[1] In the 1960s and 1970s, as Fairfax County was rapidly transformed from a largely rural area to one suburban, Hazel became the public face and fulcrum on which the pro-development forces rested.
In 1983, a Washington Post article offered up this characterization: "[Hazel] emerged as its [Fairfax County] most controversial figure as a judge, lieutenant in the Byrd organization, community booster, preeminent zoning lawyer and developer, and eventually, as near to the political kingmaker as Northern Virginia's diffuse power structure allows.
"[2] Author Joel Garreau posits in his seminal book Edge City: Life on the New Frontier that Hazel "has done more to shape the Washington area than any man since Pierre L'Enfant.
[5] In the late 1940s after the end of World War II, Fairfax County was still a sparsely populated rural tract, but one poised to boom as a suburb of Washington, D.C.
[6][7] It was the residential low cost tract-housing development of Pimmit Hills in eastern Fairfax County near his father's old farm in McLean, Virginia, that caught Hazel's eye.
[8] Beginning in the late 1950s, Hazel, who was by then a seasoned land-use attorney at the law firm of Jesse Phillips, positioned himself as a tireless advocate for commercial and residential growth in Fairfax County.
Once these changes were approved, he then pushed for the timely installation of sewers and other utilities in accordance with the comprehensive plan, which primed the targeted areas for development.
The future Capital Beltway, a project envisioned since the early 1950s, and for which Hazel had been involved acquiring land for, was finally under construction as the 1950s came to a close.
[10] The first buildings in Tysons went up soon afterward, mainly catering to defense and national security contractors involved in providing services to the Pentagon, located in neighboring Arlington, and to the Central Intelligence Agency, which had relocated in 1961 to the Langley area of nearby McLean.
[citation needed] In the early and mid-1960s, Hazel helped steer a development company helmed by Isadore Guldesky, Theodore Lerner, and H. Max Ammerman through a legal maze of ordinances and regulations to construct Tysons Corner Center, at the time one of the first super-regional enclosed malls in the country.
After a controversial Fairfax County Board vote in favor of the Guldesky-Lerner-Ammerman group and, later, a lawsuit concerning a lease and zoning issue, the highly anticipated Tysons Corner Center was opened in 1968.
[12] The project, which has opened in stages starting in 1988, currently contains the upscale, tri-level Tysons Galleria mall, a Ritz-Carlton hotel, and three high-rise office buildings.
[citation needed] In 1988, Hazel teamed up with the Edward J. DeBartolo Corporation in an attempt to build a regional shopping center next to the Manassas National Battlefield Park, but the project faced strong opposition and was eventually scrapped.
[20][21] The family-owned Hazel Land Companies, Inc., established in 1971, remains active, pursuing residential, commercial, and retail development opportunities throughout the D.C. metropolitan region.
from Harvard Law School in 1954, Hazel found employment with the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the United States Army.
He worked for the Judge Advocate for three years, leaving in 1957 to join the Northern Virginia law firm of Jesse, Phillips, Klinge, and Kendrick.