The Pastel Dream Of the Developer

Still, she sold the dream house and split the lot between two high-rise projects. They moved into the Irene.

"It's funny the things you say you'll never do," Edwards says. "Some of those things you do."

They cleared the house of what furniture they wanted and planned a funeral for a chapter of their lives, inviting several hundred friends to brunch out on the lawn. Many came dressed as if to watch a polo match. "The bulldozers came in for entertainment," Edwards says, "and also to pull the house down." She watched as their metal mouths ate away at the life she had built with Billy.

"You know me," she says. "I did it all dramatically."

In the 1970s, construction's gold dust blew downwind to bordering neighborhoods of single-family homes, where many residents feared the march of the monstrous towers. A backlash also built in Friendship Heights. Edwards's grand plan for a bustling metropolis encountered small-town politics and power struggles. As secretary of the Friendship Heights Council, she was among the landowners and developers who ran the town in private, out of a council member's living room. Edwards personally spearheaded the project of widening 20-foot streets to 80 feet.

But some people came to resent Edwards's imperial ways, how she would swan into the planning commission in a pink suit, certain that she'd get her way. A group of renters, who wanted lower-density development, revolted against the council.

"We had our dust-ups," says Cleo Tavani, a renter who led the slate that pushed Edwards out (261 votes to 156). "We sued them and they sued us," Tavani recalls, sipping iced tea in her apartment in the Carlton. "It was very unpleasant."

The new council's greatest accomplishment came when it ripped up a street Edwards had widened to clear land for its grand vision: the Friendship Heights Village Center, which would offer afternoon teas and bridge clubs in the ballroom. It also would provide a public space to hold council meetings -- not somebody's living room.

Anti-development activists also blocked new construction by imposing a sewer moratorium when public utilities were not able to keep up with the growing population. "People fight against any change," Edwards says dismissively. Yet even today, some of them hold grudges.

'One Woman's Vision'

More than 30 years later, a few dozen senior citizens gather in the ballroom of the Friendship Heights community center and unstack chairs in front of a large-screen TV. They've come to watch a half-hour documentary called "Friendship Heights: One Woman's Vision." The star is Edwards, who partially funded the documentary by filmmaker Ginger Woolf. (It became part of WETA's series on local neighborhoods.)

At 3 p.m. tea is served in the ballroom, christened Huntley Hall in honor of Clay Huntley, a physician who served as president of the Friendship Village Civic Association. Just before the DVD is shown, Huntley's widow, Helen, storms out -- a petite seventy-something in sheer black silk whose kitten heels clack across the parquet. She strides toward a framed photograph of her and her husband of 42 years, who died in 2005. In the photo, they are posed over shovels, breaking ground to build the community center. She points with a pinkie: "That's me. And where's Tim?"

"In the film she doesn't mention the council," says Huntley, who's already seen it on TV. "Tim's full of self-praise. She did nothing." Indeed, the film neglects the history of the neighborhood before Edwards arrived, describes the sewer moratorium as zany, omits completely the squabbles over the village center, and doesn't mention a multimillion-dollar legal battle she lost involving a former partner.

The DVD plays without further incident, with a scatter of applause at the end.

The final scene is a sweep of the neighborhood's crowning jewels: the gleaming new storefronts along Wisconsin Avenue, ready to welcome the region's richest shoppers.

'Everything Always Changes'

The windows and shutters were fixed, and once again they painted her a lovely shade of pink.

-- "The Little House"

There is more that the documentary leaves out. Edwards fell in love and married again -- a fellow developer named F. Winfield "Win" Weitzel. Two of her sons died. First, Terry Edwards, at 33, from a heart attack, leaving three young children. Ten years later Billy Edwards Jr. also had a heart attack, and died at 54, leaving behind a son.

Through this period of loss, Tim Edwards focused on the Little Pink House. She and Weitzel decided they didn't want to live in high-rises forever. "It was a real revelation to me," Edwards says. "When I started looking at the future, I thought really what I wanted is a sanctuary for myself."

They gutted the house, opening up the first floor by knocking down walls and installing a row of French doors that let in light from the big back yard. Out front they installed a slate porch, and downstairs they renovated the basement to serve as Edwards's office. Weitzel retired, but Edwards started a second career as a landlord. She bought the 800-unit Willoughby building and moved into its top floor. But days she still worked from the Little Pink House as a broker consulting on plans for Geico's 26 acres and the Chevy Chase Center.

In 1996, at the age of 93, Weitzel died. His widow was 79. "It was devastating," she says. "But I don't sit around and grieve over the past. . . . Everything always changes, and you can't stop it."

Falling in Love Again

While "One Woman's Vision" was in production, Edwards stuck to her walking route from the Willoughby, striding past the Panera bakery to spend mornings at her desk in the Little Pink House. Jeffrey Binda, a divorced 87-year-old Willoughby resident, covered the same stretch on his daily 12-mile jaunt. A retired Marine Corps officer, Binda is a barrel-chested man with a dockyard tan who looks as if he could bench-press a Volkswagen. He punctuates with bright hand gestures his long stories that wander from Harvard to "glamorous Shanghai." He had seen Edwards around and thought she was "glamorous, gorgeous." They met at Panera and courted for a year. He is, Edwards says, the "love of my life."

"I met this feisty, wonderful, paradoxical genius of a woman that I'm nuts about," Binda says, patting Edwards's manicured hand. "We're insane about each other."

"You're beeping," Edwards says, pointing toward his pedometer. She offers him a slice of homemade apple cake, and he soon retires to a plump white armchair in the living room, to read. Edwards keeps three framed photographs of them, posing as a couple. In a few months, they plan to marry.

"For him to come along at this point of life is remarkable," Edwards says giddily. "It's only within the last 10 years that I have understood myself completely. I thought I was pretty smart at 20. At 40, I thought I knew everything. It's fascinating to be old."

Edwards and Binda could afford any retirement, but they choose to live together in the neighborhood she built and she still goes to her office in the Pink House every morning. "No money could buy the pleasure it gives me to look at Friendship Heights," Edwards says.

Yet at her Little Pink House, the developer has purposefully diminished any view of her developments. By terracing the sloping yard and adding a 25-foot waterfall, she has completely enclosed the back of the house.

At 89, she has realized she is "a country girl at heart," the farm girl she was in Virginia on the 42 acres her father plowed.

"The older you get the more you take comfort in things like this," she says. "It's true that all of the wealth in the world comes from the dirt, all the fish in the sea feed from the earth, all the gold, all the silver, even all the buildings and the high-rises are built on the earth. Tell me anything that doesn't come from the dirt! I wanted somewhere where I could go and live with the dirt."

* * *

When the Little House saw the green grass and heard the birds singing, she didn't feel sad any more. . . . Once again she could watch the sun and moon and stars. Once again she could watch Spring and Summer and Fall and Winter come and go. Once again she was lived in and taken care of. Never again would she be curious about the city.