Showing posts with label Arlington County (VA). Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arlington County (VA). Show all posts

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

My 9/11 memory of Washington, D.C. - "Be careful what you wish for." An avalanche of moods, moments and memories are always front and center




I've seen film director Paul Greengrass's wonderful film United 93 about seven times by now. It always gets me where I live. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475276/


Every time I see it, I think back to my friends and I at work on Pennsylvania Avenue the morning of September 11th, ten blocks away from the U.S. Capitol, across the street from the FBI headquarters and the Dept. of Justice.
And unlike most of you, I wonder if not but for the bravery and heroism of the United 93 Passengers & Crew, would I even be alive?
Or, alternatively, actually been an witness to the plane's descent into the Capitol building in an attempt to decapitate it, killing thousands of people and demoralizing the country even more than had happned by the attacks on the World Trade Center?


United we stand...

The symbol that was all over Arlington, Virginia in the days and months after 9/11. 
Including on my front door.

Thoughts on The Pentagon and 9/11
Let me relate a 9/11 anecdote that gives you some sort of insight into me, and informs my posts here. I lived for about 15 years in Washington, D.C., and while there, worked on behalf of some of the top law firms and business groups in town, doing all sorts of things on both Capitol Hill and along the K Street corridor. 
While doing so, I was fortunate to meet and befriend lots of very talented, committed and impressive people, including lots from the media, think tank and public policy sectors, as well as the diplomatic community.

On 9/11, I was a few weeks into working on a project for Crowell & Moring on behalf of our client, General Electric's Aviation division, for an upcoming federal trial that would take us to Dayton the following week for what was expected to be 6-8 weeks.

C&M is an international law firm headquartered in DC, and I worked at the main office on Pennsylvania Avenue, right across the street from the FBI headquarters and the Dept. of Justice, and adjacent to the Naval Memorial. 
After the initial reports of the attack in New York and on the nearby Pentagon just minutes after I walked into the office just after 8:30 am with my gym bag, in last time then we realized,  from our vantage point on the large wraparound patio balcony overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue that we had access to from the main reception lobby, we could see past the Old Post Office across the street to our west, and could clearly see the smoke rising up from The Pentagon to our southwest, where many of my neighbors in northern Arlington worked. 
The smoke from American Airlines flight 77 out of Dulles, bound for Los Angeles.

Being slightly closer to The White House than to the U.S. Capitol -but located high enough in the building to be in a position to have seen any attack on either- once we received word right before 11 am from the building's management company to evacuate the building because a plane within range of D.C. still hadn't been counted for and landed as ordered to -what we would all later all know as United Flight 93- I decided to forego playing the starring role of a sardine in a can on the always-crowded Washington Metrorail, and decided to walk the 7-plus miles to my home in north Arlington.

Mostly via K Street, up to M Street in Georgetown, and finally cross the Key Bridge over the Potomac river to Lee Highway in Arlington, and then west for a few miles.
Which is to say, along some of the most densely-populated real estate in the greater Washington DC area.

All along the road from Rosslyn going west, there were city, state and federal police cars everywhere because the fear was so great that there was a second surprise element of the attack that would take place before the end of the day, so police were on high alert for anything unusual, including attempts to blow up bridges.

When I got a few blocks away from the office after our evacuation was made mandatory and was near Metro Center, the middle of the Metro system in downtown DC, literally one of thousands of people walking down the street, as if an NFL football game had just ended to both my east and west, whom do you suppose I walked right into, but the one man, whom, IF things had fallen differently, might've played a much larger role that tragic day, and be a name that most of you would know now?

(As I walked and walked, it was while listening on my Sony AM/FM/TV portable radio, via ABC News' Good Morning America -the same program that had informed my entire floor for 90 minutes after we gathered en masse around my radio with the great sound quality that also allowed us to listen to VHF TV signals in our floor lobby area, maybe 60 of us- that I first learned that some of the planes involved in the attacks had left out of Boston's Logan Airport.
That news made my heart sink, and made the already-long walk home seem far longer than it normally would, since one of my recent former housemates in Arlington, Jennifer Dugan, a wonderfully sweet, thoughtful and immensely adorable University of Rhode Island grad, was, in fact, a flight attendant for the then-US Airways, working out of... Logan Airport. I listened to that radio the entire time I walked home, very fearful of what else I would hear.)

That man I'm referring to is George Terwilliger, then of the DC office of McGuire, Woods, Battle & Boothe LLP, whom I knew from 1627 Eye Street, the home of the New York Times' DC bureau, a place that I spent A LOT of time at over my last 11 years there, which explains why I personally know some of the high-profile people I do, including many Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and columnists, and DC insiders whose names you would recognize.

