Editor’s note: Remember that SACRPH 2019, the organization’s 18th conference, is in Northern Virginia (NOVA or NoVa)  this October/November from October 31 – November 3, the deadline for the CFP, which you can view here, is March 15. With this in mind, we begin our focus on NoVa as our Metro of the Month.  Submit your panels everyone! 

By Andrew Baker 

Each weekday afternoon Northern Virginia commuters leave their offices in the District and drive across the Roosevelt Bridge, up interstate 66, and onto Harry Byrd Highway (state route 7) west through Tysons Corner and into Loudoun County. After the first few turns they pass their commute traveling along well-worn lines—experiencing the metropolitan region as a succession of images from a car window. Succession suggests series; series suggests transitions from one place to another. As they journey daily from the city the mind assumes gradation even as it experiences a succession of plot by plot land uses and zoning decisions. This experience quietly answers questions few articulate.

When do the suburbs begin?

When you see the first car dealership in Tysons Corner.

When does the countryside begin?

When you see the first open fields without for-sale signs mentioning “development potential.”

Where does rural America begin?

When you see the first gas station advertising “clean bathrooms.”

This commuters’ catechism mediates between the urban planner’s categories and the messy particulars of the built environment as drivers experience it. These daily journeys from the city press concentric circles of metropolitan development deep into the mind. As a native and later historian of Loudoun County, Virginia, the experience of driving west on route 7 has likewise formed my understanding of this particular metropolitan landscape—Western Loudoun County—in ways that are often difficult to articulate.

Western Loudoun, like the Catskills and the San Fernando Valley, is both a part of the metropolis and a frequently prescribed antidote to it. It is economically dependent on metropolitan dollars even as its partisans use those dollars to defend it from metropolitan encroachment. Western Loudoun is an example of that wonderfully flexible category—the metropolitan fringe. Such a label is more concession than explanation. It identifies but does not define.

The best way to make sense of Western Loudoun is to join the commuter in experiencing images of place. Here, then, I offer a series of historical glimpses of its twentieth-century history. Each seed grew into a part of the complex ecology of this metropolitan fringe region—Washington’s backyard.

What is Western Loudoun County?

An anti-urban, metropolitan region defined by health, horses, hamlets, and homesteads.

Snickersville

As a traveler drives west from Washington into Loudoun they leave the tidewater, move through the piedmont (literally “foot of the mountains”), and enter the Blue Ridge within a space of sixty miles. Here a sleepy village lined with stone walls lies down a hair-pin turn just off route 7, right before crossing the Appalachian Trail.

From the 1880s to the 1920s, summer trains brought Washingtonians out of the heat and humidity of the lower Potomac River into Western Loudoun’s Blue Ridge foothills. With the extension of the Washington and Ohio Railroad line (later the Washington and Old Dominion) to Round Hill in May 1875, the travel time from the city dropped to only two hours. Families rented summer homes or took out rooms in newly opened boarding houses while husbands commuted to the city for the week’s business. By the 1890s Western Loudoun hamlets enjoyed a thriving summer tourist trade.

The unfortunately named village of Snickersville was the most popular of these summer retreats. Visitors came to ramble over the mountain ridges and gaze down at the Shenandoah Valley to the west and distant Washington to the east. The price of these beautiful vistas was a four-mile carriage ride up poorly maintained country roads that jostled and rattled guests before depositing them in the sleepy mountain town. Enough people made the trip to keep three small hotels in operation by 1885. It was Jules De Monet, a prominent chef from D.C., who put Snickersville on the map when he opened the Blue Ridge Inn in 1893. His new hotel added a level of sophistication the small resort town had lacked. Sophistication was good for business. In 1900, when the railroad extended the line to Snickersville, the company took the liberty of dumping its ill-fitting label for the more bankable Bluemont.

During the height of summer six trains pulled into this station from Washington and Alexandria each day with up to twelve coaches full of summer residents and tourists. Sunday trains brought up to thirty people for afternoon dinner. Here urban professionals sipped tea, played croquet, and socialized with other members of their class. The more daring dabbled in the “strenuous life,” hiking to Bear’s Den or hunting quail and turkeys in the surrounding woodlands. Some vacationers purchased land and had private mountain cottages and second homes built along the hillside overlooking the town. For those who preferred a more modest home in town, Charles B. Turner, a local physician, offered lots for $100 each. There Washingtonians could turn a summer vacation into a year-round lifestyle by commuting to city jobs and living in the health and beauty of the mountainside.

