Could a boardwalk for visitors one day encircle the Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary adjacent to Gravelly Point?
And could there be better accessibility to the site, which today is effectively restricted to vehicular traffic?
Both possibilities were dangled when Rob Mandle, deputy executive director of the National Landing Business Improvement District (BID), on Dec. 9 briefed the Crystal and Pentagon Cities Council on the BID’s fiscal 2026 work plan.
Providing greater access to Roaches Run is a concept that has proved “extremely popular across the board” among planners and other stakeholders, Mandle told members of the council.
“This would be our version of Theodore Roosevelt Island,” he said, referring to the 88.5-acre National Park Service property located in the Potomac River between Rosslyn and Foggy Bottom. The island is accessed via a footbridge from the George Washington Memorial Parkway on the Virginia side of the river.
Like Roosevelt Island, Roaches Run also is under jurisdiction of the National Park Service. Home to a variety of migratory birds throughout the year, it is currently only accessible to the public via a parking lot with several dozen spaces.
The parcel is located between the GW Parkway and a Potomac River lagoon inlet, close to Gravelly Point and about a quarter-mile across the water to the National Landing areas of Crystal City and Pentagon City.
While Gravelly Point can be accessed by walkers, runners and bicyclists via the Mount Vernon Trail, Roaches Run is cut off from the rest of Gravelly Point, including the trail, by six lanes of the GW Parkway.
Providing better access to the site, coupled with an comfortable way for circumnavigating it, could make it a more popular venue with the public at large and those living and working in the nearby National Landing area.
And it would serve as a component of Arlington’s “green ribbon” initiative to link trails across Pentagon City and Crystal City, said Mike Dowell, chair of the Crystal and Pentagon Cities Council.
The effort to do something with Roaches Run is not new; in fact, it dates back several decades. But now there may be a way to deliver the funding that Mandle estimated might be $20 million to $30 million.
Those funds potentially could come from the proposed Trust for National Landing, a non-profit foundation planned by the BID in collaboration with property owners.
Having “a really cool, big idea” like expanding facilities at Roaches Run could be one way to kick off the philanthropic effort with a bang, Mandle said.
There has already been some buy-in for upgrades to Roaches Run, albeit only in the aspirational sense.
In 2020, JBG Smith — the key property owner and developer across much of National Landing — said it would welcome “the opportunity to work with the community, the County Board and the National Park Service to help make this vision a reality.”
But as Libby Garvey — in 2020 as in 2024 chair of the County Board — acknowledged to ARLnow at the time: “Nothing is happening tomorrow … it’s probably 5-10 years out.”
For those wondering, the site is not overrun with the bug that shares its name. It is named after James Roach, a 19th-century business leader who lived in the vicinity and gave his name to a creek that once ran nearby.
Facilities to support the site were constructed in the mid-1930s by the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Just a few years later, its current southern neighbor — National Airport — began to rise from the marshy environment.
During initial development of Roaches Run in the 1930s, a gamekeeper’s residence and feed-storage house were built, but eventually they were overtaken by nature and their exact locations currently are unknown.
Unlike Theodore Roosevelt Island, which, because it is in the Potomac River, is under the sovereignty of the District of Columbia, Roaches Run is part of the Virginia shoreline, making it part of the Old Dominion.
Today’s interstate border was set by royal land grant of the 1600s that ceded the entire river to Maryland. When the District of Columbia was carved out of Maryland and Virginia, it received control of the adjacent river up to Virginia’s natural shoreline, as well.
While nearby Reagan National is built on river infill and therefore could be considered part of the District of Columbia, Congress in 1945 decreed it to be in Virginia.
All those properties, however, remain under federal-government control, limiting the ability of local governments to intervene in decisions about their future.
