The Pastel Dream Of the Developer
Thelma Edwards Made a Little Pink House Her Building Block for Friendship Heights

By Adriane Quinlan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 11, 2006

Once upon a time, there was a little house way out in the country.

Everyone called it the Little Pink House. It was bordered by two streams, and just across the dirt lane of Willard Avenue sat a dairy farm. Not far to the south, the trolley from downtown Washington made its last stop at Friendship Heights, which in the 1940s was nothing more than a filling station and a Howard Johnson's at the intersection of Western and Wisconsin avenues on the District line.

Today, the Little Pink House still stands, bordered by two soaring apartment buildings. Across Willard -- now a traffic-clogged four-lane road -- squats Geico's massive office complex. The Metro long ago replaced the trolley. Along Wisconsin, the nearly completed Chevy Chase Center boasts the region's most opulent shopping palazzo, home to the glittering facades of boutiques such as Christian Dior, Ralph Lauren, Barneys Co-op, Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo.

People sometimes take notice of the Little Pink House, but few know why it still stands, or who its owner is, and how she ranks among the most important developers in the history of Washington.

There she is now: a little old lady watering her roses this particular morning; or maybe, later in the day, waxing the grill of her white Rolls-Royce convertible.

Her name is Thelma Edwards, but everyone calls her Tim. She is 89 years old. She has lived in Friendship Heights for nearly 60 years. And she is not so little, really, when you see her up close. A thin woman, 5 feet 8, with a dancer's stiff posture, she ties her shirts around her waist, matches coral lipstick to her metallic nails and prances around the house in slip-on mesh sneakers.

Known in the soaring 1960s as Friendship Heights' "unofficial mayor," she was the only woman in the multimillionaire developers' club of the day, a shrewd businesswoman who flew a Piper Cub to scout land for Lord & Taylor, argued for a Metrorail stop at Friendship Heights and brokered deals for Geico's headquarters and the very high-rises that now tower above her cozy 1,400-square-foot cottage.

"Everyone thinks it's just a sweet old house," Edwards says sharply, tapping a nail on the kitchen's black granite countertop, "but this one is the key to assembling the block." In development terms, "assembling" means gathering together neighboring lots to create a large enough base for commercial property. But Edwards, who bought the cottage 40 years ago, is holding out. She doesn't need the money. This place, she says, is her sanctuary. The Little Pink House is the developer's last bastion against development.

Entering 4607 Willard Ave. feels like stepping into a Florida beach house. Its snow-white wall-to-wall carpet retains the lush stripes of a recent vacuuming. Terra cotta angels preen atop a bamboo end table. On the table sits a hardcover copy of a children's classic: Virginia Lee Burton's picture book "The Little House," subtitled on its cover, "Her-Story."

That story, as you may remember, is a parable of urban development. A strong and well-built pink house starts out life in the country, where she observes the passing of time: "the trucks and automobiles going back and forth to the city . . . Everyone and everything moved much faster now than before." She ends up surrounded by a city, with all of its vexations, grime and noise. Generations later, the house is finally moved to a new place back in the country.

Edwards bought the book, first published in 1942, because she has always enjoyed reading it to her nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

On the first page, the man who built the house vows:

"The Little House shall never be sold for gold or silver and she will live to see our great-great-grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren living in her."

Edwards can't say whether such longevity will bless her little house, but her life so far suggests that it might. And her story provides another parable: Things always change, yet somehow remain the same.

'The Money Is in the Land'

Thelma Terry grew up on a 42-acre farm in Fairfax County but couldn't wait to get to the big city. Her mother was a postal worker and a descendant of Thomas Jefferson; her father was a Baptist minister who maintained the farm and always counseled his eight children that "the money is in the land." At age 16, in the thick of the Depression, the girl nicknamed Tim dropped out of high school against her father's wishes, to move to the District with her two older sisters.

She found work as a low-level secretary at a building supply company that had five trucks to provide material for the growing metropolis. She says she was fired "for cranking things out too fast" and rising too high; the company had 60 trucks when she left her post as its corporate secretary.

Having never gone to college, Edwards thinks, was the key to her success: "I never learned all the things you couldn't do."

One night in 1936, at a beer joint on Georgia Avenue, she met a pilot and liquor salesman named Billy Edwards. He was six years older, tall and dashing, with a jack-o'-lantern grin that emerged when he was in the air, flying her on dates in his Piper Cub out over the countryside. He taught her to fly, too. When she went up alone for the first time, the engine cut out. She remembered what Billy had taught her, and managed to glide to a landing. A half-hour later, Billy made her go up for a second run -- otherwise, he worried, she would never agree to solo again, and he couldn't get serious with a gal who couldn't fly.

"He wasn't fit to live with if he wasn't flying," Edwards remembers.

They married, he carried her over the threshold of a tiny house in American University Park, and three sons later she thought they needed a bigger place, which she found squarely atop a hill in Friendship Heights surrounded by two acres of rolling lawns. It was her dream home -- she longingly called it the House on the Hill. It was too expensive for them, but they bought it anyway.

"Billy asked me what I thought I was gonna do about money and I said, 'I don't know. I'm gonna sit down and think about it.'

"All I knew how to do," she says, "was to be an executive!"

A friend worked in a real estate broker's office, so she applied there, striding into a back room to meet the three male brokers. By the end of two years she would outsell them all -- handling 39 of the 108 houses in the 32-acre triangle of Friendship Heights.

"I was on the PTA," she recalls. "I was a mother. People trusted me." But "if being maternal didn't work, I would take reverse action and be tough as nails."

She set up her own firm, Edwards Properties, running it from home, along with raising her family. Says daughter Deborah Demaree, the youngest of her four children: "I thought everyone's mother sewed clothes and made multimillion-dollar real estate deals off the back porch."

There was indeed money in the land. Edwards paid off the mortgage and brought in enough cash that Billy could quit his job selling liquor. She bought her first Rolls, in part to impress her male peers. "Men like toys," Edwards says. "You don't raise boys and a husband-- which is like raising a boy -- without understanding what makes them tick."

To drive with the top down in all sorts of weather, she bought a red mink coat.

"She wanted to act like a man in a man's world, and did it with a lot of confidence," says Stanley R. Zupnik, an area real estate broker.

"She didn't just have bravado," says Austin Kiplinger, a friend and publisher who lived on Willard Avenue in the 1940s. "She did her homework."

He laughs. "How she got herself a red mink coat I don't know. I guess you dip it in red ink."

Once, hoping to lure in a buyer who had previously snubbed her, Edwards hired a chauffeur to pick him up from the airport in the new Rolls. "Same woman, same brain, nice car, and all hell breaks loose," she says. She landed the deal. "You like to think everyone loves you, but really it's just the money."

A High-Flying Woman

More roads were made, and the countryside was divided into lots. More houses and bigger houses . . . apartment houses and tenement houses . . . schools . . . stores . . . and garages spread over the land.

-- "The Little House"

Edwards eventually tired of selling houses to family after family, watching the faces change while the houses remained. She wanted to change the face of the city itself.

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."

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.