This summer resort town was a regional affair. The beauty of Bluemont’s scenic vistas paled in comparison with what could be found further into the Blue Ridge. As the automobile redefined the American vacation in the 1920s, sublime mountains and lofty vistas lured tourists further west. The Great Depression forced most of western Loudoun’s struggling boarding houses and hotels to close down. The limited scale and short lifespan of this tourist industry, however, protected Loudoun from becoming another Luray Caverns or Gatlingburg, Tennessee. This left Bluemont to quietly transition into a village for Washingtonian commuters. Quaintness, historical charm, and seclusion, not bustling commercialism, would define these places as the county entered the postwar years. Such were the qualities that a new generation of Washingtonians would see from their cars as they drove around the countryside looking for an alternative to suburban sprawl. Those who chose such a life joined with locals to form the Bluemont Citizens Association (1955) and the Bluemont Fair (1969), a popular yearly celebration of the area’s rural heritage and history. Tourism made Western Loudoun.[1]

Middleburg

Traveling the same distance southwest from Washington along current day route 50 (Lee Jackson Memorial Highway), drivers enter the heart of the Virginia Piedmont that stretches from Middleburg down through Charlottesville. Lichen-encrusted stone walls replace wooden fences and red brick creeps from historic buildings, taking over sidewalks and and even daring the traffic as crosswalks. Motoring past the Red Fox Inn and Tavern, a sign for the Foxcroft school, and the Red Horse Tavern, it becomes clear that while Middleburg is not a themed town, it is certainly one with a peculiar identity. The imposing National Sporting Library and Museum anchoring the west end of town removes any doubt on this point.

Over the course of the twentieth century the American sporting set transformed these rolling hills into Hunt Country, an internationally known center of equestrian sports. Their social and economic ties bound the region to urban centers of the Northeast and, ultimately, to England. From November 1-15, 1905, Loudoun County and neighboring Fauquier County hosted the Great Hound Match. During the winter of 1904 and into 1905, Harry Worcester Smith and A. Henry Higginson, two Massachusetts sporting gentlemen, had bandied over the relative merits of English and American (largely southern-bred) foxhounds within the pages of Rider and Driver. Higginson challenged Smith to choose a time and place to settle the matter. Each man put up $1000 and selected a judge. The two judges selected a third. The first pack of hounds to kill a fox in the Loudoun countryside would be the winner. Journalists from the Boston Herald, the New York Herald, and London Daily News arrived to see the issue settled for good.[2]

The day before the match, gawking crowds greeted Higginson and his entourage of hounds, horses, and servants as they pulled up to the rail station at The Plains, five miles South of Middleburg. For the next two weeks anywhere from three dozen to over a hundred riders galloped off at dawn, following the hounds. They spent the day bounding across stone walls and pastures in pursuit of the fox. The riders included members of twenty-six registered hunts, a gathering the likes of which had never before been assembled this side of the Atlantic. Neither pack made a kill, leaving the judges to unanimously declare Smith’s American hounds the winners.

Such is the creation story of Northern Virginia hunt country. From the moment they stepped off the train northern journalists launched into romantic accounts of the countryside. In one of the more florid descriptions of the region to come out of the event, a journalist intoned

It is a beautiful hunting country. Twelve miles to the west, the Blue Ridge heaves up its rounded breast, mottled with woodland and cultivated fields. . . . Between the Blue Ridge and Bull Run mountains stretches away, twenty-five miles broad, a rolling country, free from stone and checkered with green fields of winter wheat, now in its tenderest hues, corn fields stacked with heavy harvest, and grass land taking on the sober garb of late autumn. Here and there the bronze of oak woods lends a splash of color, but there is little woodland and the fox, once routed from cover must run for his life.[3]

Soon after Smith announced in The Sportsmen’s Review that his desire was “to make Middleburg the fox-hunting center of America.” The quiet southern town was, Smith boasted, quickly becoming a place where gentlemen sportsmen would enjoy the finest of southern hospitality, fellowship with their social equals, and the thrill of the hunt. Virginia landowners opened their hunt country to the nation’s sporting class. The response was overwhelming. In the decades following the Great Hound Match, wealthy northerners bought up large tracts of land, turning the region into one of the wealthier rural areas in the South.[4]

Loudoun’s pastureland, stone walls, and farm cottages matched Anglo-American conceptions of the picturesque and the pastoral. Here, on this most British of American landscapes, Virginians pursued the fox. Hunt Country, buoyed through northern money and embracing the mystique of “Old Virginia,” became a staple of sporting magazines and society pages across the East Coast. Much of this hunt country mystique and culture survives in Middleburg to this day through the preservation efforts and cultural labors of area landowners and institutions like the National Sporting Library and Museum. Equestrian sports made Western Loudoun.

