It’s hard to be an adult. When you’re young, you dream of the unfettered freedom of self-determination and give little consideration to the downside of complete agency: the meals that have to be planned, the laundry that doesn’t do itself, the commutes that must be navigated. Being an adult is facing an endless series of choices across a limitless range of obligations, which kind of makes the upside of being allowed to eat ice cream directly out of the container at 1am seem a little shitty by comparison.
It’s hard to be an adult, because even as you master the endless carousel of logistics that goes into living a (mostly) organized and (occasionally) squared away life, you’re doing that in the face of an unceasing wave of scary shit both close to home (household finances, family health, Congressional Republicans) as well as shining up at you from the hell-box we all carry around in our pockets (war, human rights atrocities, a planet on fire, Congressional Republicans).
And that stuff is scary! All that stuff is scary, and so much more besides. We’re not here to tell you today that it’s not. Because it is. And this, right here, is actually the hardest part about being an adult: you can’t be scared.
Well, actually - that’s not entirely right. We suppose you can be scared (you do you, that’s not for us to decide) but what we mean to say is you shouldn’t be scared. Every day, in ways big and small, we have the repeated choice to be scared of the things we face—of the things we might face—or to greet those things with optimism and determination, with courage. To be open to the possibility that good things are possible, and that doom does not lurk behind every door and in every corner.
Listening to public testimony Wednesday night as the Planning Commission reviewed the Zoning for Housing proposals, we were struck by how many people were essentially talking about being scared. Scared about new people moving in, scared about buildings changing, scared about traffic, scared about gangs in CVS. And honestly, that’s just no way to go through life! When you constantly expect the worst, when you move through the world in a defensive crouch expecting at any moment the lightning strike of some vengeful deity… you’re going to end up missing much of what makes moving through the world great in the first place (and you’re also probably going to throw out your back).
So yes, being an adult is hard. But lifting your eyes to the horizon is easier than you think. Don’t be scared, Alexandria—we can’t promise you it’s all going to work out perfectly, but we can promise you that whatever comes, we’ll all face it together.
Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life
Disney-owned national media platform Andscape ran a profile on the owner of Goodies in Old Town, just in time for ice cream season!
The city is launching a Green Business Recognition Program. We hope that one of you nominates this newsletter so we can be formally recognized for our sustainable practice of recycling jokes.
Former Alexandrian Dave Grohl performed on SNL with Foo Fighters last weekend. Sure, everyone knows that their song “Arlandria” is named after the neighborhood, but did you know that “Everlong” is about commenters who go over their allotted 3 minutes at zoning hearings?
The city has settled a lawsuit asking it to clean up coal tar waste polluting the Potomac River in North Old Town. Meanwhile, toxic discharges of Alexandria Times guest opinions continue unabated.
Local Discourse Power Rankings
Don’t Zone Me Bro (Last week: 2). There came a point in last night’s marathon Planning Commission hearing—somewhere between the time a speaker ran over her three minute limit because she simply had to finish reading a Bill Rossello column into the record and the second time a speaker compared Alexandria unfavorably to Gaza—when it became impossible to ignore the contrast between the pro-housing speakers (younger, optimistic, excited about the city) and the anti-housing speakers (demanding to speak to the manager about getting off their lawn). On an issue where there is genuine nuance, complexity, and substance worthy of contrasting, it was kind of wild how many people opposed to this process arrived at these proceedings armed with little more than “a man gave me a scary pamphlet at the farmer’s market.” If we apply the classic and never-wrong political candidate test of “who would we rather have a beer with,” there was only one side last night that seemed like they’d be a pretty chill hang (it was the side that didn’t imply they had unfinished business with Nelson Mandela).
Spooky Szn (Last week: NR). Halloween has come and gone, but not before we all got to have a welcome chuckle at ACPS students petitioning to cancel school the day after Halloween. And on some level, good for you, teens—you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. But also—what the hell do you need a break from?? Did you drag small people dressed as a Minecraft around in the dark for blocks and blocks? Did you have to wrestle a surprisingly strong elementary schooler away from the enormous pile of candy he dumped on his mattress so he could sleep on it? Did you wake up at 2am because earlier the kids insisted on walking by that goddamn clown house four extra times and now the clown is definitely in their closet? No! You didn’t! You’re fucking teens! You roamed around in the dark having the time of your life ironically dressed up as what we all actually wore to high school in 1998! Get the day off school our ass.
