Charles E. Beatley Jr.

Charles Edmund Beatley Jr. was born February 26, 1916 in Akron, Ohio and died March 11, 2006 in Alexandria, Virginia at age ninety. He served two non-consecutive terms as mayor of Alexandria, Virginia — 1976 through 1979, and again 1985 through 1991 — a combined ten-year mayoral tenure across two of the most transformational decades for late-twentieth-century Alexandria.

Career arc

Before entering Alexandria municipal politics, Beatley spent his professional career as a commercial-airline pilot — flying for Capital Airlines and (after Capital’s 1961 merger into United Airlines) for United through his retirement. He came to Alexandria municipal politics through the city’s civic and neighborhood organizations, and was first elected to the Alexandria City Council before his ascent to the mayoralty.

Mayoral service (1976–79, 1985–91)

Beatley’s first mayoral term ran 1976 through 1979 — the bicentennial-and-after years for Alexandria, a period during which the city was working through the implications of its 1968 King Street Old Town historic-district designation and the early waves of historic-preservation-driven downtown redevelopment.

His second tenure ran 1985 through 1991 — six years that bracketed the initial planning phase for the post-BRAC redevelopment of 4800 Duke Street Place 4800 Duke Street 164-acre former U.S. Army installation on Duke Street, active 1942–1995. Headquartered the Defense Logistics Agency, the Defense Mapping Agency, and elements of the U.S. Army … (BRAC selection 1988; final military shutdown 1995; LCOR-led redevelopment 1998–2002). When the redevelopment delivered the new central library branch on the former military parcel in 2000, the City Council named the facility the Charles E. Beatley Jr. Central Library in recognition of his mayoral leadership during the plan’s gestation. ^[1] Source 1 Washington Post — Charles E. Beatley Jr. obit (2006) Newspaper

The Beatley Library at 5005 Duke Street has functioned as Alexandria’s main library facility since its 2000 opening, succeeding the older Burke Branch as the city’s central reading-and-reference branch.

Legacy

Beatley is remembered in Alexandria municipal-history materials as a steady, long-tenured civic figure whose two mayoral tenures bracketed the modern-Alexandria-as-historic-tourism city that emerged from the late-twentieth-century historic-preservation and downtown-redevelopment work. He died in Alexandria in March 2006; his Washington Post obituary anchors the corpus’s biographical record for him.