Catoctin Creek, 1974, Photo by John Lewis, from Loudoun Watershed Watch
http://www.loudounwatershedwatch.org/subitem9_3.html

Taylorstown:

Heading north from route 7 a few miles west of Leesburg, travelers enter the National Historic Landmark of Waterford, Virginia. Most tourists make it no farther than this restored Quaker village. Those willing to continue north for another five miles, roughly following the path of Catoctin Creek, past pastures and dirt roads, reach Taylorstown. Here the historic preservation is less forthright, but no less serious. An old stone mill and general store anchor a few dozen homes.

Its location along Catoctin Creek a few miles South of the Potomac River placed Taylorstown on the top of the Army Corps of Engineers’ list of potential reservoir development sites in 1974. Having failed for three decades to dam the Potomac River, the Corps looked to the creek as a consolation prize—a way to build in a few days of urban water supply into the river. If built, it would have inundated 8,500 acres and submerged the entire town, which, at that point, was 240 years old and had 70 residents.[5]

The battle to save Taylorstown followed many of the classic NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) tropes. These residents were both highly educated and well-connected. Within the group of 140 people that met to organize the Catoctin Valley Defense Alliance, there were lawyers, engineers, retired army and navy brass, a dean of the International School of Law, and a board member of the Interstate Commission of the Potomac River Basin. Residents had the financial resources to hire a top environmental law firm to represent them. A group of white, upper-middle-class professionals organized to defend their adopted landscapes from destruction. Yet the members of the Alliance expanded their arguments beyond these limits. They believed that the damming of Catoctin Creek was not just about the destruction of their property; it was an act of vandalism and a shameful violation. Damming Catoctin Creek would destroy what was, in their estimation, “one of the most historic villages in Loudoun County.”[6]

The alliance worked with local architectural historian John G. Lewis to document and publicize the architecture and genealogical record of each house that would be inundated.[7] Members held a “Don’t Dam Loudoun House Tour” to invite the public to bear witness to what might be lost. These efforts sought to stir their readers to feel the romance of historical renovation. These houses were, in the words of one article, the result of “ample portions of labor, research, and love.”[8] The meticulous process of reconstruction was almost as important as the genealogy and local history in convincing people that these homes were not the product of mass, industrialized construction. Each dwelling had its own conversion narrative. The benefactors found them mired in squalor and despair. They redeemed these homes from decay and, through their efforts, restored them to their former beauty. These were storied places whose history gave them dignity. Their loss would be the loss of that story.[9]

The Alliance buttressed these efforts with the variety of new preservation tools at their disposal. They secured passage of the Catoctin Creek Scenic Rivers Designation Bill in Richmond in March 1977.[10] They worked with county supervisors, Virginia Commission of Outdoor Recreation, and Virginia Historic Landmark Commission to secure historic district status from the state (the county had nine such districts by 1984).[11] Their local efforts, combined with the release of a May 1977 report by the Washington Metropolitan Council of Governments that challenged the need for the additional water storage, forced the Corps to abandon their plans in August 1979.[12] These preservationists protected their rural enclave from a piece of metropolitan infrastructure. Taylorstown endures as home to a mix of commuters and retirees, restored homes and horse farms, all surrounding an old stone flour mill. Historical Preservation made Western Loudoun.

Broad Run Farms

Before reaching any of these Western Loudoun destinations, commuters struggle through what is Eastern Loudoun—strip malls, housing developments, traffic lights (although not as many as there once were), and divided highways. For those willing to risk pulling off on the south shoulder of route 7 as it crosses Broad Run, a small tollhouse is visible twenty feet below along the old bridge. Just north of this local landmark Robert and Barbara Young launched what would become the first housing development in Eastern Loudoun.

