Parkfairfax is a 132-acre garden-apartment community along the Glebe Road / Quaker Lane / King Street corridor straddling the Alexandria–Arlington line. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company bought the parcel and built the development between 1941 and 1943 under Federal Housing Administration defense-housing financing, spending approximately $8.5 million on 1,684 garden-apartment units to accommodate the explosive growth of the federal workforce in the Pentagon-era Washington metropolitan area. Architecturally the community was designed in Colonial Revival garden-apartment vernacular — red brick, shutters, hipped roofs, low-slung two- and three-story massing arranged around shared green space — by the architectural firm Leonard Schultze & Associates of New York. ^[1] Source 1 NRHP — Parkfairfax Historic District (1999) Government record

MetLife operated the development as rental housing through the early 1970s. Condo conversion happened over 1977–1978, and Parkfairfax has since operated as the Parkfairfax Condominium Unit Owners Association — one of the largest condo associations in Northern Virginia. The community was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999 in recognition of its architectural integrity and its historic role as a representative example of large-scale wartime defense housing.

The two-future-presidents distinction

Parkfairfax’s most-cited Alexandria-history claim is its distinction as one of the few American neighborhoods to have housed two future presidents as freshman or mid-career congressmen — a fact widely covered in Washington Post feature journalism and the Parkfairfax community’s own published history materials. ^[2] Source 2 Washington Post — Parkfairfax presidents coverage Newspaper

Richard Nixon Person Richard Nixon b. 1913 · d. 1994 37th President of the United States (1969–1974). Lived in Alexandria at 3538 Gunston Road, Apt. T-2 in in two stints — 1943–44 during his Office of Price Administration work and … lived at 3538 Gunston Road, Apartment T-2 in two stints — first 1943–1944 during his Office of Price Administration work and his early U.S. Navy service, and again 1947–1951 as freshman and sophomore Congressman from California’s 12th district. The 1947 apartment rent was approximately $80 per month. Nixon left Parkfairfax for Whittier Street, NW Washington, after his election to the U.S. Senate in 1950.

Gerald Ford Person Gerald Ford b. 1913 · d. 2006 38th President of the United States (1974–1977). Twenty-three-year Alexandria resident — first in 1951–55 as freshman Congressman from Michigan, then at 514 Crown View Drive … and his wife Betty lived in Parkfairfax from 1951 through 1955 — the freshman-Congressman period of Ford’s career, before they commissioned the new house at 514 Crown View Drive in 1955 that would serve as the Ford family’s Alexandria home for the next nineteen years through Ford’s full congressional career, his vice presidency, and the first ten days of his presidency in August 1974. ^[3] Source 3 NPS — Gerald Ford in Alexandria Website

Other Alexandria-connected residents from Parkfairfax’s first several decades include figures from the federal civil-service and military officer corps generations who anchored the Pentagon-era expansion of federal Washington — a research-bound deepening target for a future pass against city directories and Parkfairfax community archival materials at Alexandria Library Special Collections. ^[4] Source 4 Alexandria Library Special Collections Manuscript