Adam Henderson
"I'm President of the Douglas Park
Civic Association. I'm also Chair of Pike Presidents Group. I've been President
five years in February, and for three years I've been Chair at the PPG.
I've lived here for a little over twenty years. We moved
back to Arlington in 1998. I really got involved through a combination of
things, but primarily my interest in the community in general.
I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania on a farm, in Greene
County, Pennsylvania, about 15 miles north of the West Virginia line. When I
got out of the college in the mid '80's there just wasn't a lot of economic
opportunity in western Pennsylvania. I liked this area. I had visited it a
couple of times as a teenager, and why not? It was busy, it was growing.
When I moved to Virginia in 1985, I originally worked in
the wholesale end of the nursery industry, for a company out in Manassas. I worked
there for about five years. We relocated to Connecticut because I got promoted
and I was a VP at that company for a number of years. We moved back here in 1998
because of my husband’s father’s failing health, to help take care of him. I've
run my own consulting business since then; two nursery companies doing customer
relations, marketing, advertising, and employee development.
I met my husband here in the DC area, thirty years ago
this December. We've been together thirty years. We officially got married seven
or eight years ago on our anniversary, just because I wasn't going to remember
another date. It's nice to have it official but it doesn't really change thirty
years.
When I first moved here, I really liked Arlington,
especially for the convenience. At that point I was in my early to mid twenties.
It was great. The night life in DC was convenient and everything. When we moved
back here in 1998, we knew we did not want to live outside the Beltway. My
husband’s the director of membership for a non-profit downtown. The first
thought was Arlington, and we went exploring houses. We looked at 17 or 18
houses at least. We saw this one, it wasn't even on the market yet. The realtor
said, "Well, they're going to put this on the market in about two days.
It's not ready yet." But we saw it and it's like, "Yep. That's the
house."
We’ve seen a lot of changes in the neighborhood. It's
really quite amazing that when we moved here in 1998. We were in our mid thirties
at that time and were by far the youngest homeowners on the block. When my
husband and I moved in there weren’t any issues for us as a couple. I've been
out since I was fourteen. To be very honest, I really don't give a damn what
somebody thinks of me in that regard. It's like that's their problem, not my problem.
At the time we moved in the residents were almost
exclusively older, if not elderly. There were a lot of people who owned homes
who lived here who were in their 70's, 80's, and older. Almost exclusively white.
And here twenty years later, even this block is much more multi-ethnic. The
home ownership, it's much, much younger. Now we're amongst the oldest people in
this section.
And it’s been an interesting transformation to watch
because it’s bringing in younger people. The diversity has kind of helped
spruce up the neighborhood, for lack of a better term. We have gotten younger
people in here who have new ideas, want their house to look good, want it to
look nice if they're having friends and family over, things like that. So, it’s
made a difference in the appearance of the neighborhood. I would also say the
congeniality of the neighborhood has increased. People are much more likely to
say “hi” to the neighbors than they were say twenty years ago, in my
observation. I think just because it's a younger crowd, and especially with so
many kids here now, there's more threads interweaving through the community to
allow people to know each other a little bit better.
The neighborhood is a big mix. We have a lot of people who
originated in Central America, but we also have a fairly small but a growing
number of Asians in the neighborhood. We have African Americans in the
neighborhood. We have actually quite a few people of East African immigrants, Ethiopia,
et cetera, who have bought homes in the neighborhood and live here now. I can't
say that there's any group that particularly dominates. Caucasians are probably
still the largest group, but it's certainly not anything like it was twenty
years ago. It's much more of a melting pot.
Elementary school redistricting is the hot topic right now
with the Civic Association. There's a lot of people up in arms, concerned,
questioning. That process is kind of fumbling through to an end at this point.
It’s been through a number of iterations. We are all in communication with the
school board on this, though. Reid Goldstein, who is the School Board Chair, is
a former president of our civic association. He's well aware of it as a
neighborhood resident, but the School Board is kind of between a rock and a
hard place with the ever-growing population in general and the school age
population in Arlington.
We have other issues, of course. There's always the
concern with parking issues and with utility projects. Virginia Power wants to
underground a bunch of cable lines. Over on Pollard Street there's concerns
with traffic, and commuting, and what's going on with the reconstruction of the
Pike. It seems to be dragging on forever. The streetcar project went away and
all of the promised rapid bus service hasn’t arrived yet. The Pike has still
really not been reconstructed yet… it's an ongoing effort.
There's a lot of things that people talk about all of the
time, but it’s generally a pretty quiet place, especially compared to a few
years ago when all of the fuss was going on with the streetcar versus the bus
service. That became a very polarizing debate and people were getting quite
adamant about it on either side of the issue.
The whole discussion over elementary school redistricting
is a perfect example of how complicated things are. I've had numerous parents
reach out to me saying that, " We don't like proposal X and we want you as
a Civic Association to take a stand on this particular thing." But the
problem is that some other group of parents may be affected in a different way,
and may actually like the changes. So, I can have my personal opinions, but
those have to be different from what the opinion of the official Civic Association
is, because this neighborhood is huge. It's the largest neighborhood
geographically in the county. Right now it's divided up amongst five elementary
schools. The latest proposal has it being divided up amongst three, but it
would be impossible no matter what they did to fit all of the children who live
in this neighborhood in one elementary school. I haven't seen any recent
updated population figures from the county, but in the early to mid teens it
was around 11,000 people. That's a lot of folks in a single neighborhood.
