Ends and Beginnings

The denouement was rather unremarkable when it finally arrived. After a year of work, months of conversation, weeks of op-eds and yard signs, days of increasingly unhinged doomsaying—in a half empty City Council chamber in the small hours of a Wednesday morning in late November, a unanimous 7-0 vote was recorded in favor of taking a small but meaningful step into our city’s future.  

This was the end we had been moving inevitably toward for some time now. If this moment felt mundane and quotidian [Editor’s note: and sleepy, let’s definitely not forget sleepy] that’s because it is mundane and quotidian. For all the angst and existential terror that had been poured into this process, for all the hope and eager anticipation poured in right beside, this has always been a bureaucratic down-payment on the things that come next. There were no sailors bending their partners over in a deep kiss of relief in Market Square when this passed, because this has never been about a single moment of catharsis and reconciliation. This has always been an end that pointed toward beginnings we have yet to shape.

We’re pretty pumped, but this isn’t a “we did it, Joe” situation.

This is not to unfairly diminish the importance of what we’ve done here—what we’ve done over this past year. These updates to the zoning code are important, for what they will let us do, but equally for what they say about the things we value. These changes will let us build houses, sure. But they’ve also already built new relationships and started to tell a new story about who we are and who this city wants to be. This process engaged people and drew them in—let them be seen and be counted—and in our experience, once that kind of engagement starts it tends not to stop. The real zoning changes may not have been the friends we made along the way, but that in no way invalidates the tangible proof that you matter in this conversation, that you are a stakeholder no matter your age or property ownership, that you can make a difference if you try.

So in the end, we begin. We begin with paying attention to the implementation of these changes, and working hard to address unintended consequences while holding everyone—home builders, city staff, local leaders—accountable to the intent and promise of this project. We begin by paying attention to and participating in a local election cycle that’s going to suck everything around into it like a collapsing neutron star. We begin by trying to find our way back to the things we as neighbors all share in common and focus less on the listservs that drive us apart.

This was an important week in Alexandria, and this end—though mundane and tiring and all the other things we’ve said above—is absolutely worth marking. But next week is an important week in Alexandria too, and so is the one after that, and the one beyond that still. They’re all important because the act of making a place is nothing but ends and beginnings, always. All we can do is all that any of us can ever do. 

Our best, and begin again.

Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life 

• Joy on the Avenue, the holiday iteration of Del Ray’s pop-up bar, is now open. Swing by and enjoy the 90s nostalgia hit of ordering a “We Forgot Kevin!”

• The city was planning to do a very cool holiday gingerbread house event but we regret to inform you that it’s likely to be shut down by the BAR because gumdrops are not a historically consistent siding material consistent with the character of homes in Old Town.

• Alexandria is joining forces with Arlington and Henrico County to sue drug companies over high insulin costs. This should be a nice change of pace for our city attorneys as they enjoy a break from the local litigious cranks and deal with a more chill and laidback adversary, Big Pharma.

• Nominations are now open for the newest batch of Alexandria Living Legends, who are honored for “exemplary and lasting contributions that have significantly impacted Alexandria’s quality of life.” Notably, “Only single individuals or a team of two persons working together are eligible to be nominated.” You all know what to do [Editor’s note: Becky and Jesse wink meaningfully at ALXtra readers].

Us showing up to be honored at next year’s Living Legends ceremony.

Local Discourse Power Rankings

1. Don’t Zone Me Bro (Last week: 1). Sorry, bro. You got zoned.

2. You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (Last week: 4). Alexandrians are so happy that the zoning vote is over, we’re shitting bricks rainbows brick rainbows. On Tuesday night, Council approved a plan to install two rainbow crosswalks in Old Town in time for next year’s Pride. This development so enraged ALXnow commenters that they immediately confessed to mowing down pedestrians any time a crosswalk deviates from the standard-issue black-and-white zebra stripe formula. Knowing that these people are on the road endangering lives at this very second, we wonder if Council should take this opportunity to upgrade all crossings citywide (rainbow or non) with strobe lights, motion-triggered air horns, and fluorescent neon signs that say THIS IS A CROSSWALK, DUMBASS. Possibly also spikes that pop up and shred the tires of anyone who blows through without yielding. And ejection seats that expel drivers unceremoniously from their vehicles if they come within ten feet of a pedestrian. Fuck it, let’s just ban cars. 

3. Conspiratorial Thinking (Last week: NR). So let’s get this straight: the city is secretly planning to double the city’s population, councilmembers are having shady conversations with “activists,” and those green yard signs popping up everywhere (ahem) were funded by developers? Look buddy, you’re not Fox Mulder and the truth isn’t out there. Remove your tinfoil hat, step away from the computer and touch grass. We’re sorry that things aren’t going your way, but it’s not some devious plot orchestrated by the Koch brothers, your views are just unpopular. Hope this helps!

