artists, spies and
other neighbors: the
eclectic community
of hollin hills
Singer Roberta Flack released Chapter Two in 1970, while living in Hollin Hills
by stephen brookes
Hollin Hills has always been as notable for its residents as for its pathbreaking architecture. Meet a few of the creative, committed and accomplished people who have made this unique community their home.
Ask a Hollin Hiller why they live here, and you’ll often hear something like: “We came for the architecture — and stayed for the people.”
It’s a widespread feeling. The distinctive, unusual houses of Hollin Hills have always drawn an equally distinctive and unusual crowd, and Hollin Hills today is a lively community of artists, teachers, diplomats, architects, physicians, journalists, entrepreneurs — creative people in almost every field.
And despite all that diversity, the sense of community is palpable. Hollin Hillers gather regularly for community picnics and parades, volunteer in the parks together, socialize at the swim clubs, and manage neighborhood affairs through the Civic Association. The architecture and landscaping may be world-famous — but what really brings Hollin Hills alive is the people who live here.
“Hollin Hills seems to attract creative thinkers, nature lovers and artists that somehow have a way of inspiring each other,” remembered former resident Lynne Chytilo, a professor of art at Albion College who grew up here.
architecture and community
The idea that architecture and landscaping could actually help build a sense of community was built into Hollin Hills from the start.
When they teamed up in the 1940s to build Hollin Hills, developer Robert Davenport and architect Charles Goodman designed houses that would connect people with each other, rather than wall them off. Hollin Hills houses aren’t fortresses; they’re open and welcoming and human-scaled, with walls of glass that seem to subvert the very idea of a “wall.”
The houses also share a distinctive architectural style that ties them together — and deliberately minimizes differences of wealth and status. And the free-flowing landscaping, with few fences or barriers between houses, physically knits the community into a whole, while the parks serve as common areas for people to gather.
what’s new in people
“I’m interested in civilized architecture,” said Goodman, looking back on Hollin Hills in a 1984 interview.
“The setting that people live in can create the climate … for living as dignified human beings,” he added. “What we yearn for and need is the flowering of the individual. We deeply need more offbeat personalities, more people with unique interests, more people strong enough to stand unafraid and be themselves. We need them not just in houses but in communities where their influence can be felt.”
An early gathering spot: the community mailboxes on Paul Spring Road
And from the earliest days, those “offbeat personalities” flocked to Hollin Hills. It was a young, urban, well-educated crowd, drawn both by the cutting-edge architecture and the lure of creating an entirely new community, and a new way of life.
“The early settlers had a kind of pioneer spirit,” recalled George Brickelmaier, who worked with the developers and was an early resident. “At that time, these houses were wildly unconventional. Besides, nothing worked right. The roads weren't in, nothing but bare dirt around. What the people put up with was astounding! Furthermore, most of 'em had come from apartments and they didn't know how to do a damned thing anyway.”
Perhaps because of the near-primitive conditions, a sense of community quickly formed in Hollin Hills. There were no streetlights or fire hydrants, no sewer system, few phone lines (the ones that existed were ten-party lines), and not even the post office would risk the steep, muddy roads — residents had to pick up their mail at the community mailboxes on Paul Spring Road. In a 1950 “welcoming” note to new residents, developer Davenport noted that they would be responsible for figuring out almost everything for themselves, from trash collection and road maintenance to schools and playgrounds.
George and June Brickelmaier
A community association was formed that year, and Hollin Hills began to move toward the self-governing “cooperative community” that Davenport had envisioned from the start.
Community traditions began to take shape, including the annual Fourth of July picnic, the Christmas carol singalong and a community newsletter, all launched in 1951, and continuing to this day. The first Hollin Hills House and Garden Tour took place in 1953, and residents banded together to build the Hollin Hills pool in 1954. Amateur theater groups including the Popkins Pasture Playhouse popped up, along with book and cooking clubs.
