than Arlington. It was in the next county, Fairfax. In distance, the "next county" meant something in Virginia. At the time of first founding, county seats were flung purposefully far so that one would be within a day's horse ride of each settler.

The farm was in an area known as McLean. John Sr. sent away for hundreds of pamphlets from the Department of Agriculture on subsistence farming. The result was bacon for the family from home-butchered hogs, and cottage cheese Til's mother made from their own cows' milk. Gardening was serious. Putting up food for the cold time was an important part of life.

For all his desperate concern, though, John Hazel, Sr., had absolutely no time himself to raise crops. He scarcely had time to raise sons. He was a driven man, working long hours. Church was never very important to the family, Til recalls. "Dad was so involved in medicine that it was like Sunday was the same as any other day for him. That was the day he made rounds. The only difference was he didn't schedule any operations on Sunday. He operated every other day of the week." For two years, just as Hazel became a teenager, his father was gone completely, working at the Mayo Clinic.

That was why Til, even before he reached his teens, became the mainstay of the farm, working alongside a hired man and his aging grandfather, the cavalryman. He started by bicycling or hitchhiking the eight miles from Arlington to the McLean farm. But by the age of twelve, he was getting out of school by noon-time and driving an automobile out there himself. Because few tractors were available during the war, he worked behind draft horses and a borrowed pair of mules.

At an early age, Til Hazel repeatedly proved that he could be every bit as driven as his father. The family legend has him reading encyclopedias as he lay recovering from such dreadful maladies as appendicitis and acute poison ivy.

But more significantly, working the farm was the means by which he gained contact with his father—and his approval. "We used to have kind of a routine session after dinner—if he was home. Before he made his evening rounds. Where we would discuss what had happened at the farm. What the plans were. He got a lot of enjoyment out of that. And I got a lot of enjoyment out of it." His mother called that precious half-hour ritual the Men's Club.

It was not that Til Hazel held any romantic notions about the land. "I figured out it was better to do something at school. Because you sure in hell weren't going to get very far on a farm. That was clear to me from day one."

So when a teacher advised her bright, hard-working, and precocious young ward that he really only had two choices—to go to Iowa State to study agriculture, or to go to Harvard—for Til the decision was easy. Hazel knew nothing about Harvard. His classmates thought the acme of achievement was to attend William and Mary in the Colonial Virginia capital of Williamsburg. But his father had taken a few courses at Harvard while working for the Public Health Service. "My father said, 'That's good. I know Harvard,' " Hazel recalls.

With that ringing endorsement, Til—ever dutiful—went off in the direction he was pointed. He had no sense that anyone thought it a particularly big deal. One influential uncle even doubted Harvard would do a future Virginian much good. Til's mother's concern was that he have a good suit. His personal attitude was that if college was the next thing on the agenda, Cambridge had to be better than Ames.

In 1947, Til Hazel left Northern Virginia for New England. He would remain distant from the affairs of Arlington and Fairfax for ten years, only a sporadic visitor until after completing Harvard Law and his stretch in the service in the Army Judge Advocate's Corps.

Of his final summers on the farm, however, two things stick in his mind. The first was what a pleasure it was finally to have a tractor. Photos of him on top of his McCormick-Deering Farmall International Harvester Model H—with those two tiny wheels snugged together up front—show a satisfied man. Cutting the wheat and barley and oats and rye of McLean by pulling a combine behind a tractor was infinitely better than working with horses and mules. He never sentimentalizes that experience.

The other thing that remains with him was watching, as he was making hay, the building on the horizon of a place called Pimmit Hills. It was the area's first big postwar subdivision—hundreds of three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath, single-level, $7950 homes. "I remember looking over there, and they probably had fifty or seventy-five houses all being framed at once. It was a really big deal." Hazel remembers a picture on the cover of Life just like it. "It was a general topic of conversation among the farmers. It was, 'Goodness, look at all these new houses and look at how much good it's doing in the area.' It was a fraction of the agenda that you now have out of these things. You know, a very minimal understanding of all that went with it." So minimal, in fact, that one of the things Hazel noticed in streams that watered milk cows were feces that had escaped the subdivision's primitive sewage facility.