4. Yard Signs (Last week: 2). Congrats to the Coalition for a Livable* Alexandria (*offer not valid for rooftop decks) on finding a whole new way to make Thanksgiving problematic. Instead of engaging in normal holiday behavior like spending time with family or getting day-drunk watching the Macy’s parade, the CLA’s most committed members—all eight of them—decided to line the Turkey Trot route waving their one-sided yard signs and getting shirty with anyone who cringed at them too visibly. Right, because nothing says “grateful for our many blessings” like yelling “WE WERE HERE FIRST” at people who are just trying to complete their five (5) miles without keeling over into J.D. Vance’s front yard. Puritanical zealotry? Indigenous erasure? The Pilgrims would have been proud (not a good thing). What the Pilgrims would not have understood, and in fact what many of us are struggling to understand in 2023, was the faux jalopy covered in the aforementioned signs blasting “Big Yellow Taxi” parked on the sidewalk in front of the Dog Store. The irony of a song complaining about parking lots being weaponized by people ardently advocating for the city to maintain parking minimums could not be more exquisite, 10/10 no notes. The president of the Del Ray Citizens Association published an op-ed in today’s Times arguing that these “protesters” embarrassed the neighborhood, but she’s wrong. The only people they embarrassed were themselves.

5. BAR Rescue (Last week: NR). The venerable arbiters of aesthetic purity at the BAR are, unsurprisingly, back on their bullshit. Not content to limit themselves to paint-color quibbles, they’re now objecting to entire residential projects on the basis of “ew, building too big.” Since when is largeness somehow historically inappropriate? George Washington loved big-ass buildings! They’re like his entire brand! Mount Vernon is quite a sizeable mansion, the Masonic National Memorial is one of the tallest landmarks around, and let’s not forget America’s phallus the Washington Monument. If anything, George would scoff through his (not wooden because that’s a myth) dentures at this project’s measly four stories. There’s only one thing that’s “too massive” around here and it’s the amount of time our elected leaders have to spend overruling this board’s blockheaded recommendations.

Alexandria’s Hottest Club Is… Bluesky

Remember Twitter before Elon Musk? Specifically, Alexandria Twitter. That was fun, wasn’t it? We had a good time there. Remember when we crowdsourced an AI-generated song about the surprisingly voluptuous Del Ray Christmas tree? There was also that thread in which we shared stories about the infractions that got us kicked out of a certain integrity-restoring private Facebook group. We made a lot of jokes about pizza and laughed at the Shallot hyperlocal satire account and got into arguments with local trolls who gave us baller nicknames like “Chardonnay Antifa.” Sometimes we even invited all our random-stranger internet friends over to our house for a barbecue! (Okay, that one was just Becky.) 

Unfortunately things have taken a bit of a nosedive on the ol’ bird app over the past 12 months. The new owner is a white supremacist who spends most of his time posting Pizzagate memes and commenting “interesting!” under tweets asking whether Mussolini made some good points. Anyone still spending time there—why? Dear god, why?—can’t help but notice the End Times vibes, that is if they’re not too busy fending off harassment from anonymous accounts calling them [redacted], [redacted but sexist] or [redacted but homophobic].

Coach Beard says stop supporting a company that platforms conspiracy theorists and racists.

So yeah, no thanks to all of that. But just because Twitter is dead doesn’t mean we’re no longer terminally online (lol, could you even imagine). We’re on Bluesky! It’s a new app that’s basically what Twitter used to be back when it was great. It’s currently invitation-only, so it’s small and more than a little quirky. Most importantly, there are pretty much zero Nazis, which is the only correct number of Nazis to have on your social media site. Even contrarian know-nothing Matt Yglesias gets chased off the platform every time he attempts to post there, which is honestly just so beautiful. Brings tears to the eyes, et cetera.

As a mostly dickhead-free zone, Bluesky has become the online home for many of the marginalized communities who fled Twitter’s fermenting garbage dump of misery: LGBTQ+ folks, sex workers, and certainly not least, furries. It’s got leftists and fandoms and journalists and Neil Gaiman and Darth. And in the middle of all that… Alexandrians. It’s been a great place to set up camp so far. We’ve created an ALX users list that basically functions like a group chat that occasionally turns into real-life hangs. Just in the last few weeks, Alexandria Bluesky has collaboratively designed pro-housing yard signs, shared penguin selfies and date night restaurant recommendations, developed a running joke about one elected official’s excessive consumption of peppers (you know who you are, Sarah), and provided live commentary throughout Council hearings (we spent most of Tuesday’s zoning vote debating whether various fictional characters would be NIMBYs or YIMBYs, a question J.R.R. Tolkien would surely have wanted applied to Tom Bombadil). 

Kendall and Cousin Greg would be satisfied with the meme quality on ALX Bluesky.

To be clear, you can also do other things on Bluesky beyond gossip with us about local politics. The number of users is growing rapidly and you can find whatever interests or online communities you’ve belonged to elsewhere. [Editor’s note: Becky, don’t mention furries again, for fuck’s sake.] Especially furries! [Editor’s note: Dammit!] So if you’re still using Twitter, please consider… not doing that. Join us! We can rustle you* up an invite code (*offer not valid for dickheads). Just let us know if you want one, and we’ll see you there!

