Construction Maison

When Amy Franklin, 30, bought her one-bedroom condominium in Arlington County’s Colonial Village seven years ago, she found the neighborhood’s pretty 1930s buildings and graceful expanses of lawn pleasingly familiar . “I was 23, just out of college, and it felt like a college campus,” she says. Other Colonial Village residents say the community, with more than 50 acres of red- brick buildings linked by paths that wind among plentiful trees and landscaped lawns, is “parklike,” “serene” and an “oasis” in Arlington’s busy and increasingly high-rise Rosslyn-Ballston corridor. “The location can’t be beat: It’s closer to downtown than parts of Northwest [Washington], and you can walk to two Metros,” says Bob Somers, 54, a government attorney who has lived there since 1992. “But what makes it so nice is the parklike setting. They would never build like that now.” As it turns out, people have always clamored to live in Colonial Village. The community was built as a rental complex by deve...

NEW YORK — The Confederate flags had been in a Manhattan apartment’s windows for over a year. And then, in a matter of days last week, they were met with hurled rocks, a punched-out window, a tarp hung over them and legal action. By this week, the lighted flags were no more to be found in the seventh-floor windows in the East Village neighborhood , where the Confederate symbol had been displayed alongside an Israeli flag and a colonial-era American one. They’d attracted new attention after an Aug. 12 white nationalist rally to preserve a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, spiraled into violence that left a counter-protester dead and stirred debate over where or whether Confederate statues and symbols belong in 21st-century America. The flags’ owner, William Green, said by email Tuesday that the reaction reflects a misunderstanding of their meaning. “The problem here is media, and schools abusing their power and leaving the population completely ignorant of what the Dix...