River Place in Rosslyn Expires in 2052

About 1,700 Rosslyn homes sit on a 99-year ground lease. Diplomats once trained in its garage, and a ballpark almost replaced it.

Show Notes

About 1,700 homes in Rosslyn have an expiration date. In 2052, the land under them goes back to the landlord, and the buildings go with it.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2026/06/15/river-place-rosslyn-arlington-towers/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

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River Place in Rosslyn Expires in 2052
Ghosts of DC

There are about seventeen hundred homes in Rosslyn with an expiration date.

People buy them. They live in them. They sell them.

But in twenty fifty-two, the land under them goes back to the landlord. And the buildings go with it.

These four brick buildings started life as one of the first high-rise apartment complexes in Northern Virginia. The State Department once trained its diplomats in the garage.

A ballpark almost replaced them.

And the clock started ticking in nineteen fifty-three.

So how do you end up owning a home on borrowed time? And what happens when the time runs out?

Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice.

I've spent a lot of years digging into this area's forgotten corners, and few of them have a stranger ending waiting than this one.

This one draws on eighteen sources, from a nineteen fifty-four architect's drawing to today's mortgage rules. They're listed on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

The place is called River Place. Four brick buildings on a triangle of land between Route Fifty and Wilson Boulevard, in Rosslyn.

And the strange part isn't the buildings. It's the ground.

In nineteen fifty-three, a ninety-nine-year ground lease was signed on the land. Ninety-nine years from nineteen fifty-three.

Twenty fifty-two.

So when you buy at River Place, you're buying into a co-op. Not the dirt.

In nineteen eighty-two, the Washington Post asked the man whose firm owned that dirt how it would end. His name was Stanley Westreich. When the lease is up, he said, they get the property back. The building too.

All they are buying is a right to live in the building until then.

That's why a unit here can sell for under two hundred thousand dollars, in a county where the average home topped eight hundred thousand in twenty twenty-two.

Imagine that. A bargain, with an expiration date.

Is that normal? In England, it is. About one home in five there sits on a lease, most of them flats.

In America, it's unusual. You find it in a few corners of New York. And in Hawaii, where seventy-two private landowners once held nearly half the state, and leased it instead of selling, until a nineteen sixty-seven state law forced sales.

The Supreme Court upheld that law in nineteen eighty-four.

But how does a whole apartment complex end up on rented ground?

For that, you have to go back to a Rosslyn that looked nothing like it does now.

In the early nineteen fifties, Rosslyn wasn't glass office towers. It was industrial.

Lumber yards. Concrete plants. Coal yards. Auto repair shops, pawn shops, and a brewery.

And on that riverfront went up something new. Arlington Towers. Four buildings, more than sixteen hundred apartments, built with federally insured mortgages.

The first tenants moved in on November first, nineteen fifty-four.

The Post later called it one of the first high-rise apartment complexes in Northern Virginia.

It had been years in the making. The land was put together in nineteen forty-nine, and the ground lease under it was signed in nineteen fifty-three.

Which means the countdown started before anybody even moved in.

And then the place got an unlikely tenant. Check this out.

In the late nineteen fifties, the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, the school that trains American diplomats, held classes at Arlington Towers. In the garage.

One diplomat who started there in April of nineteen fifty-nine remembered a converted basement garage at Arlington Towers.

Stephen Low, who would later run the whole institute, started his own training there in nineteen fifty-six. Here's how he remembered it.

My training at F S I started off in an apartment building, then moved to the garage of Arlington Towers. Then for twenty-five years we were in the Rosslyn high rise where we spent a significant amount of time waiting for elevators.

He called those later quarters simply unsatisfactory. The institute didn't get its own campus until nineteen ninety-three.

So for a while there, America's diplomats learned their trade under a Rosslyn apartment building.

And upstairs, the clock kept ticking.

By nineteen eighty-one, Arlington Towers was getting old.

And somebody saw an opportunity.

In June of nineteen eighty-one, a Washington development company, led by two brothers, Gary and Scott Nordheimer, announced it would buy the complex.

By early nineteen eighty-two, they were turning it into a co-op. They called it River Place.

Why a co-op? A condo needed the landowner's consent. And the landowner, Westreich's firm, would only give it for a big increase in the ground rent.

A co-op didn't need anybody's blessing.

Then came the ads. Full-page ads, with a tide of young men and women marching across Memorial Bridge, carrying their belongings. And the line across the top.

Washington's most successful single men will be moving out of town.

Efficiencies started at under thirty thousand dollars.

But as the Post pointed out, there was one thing the ads didn't mention.

The land.

The renters already living there noticed. Some, including elderly residents, couldn't afford to buy. One building was told to buy or move out by the end of February.

Wallace Witkowski lived on the eleventh floor, in a one-bedroom with a view of the Potomac. His rent was four hundred twenty-five dollars a month.

Owning it would cost thirteen hundred.

In January of nineteen eighty-two, the Arlington County Board passed a resolution citing grave concerns about how the residents were being treated.

And the developer? Gary Nordheimer was philosophical about that lease. Here's how the Post quoted him.

First, none of us are going to be here in seventy-two years.

The real number was closer to seventy.

River Place got through the conversion. About twenty years later, it almost didn't get through baseball.

In two thousand three, Northern Virginia was fighting Washington and Portland for the Montreal Expos. That spring, Virginia's stadium authority named five possible sites for a ballpark.

One of them was River Place.

It was by far the most expensive option, at an estimated six hundred nine and a half million dollars.

A developer working on the site approached the owners with a letter of intent. Sixty-three to sixty-four million dollars.

Per building.

What would you do?

In the end, nobody had to decide. In February, the site was reported dropped for cost. By April, it was back on the list. In May, the authority said it would chase River Place only if Arlington made it the first choice.

It never came to that. The Expos became the Nationals, and in two thousand eight they opened Nationals Park in Southeast.

River Place stayed put. And its clock kept running.

Today there are about twenty-six years left on that lease, and lenders have noticed.

One real estate agent said in twenty twenty-two that lenders typically want twenty-five to forty percent down, at rates about a point higher than normal.

A thirty-year mortgage now runs past the lease.

And Fannie Mae won't buy a mortgage unless the lease outlasts the loan by at least five years.

For a loan Fannie will buy, that means paid off by twenty forty-seven.

Still, people buy in. James Marandi moved in as a student in nineteen eighty-two, the year of those ads, and bought his first unit two years later. In twenty twenty-two, as president of the owners association, he put it this way.

We are not necessarily nervous yet. Thirty years is a long way away. But we do realize that the lease expires and something has to be done.

So who's on the other side of that lease? The land belongs to Monday Properties, founded by Anthony Westreich.

Stanley Westreich's son.

Stanley moved to Rosslyn in nineteen fifty-nine, when his family owned an interest in what his son called Rosslyn's only federal housing project. Almost certainly, Arlington Towers.

He went on to build ten buildings in Rosslyn.

And the man who said, in nineteen eighty-two, that they get the property back? It's his son's company holding the land.

So what happens in twenty fifty-two? Nobody knows yet.

Monday could negotiate and extend the lease. It could buy out the co-op owners. Or it could sell the land to another developer.

Who would decide whether River Place stands, or falls.

Around Rosslyn, people call it the jewel of Rosslyn. An oasis of affordability.

It's been standing for seven decades.

Whether it makes it to a full century is a question only twenty fifty-two can answer.

So that's River Place, and its clock. Thanks for coming along on this one.

The photos, that nineteen eighty-two ad, and the rest of the story are at Ghosts of D C dot org.

Ghosts of DC digs up the lost and untold stories of Washington and the whole area.

This has been Ghosts of DC.