Mr. Terwilliger was the man that much of the Washington press corps and Beltway Crowd was reporting was the likely first choice for President George W. Bush to be the new FBI Director, and a person that many of my friends at 1627 had an enormous amount of respect and admiration for, even if they disagreed with him politically. 

When I saw him in passing on the sidewalk near a CVS, with a concerned and pensive look on his face, and he looked at me and shot me a look of recognition, even more than nearly everyone passing us on both sides and spilling out onto the road, all I could think to myself was, "Be careful what you wish for."

As most of you know, President Trump was at the Flight 93 National Memorial 
today.

This is a beautiful but sobering memorial and I urge any of you ever heading across the country to try to see, especially in the Fall. maybe after seeing Gettysburg, another favorite place of mine that never disappoints and always leaves you feeling smaller -and full of gratitude.

Dave
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Friday, May 29, 2015

Personal thoughts on the proposed idea of a gondola going across the Potomac River, next to Key Bridge, from Washington DC's Georgetown area to Arlington County's Rosslyn Metro station. Naturally, it causes me to recall crossing it on 9/11. Don't ruin the views of that iconic bridge -and the iconic views FROM it. NO to the #gondola









GreaterGreaterWashington blog
Yes, it's worth looking into a gondola in DC 
by Topher Mathews 
May 29, 2015


Having lived in Arlington County for about 15 years from 1988-2003, a mile north of Ballston Metro, conservatively, I've walked across Key Bridge about a thousand-plus times to get to and from Georgetown and Downtown DC from Arlington. 
It actually could be even more times, since I also worked part-time for a few years at stores in Georgetown, both at the Abercrobie & Fitch in the Georgetown Mall in the early '90's, and years later at the Barnes & Noble Superstore .and often walked home at night after closing.

 USA Today's Susan Page was a very frequent visitor at Barnes & Noble, especially baseball-related books, and A&F was where I'd first told then-U.S. Rep. Bill Richardson -whom I was a big admirer of- just what I'd heard and read about the newly-elected to the House Bernie Sanders of Vermont, after he admitted that he'd never heard of him before.

Many if not most walks across the bridge came on weekends when the Metro runs less frequently and I could walk to Georgetown and its great Washington Harbour area, one that I so often used as a second home for writing purposes, in about 75 minutes.
Roughly the same amount of time as walking to Ballston Metro and waiting and waiting and waiting... and then walking to Georgetown from the Foggy Bottom metro next to GWU, George Washington University.
If the weather was even halfway nice I'd usually walk, especially on sunny Sundays when I could listen to sports radio on my walk into Georgetown and not really think so much about the distance.
If you hadn't already caught on from previous posts over the past eight years, I'm a longtime walker from way back...

As I've written about previously here on the blog, including back on September 11th, 2011, 

9/11 -George F. Will on the American landscape ten years after 9/11: Commemoration can’t heal what is self-inflicted

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/911-george-f-will-on-american-landscape.html


that includes my experiences on 9/11, walking from my office on Pennsylvania Avenue opposite the DOJ and the FBI, and walking' the seven-plus miles or so home because, 

a.) the Metro was packed like sardines times ten, and, frankly,
b.) I didn't want to be underground for so long and not know what was going on.

Everyone in my office had been kept informed via my awesome portable Sony radio the size of a sub sandwich, which had TV station audio reception back then, before FCC's Digital TV changes changed that.
We all listened to the audio of NBC's Today Show, but I didn't personally see footage of collapsing WTC Towers until hours later, at the Baltimore Orioles team store in downtown DC around the corner from NY Times Washington bureau, where I headed after my building was ordered to evacuate because of the fears that a plane -what we later came to all know was United #93- would be used to attack the Capitol Building or the White House.

Bud Verge was a friend I'd met and the very savvy and friendly manger of the O's Team store then, and it was there while he waited for his wife to come pick him that watching a TV that usually was running Orioles team highlights, that I first saw the two Towers fall.
Then I walked over to the NY Times Washington bureau to hear what some of  my friends and their colleagues had heard or was being reported, before I decided to finsih my walk home, a little bit better infromed than I had been when the fighter jets were flying directly overhead.

Lots of other north Arlington residents I know walked home by choice across Key Bridge from downtown DC or even Capitol Hill because they shared the same concerns I had, that given everything that had already happened that morning, to say nothing of all the rumors we heard reported at the time, like the State Dept. being partially-bombed, something would or could happen on the Metro -or to it.

