Queen City: The lost Black community swallowed up by The Pentagon

4 hours ago By Barbara Noe Kennedy,  Barbara Noe Kennedy The stout, jug-like building rises 35ft above the greenery of Arlington, Virginia’s Metropolitan Park, a green, path-laced oasis set amid Amazon’s new HQ2 headquarters. Constructed from 5,000-odd red bricks, the structure feels both industrial and earthy, and stepping inside the small space reveals hundreds of glistening, glazed ceramic bulbs cascading from above in waves of blue, green and brown. This is Queen City, an art installation paying homage to the 903 African American residents of the eponymous all-Black community, as well as the surrounding East Arlington neighbourhood, who were forcibly removed from their homes in the early 1940s to make way for the construction of The Pentagon. “What they did to us was an atrocity,” said 93-year-old Dr William Vollin, who remembers his childhood in Queen City before he and his family were kicked out. “There was an alleyway with small houses on each side. We had a Black fire department, churches, barbershops, all kinds of businesses,” he said, recalling how he and his friends used to play and walk to school together. And while there was no running water or electricity common in white neighbourhoods at the time, Queen...