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Belle View Boulevard

The Belle View Shopping Center opened around 1949 on the low ground along the George Washington Memorial Parkway south of the Alexandria city line. The center’s site lies within the historic boundaries of River Farm, one of the five working farms that made up George Washington Person George Washington b. 1732 · d. 1799 Planter, military commander, and first President of the United States. Master of Mount Vernon from 1761 until his death in 1799, and a regular presence in Alexandria, which he … ’s Mount Vernon plantation in the eighteenth century ^[1] Source 1 Powell, History of Old Alexandria, 1928 Book . Washington acquired the River Farm tract in 1760 and worked it with enslaved laborers until his death.

The land passed through successor owners after 1799 and was farmed in various forms through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. In the 1930s and 1940s, as the George Washington Memorial Parkway was extended southward, portions of the old Washington farms were cleared for federal parkland, for a sewage treatment plant, and for the suburban developments that followed ^[2] Source 2 Alexandria Library Special Collections Manuscript . The Belle View Shopping Center and the adjacent Belle View Apartments date from this postwar wave of development.

The American Horticultural Society acquired the surviving main residence of River Farm in 1973 and maintains a 27-acre portion of the tract as its national headquarters and public garden. The shopping center itself is ordinary mid-century commercial architecture — a Safeway anchor, a row of smaller storefronts, parking facing the parkway — but its siting atop Washington’s River Farm is, to the platform’s editorial eye, one of the most striking juxtapositions of American history and twentieth-century commerce in the metropolitan region ^[3] Source 3 LOC Prints & Photographs Photograph .