My guess is that the coming of Amazon to south Arlington will
probably affect the neighborhood. I don't think it will occur nearly as quickly
as people expect. One of the initial effects is likely that with a lot of
office space getting booked in the next couple of years, is that it will help
revitalize the tax base in Arlington, so that we won't be so fiscally
constrained as we have been the last few years. As far as housing prices, who
knows? Obviously if you have more people coming into an area and there aren't
changes in the housing policy to allow more multi-family structures, or higher
density, it's probably going to end up escalating prices. Just gauging by my
own experience as a home owner, house prices have quadrupled, almost quintupled
in twenty years. It's already to the point where I find it difficult to figure
out how knowing where I was when I bought my first home, how I would afford to
buy something in the current market.
The Pike Presidents Group originated about twenty or twenty-five
years ago. It was then called the Pike President's Breakfast. It was kind of an
informal thing that started as an offshoot of CPRO (Columbia Pike
Revitalization Organization) to get various civic association presidents
together. I'm a pretty outspoken person, I'm not a wallflower by any stretch of
the imagination. We reorganized the group and made it more separate from CPRO,
more of our own entity. We in the PPG look at CPRO as representing the Pike
overarching regarding its redevelopment, especially focused on business. We try
to keep focused on neighborhood concerns, the actual people who live here, the
infrastructure of the area, and how that all interrelates.
Three things have occupied a lot of our time over the last
couple of years. One is how we can move forward more quickly on getting the
Pike infrastructure upgraded to its ultimate state. We hope to spread the
economic opportunity that has spread through the eastern and central Pike, and
bring more of it to the west end of the Pike, because the west end of the Pike
has still really not participated in a lot of the benefits of the economic
redevelopment that has been occuring. Part of that effort was getting the Arlington
Farmers Market back up and running after two or three years. It was initially
opened and then went on hiatus for a couple of years. Now it’s going again.
The other big thing we've been involved with a lot the
last couple of years is what happens to the large Career Center site off Walter
Reed and the Pike. That's kind of downtown Columbia Pike. Much of it is owned
by the school system, but the opportunities are there to unify it into the
actual façade of the Pike and make it more connected to the Pike. The decisions
that are made over the next ten years about that huge parcel will have enormous
ramifications for what the Pike is for the next half century. The PPG is very
much of the opinion that we need to take our time and get it right. It has to
work for the schools and also work for the community at large, whether it's
community resources, or moving the library down onto the Pike so it's more of a
focal point. We want to help energize the whole Pike.
The biggest challenge honestly, and it's something I'm
glad that we have the PPG to work through it, is understanding and working
together, rather than working at cross purposes. That's something I've tried to
foster by working interactively, not just between various Civic Associations,
but between other community groups and communities in general on the Pike. We
all need to pull together. I think the general gist of wanting this to remain a
hugely diverse community, and also bringing it upwards economically are two
broad goals that I think most communities along the Pike and most of the Civic
Association Presidents are for. A lot of our efforts are in working with County
staff, and working with County officials to help better understand what makes
the whole Pike community special. There
are always challenges, but I think we've made a lot of progress in that over
the years.
The way I describe the Pike to people
who don't know it beyond the diversity and the multicultural aspect, the “world
in a zip code,” is that it's a place that is on the cusp of becoming great. It's
just how do we get that little push to do it. There's always just a little bit
more of a hill ahead of us to kind of get us over the top to where it's going
to be self-sustaining, growing, keeping all of the things like diversity and
affordability that we value, but also bringing those economic benefits that
hopefully can lift us all up.
I certainly don't get emails or phone calls talking about,
"We want to keep diversity on the Pike." I think that is because
people who live here just take it as a given, that diversity is something they
value. I'll give you a couple of examples. We've run a holiday fund drive here
in Douglas Park for our 35th year. We work with Randolph Elementary, and they
identify students who aren't going to get a lot for Christmas. We raise money,
we have people who volunteer to shop to get things for the kids and their families.
It’s been a very successful effort we've done for decades. Another event we
hold is a community Fourth of July parade and picnic, up in Douglas Park proper.
All you need to do is walk around that picnic after the parade. Everybody from
around the planet is there. I'm usually grilling hotdogs, I'm sweating my ass
off. The typical attendance is three, four, five hundred people. Everyone from
seniors, to kids in diapers, and everywhere in between, a really fantastic
cross-section of the neighborhood economically and culturally, in any way you
can imagine. When I send out reminders in June for volunteers, many people talk
about "we look forward to this so much every year, because its what makes
living in Douglas Park and the Pike area great." The only thing we provide
is the hotdogs and the water, then everybody else brings something. I love it
because there's food from all over the world there every year. Pupusas, curry, spices…
Everybody from everywhere is here, and everybody generally just gets along and
enjoys what Arlington and the neighborhood has to offer.
I've been very proud for the last five years to work with
a bunch of people who really are interested in the future of their community, I
think there's not a lot of places anymore where you can really say that. The people
who make up the Pike, whether it's Douglas Park or the community at large, are
concerned about this place. People want to see things improve, to preserve the
great things that we have. This area seems to attract people who actually want
to be hands on and want to be involved with shaping their community. There's a
lot of smart people in the Pike Corridor who have a lot of great ideas, and
we're working together. Together I don't think there's anything we can't
achieve for the future."
Interview and photography by Lloyd Wolf.