With my work clothes in my gym bag over my shoulder and that radio under my left arm like a football, every few minutes I'd stop and let a group of passersby catch their breath, too. and together, we'd get caught up on what we "knew" at the time via uncertain voices reporting "facts" from DC or NYC.
And all you could do was shake your head at what you were hearing.

That was never more the case then when standing halfway across Key Bridge over the Potomac looking at the nearby Washington Monument, looming larger than ever.
I still remember exactly how that felt.

So yeah, while I understand the arguments for studying the gondola idea cited by GreaterGreaterWashington, I'm firmly against a gondola that would ruin the view of that iconic bridge and the views that you can see FROM it.
Let 'em walk across the bridge.
Or call Uber or lyft.
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Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Coral Gables planning firm Dover, Kohl & Partners is focus of mounting taxpayer anger in Arlington County (VA) -their charrettes are "charades"


Link
Well-meaning but gullible Arlington County residents attending a charrette on Saturday in the Columbia Pike neighborhood of Arlington County (VA), who don't understand that their role in this particular "planning" process: cameo appearances. The pro-development and patronizing Arlington County Board is going to ram high-intensity development down their throats whether they like it or not, regardless of how many suggestions they make on the docs and maps at this charrette or how impassioned and logical their comments. The narrative has already been written -they're just props! And in this case, it's been captured on video here by a front group that's paid for by Arlington County Government. i.e the taxpayers. IF Arlington residents in this neighborhood don't want the unhappy future of more people and traffic congestion that the County Board has in store for it, that's tough. That's how they roll.
http://youtu.be/IUGPi9ggVBw

Coral Gables-based planning firm Dover, Kohl & Partners is the focus of mounting taxpayer anger in Arlington County (VA), where beleaguered residents believe they are trying toLink ruin their neighborhoods along the Columbia Pike Corridor with MORE intense development in the future, altering the fundamental nature of the neighborhoods and the reasons why some people move into them -and leaving them hefty living expenses tabs in the meantime.

http://www.doverkohl.com/

http://www.arlingtonva.us/departments/CPHD/forums/columbia/current/Columbia_Pike_LandUse_Housing_Study.aspx

Columbia Pike Form-Based Code: http://www.doverkohl.com/project.aspx?id=9&type=1

The savvy, well-informed and heavily-taxed citizens of Arlington County, including many of my friends still living up there, have already been calling the company-led charrettes "charades" for quite a while now, and when taxpayers are paying $5,000 a day in hotel costs for the visitors from South Florida, as some opponents allege, it's REALLY galling.

Hallandale Beach Blog favorite Arlington Yupette and her blog's readers are all over the story and they are NOT mincing words about their disgust and anger, even as the Washington Post is -surprise- completely under-reporting the depth of that animus. http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/

Monday's post is a perfect example, but there are ample examples:
Pike Corridor Post-Redevelopment 'Open Space' : Your Front Lawn

Hi, Yupette,

Talk about a planning charade, tonight's open space planning meeting at the Career Center was a hoot. The County's open space planning consultants talked parks and playgrounds, but the reality is that there won't be much open space left after in-fill yuppification for anything but Pike Corridor residents to hie to existing parks and recreation centers (including the future aquatic center, indoor soccer area, and boathouse) and use single family residential neighborhoods for their parks and recreation.
Read the rest of the post at:
http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/2011/06/pike-corridor-post-redevelopment-open.html

According to reports, Arlington County Yuppie/Infill Czar and Commissioner Chris Zimmerman was present at some of these meetings in order to keep the high-paid consultants in line and not veer from County Board orthodoxy, which is Moscow-on-the-Potomac, circa 1974.

http://audreyclement.org/2011/06/21/recycling-on-columbia-pike/

While it's true that a collaborative community process yields better communities, what you have in Arlington County is a top-down planning process that allows unelected people to have far too much power and influence, and since those people are selected by elected officials to do their bidding, where's the checks-and-balances?

And more importantly, what's the point of participating if you are just a prop and the process is a charade?

The above is not just the favorite template of Arlington County but also the favored plan here of Hallandale Beach under the ruinous reign of Joy Cooper/Mike Good/Mark Antonio & Company.