The Broad Run Farms subdivision was not the Young’s original plan when they purchased the 706-acre Miskel Farm in 1950. Robert had worked as a lawyer for the U.S. Senate and wanted to try his hand at dairy farming. Within a year they had abandoned the enterprise. It is hard to dabble in dairy farming. Instead the Youngs partnered with a Leesburg real estate man to subdivide their farm. The couple dug a lake along route 7 and began waving down any car that drove by and offering to show them around. Washingtonians had spent the day motoring along the county’s back roads, gazing out at the horses and cattle, soaking in the scenery, and admiring the hard-working country life of Loudoun farmers. Weekend excursions primed them to desire what the Youngs offered—low taxes, good schools, natural beauty, and recreation in the countryside.[13]

By 1953 the Youngs had sold one hundred lots and had eighty houses under construction. The typical mixture of government workers, politicians, and retired military men took up residence in the moderately expensive neighborhood where lots ranged from a half an acre to ten acres.[14] Broad Run Farm’s success inspired imitators. By 1953 the county had approved more than dozen plans for small subdivisions in Eastern Loudoun.[15] By the 1990s, Broad Run Farms would be lost among a series of development projects: Algonkian, Countryside, Cascades, and Dulles Town Center. While it reflected many of the ideals of Western Loudoun, Broad Run Farms became the advance guard of the Eastern Loudoun that would threaten Western Loudoun over the next half a century.

Subdivisions made Eastern Loudoun. . . and therefore defined what Western Loudoun was not but was always in danger of becoming.

Commuters underwrote, consumed, restored, purchased, celebrated, farmed, developed, hunted, defended, and subdivided rural Loudoun County. As I have argued elsewhere, rural people were central actors in this process as well. Yet it was these newcomers who cultivated these fringe landscapes and then defended them. As the postwar period dawned, each group defined these landscapes, whether explicitly or implicitly, in opposition to the supposedly crass, mass-produced imitation lifestyle that was D.C.’s ever-encroaching suburbia. These gentrifiers squared off against development in their efforts to protect Loudoun’s countryside. The project of defending Western Loudoun from sprawl has been inseparable from landscape aesthetics. Preserving these largely private lands for the public good only makes sense to the extent that any resident can access and enjoy their beauty from the public rights of way. The Western Loudoun of health, horses, hamlets, and homesteads is a Loudoun the public sees and enjoys from a car window. It is a commuter’s paradise—a reminder that anyone with a car can drive out past the city and the suburbs and witness the countryside.

What is Western Loudoun?

Western Loudoun is a metropolitan landscape preserved, protected, and promoted as the countryside for anyone willing to look.

Andrew C. Baker is assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University-Commerce in Northeast Texas. His recent book Bulldozer Revolutions: A Rural History of the Metropolitan South examines the development of the metropolitan fringe outside Washington, D.C., and Houston, Texas.

[1] Scheel, Loudoun Discovered, vol. 4 (Leesburg, VA: The Friends of Thomas Balch Library, 2002) and Jean Herron Smith, From Snickersville to Bluemont: the Biography and History of a Virginia Village, Evelyn Porterfield Johnson and Robert Hoffman, eds. (Bluemont, Va.: Bluemont Citizens’ Association, 2003), especially 144-53; Writers’ Program of the WPA, Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940, 1941), 527.

[2] Martha Wolfe, The Great Hound Match of 1905: Alexander Henry Higginson, Harry Worcester Smith, and the Rise of Virginia Hunt Country (Lyons Press, 2015); Higginson’s scrapbooks from the event are housed at the National Sporting Library and Museum (NSLM). Grafton-Middlesex Match, Piedmont Valley, Va., November 1905, Box 7, Alexander Henry Higginson Scrapbooks, 1899-1926.

[3] “Big Hound Match is On,” newspaper clipping, Match Scrapbook.

[4] The Sportsmen’s Review, 1906, 177-178, Folder 21, Box 1, Alexander Mackay-Smith Papers, NSLM.

[5] Piedmont Virginian, June 5, 1974, June 19, 1974, and October 2, 1974 and Washington Star-News Jun 9, 1974, each in Catoctin Valley Defense Alliance (CVDA), Manuscript Collection SC0011, Thomas Balch Library, Leesburg, Virginia

[6] In addition to this, the statement rehashed standard anti-dam arguments. They complained of the loss of county tax base, ecological destruction, and the ruining of open space and farm land. Catoctin Valley Defense Alliance, Official Statement, September 15, 1974, CVDA.

[7] John G. Lewis, “A General History of Taylorstown and the Catoctin Creek Valley from the Potomac to Waterford, Virginia,” August 26, 1974, CVDA.

[8] “Catoctin Valley Threatened by Dam,” Echoes of History, 4 (September 1974), 69-71.

[9] Ray Cheronis, “Foxton Cottage, Taylorstown, VA: A Miracle of Restoration and Reconstruction,” Folder 1, CVDA.

[10] John G. Lewis to Members of the Loudoun County Scenic Rivers Committee and the Goose Creek-Catoctin Creek Task Force, March 4, 1977, Lewis collection.

