It happens once a year, for about two minutes, and if you look away you miss it.
This year, on Saturday morning, a crowd gathered at Dark Star Park, near 1655 N. Fort Myer Drive, to watch the shadows cast by concrete spheres and steel poles creep into alignment with the shadow shapes embedded in the ground below them. The sculpture occupies two corners of the intersection, and might be overlooked if driving past to or from the Iwo Jima Memorial.
A small scattering of applause broke out at exactly 9:32 as the sun cast its light upon the poles and spheres and the shadows settled into place in the concrete markers on the ground. The sculpture itself remained motionless while the sun performed its annual trick.
The date isn’t arbitrary. On Aug. 1, 1860, a man named William Henry Ross received a large waterfront farm, the land that is now Rosslyn, as a wedding gift from his father-in-law upon marrying the daughter Carolyn. Ross named the land “Rosslyn,” blending his own surname with his new wife’s name. The Rosses later sold to the Rosslyn Development Company, planting the seed of the neighborhood that exists today.
When Nancy Holt designed Dark Star Park between 1979 and 1984, it became Arlington’s first county-commissioned piece of public art, years before the county even had a formal public art program. Holt was already an established figure in the land art movement. Her best-known piece, Sun Tunnels, is a set of four 18-foot concrete tubes she placed in the Utah desert, aligned to frame the sunrise and sunset on the summer and winter solstices. For Dark Star Park, she worked with an astrophysicist to calculate exactly how the shadows needed to fall to line up with the shapes she would set into the pavement on the anniversary of the land deal that gave Rosslyn its name. The moment itself, 9:32 a.m., was her call, chosen simply because she liked the quality of the light at that hour.
It’s not technically National Landing, but it’s genuinely close: Rosslyn is a few Metro stops up the Blue and Orange/Silver lines from Crystal City and Pentagon City, which makes Dark Star Park an easy add-on for anyone already in the neighborhood.
Missed it this year? Mark your calendar. It happens again next Aug. 1.