The Alexandria Times Quote of the Week

“In the 19 years of the Times’ existence, we don’t recall any single issue that has outraged such a large swath of our city’s residents as ZFH.”

Really? Huh. We wonder who got everybody so worked up about it. Guess we’ll never know!

We Get Letters

From reader Liz, a submitted essay titled Intersectionality:

I have to cross ten lanes of traffic like I live in friggin LA at the intersection of Quaker Lane, King Street and Braddock Roads in the Seminary Hill neighborhood of Alexandria to get to the coffee shop St. Elmo’s of Fairlington. I was happy when this coffee shop opened. It was “walkable-from-my-house.” Theoretically. I was enthusiastically (and, it turns out, too optimistically and too soon) envisioning the “15 minute city” for Alexandria.

As the crow flies, this branch of St. Elmo’s is only a mile from my house. I am able and willing to walk that. And yet. Getting there is a total pain in the a**. [Editor’s note: unlike us, Liz is apparently not a filthy-mouthed degenerate. We recognize that this censoring of profanity may be disorienting for longtime readers of this newsletter and apologize for any confusion.]

Walking in a city should be a pleasure. It should be fun. And safe. See Thoreau’s On Walking on the importance of walking to mental and physical health. See New York. See Boston. There, neighborhoods connect. There is little dead frontage, or big block development (the entirety of the new Minnie Howard is a big block, see How Bad Architecture Wrecks A City) and no car dealerships in the center city. You, as a walker, are conveyed along by interesting mom and pop shops, pocket parks, fellow pedestrians, all endearingly higgledy-piggledy. Jane Jacobs, the mother of all city planners, called it the “ballet of the street.” This intersection has zero ballet. No balance or rhythm or grace.

I feel for all the high school students who have to play Frogger (yes, I’m dating myself) to get to school at Minnie Howard. I see them standing on the islands of scrubby grass and native plantings, unsure of when it’s safe to cross. And when they do leg into the street, drivers lean on their horns as if to say “F– you, future generations.” [Editor’s note: this means “fuck.”] There’s never a right time to be a pedestrian or a young person at this intersection. 

I have a choice to put my life into NOVA drivers’ and Alexandria City’s urban planning’s hands when I walk to St. Elmo’s. Some students have no choice but to shanks’ mare to school. 

Here’s how it feels at this intersection. I am going to exaggerate. But only by a little. It feels End Times-ish. Like the Machines have already Taken Over. It feels unfriendly in the extreme to the human. This very busy intersection privileges the car over me, the middle-aged mom (trying to get some writing done at a cafe) and, far more worrisome, over the city’s high school students (just trying to get an education, as we are always admonishing them to do).

It is so insulting. Being able to safely walk to school (and to a cafe) shouldn’t be a privilege for the very few, in the top 1% of cities. It should be a right. I stand (or rather, walk) for PEDESTRIANISM. I am determined to take to the streets, to take them back for sauntering, for being a flâneur, or for just getting from one place to another like to Walgreens for toothpaste. (How very pedestrian.) 

When I’m out on the island in the middle of King Street at Braddock trying to figure out when to cross and I see a group of high school students also marooned, I have to hold myself back from saying “Okay, kids, let’s hold hands. Look both ways, children,” and then shouting, “On my call. 1-2-3 goooooo!” as we run together, them fast, me lagging behind because of hip arthritis, as we break the system of only cars being on the road.

Thanks Liz, this was awesome. And thanks also to others that have written letters recently—we’re excited to get to more of them in upcoming editions.

One Awesome Thing in ALX

While we were bitching and moaning about having to run five (5!!!) consecutive miles last Thursday, the good people at ALIVE! were busy collecting 1,200 pounds of food from Turkey Trot participants to distribute to families around Alexandria. (For comparison, that’s roughly the quantity of donuts we ate as soon as the race ended.) It was a major accomplishment that built on the 33,000 pounds of food that ALIVE! gathered during this summer’s first citywide food drive.

Volunteers guarding donations from ravenous runners desperate to shove food into their mouths with utter abandon like Cookie Monster.

This work is so important because the Capital Area Food Bank estimated that about 1 in 3 Alexandrians experience food insecurity. ALIVE! is the oldest and largest private safety net in the city, serving 5,000 households every month through its food programs. It also provides donated furniture to Afghan refugees and people transitioning out of homelessness, as well as connecting people with aid to cover their rent and utility bills. In other words, the ALIVE! folks single-handedly put enough goodness out into the universe to balance the bad juju that until very recently was contributed by Henry Kissinger. So please consider donating and volunteering. We’re fortunate to have helpers like this in our community—let’s support them during the holiday season and throughout the year.

You can follow Becky @beckyhammer.bsky.social and Jesse @oconnell.bsky.social on Bluesky, or you can e-mail us anytime at alxtranewsletter@gmail.com.