[11] Calder Loth, ed., The Virginia Landmarks Register, 3^rd ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1987), 238-247.

[12] Washington Post, August 28, 1979.

[13] Scheel, Loudoun Discovered, vol. 1, Goin’ Down the Country, 123-127.

[14] For a example of Broad Run Farms settlers, see Jack Eisen, “New Airport and Suburbia Perk up Loudoun County,” March 21, 1960 and Berta Mikesell, “Formula for a Rich Life,” Folder 2, Box 5, Keep Loudoun Beautiful Collection, TBL.

[15] James Birchfield, “Rural-Urban Broad Run,” Virginia and the Virginia County (January, 1953), 23.

Editor’s note: Remember that SACRPH 2019, the organization’s 18th conference, is in Northern Virginia (NOVA or NoVa)  this October/November from October 31 – November 3. The deadline for the CFP, which you can view here, is March 15. With this in mind, we continue our focus on NoVa as our Metro of the Month.  Submit your panels everyone! 

By Tommy Shay Hill

To the extent that it enters the public eye at all, Northern Virginia appears to outsiders as a land of interstates, office parks, and civil war battlefields, where the frumpiness of Washington bureaucracy takes on southern baggage; a place epitomized by such landmarks as the Pentagon and Arlington Cemetery, and where grey mid-century office blocks front onto highways named after Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Its urban form is summed up by Tysons Corner, made infamous in the 1990s by the urbanist Joel Garreau as the archetypal “Edge City”: less a functioning community than a cautionary tale of the excesses of late twentieth century auto-dependent exurbia.

It thus came as a surprise to some that Amazon would choose this place to bring 25,000 white collar jobs as part of its highly-publicized HQ2.[1] The company’s move to New York City seemed cliché; the move to Virginia, uninspiring. To those who live in the Washington area, Amazon’s chosen site straddling Arlington’s Crystal City and Alexandria’s Potomac Yards is a drab corporate landscape of aging office towers and big box stores. Like ‘Foggy Bottom’ five stops away on the Blue Line, ‘Crystal City’ is one of those place names that has become a joke among area residents. Simultaneously imposing and forgettable, the neighborhood’s slew of hulking concrete office towers – many of them carbon copies of one another – are exemplars of the monumental blandness of post-war Washington. Think Le Corbusier, but without the style.

Amazon’s arrival in Northern Virginia seems at odds with the mental image many outsiders have of the region’s major players: the Department of Defense, the security agencies, and the hundreds of independent contractors serving them – the back-of-house operations of the Deep State. And to a large degree this mental image is accurate: local developer Robert Smith built this collection of modernist-lite high rises in the 1960s and 1970s as cheap office space for government agencies and defense department staff.[2] It was in this otherwise unremarkable office cluster – and in a few others like it across the region – that Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program was waged. The region as a whole was effectively built by the Pentagon. Many of the largest structures in the area house Defense Department functions, and the housing tracts and high rises that dot the region can often be dated to some spurt of postwar defense spending.

And yet, Amazon is no stranger to this world of intelligence and defense contracting. The company’s cloud computing subsidiary Amazon Web Services (AWS) has had a major presence in the region since 2006, and since 2013 has hosted all of the CIA’s web traffic in a purpose-built private cloud.[3] Follow Virginia Route 267 West past Tysons Corner out to Loudoun County and you’ll reach Ashburn, Virginia, where AWS operates 25 of the more than 70 data centers in this remote corner of the D.C. area.[4] This formerly agricultural community 45 minutes from Washington houses the world’s busiest intersection of fiber networks, making it the optimal point on the globe to store and exchange data.[5] In the open tracts and brownfields of this Northern Virginia exurb, an arms race is being fought once again: this one not for mastery of space, but for control of “the Cloud.”

Northern Virginia: The Internet’s Utility Closet

The region’s status as a tech hub has by now become banal to Northern Virginia natives. Parts of the region are so dense with underground fiber optic cables that a construction project in the area knocks one out from time to time, bringing down some portion of the web for a few hours and causing serious delays on the interstates radiating outwards from Washington.[6]

But the details always seem to shock out-of-towners. Loudoun County officials like to state that 70% of internet traffic in the world passes through data centers located here.[7] While it is difficult to evaluate this precise figure, Northern Virginia’s volume of data center space dwarfs the size of Silicon Valley, the next largest market.[8] The internet is a network of networks, and server farms in Loudoun County are the interface where those networks intersect. A huge portion of the internet’s many networks articulate with one another in the wires and servers of Northern Virginia’s dozens of faceless data centers.[9]

