Queen City: remembering the black neighbourhood erased for the Pentagon

William Vollin remembers the games he played as a boy. “Hide and go seek and marbles and ball games and that kind of thing,” he says in a video call. “I never thought I was poor personally because I had a grandmother who worked 30 years or so as a maid and always kept food on the table. We adjusted to the environment.”

Now 92, Vollin is one of the last remaining former residents of Queen City, a historically Black neighbourhood in Arlington, Virginia, erased to make way for the rushed construction of the Pentagon during the second world war. He spent a lifetime mourning its passing. But now he is delighted by a public artwork that honours its memory.

is a 35-ft tall, well-like brick tower in Metropolitan Park, Arlington, that peers over trees and architecture to mark the site of what existed before. Durrett commissioned 17 Black ceramists to make 903 ceramic teardrop vessels that signify the 903