South Union Street

The Interarms warehouse complex consisted of several separate brick industrial buildings along South Union Street south of the Alexandria waterfront, most built around the turn of the twentieth century for other industrial uses. Samuel Cummings Person Samuel Cummings b. 1927 · d. 1998 American-born, Monaco-based arms dealer who founded International Armament Corporation (Interarms) in 1953 and built its principal operations in Alexandria. At its peak Interarms … acquired the buildings incrementally beginning in the late 1950s as Interarms Business Interarms founded 1953 Alexandria-based arms dealership founded by Samuel Cummings in 1953, doing business as Interarms. For much of the Cold War the firm held one of the largest private inventories of … expanded, assembling a contiguous waterfront footprint at the south end of Union Street ^[1] Source 1 Brogan & Zarca, Deadly Business, 1983 Book .

The buildings housed at various times surplus rifles (British Enfields, German Mausers, American M1 carbines), pistols, submachine guns, spare parts, and ammunition. The Brogan and Zarca biography describes inventories in the hundreds of thousands of firearms at peak and individual shipments moved from the warehouses to the adjacent pier for ocean transport. The complex attracted occasional attention from local neighbors concerned about the concentration of munitions at the waterfront and from federal regulators overseeing the import and export licenses that Interarms required ^[1] Source 1 Brogan & Zarca, Deadly Business, 1983 Book .

Because this parent place covers several separate buildings at different addresses along South Union Street, sub-place entries for individual warehouses may be added to the data model later; for now the complex is represented as a single record with address-level detail deferred. A 1997 criminal case involving Cummings’s daughter, Susan Cummings, and the accidental-shooting prosecution that followed brought renewed media attention to the family name during the final years of the Alexandria operation, though it was unconnected to the waterfront business ^[2] Source 2 Alexandria Library Special Collections Manuscript .

Interarms vacated the warehouses in stages in the late 1990s. Most of the buildings have since been converted to residential and commercial uses as part of the broader Strand Street Place Strand Street The Potomac waterfront from the Torpedo Factory south to Jones Point, subject to a decades-long redevelopment project that has converted former industrial and shipping frontage to … redevelopment.