The Captain in the Harbor
Milt Peterson's Vision Anchors a Massive Development

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, March 30, 2008; M01

Milt Peterson is sitting in his offices looking down with childlike glee on National Harbor, a new city he is building on the Potomac.

"You know what's the mainstay of this whole project?" he asks. "I'll tell you. It's the art."

When Peterson employs the term, it wraps around a lot of things -- standing stones and white shell paths, forests on the skyline, enormous public sculptures, mosaics on external walls, huge maps underfoot, giant eagles overhead.

He says: "You don't go to Rome to see Italians! You don't go to Venice to ride in a boat! You go for the art. What's art supposed to do for us? I'll tell you. Art identifies the place. More than any other aspect, it puts us on the map.

"Every developer thinks he has pretty buildings, but the public doesn't care if they're pretty or not. Every developer has architecture, doors, windows, elevators, but who else has art?

"At National Harbor art wasn't an afterthought. We had art before we had buildings.

"Art works, let me tell you. When we opened sales for our first building -- 254 condominiums -- we sold out in 37 days. Then we made another 180 units available in our second building, and we've got four left. The buyers who paid $650,000 for a two-bedroom -- what'd they see? They didn't see the buildings; the buildings weren't built yet. They saw the big vision. They saw the art.

"I was biznified when I started this project. Then I became artified. You've got to be a zealot. A zealot! You've got to lift the spirit, and appeal to the emotions. You've got to make them soar."

Then Peterson jumps up from his chair and says, "Let's go see some art."

Today he is accompanied by artist Albert Paley, the thoughtful, self-contained ponytailed sculptor from whom he has commissioned the tall sculpture that will greet visitors arriving at the development's front door. ("The rest of the site will be fenced," Peterson says, "and the fences will be screened by trees, big trees, so you can't see in or out. I learned that from Disney.")

Paley, in the '70s, was best-known as a jeweler, but his work in recent decades has been getting ever bigger. The sculpture he has fabricated for the National Harbor entrance looks something like the torch held up as a beacon by the Statue of Liberty. But this one is not depictive. It's burned off its depictiveness. Now it looks, instead, like a kind of abstract flame.

Peterson is thinking of calling it "The Beckoning." The Paley sculpture makes you lift your head. Yellow, gold and rust, the sculpture on its pedestal is 85 feet tall.

Paley first became a metalsmith known in Washington when his impressive "Portal Gates" of bronze, copper, brass and steel were installed at the Renwick Gallery in 1974. Earlier this year another door of Paley's metalwork, this one called the "Good Shepherd Gate," was placed in Gothic stonework at Washington National Cathedral.

Paley, a professor in residence at the Rochester Institute of Technology, runs a metal workshop on the scale of a factory in that northern New York city. Once, when Peterson rode his private plane to Rochester to check the progress of "The Beckoning," he noticed the sculptor was just as skilled at animals as he was at abstract art.

"Suddenly it hit me," Peterson says. "I thought, 'Pow! Eagles!'

"Eagles soar. They're on the dollar bill. They're patriotic. There are 300 pair on this river. Fourteen eaglets have hatched on this property. So I turned and said to Albert, 'How literal can you be?' 'Try me,' he answered. And I did."

The result had just arrived on the National Harbor site -- two enormous eagles of shiny stainless steel, birds with predatory eyes and sharp talons and 17-foot wingspreads.

Eventually they'll perch on the two four-story pillars on either side of the American Way, the main boulevard. The setup may echo the twin columns near San Marco that frame a view of Venice's lagoon.

For the moment they were grounded still. Peterson could not wait to see them. So he untied the cords around them, pulled away the blue translucent tarps in which they had been wrapped, picked the one that he liked best and climbed up on its back.

In classical allegory the eagle is an attribute of pride, and of sight. For a moment, Milt Peterson, bathed strangely in blue light, looked not like a developer, but a figure from mythology. He didn't hurry to dismount. He lingered there, entranced.

* * *

We all are aestheticians, not that it much matters.