In Arlington County, because the county government don't miss a single trick -and wants to try to crowd-out opposing points of view- they have even created a 'front' organization that is supported by taxpayer dollars called the Columbia Pike Revitalization Organization -CPRO. They're the ones who made the video at the top of this post.
http://www.columbia-pike.org/

See this story at Greater Greater Washington blog about problems encountered by some residents in the affected area and how they heard about it from the county's top-heavy information distribution system:

I've told you all before in this space a little about about the over-size ego and relentless patronizing and condescending tone of Zimmerman, and what's happened to Arlington under his reign of ruin, where middle-class people have to flee.

In South Florida over the past year-and-a-half there have been all sorts of newspaper articles, TV newscast segments and blog posts, esp. by Big Labor-types, calling for liberals to create a group that would be the liberal alternative to the popular Tea Party movement that has fundamentally changed American politics.

But the problem they have is that when you gather lots of people who actually believe in LOTS of government spending -if not more than current- without lots of scrutiny and oversight, much less, a stacked deck of a public policy process, you quickly chase away anyone who knows how to run a successful small business because they know what the reality is of more rules and regulations -less jobs.
And what are you left with?

Lots of patronizing people who want to tell others how to live their lives.

Arlington County is full of these sorts of people, befitting one of the most liberal places in the entire country, but even there, liberal people with successful businesses of their own and who actually have to meet a payroll, have come to see see the reality that the Arlington County government's spending and chronic edifice-complex is beyond out-of-control as that term is generally understood in the U.S., and seems more Soviet-like than even I and others have pointed out from different political and writing perches over the past 15 years.

At some point, as no doubt some of you are already saying to yourself, you run out of people to tax to build your castles in the sky.
And who are tired of being told what to do by others.

For all their talk about diversity, how is shutting-down one of the few low-to-middle class housing sites in the county so that wealthy people can move in -and build and pay lots of taxes to the county- an actually strategy?
But there it is and was discussed by Yupette in the recent past, as I've noted here

See also:
http://piketowncenter.com/2011/03/plenary-group-eyes-greenbrier-apartments-for-redevelopment/

What happens when liberals who are forever patting themselves on the back with their boasts about their commitment to diversity, chase all the actual living and breathing diversity out of the county, only making it Richer and Whiter?
A lot of things, but in Arlington, heartfelt remorse is NOT one of them.

And seriously, when almost all of the county administrators involved in the planning and bureaucratization of normal social life in Arlington live elsewhere, how can there not be a real dis-connect between County Hall and the average Arlington taxpayer, who seems to be paying for everyone else's needs but their own?

Well, we will see the answer to those questions in Arlington County, because eventually, the people with the golden goose get tired of gold-plating everyone else's neighborhood but theirs.

Keep up the good work, Yupette!
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Monday, March 7, 2011

Heart-breaking hard times for kids in Obama's America - Sixty Minutes: Hard times generation: homeless kids




CBS News, Sixty Minutes: Hard times generation: Homeless kids,
First aired: March 6, 2011
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358670n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel
From the Sixty Minutes website: 
For some children, socializing and learning are being cruelly complicated by homelessness, as Scott Pelley reports from Florida, where school buses now stop at motels for children who've lost their homes.
Story at: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/03/60minutes/main20038927.shtml
-----

I originally had a lot to say about this Sixty Minutes segment from Sunday night's show but my draft of those comments was accidentally deleted this morning, and I'm exhausted, so this will have to do instead:

The emotionally-draining situation they describe -homeless individuals or families cleaning themselves at Walmart- is one that I actually used to see over at the Arlington County govt. HQ more often than you'd think in the 1990's when I lived in Arlington.

Since I moved back to South Florida in late 2003, I've occasionally written emails to friends and posted something here about how Arlington County, even more than usual, acted like a dog chasing its tail in their own policies on the homeless.

In the view of many well-informed people I knew -plus me- the County often seemed to be focused almost entirely on appeasing well-organized groups "helping" a segment of the homeless population, not entirely from Arlington, that, to me, at times resembled nothing so much as a very pushy and indignant voting bloc of the CDU under Helmut Kohl, constantly going on about what they wanted and needed, while simultaneously, the County seemed genuinely blind to instances where some assistance could really help some Arlington County families keep it together in their own homes.

It was hard not to notice that the constantly complaining spokes in the wheel, not the truly deserving, got the grea$e.
And that was before the foreclosure epidemic hit the country.

Friends and acquaintances of mine who travel across Florida more than I do now say they see a LOT MORE families cleaning-up in Florida Turnpike rest stops in the morning than they ever remember seeing.


Below, something I posted in January of 2010 on hemlösa, featuring the amazing Yohanna.



