Jeff Bezos is Charlie Pickett's New Neighbor

Manassas, VA | A Conversation on Dean Drive

Charlie Pickett was born in the house he still lives in on Dean Drive, just outside of Old Town Manassas. That home — weathered but sturdy — has stood through decades of change. But lately, the changes feel different. Louder. Closer. Impossible to ignore.

I spent an hour with Charlie recently. We stood by his gate, just a few feet from Dean Drive — currently closed to all but construction traffic and the Pickett household. The road is all that stands between Charlie and his new neighbor. On the other side, heavy equipment churned dirt into submission. On Charlie’s side of the street, the siding on his home is aged, in quiet contrast to the freshly painted facade of a massive, windowless fortress of cloud computing.

“They say it’s progress. I don’t know what kind.”

Charlie Pickett stands at the gate of the house he was born in — a home his family has lived in for generations. Behind him: an AWS data center under construction. “I always thought I’d leave this place feet first,” he said. “Now I’m not so sure.”

Charlie is remarkably fit and trim, looking twenty years younger than his actual age. He worked with his hands and still dresses like a blue-collar worker, ready for the day. Behind the house, there’s a small brick building where Althea once did laundry for “the folks in town.”

Charlie’s voice broke when he spoke about the future. He’s lived through segregation — from school to train travel — and remembers a time when Manassas was divided by law but held together by people who, in his words, “managed to treat each other with decency.”

He and his wife Althea have been married 67 years. He walked to school at Regional High School, a segregated school in Manassas. He left for basic training at Fort Jackson, SC, on a segregated train. He returned to Dean Drive, expecting to live out his life there.

“I always thought that when I left this house, I’d be leaving feet first on a stretcher — like my father, and his father before him,” he said.

And when that time comes, he expected to be buried just down the street, at the historically segregated Rose Hill Cemetery — with the rest of his family. He chokes up when he talks about that outcome. He doesn’t seem afraid of dying or what comes after. The emotion comes from the uncertainty of a physical world being turned on its head.

Rose Hill is within “hollering distance” of the Dean Drive house — and the data center. Now, a massive Dominion Energy substation project sits between Charlie’s home and those graves. It’s hard not to see a metaphor in that, as they build over everything that once made Dean Drive a neighborhood.

Charlie doesn’t speak in buzzwords. He doesn’t call it gentrification. He doesn’t have a list of demands. But what he carries is a quiet clarity: what’s being lost here isn’t just history — it’s place, peace, and the promise of belonging.

Manassas is gaining data centers, substations, and warehouses. But what are we — as community members, as people who are part of a place — really gaining? And at what cost?