The history of the internet and the history of defense contracting are not as estranged as they might seem, and it is in the office parks, edge cities, and suburban downtowns of the Northern Virginia suburbs that these two stories cross. In his brilliant history of the region, Internet Alley, Paul E. Ceruzzi traces the origins of the internet to a series of Department of Defense contracts from the 1960s through the 1980s. These contracts went disproportionately to companies located in D.C.’s Virginia suburbs, cementing a network of connections that built such edge cities as Tysons Corner and which solidified the region’s status as the center of the internet before any personal computer even had a dial-up connection. Like all media, the internet relies on physical infrastructure; like all infrastructural systems, the internet’s backbone of server farms and fiber optic cables has grown in a highly path-dependent way. MAE-East, the server farm established in an Ashburn parking garage in 1992 to allow the world’s fledgling online companies to connect, remains at the hub of the world’s internet traffic today. AOL moved its corporate headquarters to Ashburn in the 1990s in order to minimize distance to MAE-East, and soon enough all internet service providers were running their cables to this one spot.[10] Today more than 200 networks converge in Ashburn, which has come to be known in industry circles as “Data Center Alley.”[11]

As much as consumers may grumble about Amazon’s monopoly over the world’s e-commerce, its control of global internet traffic is by no means secure: the company is in the midst of one of the fiercest commercial battles of our times – an ongoing war with Google, Microsoft, and Oracle for control of the Cloud. The war for this ethereal medium is being waged in Ashburn and surrounding communities, where these four players are scrambling to buy up available space for new data centers.[12] These exurbs are experiencing an extraordinary building boom in new data center space, one that is straining the capacity of the local utility company – Dominion Power – to sustain it.[13] The cost of land in this secluded jurisdiction at the outer edge of the northeast corridor has nearly tripled in just the last two years, reaching over $1 million per acre at the end of 2018.[14]

What is driving this exploding demand for data center space? Many recent digital phenomena have enhanced the need for data center capacity: the widespread adoption of cloud computing by companies and individuals; the pervasive streaming of content; the Internet of Things; the prospect of 5G; and the exponential increase in data generated by our most everyday objects and activities.[15] The journalist Rich Miller has carefully tracked the drivers and dynamics of the data center industry on his excellent blog Data Center Frontier, and points to the coming ‘data tsunami’ generated by ‘machine-to-machine’ (m2m) communication as a phenomenon that will sustain continuously growing demand for data center capacity over the coming years.[16] While these phenomena are sure to transform economies and social relations around the world, their effects are felt most acutely in a single local real estate market: Northern Virginia.

NoVA’s Security-Driven Building Booms

This is not the first time an exogenous series of events has sparked a building boom in the area. There are distinct parallels between the current upswing and the frantic construction of defense contracting space in the years after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. I have written elsewhere of the way in which the Defense Department’s massive increase in demand for space after 9/11 facilitated the growth of a new type of landlord in Northern Virginia – the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) – capable of issuing shares on stock exchanges to fund new development.

The early 2000s saw this new generation of real estate company buy out and out-compete the local developers that built Crystal City and Tysons Corner in the 1960s and 1970s.[17] With access to the public capital markets, REITs proved uniquely capable of financing and developing the hyper-protected, state-of-the-art garrison-campuses effectively required by the Department of Defense’s post-9/11 security requirements. The years after 9/11 witnessed the rapid proliferation of a new type of structure across the Northern Virginia landscape: the SCIF, or “sensitive compartmented information facility.” High-security SCIFs can cost upwards of $300 a square foot to build, relative to the $30 per square foot standard of conventional office space, and thus are prohibitive for small- and mid-sized firms to provide.[18]

The REIT Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) cornered the market for high-security defense contractor space early on, increasing its tenant revenue from defense and intelligence from roughly a quarter of its total revenues in 2002 to nearly half by 2004.[19] By 2010, 36 of the 50 largest Defense contractors were COPT tenants, most of them with multiple leases in place.[20]

Long a player behind the scenes in the War on Terror, COPT has quietly assumed center stage in the war for the cloud, becoming Amazon Web Services’ primary data center provider in Loudoun County.[21] The REIT’s experience in providing high-security spaces commensurate with Defense Department standards translates well to the market for data center space, and gives Amazon a distinct advantage on a major front of the Cloud War.