You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (Last week: 4). It turns out it’s more than just road design that makes getting behind the wheel in Alexandria feel like you’re involuntarily reenacting the vehicular combat scenes in Death Race 3: Inferno—it’s also all the other drivers using our streets to film their demolition derby audition tapes. This shocking and completely unanticipated revelation has led to APD announcing stepped-up enforcement on some of our more heavily trafficked routes. Which is a great idea, but it feels like a lot more trouble than just putting up a really, really big toddler gate on the Maryland side of the Wilson Bridge.
Yard Signs (Last week: 3). Like kudzu devouring the landscape of the American South, NO ZONING CHANGES signs have continued to creep across the lawns of our fair metropolis. Beyond just front yards thought, they’ve also started to pop up in medians and other public right-of-ways. Which is a hilarious coming from the crowd that has been trying to work the refs on all the ticky tack rules about meeting timelines and public information on websites but this ticky tack rule, well this ticky tack rule they feel perfectly free to ignore. There’s got to be a word for committing a violation of the zoning ordinance with a sign that opposes changes to the zoning ordinance, right? Somebody get us Alanis Morrisette’s agent on the phone.
Long Newsletters (Last week: NR). It was the first of the month this week, which meant another edition of the mayor’s newsletter landing on our digital doorsteps. Now, Hizzoner is rather infamous for his lengthy newsletters, but this one hit the email cutoff limit before even reaching the end of his first item which we think might be a personal best. It’s almost like he’s been feeling some pressure to live up to someone else’s example. Which is interesting… verrrrry interesting. Verrrrrrry inter- [Editor’s note: goddammit Jesse, stop dragging this out just to try and trigger the email length warning].
Alexandria’s Hottest Club Is… Another Fucking Pizza Place
A new pizza restaurant is about to open in Alexandria. “Which one?” you ask. Great question! It’s hard to keep track, isn’t it? For that matter, is it even worth trying, knowing that another pizzeria will probably open by the time you get around to visiting this one? So why bother figuring out what it’s called or where it’s located?? Is there any point in distinguishing it from the approximately five hundred other pizzerias that have opened for business in this city within the last year??? (It’s Jet’s.)
Alexandria has had quite a few slogans over the decades. “Easy to Get to, Hard to Leave” was one, and who could forget the somehow even sluttier-sounding “The Fun Side of the Potomac”? Yet all along, while our tourism board was busy coming up with increasingly promiscuity-coded taglines, our unofficial motto has always been, and continues to be, “Why Eat Anything Else When You Could Eat Pizza.” If Jane Austen lived in present-day Alexandria instead of Georgian-era Hampshire, she would start her novels with bon mots such as, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a city in possession of many pizzerias must be in want of more pizzerias.” Remember when the Latinos for Trump guy threatened that if Hillary won the election we’d have a taco truck on every corner? Well, we already have that here, except instead of taco trucks it’s pizza. Is this the future liberals want? Opinions may, and decidedly do, vary.
Are we exaggerating the extent of pizza’s culinary domination? Consider these facts. In addition to the impending opening of Jet’s Pizza in Arlandria, we’ve also got Pupatella coming in Old Town and Benny Diforza’s about to unleash their 28-inch monstrosities on Del Ray (because nothing says “wholesome families with toddlers” like jumbo slice, a food that should only be consumed with a minimum blood alcohol content of 0.12). Not to mention all the recent high-profile ribbon cuttings at Frank Pepe, Handover by the Slice, and Andy’s, which is also about to open another location in Carlyle. And if that weren’t enough, every time you turn around there’s a new &pizza behind you. Leave us alone, &pizza! Restaurant names should not begin with punctuation!!!
It’s all entirely out of control. Do you know how many pizzerias Alexandria has per capita now? Neither do we, but it feels like a lot. In fact, we have so many pizza places that Alexandria Living Magazine’s reader poll produced an unreadably cluttered graphic that doesn’t even include them all.
At this rate, every dining establishment in the city will serve pizza by 2029. Where does it end? At the risk of sounding like a card-carrying member of QAnon Beverley Hills, it’s hard not to conclude that local elected officials are somehow behind this. If City Council is nefariously masterminding a plot to double the city’s population so they can dive headfirst Scrooge McDuck-style into a swimming pool full of developer gold coins, then who’s to say they aren’t also working to hand the keys to the city over to Big Pizza? After all, they brought up easy transit access to pizzerias multiple times during the Duke Street in Motion public hearing this summer. This was either shameless constituent pandering or circumstantial evidence of wrongdoing, and whichever one it was they should be ashamed of themselves!