From “In the Swim”, an amateur revue in 1954 to raise money to build the Hollin Hills pool
the early pioneers
“The community was a kind of utopia,” says Jennifer Kabat, who grew up in Hollin Hills in the early years and wrote about it for Granta magazine. “When it was founded, all the residents believed in hope and change. My parents arrived to communal co-ops, collective parks and collective baby-sitting. People banded together. There were committees for everything from water to trash. A Viennese magazine called it a ‘colony of intellectuals.’ The families that came here chose someplace new and different: walls of glass, reclaimed brick, open plan, open lives.”
progressive politics
Architecture critic (and Hollin Hills native) Michael Sorkin
Attorney Philip Jay Hirschkop
Diplomat Richard Moose
Journalist Bernard Fall
The ideals of modernist architecture seemed to shape the emerging community. “Because of its architecture, Hollin Hills was the kind of place where liberals, employing postwar prosperity and financing, were inclined to move,” wrote the late architecture critic Michael Sorkin, who grew up in Hollin Hills.
“Charles Goodman's architecture appealed to their progressive tastes as, surely, did the sense of enclave, the idea that political values were wrapped up in the environment, that progressivism inhered in those glass walls and sinewy lines of landscape as well as in the mini-soviet of collective parks and activities.”
Alex Bernstein, who grew up here in the early years, remembered in a 2021 survey that she “never was exposed to people who were pro-war, Republican, uninterested in protecting the earth, or uninterested in esthetics and the built environment.”
“Everyone was fairly liberal of course,” confirmed Mark Bobotek, whose family moved to Mason Hill Drive in 1967. “But an important offshoot was that we all believed that the world was our oyster and we could be anyone we chose to be.”
One of those people was Jeanne Gayler — who, after a glittering but unsatisfying career as a Hollywood actress (and runner-up Miss America), moved to Hollin Hills in 1974, became director of development for the Federation of American Scientists, and in 1977 co-founded the US Committee on US-Soviet Relations – which a few years later would become the American Committee on East-West Accord, a hugely influential voice in the country for nuclear disarmament.
Actress Jeanne Gayler, who later founded the Committee on East-West Accords
The community’s political leanings brought unwelcome attention at times. The journalist Bernard Fall (who wrote Street Without Joy and other critical works about the Vietnam War while while living on Drury Lane) was wiretapped by the FBI during his years in Hollin Hills. “The FBI thought we were all communists!” recalls Bobbie Seligmann, who has lived on Recard Lane since 1952, and knew Fall and his wife well.
Another early skeptic of the Vietnam War was Richard Moose, an influential diplomat and longtime resident of Hollin Hills, who served as special assistant to the National Security Advisor during the Johns Administration. He remained at the National Security Council into the Nixon administration, but clashed with the new National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, and resigned in late 1969. When Kissinger had Moose’s Hollin Hills phone tapped (suspecting him of leaking to the press), Moose sued Kissinger, and the case was settled. Later, he worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and co-authored a series of reports exposing the United States' secret bombings in Cambodia.
Those progressive politics weren’t universal, and Hollin Hills was also home to CIA agents and conservative figures.
But the general outlook was closer to that of Philip Jay Hirschkop, a lawyer who lived on Beechwood Road. Hirschkop took on Mildred and Richard Loving as clients in the landmark 1967 “Loving v. Virginia” civil rights case, which ended the enforcement of state bans on interracial marriage, and later went on to found the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. His other clients included Martin Luther King, Jr., H. Rap Brown, Norman Mailer and any number of anti-war protesters during Vietnam War era.
a “veritable artists colony”
Hollin Hills was also becoming known for its artists and potters, who added studios to their homes, arranged exhibits at the swimming pool, launched the Hollin Hills Potters group, and opened the Garrett Gallery at the nearby Unitarian Church.
By 1960, the Alexandria Gazette was noting that “a veritable artists colony” had taken up residence here, with artists including Frank and Kathleen Spagnolo, painter Hilda Shapiro Thorpe, ceramicist Solveig Cox, physicist-turned-sculptor Pat Monk, and dozens more. They all left a distinctive mark on the community, particularly Hilda Thorpe — who, recalled early resident Mike Yudkin, “was a marvelous, warm-hearted and creative soul – an exceptional artist, one of Hollin Hills’ finest.” The sculptor Carl Mose — who lived and worked in Hollin Hills in the 1960’s — is best known for a ten-foot-tall statue of baseball player Stan Musial, at the Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis.