Our visual decisions are mostly pretty measly. We rearrange the fridge magnets, tastefully or crassly, or splurge on a necktie, or try to influence how we will look today by picking this handbag or that. But these moves are unimportant. I find this reassuring. What we show the world of our visual ambitions change it very slightly, and not for long.

Peterson's aesthetic matters more than most.

Already it has altered the neighborhood of the capital, the view from Alexandria and the mood of the Potomac. It means to tweak, with fun, the old, white marble staidness of the Washington vacation. His National Harbor, the city in the suburbs by the Woodrow Wilson Bridge that he'll start opening in the summer, was shaped by it.

Milton V. Peterson, 72, founder and chairman of Peterson Companies in Fairfax, is not one of your stay-in-the-office developers. Out on his construction site, he joshes with the hard hats, calling them by name and expecting they'll josh back, and drives his Porsche off-road over fallen trees.

"I love bulldozers," he says.

A happy Viking sort of guy, blue-eyed, white-haired, glad and big, he overthrows the notion that Scandinavians are dour. His four grandparents were Swedish, but he's the opposite of dour. Aestheticians are thought to be delicate, but Peterson, the son of a football player, the father of football players and once a football player himself, isn't delicate, either. He keeps forging on, driving his aesthetic like an earth-moving machine.

What Peterson is aiming for can be seen in the context of art's history. First, draw a mental line from the timelessness of nature (rough stones and thick trees) high up at the top, to the newness of the suburbs (cars and roady sprawl), way down at the bottom. Then, imagine a continuum that runs all the way from Disneyland to the solemn precincts of monumental Washington, the marble, the memorials, the white temples in green parks, and look in the middle.

Peterson's aesthetic can be located precisely where those cross hairs meet. It's new-old. It's halfway between the Mall and the Mouse.

Peterson is the man who took away "The Awakening."

Even if you find it difficult to forgive him, you might like him. It's hard not to. He's so energetically involved in whatever is going on. And he wasn't stealing. He was obeying his aesthetic.

J. Seward Johnson Jr.'s yowling giant had been furiously erupting out of Washington's Hains Point for 27 years. Not anymore. If you went there now, you'd find he had finally clambered out of his tomb and rushed off. As soon as Peterson learned the sculpture was for sale, he went and bought it -- $725,000, no problem -- not wholly for himself, but for the project.

Sometimes it is hard to tell the two apart.

National Harbor's scale is that of a city's. Its cost is in the billions. Already, you can't miss it. It's as if a small Dubai had suddenly appeared in sight of the Capitol dome.

Part family resort, part dwelling place for the prosperous, part conventioneer's destination -- you should hear Peterson describe it. There'll be vendors on the boulevard, music in the air, performances on the stages, wonders all around. Oz on the Potomac. Except we're not in Oz, or even on the Gulf. We're in Prince George's County.

Peterson's a salesman. When he has a point to hammer home, he takes you by the arm, or pats you on the shoulder, as salesmen are known to do. Beneath his glass-walled office, hard hats scurry busily, heavy machinery coughs, stone dust dulls the air. But Peterson looks past all this -- to the river, to the future, to the crowds he knows will come -- scanning the horizon like the captain on the bridge.

The weather looks uncertain. There may be hard times coming. But Peterson sails on.

The city he envisions will contain -- will self-contain -- thousands of new homes, five brand-new hotels, two museums (one designed by C¿sar Pelli), scores of shops and restaurants, 10,000 parking spaces, the largest convention center on the East Coast, a forest of white birches, two yacht-welcoming marinas and a riverside for strolling where the walks are white and sparkling because he's already covered them with seashells, 400 tons of them.

Peterson "can't have a cathedral," though he'd like one. Instead, he envisions an 18-story skyscraper atop his highest hill.

Beneath him, raging on, half-buried once again, "The Awakening" howls silently on a boulder-bordered beach.

That titan is titanic. And scary in the way amusement parks are scary. He also has about him a hoariness of olden days, hinting at binding spells and subterranean forces. Plus he was a great investment. "He's already paid for himself three times over," Peterson says.

"The Awakening," in short, fits into the core of Peterson's aesthetic like a key in a lock.