But the pollution was by no means what people were talking about. It was the blessing of this new growth, this prosperity. It seemed a miracle. "It was a tremendous new change. I was generally alleged to have been a pretty serious kid and I was interested in what was happening and what it meant for the farms."

Indeed, almost nobody in America expected this. If anything, the lurking fear had been that the war years might end up being the high point of people's lives. There was little reason to think life would be much different after the war from the way it had been before. With all the veterans returning home looking for jobs, most people figured America would return to the Depression. Had not Roosevelt tried everything to pull the nation out of its doldrums? Nothing had worked. Now half the world was in ashes, Roosevelt was in his grave, and his third vice president, a man almost no one knew, was in charge. This was a recipe for prosperity? The most strike-ridden year in American history was 1946. Shortages of meat were widespread. In 1947, America's GNP hit its lowest level since 1942, adjusted for inflation. The pessimists' worst fears seemed confirmed. The reason the Hazel family has no photos of Til with his team of horses is probably simple. There was no reason to think that era would ever end. The rest—as the saying goes—is history.

Michael Barone in Our Country refers to 1947 as "a hinge in American history, a time in which the country changed quite markedly from one thing to another."

Following 1948, America's gross national product, adjusted for inflation, grew at an average rate of 4.0 percent every year, for twenty years. That kind of sustained boom was without precedent in the annals of mankind. America was changed forever.

While Til Hazel was away from his homeland, meanwhile, other things happened that would reverberate in the decades to come, as they influenced his view of the land.

First, as an undergraduate at Harvard College, Hazel majored in American history. He started with the Revolution, wherein it seemed every other hero was a Virginian who had trod the ground he knew so well—from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to George Mason. That led him backward into European and especially British history from 1500 on, because it related directly to the Revolutionary history with which he was entranced.

Decades later, the fact that he had been an American history major was as dumbfounding to one interlocutor as was Hazel's relationship to the land. What about the Civil War? he was asked. That seemed an important question to ask a man who had thought to build a mall next to Manassas National Battlefield Park. Great sweeps of the Civil War were fought in Virginia, from Manassas to Chancellorsville to the Wilderness to Appomattox. Did you study much history of the Civil War?

No, he says. "The Civil War always struck me as a great waste and a great tragedy and, you know, I don't know whether it was I don't like to lose or not. But I just never got all wound up in the Civil War. I was never particularly intrigued by the Civil War, except as it relates to physical things. Did I identify with the Confederates? Yes, oh yes. You've got to if you're raised in my family. Lots of courageous activity, lots of exciting things, but all for no clanged good reason. When you say 'Lost Cause,' you've said it all.

"It just seemed to me a great waste."

A few years after he came to that conclusion, a second thing happened.

His father sold Til's farm.

The farm that was the basis of their relationship, the land on which Til had sweated to build a concrete-block barn for his younger brother, Bill, to milk cows and even live sometimes . . . The place designed to be the family's salvation, where it could go to ground in hard times . . .

His father sold it. To developers.

Hazel claims to this day that the transaction was of no particular concern to him. After all, the farm had been replaced by a new and far grander one two counties west, in Fauquier County. "In those days," says Til, "it never occurred to anybody that you weren't supposed to use the land for whatever purpose it was needed."

But on the warm September day in 1989—the one that started out with Hazel pacing the tower in Tysons—Til ended up concentrating seriously. Back and forth he swung the giant Oldsmobile, trying to get his bearings amid the convoluted swirls of an old subdivision three miles east. He was looking for some particularly huge old trees, much larger than the suburban growths nearby. He wanted to show them to a reporter. They were the last things left from the farm where he had turned himself into a man.