So many artists lived in Holllin Hills that a 1999 exhibit at Alexandria’s Torpedo Factory included the work of no fewer than sixty-four of them, from painters to sculptors to jewelry designers.
Musicians moved in too, including singer Roberta Flack (and her beagle) and the jazz musician Gil Scott-Heron, who both lived on Martha’s Road in the 1970s. There were many writers as well, including Bernard Fall (Street Without Joy, Hell in a Very Small Place) who lived on Drury Lane, and David McCullough (1776, The Johnstown Flood) of Paul Spring Road. Leslie Gelb, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times (who led the team that compiled the Pentagon Papers) and a senior Defense and State Department official, lived on Elba Court. He also served as president of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1993 to 2003.
Hollin Hills art exhibit, 1968
It all contributed to a distinctly intellectual and bohemian atmosphere, as the LA-based artist Jennifer Gilman, who grew up in Hollin Hills, colorfully describes.
“Growing up in Hollin Hills can have a strange effect on a person,” she says. “You believe (for a while anyway) that those freaky, spontaneous, curious, perverse, intelligent, wild, willful, imaginative and generally ill-behaved people (your parents and their cohorts) are normal.
“You believe that they represent what the world has to offer. You believe that the world is magical nighttime pool parties with floating candles and lots of vodka and papier-mache mermaids, Vietnam protesters from faraway places sleeping on the living room floor, baby crows nursed to maturity and taught to fly, games of ‘endangered species tag,’ a real farm with a pond you can skate on, woods, windows, walking barefoot down the middle of the road in the middle of the night, Halloween costumes like the Mayflower and the Hookah-smoking Caterpillar, and art. Art everywhere. Bad art, good art. As if it grew naturally. As if it were normal. As if that’s what life had to offer.”
Journalist Leslie Gelb
Musician Gil Scott-Heron
Writer David McCullough
Artist Hilda Shapiro Thorpe
hollin hills in the 21st century
Now, in the 21st Century, Hollin Hills still retains much of that early magic. While the once-radical architecture no longer seems revolutionary, it still draws an open-minded, creative and non-traditional crowd, with a remarkable number of musicians, writers, architects and artists. Politically, the community is still generally (but far from exclusively) liberal, and may be more diverse now than at any time in its history. A number of early settlers spent their entire adult lives here (a few still remain!), and Hollin Hills is now home to many second-generation families.
caroling in mccalley park
Perhaps most importantly, the community traditions launched in the early years remain a cherished part of Hollin Hills life, from the annual get-togethers in Voigt Park to the clean-up parties in the parks. The original Community Association has evolved into the democratically-elected Civic Association of Hollin Hills, which manages the parks and other community interests, and offers an inclusive platform for dialogue on issues facing the community.
Is Hollin Hills today the modernist utopia its founders dreamed of? Maybe not quite. But as critic Michael Sorkin once put it, “Hollin Hills is one of the truly happy experiments in modernity … the kind of community so many modernists dreamed of, a beautiful place of social activism, love of nature, and potluck picnics.”
— Stephen Brookes
more in people
hollin hills heart throb
Meet Jeanne Gayler — beauty queen, Hollywood actress … and founder of the Committee on East-West Accord.
a HIRO of modern art
From a World War Two internment camp to the Smithsonian, a Marthas Road artist has fought for justice through art — and left a searing mark on the world.
please do not jump on the viola!
Hollin Hills virtuoso Jerome Gordon has toured with Celine Dion, performed for the Pope ... and really does not need to hear your viola jokes.
wiretapped in hollin hills: the bernard fall story
One of the most influential scholars and journalists of the Vietnam era, Bernard Fall lived in Hollin Hills while writing perhaps his most important book — and was spied on by the FBI while he was here.
modern art and the hollin hills home
A Hollin Hills collector talks about his life in the world of contemporary art — and why we all need to live with beauty.
jennifer kabat: the fairytale
One of the most thoughtful and interesting pieces about the people and culture of Hollin Hills in its early years was written by Jennifer Kabat, and published in Granta magazine in 2016.