The Pastel Dream Of the Developer

One morning in 1951, she swooped low enough in Billy's plane to notice men digging a trench for the Woodward & Lothrop department store, and understood then that Friendship Heights could become commercial. At the airport, Edwards met representatives from Lord & Taylor, sent from New York to scout a location on Connecticut Avenue. The men in suits emerged from a DC-3, stumbled down the steps and were confronted with a thin-lipped blonde in a pilot's zip-up flight jacket, her left arm leaning against an open-cockpit plane, offering to take them for a bird's-eye survey.

Eventually Lord & Taylor built at the Western and Wisconsin intersection she had pointed out from the air as "the place where all the action was."

"She's almost a genius," says Edward Asher, president of Chevy Chase Land Co., which lost the Lord & Taylor deal (and many others) to Edwards Properties. "A lot of people sort of work away at things and maybe pile up one deal after another, but she always did it with a vision: She knew what Friendship Heights was going to look like 20 years from the time she started."

In 1964, Edwards was astonished to read a new Montgomery County law that applied to the special taxing district of Friendship Heights, one block north of the District border. It allowed zoning for buildings 145 feet high, lot line to lot line, curb to curb. This would allow for 16-story buildings as wide as there was land, whereas across Western Avenue, in the District, only 10 stories were permitted.

Overnight, she recalls, land values skyrocketed from 50 cents per square foot to $16. When Metro consultants later fought over five possible routes for the Red Line, Edwards informed them of her confidence that high-rises would soon inhabit Friendship Heights, insisting they place a station there.

Her vision of a metropolis of luxury towers started on the ground: She began buying back the single-family homes she had sold a few years earlier to assemble land to present to developers. She used colored pencils to mark up a map, crossing off groups of houses as single plots.

"If there were problems, I bought the problems," she recalls. Homes she had sold for $5,000 five years earlier she bought back at $175,000. One of them was the cottage that would become the Little Pink House, whose owner refused to sell until Edwards made an irresistible offer.

She assembled and sold the lots for commercial and residential development, but never let go of the Little Pink House. Her deals included land for the luxury Barlow office tower with its rooftop pool, the posh Highland House and the Irene -- lifestyle apartment complexes advertised to suit people whom Walter Behr, the mayor of neighboring Somerset, says were derided as "country club empty-nesters." Edwards calls construction dust "gold dust."

She made millions, married off her sons, and cruised the streets each Fourth of July parade in a Rolls, wearing a floppy sun hat and waving to the neighbors with the flat hand of a practiced royal. On weekends, Edwards and her husband would fly to Ocean City for lunch. Their daughter was learning to be a pilot as well.

Then, in 1972, Billy Edwards was up in the airplane, alone, and had a heart attack. He crashed in a field and died.

Mother and daughter could no longer bear to live in the big house on the hill. It seemed full of ghosts. The skeletons of apartment towers being built around it seemed to hunch over the lot. Daughter Deborah thought it might be best to just rent one of the apartments her mother had built.

"I had thought high-rises were all right," Tim Edwards says, "but I wouldn't live in the damn things."