Reply to "Where do you live?" "Oh we're in North Arlington"

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Reply to ""Where do you live?" "Oh we're in North Arlington""

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"North Arlington, not to be confused with South Arlington," is how I would take that comment. [/quote]

this. it's definitely this. people have been saying this since the 80s, at least.
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to follow up on this, what I understood was South Arlington was where poor immigrants lived in apartments (the horror!) whereas north arlington was "old virginia families" who were "wealthy" and lived in "single family homes." The people who said "North Arlington" would always sort of pause right after they said north, just to give it some emphasis. "North [breathy pause] Arlington [looks around the group for acknowledgement]."

Growing up in NoVA, people were so snobby about North Arlington that when I visited Yorktown HS for an event, I thought it was going to be some kind of amazing school with chocolate milk in the water fountains and mercedes in teh parking lots. Was disappointed to find it was just another NoVa high school, although i remember getting super lost on my way there, driving through the wilds of arlington in the pre-GPS days.

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I think you are fabricating this story, right up to your stupid “breathy pause.” Arlington was not know for wealthy families until recently. That has anlways been what McLean has been know for.  And some parts of North Arlington were in fact crappy. When I moved to Arlington after college from up north, one of my college classmate’s mom was nervous about me living in Ballston because “it was such a bad area.”[/quote]

Lol, so glad someone else said this. I had friends who lived in a Ballston townhouse circa 1990, and it was considered borderline unsafe (not to mention my friends who dared live on the Hill).[/quote]

Your anecdote proves my point. Ballston = Old South Arlington, aka "unsafe" and "crime ridden." Basically it went in gradients, with south of Route 50 "really bad" and south of 66 "borderline unsafe." That's exactly why people made such a big deal about living in "North Arlington" aka north of 29, the part of the county that's cuddled up next to McLean.

(Worthy of its own thread is a discussion of how Old McLean transformed from nice ranch houses and ramblers on ample lots to New McLean, a hellscape of colonial mcmansions united by one crappy shopping center.)[/quote]

At no time was Ballston considered “Old South Arlington.”  And the delineation between North and South Arlington has always been Route 50, not Route  29. 3/4 of Ballston has always been in North Arlington. So tell me again what people would say in their “breathy voice?” “I live in North Arlington…the good part, not the bad part!”

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