Queen City, razed for the Pentagon's roads
Condemned and demolished, February - April 1942Queen City, now beneath the Pentagon's road network, Arlington County, VA
Descendants of Freedman's Village built Queen City and East Arlington along Columbia Pike. In February 1942 the War Department gave them less than a month to leave, then levelled both for the Pentagon's road network. Owners averaged $2,052; tenants got nothing.
Queen City and East Arlington were two Black neighbourhoods on Columbia Pike, settled by descendants of the people the government had cleared out of Freedman's Village a generation earlier. By 1940 they were established places - houses their owners held title to, churches, small businesses, a streetcar stop - in a county that had not extended them sewers, pavements or street lighting.
The Pentagon was built in sixteen months, from September 1941 to December 1942, and its road network had to come through somewhere. In 1942 the War Department used eminent domain to buy all the land in Queen City and East Arlington. Notices went out in early February telling families to be gone by 1 March - less than a month, in a wartime housing shortage, in a segregated county where Black families had almost nowhere to move. Some 900 residents were displaced and 218 houses demolished. Homeowners were paid an average of $2,052. Tenants were paid nothing at all. A War Department official later acknowledged that little thought had been given to the welfare of the hundreds of people uprooted.
The government resettled people in a trailer camp in Green Valley, on ground so muddy that many of the new arrivals abandoned it. Others ended up in the Paul Lawrence Dunbar Homes, a public housing development built on land seized from another Black landowner, Elizabeth Hicks.
The pattern held across Northern Virginia: Lincolnsville was displaced in 1959 for the CIA headquarters at Langley, and the Black town of Willard was destroyed in 1958 to build Dulles Airport. Where Queen City stood there is now the cloverleaf of Columbia Pike and Washington Boulevard, and the traffic going into the largest office building in the world.
218 houses were demolished. Homeowners averaged $2,052; the tenant households received nothing, which was the larger share of the compensation question and was answered by leaving them out of it.
Sources
- Urban Renewal in Northern VirginiaEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe 1942 seizure of Queen City and East Arlington: the notice period, the 900 residents and 218 houses, the $2,052 average payment to owners and none to tenants, the Green Valley trailer camp and the Dunbar Homes.
- Construction of the PentagonEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe April 1942 Defense Department photograph of the demolition of the surrounding area, captioned with the building's sixteen-month construction and the 900 residents displaced without adequate housing or fair prices.