Milton V. Peterson, developer of National Harbor, dies at 85
By Bob Levey,
Bill O’Leary The Washington Post
Milton V. Peterson, one of the Washington area’s most successful real estate developers and the politically savvy creator of the sprawling National Harbor retail-hotel-casino complex in Oxon Hill, Md., died May 26 at his home in Fairfax County, Va. He was 85.
Angela Sweeney, chief marketing officer for the Fairfax County-based Peterson Companies, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.
Mr. Peterson combined a seven-day-a-week work ethic with seemingly bottomless determination to build a wide portfolio of projects and a personal fortune believed to surpass $100 million.
He developed dozens of major commercial projects and dozens more residential clusters, mostly in Northern Virginia. His partnership with Fairfax County real estate lawyer John T. “Til” Hazel produced more square feet in Northern Virginia than any other development operation during the 1970s.
In 2020, Mr. Peterson’s company estimated that he had built more than 26,000 residential properties and approximately 234 million square feet of commercial space. Control of the Peterson Companies passed to his two sons in the 1990s, but into his 80s, Mr. Peterson continued to actively participate in the firm’s operation.
“What else am I going to do?” he told the Washington Business Journal in 2015.
His 20-year effort to build National Harbor — and his eight-year fight to include a casino there — caused often acrimonious environmental and political controversy. But through Mr. Peterson’s deep pockets and patience, and with help from Prince George’s County and Maryland politicians he had cultivated with campaign contributions, the project was fully developed by 2016.
The complex, which sits beside the Potomac River just south of the Capital Beltway, now encompasses 350 acres and more than 8 million square feet of space. Millions of people visit, live or work there during an average year.
“Milt created projects that were transformative in their time and typically would not have happened without his vision and commitment,” said Douglas Firstenberg, a major developer in Montgomery County, Md. “His sheer force of will made success where others would, or did, fail.”
Lucian Perkins
The Washington Post
Mr. Peterson prepares for construction of National Harbor.
Milton Victor Peterson was born in Worcester, Mass., on Jan. 7, 1936. His father was a small-scale real estate developer and art dealer.
A strapping 6-foot-2 star in high school football, basketball and baseball, Mr. Peterson won an athletic scholarship to Middlebury College in Vermont. He developed his first business there, buying used textbooks from his fellow students and reselling them at prices far below what the campus bookstore charged for new copies.
Many of those books were written by Middlebury professors, who complained that Mr. Peterson was undermining a major income stream. He told The Washington Post he was nearly kicked out of school before he folded his business. But by then, he had cleared several thousand dollars, which he used to flip houses in Maine and Massachusetts in his spare time.
A member of the ROTC at Middlebury, where he received a degree in business economics, Mr. Peterson joined the Army Corps of Engineers after graduation in 1958. He was assigned to Fort Belvoir, Va., as a lieutenant. Enticed by the post-World War II growth in the federal government, and the related growth in housing demand, he began selling houses for Arlington County developer Stephen Yeonas at night and on weekends.
At 23, Mr. Peterson sold more than $1 million worth of properties during his first year. After completing his military commitment, he became a full-time salesman for Yeonas. Having saved more than $50,000, he struck out on his own as a developer in 1965.
Mr. Peterson concentrated on Northern Virginia at first, largely because he lived there. His initial projects were heavily residential, but he migrated in later years to mixed-use and all-commercial development.
He found a useful complement in Hazel, who thrived in the public aspects of real estate development, going to court to seek rezonings and attending ribbon-cuttings alongside local politicians. Mr. Peterson, meanwhile, preferred tending to ground-level details and swapping jokes with his workers.
“Til was always seen as the brains of the operation, but I always thought it was Milt,” said William Regardie, a longtime editor and publisher of real estate magazines covering the D.C. area. “He was the one who ran the partnership, made all the decisions. He was like Paul Newman. Always cool.”
But when tensions got to Mr. Peterson, as they sometimes did, “he had a bulldozer in his backyard,” Regardie recalled. “He used to get on it and redirect the stream behind his house before dinner.”
By the early 1980s, Mr. Peterson had ended the Hazel partnership — by all accounts amicably — although they occasionally went in on deals together in later years. Their most controversial project was a planned commercial development near Interstate 66 in Manassas, Va., on 400 acres where two significant Civil War battles had been fought.
The federal government had added the land to Manassas National Battlefield Park after Hazel and Mr. Peterson bought it. Years of legal skirmishing followed, with the government and local preservationists. In 1990, the government agreed to pay an $81 million buyout to the developers. The commercial complex was never built.
On his own, Mr. Peterson completed the Fair Lakes Promenade, the Burke Centre housing development and the Virginia Gateway commercial complex in Gainesville, all in Northern Virginia, as well as the rebuilt downtown Silver Spring, Md., and the commercial Washingtonian Center in Gaithersburg, Md.
But he told associates that he yearned for a signature finale that became National Harbor.
Mr. Peterson bought the land, a former gravel pit, in 1996. He planned a Disney amusement complex on the eastern edge of the property and hotels, shops and luxury residences closer to the Potomac.
Over the years, Mr. Peterson surmounted community opposition and environmental concerns over the size and look of his development, the increase in traffic it might bring and its impact on the view from Mount Vernon across the river. Meanwhile, cash flow was bumpy. Leases would come together and break apart, and downturns in the national economy hurt residential rentals and sales.
More than once, like previous development efforts on that site, National Harbor seemed destined for failure. Disney was in and then out of a 500-room resort hotel. Tanger Factory Outlet Centers was in, out and then back in. By 2011, many of the project’s 423 condos and 46 town homes had been under contract, then had fallen out, then had come back in.
Mr. Peterson agreed to shoulder the cost of many highway improvements when officials balked at the price tag. He pledged to steer more than 30 percent of construction jobs to local African American-owned firms after county officials made support for minority businesses a condition of their backing. Meanwhile, through lobbying, he and his associates won an exemption for National Harbor from stringent federal environmental reviews.
For several years, Mr. Peterson staunchly resisted bringing gambling to National Harbor. “This guy ain’t now or ever will be in gambling,” he said of himself in 2001. But he changed his stance after Maryland political leaders dangled state approval for a casino and after major gambling chains expressed interest. MGM Resorts International now operates one of the largest casinos on the East Coast at National Harbor.
In 2008, Mr. Peterson garnished his pet project with “The Awakening,” a renowned sculpture by Seward Johnson that had been embedded for nearly 30 years at Washington’s Hains Point. Mr. Peterson bought the work for over $700,000, and it now dominates the central public space at National Harbor.
“I was biznified when I started this project,” Mr. Peterson told Post art critic Paul Richard in 2008. “Then I became artified.”
Mr. Peterson, an inductee into the Washington Business Hall of Fame, contributed millions to, and raised millions for, George Mason University.
In addition to his wife of 64 years, Carolyn Skyllberg Peterson of Fairfax County, survivors include four children, Lauren Peterson, Rick Peterson, Jon Peterson and Steven Peterson, all of Northern Virginia; a sister; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Asked to describe his business philosophy during the final stages of the development of National Harbor, when the MGM casino was going up, Mr. Peterson replied in thematically appropriate fashion.
“I like to roll dice,” he said.
Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post
Mr. Peterson stands at the site where he wants to build National Harbor in 2012.
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