Listen. Do we love pizza? Of course we do, we’re not monsters! Any vehicle for melted cheese is automatically a top-tier food. Carbs are the building blocks of life. Marinara sauce prevents cancer (at least we think we read that somewhere, we are not doctors, please don’t report us to the Virginia Board of Medicine for practicing without a license). Stracci in particular is one of the most transcendent culinary experiences you can have in these parts, as long as you don’t attempt to go there at 6:30pm on a balmy Friday evening. We are not—we repeat—NOT haters. It’s just an opportunity cost issue. This is apparently a controversial statement on par with “four-story buildings are an appropriate height for an urban environment” or “people should calm down about scooters,” but… we occasionally like to eat other things!
“But Becky,” you say (because let’s be real, you know who’s writing this), “having an abundance of pizzerias allows many different styles of pizza to be represented!” No. Stop it. They’re all functionally the same (except for Chicago deep dish, which is an abomination [Editor’s note: Jesse thinks it’s great] that should be cast unceremoniously into the abyss from whence it came). Even if we accept the factual premise that pizza diversity is a thing, do we really need forty-five mostly mediocre variations on the same basic item [Editor’s note: Jesse thinks all pizza is great] when we don’t even have one (1) truly decent Thai or Chinese restaurant within city limits? Yeah, that’s right! We said it!!! [Editor’s note: Becky said it.]
We recognize this not only a minority opinion [Editor’s note: even among the staff of this newsletter] but also a futile one. It’s probably time to stop fighting pizza supremacy and accept the dominion of our wood-fired Neapolitan-style overlords [Editor’s note: Jesse greets them with open arms]. After all, denying reality is for anti-housing reactionaries who want to encase the entire city in amber like a mosquito that recently feasted on the blood of a velociraptor, and that’s just not us. So we’ll meet you at Stracci for a Bianca with salsa verde and extra olives—as long as it’s on a Wednesday.
The Alexandria Times Quote of the Week
“And just as responsible parents don’t let their children have a curfew of 3 a.m. because “everyone” is doing the risky behavior du jour, neither should Alexandria implement a transformational change on the justification that it’s been done elsewhere.”
Picking “staying out until 3am” as the risky behavior du jour when “going to the McDonald’s in Bradlee Center” was right there… I mean, it’s like she doesn’t even read her own newspaper anymore.
One Awesome Thing in ALX
Great news for the people who oppose Zoning for Housing because it “won’t create any actual affordable housing”: the city is also creating some actual affordable housing! Late last month, Housing Alexandria broke ground on Sansé and Naja, a mixed-use residential and commercial development in Arlandria-Chirilagua. When it’s done in 2026, the project is going to include 474 affordable units, including more than 100 that are “deeply affordable” for people making 40% of area median income—making it the city’s largest affordable housing project ever.
There are several extremely cool things about this, beyond the fact that it’s going to help residents stay in the neighborhood despite the Amazonification of nearby National Landi- [keyboard delivers pre-programmed electric shock] sorry, Crystal City. First of all, it’s a massive upgrade over what was there before, an empty parking lot that narrowly escaped being designated a national historic landmark by the Save Del Ray people. Also, local grassroots organizations Casa Chirilagua and Tenants & Workers United have been involved in the process to make sure the community’s needs would be met and their culture reflected in the project design. This shows up in the names of the buildings—the words “Sansé” and “Naja” come from Nahuat, a language indigenous to El Salvador. Sansé means “only one” and invokes a sense of a unified group, while Naja means “me” or “myself.” This combination evokes a harmonic equilibrium between the individual and the collective that would break area NIMBYs’ brains if they weren’t busy racistly complaining about the building names on Nextdoor.
By all accounts this project is going to be a really nice place for community members to call home. Local online commenters on all ends of the complaining-about-things spectrum will be glad to learn that the development will provide pedestrian safety improvements, bigger stormwater pipes, and new green space. It’s within a mile of the new Potomac Yard metro station, which if you’re the mayor is merely a brisk three-minute walk. And oh yeah, baby… saving the best for last… this bad boy is gonna come fully loaded with Ting internet!!! But seriously, it’s fantastic to see this level of investment in a neighborhood that’s such an important part of our community, and we can’t wait to see how it turns out.
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.