Over the past year, the continuity between Northern Virginia’s War on Terror boom years and the current data center upswing have come into relief: rumors have been circulating over a controversial Department of Defense cloud contract known as “JEDI” (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure). To be awarded in April 2019, JEDI consists of a single award of almost unheard-of proportions: worth as much as $10 billion over a ten-year time frame, the grantee will be tasked with building out the military’s entire digital infrastructure needs.[22] While it is hard to draw any direct connections, Amazon’s choice of a site for its HQ2 less than a mile from the Pentagon has analysts wondering whether the chance of snagging the JEDI contract is what lured Amazon to the site in the first place: the company has significantly intensified its lobbying activities in recent years.[23] A new HQ site in Crystal City would only enhance Amazon’s changes of securing JEDI.[24]

As Ingrid Burrington observes in her recent effort to map AWS’s data centers in Loudoun County, the company’s data center fortresses are as inaccessible and uninviting as any Defense Department stronghold.[25] Alongside the mutely imposing office towers of Crystal City and the indestructible concrete blockiness of SCIFs, the current wave of data center construction has added a new item to the region’s menagerie of blandness. Calling these structures Kafkaesque would imply something too sinister—these buildings are the architecture of anonymity, of a Big Brother that wants to be ignored.

The Economy of Security: Limits to Growth?

And yet, evading attention is becoming increasingly difficult in this rapidly growing region. Northern Virginia’s spectacular series of building booms since the 1960s has left little remaining open space for the fenced-off server farms or high-security office parks that are the region’s lifeblood, casting into stark relief the contradictions of an agglomeration economy based on classified activity. For all its abundance – of government contracts, advanced degrees, computing power – the region is starting to face an acute shortage of space. Data center providers in Ashburn are considering building up, constructing 2- or even 3-story data centers to accommodate the apparently limitless demand.[26] The region’s once-deadly office clusters are being remade as 24/7 lifestyle destinations: the REIT JBG Smith is giving all of Crystal City a new urbanist makeover. The moniker ‘edge city’ is hardly relevant anymore for Tysons Corner. In 2014, the district was sutured to the wider region by an extension of the D.C. Metro’s Silver Line, and much of the surrounding open space has long since filled in with new office buildings, shopping destinations, and residential high-rises. The housing market has felt a serious squeeze, with jurisdictions losing up to 90% of their affordable market-rate housing since 2000.[27]

But beyond its impact on the immediate region, the explosive growth of the IT industry in Northern Virginia points to an uncomfortable reality: the tech economy is highly geographically uneven, an unevenness explained as much by massive government contracts and pre-existing infrastructure as on individual cities’ abilities to lure the “creative class.” For all the talk of the internet’s flattening of space, the umbilical cord linking the digital economy to the military-industrial complex has yet to be cut, and the steady proliferation of social media, digitally-enabled devices, streaming, and cloud computing continues to pay dividends to the place where the internet was born over a generation ago. The cards were already stacked against the other 18 cities on Amazon’s shortlist for HQ2. Amazon’s announcement in November confirmed what many in the region already knew: Northern Virginia is ground zero in the war for the Cloud.

Editor’s note: Remember that SACRPH 2019, the organization’s 18th conference, is in NoVA this October/November from October 31 – November 3, the deadline for the CFP, which you can view here, is March 15, submit your panels everyone! 

Tommy Shay Hill is an urbanist, historian and data scientist currently pursuing a PhD in urban planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Tommy’s work is at the intersection of urban planning, critical geography, economic history, and computer science. Tommy’s dissertation research focuses on the challenges of developing a quantitative science of cities. Tommy is in the early stages of an empirical project to “spatialize” property development cycles through American history: to map the spatial evolution of American metropolitan regions since the Second World War through cycles of boom and bust.

Featured image (at top): Statue to William Donovan, director of the C.I.A predecessor agency, and a marker to the C.I.A’s fallen at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, Langley, Virginia, Carol M. Highsmith, between 1980 and 2006, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress 

[1] Jonathan O’Connell and Robert McCartney. “Amazon HQ2 Decision: Amazon Splits Prize between Crystal City and New York.” The Washington Post. November 13, 2018.

[2] Shapiro, Matt Schudel and T. Rees. “Robert Smith, 81, Dies; Created Arlington’s Crystal City.” The Washington Post. December 31, 2009.

[3] Konkel, By Frank. “Sources: Amazon and CIA Ink Cloud Deal .” FCW. March 13, 2018. Accessed January 11, 2019. https://fcw.com/articles/2013/03/18/amazon-cia-cloud.aspx.