"My father was big on something he called a scarlet oak. He got some and I planted 'em and watered 'em and pruned 'em and picked the caterpillars off until I thought I'd never ever want to see another oak tree. Hey, you know what? There they are over there. Well I'll be damned. See that oak tree? Yeah, I planted that tree in 1940. And there's a couple more. We had a house in the middle of'em. Those are our trees right there. This was a cornfield. And the creek is right down here. Boy, getting across that creek was a big issue. Now that cinder-block barn was right about there. And this was our garden and the hog pen. We had a little orchard back there. And those are the trees we planted. Those are the famous scarlet oak trees. I'm going to come back in the fall and see what color they turn. Most red oaks just get kinda dirty red. But those get brilliant red. And Dad, who was not much of a nature type, somewhere heard about that, and he insisted we were going to have scarlet oaks."

In fact, Hazel said, the boy and his father had talked about it at length. It was during their ritual evening rendezvous in which they shared a little time, just the two of them. The news that this serious, husky man-child, soon to be eleven, brought home of the progress of the oaks pleased his father a great deal, Hazel said. And that pleased him.

This, of course, all happened—before the earth had moved.

III: The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise

IF YOU READ America's favorite poets and novelists long enough, you notice that the last time we went through so fundamental a change in how we build cities, something ended up deeply severed in our souls.

The "last time" was especially the 1840s on. That's when America began to end as a place marked primarily by farms and quaint burgs with names like Harlem and Greenwich Village. With the Industrial Revolution came an upheaval in which the majority of people no longer lived in and off the countryside, or on eccentric hamlet lanes. By the turn of the twentieth century they were drawn to those teeming, steaming cities epitomized by New York and Chicago and Pittsburgh. There, wealth and jobs were created with the vast, clanking, astoundingly complex machinery of the textile mills, the steel mills, and the steam locomotives. These cities were built triumphantly on man's newfound abilities to slash the very dirt from the ground—limestone from Ontario to Indiana, iron ore from northern Michigan to Minnesota, and coal from Pennsylvania to West Virginia to Kentucky—and turn it into such miracles of organization and genius as the Model T.

These brawny, brawling, muscular cities, the legacies of which are our old downtowns, became the centers of our civilization. They were the place where the arts and museums were most "sophisticated," the mores most "broad-minded," the politics the most "progressive," the attitudes most "tolerant." They were where the energy levels of enterprise were deemed highest, enlightenment most bright, and where the nationtors, Frank Kimball, himself started buying up property in 1959 only after he could not convince his employer, the Marriott Corporation, to view the place as a credible location for a hamburger stand. It was too far out.

This was land Til Hazel came to know better than anybody. Decades later, he would still take great pride of craft in his work as a young lawyer. By the time the alignment of the Beltway was in place in 1960, he recounted, his decisions were never appealed, either by the highway department or the owners. His word had come to be viewed as that of authority. When he put a value on a piece of land, it stuck.

No small accomplishment. It was a time when many other values were coming unstuck:

In 1954, General Foods Corporation moved its headquarters out of Manhattan to White Plains, in Westchester County.

In 1955, the first McDonald's restaurant opened in Des Plaines, outside Chicago.

In 1956, Southdale Shopping Center, the world's first climate-controlled shopping mall, opened outside Minneapolis.

In 1965, William Levitt, of Levittown fame, started building houses outside Paris.

In the early 1960s, at the same time as the completion of the Beltway in the Tysons area, Hazel was spotted as a comer by the courthouse crowd. The Byrd machine was still the juggernaut of Virginia political power. Its power lay with large landholders, and its conservatism was so deep that even issuing bonds to build roads was viewed as a newfangled, hence suspect, idea.

The population of Fairfax County by 1960 had tripled in only one decade, to more than a quarter of a million. Subdivisions erupted like mushrooms after a warm rain. The first rezoning of the rural land around Tysons for commercial purposes began in 1962.

In 1966, a federal grand jury gained nationwide attention when it indicted fifteen people under the recently enacted Federal Racketeering Act on charges of conspiracy to exchange bribes for rezonings in Fairfax County. Among those indicted were county supervisors, planning officials, developers, zoning attorneys, and one former state senator so prominent he was referred to in press accounts as a "civic leader."

