Someone I know just bought a new townhouse nearly 40 miles outside of Washington, D.C.
From the looks of it, it’s a lovely house in an excellent neighborhood. All sorts of stuff within walking distance and freeway access less than a mile away. By all indication, a pretty good deal for $600,000.
Of course, I knew someone else who bought a brand-new house with yard roughly 15 miles outside D.C., for less than $25,000.
What a difference 60 years makes.
I haven’t lived in Northern Virginia since 1982, and the first time I had to pay rent on an apartment was 1975. That’s a year that lives forever in my memory because even though I was 25 years old, it was the first year I was really an adult.
It was February 1975 when my first wife and I put down a security deposit and the first month’s rent on a one-bedroom unit in the new Stuart Woods Apartments in Herndon. One bedroom, one bath, ’70s style shag carpeting and something pretty rare in apartments — a washing machine and a dryer.
It was a pretty good price — $230 a month — at least in part because Herndon was considered a long commute in those days. My wife worked in Langley and I worked in Merrifield the first part of the year and Arlington the second.
We actually weren’t married when we moved in. Our wedding was in April, and we actually had our reception in the community room at our apartment complex.
What didn’t we have?
Well, we didn’t have a microwave oven. In fact, my first microwave was about 14 years off. We didn’t have any sort of cable television, and our best TV set was a 13-inch RCA color portable in the bedroom. We got four VHF channels and two UHFs out of Washington.
They signed off for the night at 1 a.m. Johnny Carson ruled late-night TV from California and we were still seven years away from David Letterman and seven months from Saturday Night Live.
Our telephones were at the end of cords and cell phones were only a futuristic dream. Ditto for home computers, the Internet and even VCRs.
We had a cassette player in our car, but our home stereo had only an AM/FM receiver and a turntable to play our record albums.
We only lived there one summer, and we never used the swimming pool. Before summer 1976 came around, we were on our way to Austria for two years. I remember we used to go into Herndon to get groceries and to go to the movies. It was the early days of multiplexes, and I think our little theater had just one screen.
Oddly enough, the only movie I can remember specifically seeing there was “Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS.”
I don’t think we ever went back to Herndon together. When we returned from Austria in 1978, we got an apartment in the Tyson’s Corner area, and that was the last place we lived together.
I drove back through there in 2010 when I was visiting my mother. I was amazed to see how much the area was built up, largely because of all the growth out toward Dulles Airport and the completion of the north-south Fairfac County Parkway.
Stuart Woods is still there, going on half a century old. I don’t remember what the prices were in 2010, but I looked them up for this article. They range from $1,847 a month for the cheapest apartments to $3,470 for the most expensive.
That seems high, but I’ll be they have microwave ovens and cable/WiFi access now.
Jeez, I feel so damn old.