Yohanna - "Don't Save It All For Christmas Day" - HD -Dec. 15, 2009, TV3

Jóhanna Guðrún Jónsdóttir, December 15, 2009 in Stockholm, for TV3's broadcast of "En Sång För Hemlösa 2009" (A Song For The Homeless 2009)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVtoGYXsG4w


For more Yohanna videos, go to http://www.youtube.com/user/TEAMYOHANNA
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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Editor claims his own 'newspaper' is "not a reputable newspaper" but a real estate supplement with [his] news & views attached; so much for truth!

The creeping, under-the-radar menace of faux newspapers has been spotted once again, and this time, by a very reputable source: reliable, take-no-nonsense Arlington Yupette -All About Yuppie Arlington. http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/

Back in Northern Virginia, she is on the case of the curious ethical situation involving Scott McCaffrey, a managing editor of a so-called community paper who doesn't mind practicing cronyism while engaged in... well, apparently, NOT old-fashioned journalism by his own admission, since he is reported to have said on his blog that the Sun Gazette is "not a reputable newspaper" but a real estate supplement with [his] news and views attached.
Well, I guess he would know, wouldn't he?

http://www.sungazette.net/

Too bad he didn't let the readers in the area in on the joke a whole lot earlier than this.

Like say, well, when I lived in Arlington County from 1989-2003, and along with thousands of other discerning residents, couldn't help but wonder why such weird sycophantic things kept appearing in the Sun-Gazette that seemed to have no real basis in fact, but often seemed more like PR copy straight from the entrenched interests in the county, the smallest in the U.S., but one full of smart, affluent and well-educated people who know how to get their voices heard in the one-party state known by some as the People's Republic of Arlington.

Better late than never on the whole truth will set you free thing, I suppose, but that doesn't really change the basic facts of the ethical tangle McCaffrey's in with the local Chamber of Commerce, now does it?
Nope!

Arlington Yupette, the brave blogger whom I've mentioned previously in this space,
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Arlington%20Yupette, who holds a mirror to the face of the longstanding back-slapping and red-tape generating bureaucracy of Arlington County government and its sycophants in the community, has the story today: Citizens Demand McCaffrey Resign from Arlington Chamber's BOD
http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/2011/01/citizens-demand-mccaffrey-resign-from.html

I realize that on this story, I'm sorta out of The Loop -or Beltway- but having done a little checking on this today, including making some phone calls to some reporter and producer friends at competing news organizations, where exactly is The Washington Post on this story?

One affecting what the Sun Gazette calls "the most affluent audience in the Washington D.C. metro area."

Just wondering.
 I ask because it sounds like real news to me.

Maybe a real news story in the Post's Metro section, not simply posting a pro-Virginia Democratic blog post online: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/politics/blog-network/2010/12/arlington_sun_gazette_now_repr.html

Sadly, having lived in Arlington County for 15 years, until 2003, this attitude of the faux newspaper surprises me not a whit.
This is how cronyism works there -brazenly and with lots of attitude.

Want to muscle Arlington business owners into giving money to your preposterous ego-driven group, well, there's many precedents I can think of for that, but the latest is this from November: County Board Reportedly Helping Fairlington Civic Association Extort Shirlington Restaurant Owners
http://arlingtonyupette.blogspot.com/2010/11/county-board-reportedly-helping.html

I should know, since here in Hallandale Beach, we have a little faux community newspaper of our own, the South Florida Sun-Times, and in their case, the city commission gave them tens of thousands of dollars in CRA funds that are supposed to be used to combat blight within certain clearly-defined geographical areas of the city.

Instead, it keeps a very bad idea afloat -taxpayer-funded "news," where they ONLY write positive "news" about Hallandale Beach City Hall.
Never is heard a discouraging word...

That is, if you call the words they print "news," and not flat-out PR spin, as numerous fact-filled posts here on the blog have proven time and again to a fare-thee-well.
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search/label/South%20Florida%20Sun%20Times

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/search/label/South%20Florida%20Sun-Times

It's hard to imagine a more ridiculous, self-serving and un-true headline than this one from August 13, 2009 in the faux community newspaper, the South Florida Sun-Times: AHEAD OF THE GAME: Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper continues to do the job residents elected her to do -once again!
.

 The faux newspaper that serves as propaganda arm to Hallandale Beach City Hall

The faux newspaper that serves as the propaganda arm to Hallandale Beach City Hall and the Joy Cooper regime, the South Florida Sun-Times.

As always, if you spot this creeping faux newspaper menace in your own community, here in the U.S, or overseas, let me know about it.
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