Much like yours or mine, Peterson's aesthetic is compounded of a lot of things -- beneficent self-interest, personal opinions, a sense of visual correctness, memories from childhood, availability of cash.

His father had a Main Street art shop in Worcester, Mass. "He had a love for the best art," the builder says, "without the resources to buy it. We'd go to estate sales together, yard sales really. He always chose the best.

"I'd do the framing and the matting. When I got old enough, I'd deliver the pictures and do the hanging."

That planted the art seed. The tree seed was planted later. When still a young developer, Peterson bought a big mechanical tree spade so that he could move, and save, big trees everybody else thought he should cut down.

"Talk about a good investment," Peterson says. "Most things depreciate. Trees get better and better."

He found the London plane trees that line his project's boulevard at Moon Nurseries. At 35 feet tall, they were thought too large to sell, but Peterson brought them down to banks of the Potomac. Also thought too big to sell were the great stones he acquired "from my buddy Albert Raitt up in Maine.

"Now, there's an aesthetician," Peterson declares.

Rough, Raitt-selected stones discovered in nature and left just as he found them (quarried stone, he says, "looks like concrete") stand all over the property. Some are grouped in circles. Some stand alone like sentinels. Some are topped by lintels, as are the stones at Stonehenge.

Single stones he's purchased ("Look at the size of that puppy") weigh 20,000 pounds.

Raitt was not the only specialist Peterson turned to. While honing his aesthetic, he got other expert help.

"I found a great classicist," he says. "And a great entertainment guy. And I banged them together."

The project's formal geometries, civic in character, came from Peterson's classicist, Stuart O. Dawson, a man who'd learned their virtues at the American Academy in Rome, at Harvard University, and at Sasaki Associates, where he has been designing for more than 50 years. The flash, the glitz and the retractable 42-foot video screen came from somewhere else.

Bob Weis, the "entertainment guy," was an imagineer at the Walt Disney Co. before Peterson hired him, and since 2007 (this time as executive vice president) has worked for Disney once again.

"I told Stu," Peterson says, "if I relied on you alone, I might go too far toward the classical. And I told Bob, if I give all the work to you, it might be Disneyfied but not dignified. So let me be the catalyst. In short, I had a ball."

The American Way, the street that is National Harbor's spine, obeys -- as does the Mall -- the traditional antique strictness of a formal beaux-arts axis. The Mall's runs from the dome of the Capitol, past the obelisk, to the Lincoln Memorial. National Harbor's axis runs straight down the hill, pointing directly at "The Awakening," and the broad Potomac, until, at last, it reaches the tall spire of the George Washington Masonic Memorial on the far Virginia shore.

For this, credit Stu Dawson, who also helped devise the planting of the boulevard (a boulevard suggesting Barcelona's Las Ramblas), and the stairs down to the river (stairs that call to mind the Spanish Steps in Rome).

"I've known Milt Peterson for 35 years," Dawson says, "and I love the guy. I also love the way enthusiasm grabs him. He flips over every rock. But a project like National Harbor can't be built on distractions. It needs stability. So I did my best to give it a timeless, stable feeling. Bob Weis, you may imagine, had some other things in mind."

"I'm an entertainment designer," Weis says. "I'd hate to see myself as a circus designer, though if I do err, it's on the side of the family and tourism and fun.

"We can't duplicate Washington. But we can complement it. Tourists who arrive there represent America as a whole. The basic theme of their family vacation is enrichment, grounded in a sense of history and culture. They understand, of course, that this is a historic site. But they're also looking for fun.

"Stu's Ramblas descended to an incredibly elegant plaza. Imagine sitting there on a fine summer day, with a drink in your hand, on the edge of the water. You know what else you'll want? You'll want entertainment. The landscape architect said we need that elegance. I said we needed a stage -- for concerts, for performances. And a stage is what we got."

"Neither Bob nor I wanted 'The Awakening,' " Dawson says. "We tried to talk him out of it. I wanted to keep the beach open and simple, not cluttered with statuary, but available for sand castles or volleyball. Less is more. Bob also tried to keep it as a flexible multipurpose space.

"But you know Milt. We didn't stand a chance. His enthusiasm was impossible to smother."