The Road Taken

So how are we feeling Alexandria? How’s everyone handling their Monumental Hangover? It’s been a week and people have been reacting to the news in a variety of ways, but whether they wanted to build the arena or stop it, it seems like almost everyone has expressed a sense of letdown at the way it all unfolded.

It was emotionally taxing being in a citywide will-they-won’t-they situationship with Ted Leonsis.

Except that it wasn’t all for nothing—we learned a lot of lessons. Not just the obvious ones—like the importance of selecting a corporate advocacy slogan that doesn’t have Steve Buscemi with a skateboard energy—but deeper more fundamental ones about what to do when facing an important crossroads as a community. Because that’s where we’ve been for the last three months: standing at a forking path like the narrator of “The Road Not Taken.” Remember that poem? You had to memorize it for AP English? The one where the guy stood in a yellow wood trying to decide whether to construct a massive entertainment complex or sign another twenty year lease with the Target? That poem?

At this point the JBG Smith rendering should come with a trigger warning.

To be fair (to be faaaaaaair) there were some pretty significant differences between us and the narrator of the poem. [Editor’s note: why are we qualifying this, they all know we’re about to torture the shit out of this metaphor, they can’t be surprised by that at this point.] That narrator was just chilling, mood relaxed, open-minded, feeling pretty good about the outcome whichever way things went (“sorry I could not travel both”). Which was—and maybe you noticed this—not necessarily the vibe in our neck of the woods. We’ve written about the arena discourse a lot already, so suffice it to say that the various factions pitted against each other definitely did not think the outcome they opposed was “just as fair” as the one they favored. 

Of course, being divided as a community was not a new or unusual position for us to find ourselves in—but that familiarity doesn’t make that context in which to make decisions any less challenging. As hard as it is to choose a path forward when you’re one ambivalent poem narrator, it’s 158,309 times harder when you’re a city of people unfamiliar with saying maybe whose positions get entrenched early in the process because they feel blindsided by finding themselves standing at this crossroads in the first place. 

You may ask yourself, “What is that large tent next to the Metro station?” And you may ask yourself, “Didn’t we just fight for several months about zoning?” 

Operating in an environment of imperfect information certainly didn’t help. The narrator of the poem—who of course isn’t the same as the poet, but let’s call him Frobert for the sake of convenience—actually had a decent number of clues to draw upon. He could look ahead and see the freshness of the fallen leaves, the amount of wear on the grass in each direction. Maybe we would have felt a little confident standing at our own fork in the road if we’d likewise had more to go on than smell-test-flunking assurances that the Caps could charge $300 for valet bike parking and $65 for a hot dog. With change-skeptical residents playing a significant role in most of our recent local conversations, anyone coming in with a proposal to remake an entire neighborhood really needs to double-check the shit out of their math first or they’re setting themselves up to have a bad time. 

Another thing about Frobert, he got to take his time at the fork in the road. “Long I stood”? Couldn’t be us. The whole thing was a whirlwind—only about 100 days—and it was over before we had the chance to have the public dialogue and examination of the official final proposal we anticipated. In fact, the final choice wasn’t even ours, it was made for us by someone else. Machinations and maneuvering in Richmond denied us the agency that’s the core narrative mechanism of this poem. [Editor’s note: please tell us you are still hanging with this poem metaphor, we are well into sunk-cost territory with this thing and can’t do a rewrite]. Regardless of your satisfaction with the ultimate outcome, we hope most of us can agree that not controlling our own destiny as a community is frustrating, and something that we should examine and learn from to better inform future opportunities. It just doesn’t feel good to get shoved from behind in a direction we hadn’t yet decided was the one we all wanted to travel.

We need to manifest more of this energy.