[4] “A Gigawatt and Growing: Data Center Industry Pushing Toward Greener Energy.” Loudoun Now (blog), December 6, 2018. https://loudounnow.com/2018/12/06/a-gigawatt-and-growing-data-center-industry-pushing-toward-greener-energy/.

[5] Miller, Rich. “Northern Virginia Data Center Market Extends Leadership Position.” Data Center Frontier Special Report. 2018.

[6] Amy Gardner. “The One Fiber Optic Cable No One on the Dig for Tysons Corner Wants to Hit.” The Washington Post. May 31, 2009.

[7] Freed, Benjamin. “70 Percent of the World’s Web Traffic Flows Through Loudoun County.” The Washingtonian. September 14, 2016.

[8] Data Center Frontier. “Silicon Valley Data Center Market.” Data Center Frontier Special Report. 2018.

[9] Blum, Andrew. “The Bullseye of America’s Internet.” Gizmodo. Accessed January 10, 2019. https://gizmodo.com/5913934/the-bullseye-of-americas-internet.

[10] Kanowitz, Stephanie. “How Data Centers Power Virginia’s Loudoun County.” GCN. Accessed January 9, 2019. https://gcn.com/articles/2018/10/12/loudoun-county-data-centers.aspx.

[11] Miller, Rich. “Northern Virginia Data Center Market Extends Leadership Position.” Data Center Frontier Special Report. 2018.

[12] Miller, Rich. “Northern Virginia Data Center Demand: Home of the Data Center Hyperscalers.” Data Center Frontier (blog), November 26, 2018. https://datacenterfrontier.com/northern-virginia-data-center-demand-hyperscalers/.

[13] “A Gigawatt and Growing: Data Center Industry Pushing Toward Greener Energy.” Loudoun Now (blog), December 6, 2018. https://loudounnow.com/2018/12/06/a-gigawatt-and-growing-data-center-industry-pushing-toward-greener-energy/.

[14] Stoller, Bill. “Northern Virginia’s Already Tight Real Estate Market Just Got a Lot Tighter.” Data Center Knowledge (blog), October 1, 2018. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/colocation/n-virginia-s-already-tight-data-center-real-estate-market-just-got-lot-tighter

[15] Stoller, Bill. “Equinix Heats Up Data Center Alley’s Landgrab Rush.” Data Center Knowledge (blog), February 27, 2017. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/02/27/equinix-deal-in-n-virginia-data-center-market-may-push-land-prices-up.

[16] Miller, Rich. “Data Tonnage: Managing the Coming M2M Tsunami.” Data Center Frontier (blog), November 28, 2018. https://datacenterfrontier.com/data-tonnage-managing-the-coming-m2m-tsunami/.

[17] Ceruzzi, Paul E. Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945-2005. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008., pp. 126-134

[18] Dennis J. Lane of Ryan Commercial Real Estate Services, quoted in “U.S. government snaps up secure offices,” by David Dishneau, Associated Press. April 3, 2005.

[19] Corporate Office Properties Trust. Q4 2004 Corporate Office Properties Trust Earnings Conference Call.

[20] Corporate Office Properties Trust. Corporate Office Properties Trust 2010 Annual Report. p. 17

[21] Miller, Rich. “Amazon Plans Epic Data Center Expansion in Northern Virginia.” Data Center Frontier (blog), November 6, 2017. https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-plans-epic-data-center-expansion-in-northern-virginia/.

[22] Moss, Sebastian. “Amazon in Advanced Talks to Bring HQ2 to Northern Virginia.” Data Center Dynamics (blog). Accessed January 7, 2019. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/news/amazon-advanced-talks-bring-hq2-northern-virginia/.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Reklaitis, Victor. “HQ2 in the D.C. Area Could Help Amazon Snag a $10 Billion Pentagon Contract.” MarketWatch (blog). Accessed January 7, 2019. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hq2-in-the-dc-area-could-help-amazon-snag-a-10-billion-pentagon-contract-2018-11-12.

[25] Burrington, Ingrid. “Why Amazon’s Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country.” The Atlantic, January 8, 2016. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-web-services-data-center/423147/.

[26] Stoller, Bill. “Equinix Heats Up Data Center Alley’s Landgrab Rush.” Data Center Knowledge (blog), February 27, 2017. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/02/27/equinix-deal-in-n-virginia-data-center-market-may-push-land-prices-up.

[27] Whitehead, David. “Alexandria Has Lost 90% of Its Affordable Homes since 2000.” Accessed January 11, 2019. https://ggwash.org/view/64111/alexandria-has-lost-90-of-its-affordable-homes-since-2000.