Hazel, who that year had just started his own full-time law practice, took the defense of the grand old man, Andrew W. Clarke. Clarke was charged with being the kingpin of a scheme to distribute some $52,000 in bribes. Hazel pled him innocent. Next, he got the federal counts dismissed. Any alleged conspiracy ended four days before the passage of the Federal Racketeering Act under which the indictments came, he argued. Thus no federal laws had been violated. Then, to the outrage of the prosecutor, he succeeded in getting Clarke excused from trial on state charges. The grounds were failing health. Clarke had, in fact, suffered three strokes, and died in March 1968. But he did so while vacationing in Florida. Several of his fellow indictees ended up vacationing in Lewisburg Penitentiary. This bottom line escaped the attention of no one. Both Hazel's friends and enemies saw he was going to be a legal force to be reckoned with.

Little did they know. By the time the population of Fairfax had passed half a million, in the early 1970s, Hazel was blamed and credited with being personally responsible for the presence of 100,000 of them. He was the John the Baptist of development, making clear the way. With righteous prowess did he ceaselessly pursue the rezoning of farm and forest into quarter-acre lots attracting more and more people. He had become the pre-eminent force for growth, the legal sledgehammer systematically destroying on the anvil of the Virginia courts all attempts to slow it. Hazel knew the Old Dominion had always been shaped by this moral certitude: a man may not have taken from him the value of his land, save by due process of law.

At the time Hazel was really beginning to roll, however, America, near the end of its second decade of unprecedented growth, was changing profoundly. The Apollo program was sending back photographs that altered people's dreams forever. Our planet, from the perspective of the July 1969 moon landing, looked like a precious little marble, lonely in its vast black void. The idea of Spaceship Earth brought people to understand that the planet really was a closed and finite system. It did have limits. The first Earth Day, in April 1970, rallied national attention to the perils of unrestrained economic development. In 1972, a report entitled Only One Earth, by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, was presented to the United Nations World Conference on the Human Environment. It argued that man's foremost allegiance had to be to his planet.

This all began to fit into people's heads in ways that had profound consequences. By the late 1960s, wealth might have flowed like a mighty stream for a generation of Americans. But, better fed, better housed, and better educated than ever in history, they were nagged by fears that something had gone terribly wrong. The grammar school nuclear air-raid drills had blunted the idea that change equaled progress. Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring in 1962; it turned out that pollution endangered not only the continent's fertility, but the very song of its birds. In January 1969, an underwater oil platform ruptured off Santa Barbara, California; the televisions of America were filled with the beaches and sea birds of one of America's most beautiful—and richest—communities covered with deadly black goo and highly articulate outrage. It became the symbol of greed damaging nature, both wild and human.

As our attitudes shifted rapidly around the value of the patriarchal family and of religion and of authority, important questions were asked about the point of all this growth. In pursuit of "standard of living," were we sacrificing "quality of life"? Where did humans fit in the scheme of things?

The answers that penetrated the national consciousness came from the new studies of biology. They emphasized our interdependence with our soil, our air, our water, our forests, our farms, and our food. They showed the importance of instinct. They did so rationally and testably—scientifically. They demonstrated that man's genetic potential included a grammar of behavior as powerful as his sense of language. They resonated with the words of the emerging computer revolution. They showed that we were "hard-wired"—unalterably connected—to our nature, the nature that sprang from our evolutionary, planetary experience.

The ideals of progress thus began to come uncoupled from the Industrial Revolution's premium on the behavior of the worker bee. New ideas of human improvement—our most enduring values, those which surrounded the advancement of freedom, liberty, individualism, and progress—became linked with the flowering of human potential. Yes, man could be improved, even perfected, but only in harmony with nature, of which he was a part. The potential of our future, in this view, flowed from our connection to our futures as human animals. What, came the question, was the "carrying capacity" of our habitat?