But at the end of the day, we are like Frobert: we ended up taking one of the roads before us, for better or for worse. Because that’s how life is. You can’t stand still. You can’t save the other path for another day. You have to keep moving, and as you do, you foreclose all the other possibilities that had previously been open to you in favor of one single reality, leaving you wondering what might have been if you’d done things differently. Where would the other path have led? What would the future of Alexandria be like if we actually got the arena? Would we have solved the real concerns (the parking, the traffic, the ongoing cost of services) and been glad that we did the hard work of trying? Would the project have been the financial boondoggle and environmental disaster that its skeptics predicted? Or some other, secret third thing? Most importantly, what would Mayor Wilson have looked like in the Slapshot costume?? We’ll never find out and now we have to live with that fact. Maybe we’ll say that the path we took worked out for the best, that it was the one less traveled by, but that wouldn’t be based on any sort of objective truth. It would be a story we necessarily tell ourselves in order to all move forward together.

The most ardently wished-for dreams die the slowest.

Ultimately all that matters, the thing that will make all the difference, is what we do next. We’re on the road now, so let’s fucking go. Life is a highway and we’re gonna ride it all night long, as Robert Frost probably also wrote. We still have a revenue problem—what are we going to do about it? We still have empty land next to a Metro station—how are we going to use it? What policies can we adopt to make ourselves a more attractive place to do business—without getting rolled by corporations? Can we look not just at Potomac Yard but at other places around the city that present their own opportunities—Carlyle, Eisenhower, Landmark, Braddock? Let’s give ourselves a longer lead time to socialize ideas and have the necessary conversations. Let’s dream big, but keep ourselves realistic about the prospects of crowdsourcing ideas from Nextdoor. (Who could have predicted that the people yearn for roller skating and petanque?) 

And who knows? We might find ourselves at another fork in the road soon (Commanders… call us), and we need to be ready. We’re already a little older and wiser than we were three months ago. Earning that wisdom wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t what any sane person would describe as fun—but that wisdom is ours now, and that’s not nothing.

Housekeeping Notes

So the newsletter you’re reading this week looks more or less like all the ones that have come before it. But going forward, we’re going to start playing with the format a little bit—both to keep things fresh, but also to manage the workload of the one of us that went out and decided he needed a side-hustle for some inexplicable reason.

We haven’t decided what that might mean in terms of switching to new recurring segments, or dropping old ones, but if you have ideas or suggestions on things you’d like to see us try out let us know in the comments! We’ve joked about a book club before, but maybe it’s a book club! [Editor’s note: Jesse! You don’t have time to read a book! We literally just got done saying you barely have time to write the goddamn newsletter!]

Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life 

• Junction Bakery in Del Ray has started selling “crookies,” which is apparently a name for a croissant stuffed with cookie dough and not a new term of endearment for Donald Trump supporters.

• Speaking of Trump, you have the opportunity to stare directly into a solar eclipse on Monday (but we recommend using glasses). 

• Alexandria is once again nominated for a List. We must all vote to secure our position on the List. Nothing else matters if we are not on Lists!!!

It is our solemn duty as Alexandrians to make sure that “The Hills” star Lauren Conrad never says this to us.

Local Discourse Power Rankings

1. Not in My Potomac Yard (Last week: 2). In a fitting coda to this frantic 100 days, news has gotten around that Target has already renewed their lease. Which is a huge relief because while we were ready and willing to chain ourselves to the front of the store alongside, as near as we can tell every other resident of the city, it wasn’t like we were excited to do that. The city jail is struggling with staff vacancies as it is, they really didn’t need the additional headache of figuring out how to lock up 158,309 people for civil disobedience.

2. Don’t Zone Me Bro (Last week: 5). After all our circuit court judges recused themselves tied for first place in a heated game of “not it,” the jurist who drew the short straw to preside over the Coalition for a Livable* Alexandria’s (*offer not valid if you’ve ever taken a bus for any reason) Zoning for Housing lawsuit is none other than the same guy who was appointed to the Arlington Middle Middle case. Holy shit this man has terrible luck! You think this was his aspiration when he was toiling through law school and dreaming of ascending to the bench? Hell no, he wanted to do normal judge shit like hang out on billionaires’ superyachts, not listen to litigants earnestly arguing that their rights are infringed when they see two cars parked in the same driveway. Listen man, you can still get out of this, it’s not too late for us to see if Aileen Cannon is available.

