352 Glyndon St. NE. (Reminder: the new house and its lot are private property).
Final Days for the Old House, April 2024
Cleared: the Old House, mid-May 2024….
…And Then the Trees, Late May
Construction Begins, July 2024
New House Is Well-Along, September 2024
The Old & New Houses, Viewed on the Approach
Thank you for this history.
In the 1937 aerial photo, do you happen to know anything about the circle of trees across from the house? Did the park exist at that time?
Thanks for reading. What we now know as Glyndon Park dates to 1948, but a smaller park was envisioned at the site more than 50 years before. The website for Historic Vienna Inc. shows a late 19th-century brochure for the Ayr Hill Subdivision, platted in 1891. The brochure shows the plat, which includes a circular park and lots oriented around the circle: https://historicviennainc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Ayr-Hill-Subdivision-Map-RGB-scaled.jpg. Anyway, to answer your first question, it looks to me like the trees on the 1937 aerial image follow the outer edge of the park proposed on the plat. The curve on Glyndon Street in the 1937 image is the one part of the circular road that was built.
More on the origins of the park: In 1934, the Town of Vienna acquired the land that now is Glyndon Park in a transaction with Katrina Hine Echols, the daughter of Vienna’s first mayor. Katrina Hine Echols and the Town partitioned a dozen parcels totaling some 125 acres that had belonged to Katrina’s late brother, Charles Delano Hine. As part of the partition, the Town received 17 and 2/3 acres that included today’s park (O11:514).
At some point after that, Vienna started to use the land as the Town dump. In 1948, however, 14 community organizations banded together to form the Vienna Recreation Association (VRA) and establish a park on 11 acres between Glyndon Street and Beulah Road leased from the Town. (The organizations were the American Legion, Antioch Christian Church, Ayr Hill Garden Club, Businessman’s Association, Episcopal Church, Ladies Auxillary of the Volunteer Fire Department, Library Association, Lions Club, Methodist Church, Order of Fraternal Americans, Parent-Teacher Association, Presbyterian Church, Seventh Day Adventists, and the Volunteer Fire Department) (Falls Church Echo, 7 April 1950, p2; Fairfax Falls Church Sun Echo, 10 March 1960, p1). In October, VRA dedicated what was apparently first known as “the Vienna Community Park” (Fairfax Standard, 5 November 1948, p1). The park was popular from the get-go. In 1951, Better Homes and Garden credited the park as among the reasons the magazine awarded Vienna 3rd place in its category in a national “More Beautiful America” competition. As the Washington Post put it, “Vienna’s prizewinning projects included creating a park from a rubbish dump….” (Washington Post, 13 March 1951, pB2).