It is a little after 2:15 p.m. on Friday, March 2, 1973, and the top floors of a 26-story apartment building under construction at Bailey’s Crossroads are about to fall floor by floor. Fifty-five men are working in the tower. Fourteen men on the site will not go home.
The building is the under-construction Skyline Plaza, the next apartment tower rising at the Skyline Center over Route 7 in Fairfax County. It is easy to confuse with the separate Skyline Towers around the corner, which stood then and still stand today. This is the tower still climbing skyward, still curing concrete on its top floors, when the whole crown pancakes down through itself in about twenty seconds and opens a 60-foot-wide gap that runs from the roof to the basement.
Before the tower: a private airport at Bailey’s Crossroads
The ground under Skyline Center had been the Washington-Virginia Airport. According to Fairfax County’s circuit court historic records, John D. Benn bought the field in 1945 and, in May 1947, won a county rezoning to enlarge it. Across Route 7, the Sunset Drive-In began showing movies in August 1949, and the two businesses found themselves competing for the same airspace.
The airport closed in 1970, after Benn’s death, and his family partnered with developers on the site.
What Charles E. Smith was building
The developer was Charles E. Smith Co., the same firm that had converted an underused stretch of Arlington into Crystal City. Skyline Center was planned on the same scale: a $200 million complex that, according to the federal investigators, was to hold eight apartment buildings, six office buildings, a hotel and a shopping center. Two apartment towers were already finished by early 1973.
Skyline Plaza, designated Building A-4 in the federal report, was a 26-story condominium tower scheduled to open in August 1973. According to the sales firm, it had sold out in the summer of 1972, ten days after sales opened, to more than 400 buyers, some of whom had already sold their homes to move in. Miller & Long was pouring the concrete.
How it failed
Three days after the collapse, on March 5, 1973, OSHA asked the Center for Building Technology at the National Bureau of Standards for technical help with its investigation. Fairfax County retained its own consulting engineer, Professor Ingvar Schousboe of the University of Illinois. Both investigations pointed at the same failure. NBS ran a three-dimensional finite-element analysis on the 22nd and 23rd floors and published its findings as NBS BSS 94.
The specified design strength for the concrete was 3,000 psi. NBS estimated that on the day of the collapse, the 23rd-floor slab, just four days old, stood at about 1,200 psi. In plain terms: crews had stripped the wooden shoring out from under freshly poured concrete on the 22nd and 23rd levels before that concrete was strong enough to carry itself. At the same time, crews above were finishing a fresh pour on the 24th floor, adding its weight to the floors below.
The 23rd floor punched through around its columns. The roof came down onto the 22nd, and the 22nd onto the 21st, and so on. The tower crane went down with the building. Eyewitnesses told the Post it dropped floor by floor, but federal investigators, who found its supports on the 14th and 16th floors, saw no sign that the crane started the collapse. Investigators later found that the engineer’s drawings called for two full stories of shoring plus one story of reshoring while a slab cured. That schedule had not been followed on 22 and 23.
There was time to see it coming. According to the federal report, most eyewitnesses described the 23rd and 24th floors sagging, by six inches to two feet, over 15 or 20 minutes before they gave way.
For about 20 seconds, the Post reported, the downward movement accelerated until it reached the bottom, throwing off a cloud of fine concrete dust that spread over several blocks. A Fairfax County police officer who saw it radioed the county’s Emergency Operations Center, and units from Fairfax County, Arlington County and Alexandria responded.
Fifty-five men were on the tower
The next morning’s front page in the Washington Post led with “5 Dead, 12 Missing in Collapse of High-Rise,” a count that would climb through the weekend. Rescuers from Fairfax, Arlington, and Alexandria worked the pile through the night. Fairfax fire Lt. Harry Diezel had to worry about propane leaking from tanks buried in the collapsed parking garage. The final toll was 14 workers killed, ten in the tower and four in the garage, and 34 injured.
The names of the survivors began appearing before the numbers of the dead. Larry Rivers was stripping planking from concrete forms in the basement when he heard “a rumbling sound like Niagara Falls.” He told the Post, “I ran for my life. I looked back and saw four of my buddies being crushed by the concrete. It was sickening.”
Michael Hill, 31, was on the 23rd floor when he looked up and saw the ceiling cracking. He ran for the stairs, and when the building began coming in from the center at the fourth floor, he jumped out a window and broke both arms.
Martin Lowton, 56, of Alexandria, rode the fall out huddled under a fourth-floor staircase and dug himself out of knee-deep rubble. Lowton told the Post he had also been on the construction crew at a Crystal City building that had collapsed several years earlier.
