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.