3. “Alexandria” (Last week: NR). Look, it’s one thing when Fairfax County conspires with local TV stations to pin crimes committed at the Route 1 Chuck E. Cheese on our fair city. It brings us continual shame to be associated with that deranged mouse, but we’re used to it by now. It’s another thing entirely when the Virginia Lottery, an independent agency of the Commonwealth of Virginia, can’t correctly identify the jurisdiction in which a winning Powerball ticket was sold. You’d think with the $867 million they raked in last year they could afford to buy a goddamn map. 

4. You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (Last week: NR). The city is adding physical protection to four existing bike lanes to make it more difficult for drivers to run over cyclists. Upon hearing this news, local motorists stopped whatever they were doing and stared into the distance while muttering “challenge accepted” like Neil Patrick Harris on How I Met Your Mother.

The Alexandria Times Quote of the Week

“I don’t think we should ever be in the business of discouraging people from wanting to live in an awesome place like Alexandria.”

It’s like we’ve always said, this is a great paper full of smart people with smart ideas. No wait, where are you going, don’t go look that u-

We (Occasionally) Get Letters

So we know we said that the newsletter might be a little more brisk and efficient going forward, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can still get the dreaded POST EXCEEDS EMAIL LENGTH warning every issue like usual if you help us out! Write us a thoughtful, funny email of your choosing and we’ll try to run it. And if you do your best Aaron Sorkin humping a thesaurus impression, it might even feel like Jesse is still here full-time!

One Awesome Thing in ALX

You may remember when we wrote about the giant fucking sewer tunnel that was Alexandria’s hottest club of summer 2023. Well, we have good news and bad news. The bad news is that soon nobody will be able to go to that club anymore. The good news is that it’s because the club will be full of sewage.

This is by design, of course, as the point of the tunnel is to capture overflows from Old Town’s antiquated combined sewer system and send that waste to the treatment plant instead of letting it pollute the Potomac. Clean water is pretty awesome, but the specific awesome thing we wanted to highlight today is the machine responsible for doing the digging. Her name is Hazel and she’s basically like the very hungry caterpillar of children’s book fame except that instead of munching her way through artistically drawn fruits she spent the last year consuming an unfathomable amount of dirt. 

She thicc.

Hazel (named after Hazel Johnson, the mother of the environmental justice movement) was special-ordered from a factory in Germany just to complete this job, since each tunnel is unique and typically requires a purpose-built machine. She overcame many obstacles to get here, including a covid outbreak in her factory and concrete supply-chain issues caused by the war in Ukraine. Once she got to Alexandria, she got to work digging up to 100 feet of tunnel per day. Finally—after 16 months underground—she completed her 2.2-mile-long mission in March, emerging out the other end only 4 millimeters off target. She was then hoisted out of the tunnel with a big-ass crane looking only slightly worse for wear compared to the state in which she originally went down there. Frankly, we’ve looked rougher than this the morning after a night on the town so we’re not in any position to judge.

If you’re still in touch with your inner child, or you have an actual child, or you just like seeing extremely cool shit, you can come meet Hazel in person on Saturday, April 13, where she’s on display at the corner of Union and Oronoco. City Council officially proclaimed this date to be Hazel the Tunnel Boring Machine Day, and you know when the mayor hereunto sets his hand and causes the Seal of the City to be affixed to something it’s kind of a BFD. There will be activities! You can bring your dog! Don’t miss your chance to join the party because Hazel will soon be sent to the great tunnel boring machine playground in the sky. But we’ll send her off with gratitude because next year, after completion of a 12-story-tall underground pump, the tunnel will go fully online and we’ll all have a cleaner river to enjoy.

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.