The warning inside the story
Robert Taylor, 22, ran the hoist, the outside elevator that carried men up and down the tower. He told the Post that about two minutes before the collapse, a supervisor told him: “Stop! Stop! You’ve got to take me up! It’s an emergency!” Taylor said he could see nothing wrong. It was, in his words, “a clear, peaceful March day.” The supervisor got off at the 14th floor.
It took Taylor what he called a very long minute to get the cage back down to the ground. “I heard the thing crack at the top,” he said. “Everybody kept telling me, ‘GET OUT! The building’s going down!'” Looking back, he watched “the struts holding up the top two floors begin to shake.”
Others saw it too. Alfred Cole, 33, said that when the trouble began on the top floor, a supervisor sent him down for a jack to prop up the sagging concrete. He was on his way when the concrete around him began to crack. With about 25 other men he found the stairs blocked by fallen concrete at the eighth floor, and he jumped onto a pile of fresh dirt.
The reckoning that wasn’t
On April 27, 1973, a Fairfax County grand jury indicted Roger Gilbert Arnold, 30, the senior Miller & Long official on the job, for involuntary manslaughter in three of the deaths: Danny Ray White, Clemons Riley Holcomb, and Daniel R. Wilhite, whose bodies were the first recovered from the rubble. The Post called him a Miller & Long vice president at the indictment and a job superintendent at trial.
A Fairfax judge ruled he could not get a fair trial at home after so much publicity, so the case was moved 300 miles southwest to Dickenson County, in the coal town of Clintwood.
In September 1973, Sidney Jewel, head of quality control at the concrete supplier, Sterling Concrete Co., testified that he often asked Arnold what the big hurry was. “Roger’s reply would be that he was trying to make a name for himself,” Jewel said, adding that Arnold had asked for more water in the mix so it could be poured and spread quicker.
On September 25, 1973, the jury of 11 men and one woman told Judge Glyn R. Phillips it was hopelessly deadlocked, nine for acquittal and three for conviction. The judge then struck the prosecution’s evidence and acquitted Arnold, citing experts who disagreed on the cause. One juror said all twelve agreed the shoring had come out too early. “The main question we wanted to resolve was who gave the order to remove those shores,” he told the Post, “and none of the witnesses convinced us that Roger Arnold did it.”
The other cases ended small. In July 1973, a Fairfax judge fined Miller & Long $300 for failing to use adequate shoring, and ruled in a separate case that Charles E. Smith Co., the owner, could not be held criminally responsible for the actions of its subcontractor.
At that trial, a county inspector testified that under a little-used county law, contractors at the site had been allowed to decide for themselves when shoring could come out.
In November, Miller & Long agreed to pay $13,000 to settle federal safety citations, without admitting the violations. OSHA had cited the company for “willfully” removing shoring without testing the concrete.
Workers had few ways to sue. A federal judge dismissed a half-million-dollar suit against four firms on the job, ruling that Virginia’s workmen’s compensation law protected them. In January 1975, an Alexandria jury did award $500,000 to an injured worker in a suit against the building’s architect and engineer, and a judge later cut the award in half.
Writing in Arlington Magazine on the 50th anniversary of the collapse, Kim O’Connell reported that “after several protracted legal battles, most families of those injured and killed received nominal compensation or none at all.”
Fourteen men died. No one went to prison. The concrete company paid a $300 county fine and a $13,000 federal settlement.
What stands there now
In July 1974, the Post reported that approval had been given to rebuild the tower. The rebuilt tower stands today at 3701 South George Mason Drive, occupied. The Skyline Plaza condominium association still uses the name.
The rest of Skyline Center still fills the horizon over Route 7. Skyline Towers, the two 26-story apartment buildings across the property, sold to Los Angeles-based CIM Group in December 2019.
It was part of the same wave of Fairfax County high-rise condo development that produced the Rotonda in McLean.
Miller & Long is still in business, based in Bethesda, still pouring concrete on high-rises across the region. The company marked its 75th anniversary in 2022.
The collapse became a teaching case. The American Concrete Institute’s guide to formwork cites it as a “tragic example of too-early shore removal,” according to a 2013 study in an American Society of Civil Engineers journal, and Fairfax County went on to become one of the first jurisdictions to adopt a formal program for inspecting critical structures.
That is a bleak kind of legacy. But for the 14 men killed on what Robert Taylor called a clear, peaceful March day, it is what remains.
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