Here is one of the strangest facts in Northern Virginia real estate. If you own a home at River Place in Rosslyn, you do not own the ground it sits on. And in 2052, the lease on that ground runs out.
The four brick buildings on a triangle of land between Route 50 and Wilson Boulevard, about 1,720 units, sit on land their owners only lease. When the lease ends, the landowner gets the land back, and the buildings with it.
That is why units here can sell for under $200,000 in a county where the average home topped $800,000 in 2022. It’s a deal, but one with an expiration date.
The 1953 lease that started the countdown
In 1953, a 99-year ground lease was signed on the roughly 13 acres under the complex. Ninety-nine years from 1953 lands you in 2052.
Is that normal? In England, yes. About one home in five there is a leasehold, most of them flats. In the United States, it is unusual. You find it in pockets like New York’s Battery Park City and Roosevelt Island, and in Hawaii, where 72 private landowners once held nearly half the state and long leased rather than sold, until a 1967 state law forced sales. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in 1984.
When the lease is up, “we get the property back,” including the building, Stanley Westreich told the Washington Post in 1982. He was a partner in Arland Towers Co., which owned the leased land. “All they are buying is a right to live in the building until then.”
Today the land belongs to Monday Properties, a longtime Rosslyn landlord founded by Anthony Westreich, Stanley’s son.
The Westreichs go back a long way here. Stanley moved to Rosslyn in 1959, when the family owned an interest in “Rosslyn’s only federal housing project.” That was almost certainly Arlington Towers. He went on to build much of modern Rosslyn: ten buildings through his Westfield Realty.
His son’s firm grew into Rosslyn’s largest office owner, buying back the family’s former office portfolio for $1.23 billion in 2007. Then the market turned. After defaulting on its loans, Monday lost its seven-building Rosslyn office portfolio to Beacon Capital Partners in December 2024. The ground under River Place is a separate holding.
When River Place was Arlington Towers
River Place was not always River Place. It began as Arlington Towers, a four-building, federally insured rental complex with more than 1,600 apartments. The Post later called it one of the first high-rise apartment complexes in Northern Virginia.
It took years to get built. According to a 1957 federal court opinion over the construction contract, the land was assembled in 1949, applications for FHA-insured mortgages were filed in 1951, and the building contract was signed in December 1953.
The first tenants moved into Fourth Arlington Towers on November 1, 1954. The other buildings filled in over 1955.
A 1954 presentation drawing by architects G.V. Stone and Donald H. Drayer, now at the Library of Congress, shows the plan from above: the apartment houses, plus a shopping center and a service station.
Rosslyn then was nothing like the glass-and-steel canyon of today. It was industrial, with “lumber yards, cement, asphalt, and concrete mixing plants, coal yards,” auto repair shops, pawn shops and a brewery. Arlington Towers rose above all of it.
The office towers came later. Rosslyn’s high-rise boom arrived in the 1960s, and with it supper clubs like Tom Sarris’ Orleans House, which opened in 1964.
The diplomats trained in the garage
Now for the part almost nobody knows.
In the late 1950s, the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, the school that trains American diplomats, held classes at Arlington Towers. Brandon Grove, who started there in April 1959, remembered FSI in “a converted basement garage at Arlington Towers, an apartment complex in Rosslyn, Virginia.”
Stephen Low, who later ran the FSI from 1982 to 1987, began his own training there in 1956.
My training at FSI started off in an apartment building, then moved to the “garage” of Arlington Towers. Then for 25 years we were in the Rosslyn high rise where we spent a significant amount of time waiting for elevators.
So for a few years, new American diplomats learned their trade in a converted garage under a Rosslyn apartment complex. Low called FSI’s later Rosslyn quarters “simply unsatisfactory.” The institute did not get its own campus, at Arlington Hall, until October 1993.
The 1981 conversion fight
In June 1981, a Washington development company, its partners led by brothers Gary and Scott Nordheimer, announced it would buy the aging complex, the Post reported. By early 1982, their firm, Monument Associates, was converting it into a cooperative called River Place.
They chose a co-op over a condominium for a specific reason, Gary Nordheimer told the Post. A condo conversion needed the consent of the landowner, Arland Towers Co., which would only agree in exchange for a large increase in the ground rent. A co-op needed no such consent.
The sales pitch leaned hard into glamour. Full-page ads showed a tide of young men and women smiling and marching across Memorial Bridge with their belongings, under the line “Washington’s most successful single men will be moving out of town.” Other versions said women. Efficiencies started at $29,550 and one-bedrooms at $46,650.
What the ads did not say, the Post noted, was that River Place sat on leased land.
Tenants noticed. Some, including elderly residents, could not afford to buy, and one building was told to buy or move out by Feb. 28. Wallace Witkowski, vice chairman of the residents’ association, said his 11th-floor one-bedroom with a view of the Potomac rented for $425 a month but would cost $1,300 a month to own.
On Jan. 5, 1982, the Arlington County Board passed a resolution citing “grave concerns” over how the residents of Arlington Towers were being treated.
Gary Nordheimer was philosophical about the deadline. “First, none of us are going to be here in 72 years,” he reasoned. By the lease’s own math, it was about 70.
The ballpark that almost replaced it
River Place came close to disappearing once already, and not in 2052.
In 2003, Northern Virginia was competing with Washington and Portland for the Montreal Expos, the team that became the Nationals. That spring, the Virginia Baseball Stadium Authority named five possible stadium sites. One was River Place.
It was by far the most expensive. The authority put the Rosslyn site at an estimated $609.5 million. A developer working on the site, Lincoln, approached River Place’s owners with a letter of intent offering $63 million to $64 million per building, roughly $250 million for all four.
The site’s fate went back and forth. In February, it was reported abandoned for cost reasons. By April it was back on the authority’s list, and in May the authority said it would pursue River Place only if Arlington officials named it their first choice.
It never came to that. The Expos moved to Washington as the Nationals in 2005 and opened Nationals Park in Southeast in 2008. River Place, and its residents, stayed put.
What happens now
Nordheimer was right about himself, but the people buying into River Place today are buying into his countdown.
With about 26 years left on the lease, lenders have grown cautious. One real estate agent said in 2022 that lenders typically want 25 to 40 percent down and charge rates about a point above normal, since a 30-year mortgage would now run past the lease. Fannie Mae, for one, will not buy a mortgage unless the lease outlasts the loan by at least five years.
Not everyone is rattled. James Marandi moved into River Place as a student in 1982, the year of those ads, and bought his first unit two years later. In 2022, as president of the owners association, he said the insides “have been upgraded, updated, and fully maintained.”
Still, he admitted the question hangs over the place. “We are not necessarily nervous yet. Thirty years is a long way away,” he said. “But we do realize that the lease expires and something has to be done.”
So what happens in 2052? There are a few options. Monday Properties could negotiate and extend the lease, or it could buy out the co-op’s interests. It could also sell the 13 acres to another developer, who would decide whether River Place stands or falls.
That is the paradox of River Place. The same clock that keeps the units among the cheapest in Arlington makes them hard to finance. Around Rosslyn, people call it the “jewel of Rosslyn” and an “oasis of affordability.” It sits on borrowed time.
The buildings have stood in Rosslyn for seven decades. Whether they reach a full century is a question only 2052 will answer. If you like this corner of Arlington, the same vanished Rosslyn turns up in our stories on Dead Man’s Hollow and the grand Key Bridge entryway that was never built.
We use AI to help research, write and edit stories across our sites. Here’s how we use AI.Suggest a correction