In 1972, the widely cited Club of Rome report on limited resources fanned Malthusian fears of runaway population growth. In 1973, the first oil shock hit, giving Americans a cram course in the costs—economic and sociologic—of their way of life. Not one American in a thousand in the 1950s knew that the word "ecology" referred to the study of energy flows within a closed system. By the 1970s, ecology had come to express the belief that change specifically did not mean progress. Drastic change within a closed system—Earth—or any change that could damage a species was viewed as wrong.

No culture can truly survive which ignores the human spirit and human values, this argument proceeded. Such values and spirit rose from what was natural. Progress, therefore, could not encompass exploiting and polluting our earth. It was not progress to cut down our trees and erect buildings so ugly and wasteful that human beings could not flourish within them.

"Human beings dwell in the same biological systems that contain the other creatures but, to put the thought bluntly, they are not governed by the same laws of evolution . . ." wrote Barry Lopez in his National Book Award volume, Arctic Dreams. "Outside of some virulent disease, another ice age, or his own weapons technology, the only thing that promises to stem the continued increase in his population and the expansion of his food base (Which now includes oil, exotic minerals, fossil ground water, huge tracts of forest, and so on, and entails the continuing, concomitant loss of species) is human wisdom.

"Walking across the tundra, meeting the stare of a lemming, or coming on the tracks of a wolverine, it would be the frailty of our wisdom that would confound me. The pattern of our exploitation of the Arctic, our increasing utilization of its natural resources, our very desire to 'put it to use,' is clear. What is it that is missing, or tentative, in us, I would wonder? . . . It is restraint."

Enter Til Hazel.

At the height of his Edge City building powers.

Hazel genuinely believed in everything he did. But what made him a legend in his own time was his capacity to drive his opponents mad. As one colleague put it, he had the remarkable knack "to reduce the most complex issues to a single, pungent sentence that rallied his friends and pissed off his neighbors—I mean, enemies."

Hazel once boasted that what he did for a living was "crack open watersheds."

He meant it. In 1970, a ban on sewer hookups for new developments was put in place because three treatment plants were overloaded. Hazel attacked, saying the government had to build more sewer plants. Meanwhile, the hookups resumed.

In 1971, an attempt was made to mandate affordable housing at a time when 40 percent of the county's policemen were forced to live outside the jurisdiction. Hazel attacked, calling the measure an "unlawful, imprudent intrusion into the rights of private business," an attempt to "put off on the private sector the public problem." It was overturned.

In 1972 a new county board took office. Elected on a platform of skepticism toward growth, the members tried to suspend land rezonings to give county planners time to draft a five-year strategy. Hazel attacked. He crushed the moratorium in the courts. Then he rubbed it in. To his foremost antagonist, Audrey Moore, he sneered, "I think your approach is bankrupt—morally, socially, and financially. This county has an obligation to provide for the people."

In 1973, the county attempted to slow growth by not hearing rezoning requests or approving site plans. Hazel attacked, arguing that the government had an obligation to undertake these functions. The result were frenzied proceedings round the clock and well into the morning, night after night, as the county worked off the backlog.

In 1975, Hazel again triumphed. The county had attempted to limit growth to places where public facilities, such as roads and schools, already were in place. Hazel attacked, arguing that not providing such services everywhere was "arbitrary and capricious." It was an exercise in "discriminatory zoning" to restrict new homes to those "costing $100,000 or more." This one went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; when the Court failed to back the county, once again Hazel prevailed. Once more he rubbed it in. Said he, demurely, "You'd have thought we were out to rape the county."

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 long-time 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 identical. 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 parimutuel 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 formulations. 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?

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 un-mixed 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.

This means that whatever we experience in a place is both a serious environmental issue and a deeply personal one. Our relationship with the places we know is a close bond, intricate in nature, and nor abstract, not remote at all . . . The danger . . . is that whenever we make changes in our surroundings, we can all too easily shortchange ourselves . . .

The way to avoid the danger is to start doing three things at once: Make sure that when we change a place, the change agreed upon nurtures our growth as capable and responsible people, while also protecting the natural environment, and developing jobs and homes enough for all.

But how do we go about doing three things at once when we're still having trouble finding ways to do two things at once—helping the economy prosper while at the same time preventing damage to the environment?