Hey Neighbor. Welcome to ALXtra.
Congratulations - you’re reading the inaugural issue of ALXtra! We picked quite a week to launch a newsletter about local issues in Alexandria, given the truly manic level of civic discourse we’re experiencing (I mean, have you seen Nextdoor??). In truth, the timing couldn’t be better - it’s actually why we’re here, why we’re launching this project, and why we wanted to start it now. It’s clear to us that the people of our fair city are clamoring for insightful, non-deranged commentary to help them make sense of what’s happening, and they’re sure as hell not getting it from the Alexandria Times.
That’s where we hope to come in. Like you, we love this weird little city with all our hearts, and we have a lot to say about it. What does it mean, really, to love Alexandria? Based on the public displays of emotion we witnessed this week, people around here seem to interpret those words in two wildly different and fundamentally incompatible ways.
On one side we have the folks who think that loving Alexandria means keeping it the way it is now (or the way it was when they moved here in 1995, a state of being that no longer exists due to, uh, how the passage of time works) and making sure it stays that way—in the immortal words of Outkast—forever, forever ever, forever ever. These people stand ready to obstruct the merest threat of transformation, as if change were a jogger and they’re a light pole in the middle of the track. They’re so singularly dedicated to their vision of Alexandria as a specific and immutable configuration of streets and structures that you almost have to hand it to them for their unswerving consistency (editor’s note: you do not, in fact, have to hand it to them).
The standard-bearers for this devotion to the status quo gathered—dozens of them!—on Monday evening in front of city hall. The participants in this NIMBY rumspringa made evident that they expect to be the voice of the people, so long as said people share their exact views about the shape of the world. They said a lot of things that are wrong and made no sense, but their love for maintaining their own particular quality of life was quite clear.
But we’re guessing that you—by voluntarily choosing to read this—harbor a different kind of love in your heart. The kind of love that leaves room for growth, for experimentation. A love that opens its arms instead of crossing them, that accepts the core of our city’s identity while acknowledging that essence can be expressed in a wide variety of forms – all of which have the potential to be wonderful and valid. This love thrives within the spirit of our community, not in the property values or the current number of available on-street parking spaces. It’s a selfless love. It’s a love that knows what we have here is genuinely fucking great, and that greatness can and should be shared with more people.
The city’s official event on Tuesday night to kick off three months of public engagement with the formal proposals in its zoning reform initiative laid out a strong case for loving the Alexandria of the future as much as the Alexandria of today (or yesterday, or 1995). What does that Alexandria look like, exactly? We don’t know! But we’re pretty excited to find out.
No matter what happens, the discussions that take place this fall about the future of the city—what it should look like and who’s allowed to live in it—will tell us a lot about how we love Alexandria, and why. We hope you’ll come along with us for the ride, but be warned: like most matters of the heart, we have a feeling this one’s gonna get messy.
Wait. Back Up a Second. Who The Hell Are You Guys, and What Am I Reading.
Ah, right. Introductions would probably be helpful. ALXtra is brought to you by Becky Hammer and Jesse O’Connell. We’ve each been creating digital culture and community in Alexandria for over a decade. You might know Becky from her incandescent hatred of pizza restaurants. You might know Jesse from eating hotdogs.
As for what to expect from ALXtra, our aim is to bring you a weekly (weekly-ish? we don’t want to set unrealistic expectations) digest of commentary and information based on what we think is interesting and important locally. If we do our job right, every edition of ALXtra will be 50% longer than the mayor’s newsletter and 200% less informative.
To be clear - we have no idea what we’re doing and we’re making this up as we go. We’re going to try out some bits and recurring segments, talk about things we find notable, and ideally make ourselves laugh (reader laughter not guaranteed).
Most importantly, we’re thrilled you’re here, we hope you like what you’re reading, and we want to see you back next week (next week-ish? please don’t hold us to this).
Local Discourse Power Rankings
- Zoning Reform (Last week: NR). Look… did you even read the first thousand words of this newsletter? Of course this topic was going to debut at #1. A new coalition, an outdoor rally, a city meeting, a former civic association president offering on Facebook to fist-fight the mayor… we suspect it might be a while until zoning reform relinquishes its place atop this list.
- Ting (Last week: NR). Municipal fiber is a worthy goal and an amenity appropriate for a city of our size and seriousness. But ohmygod can it really be this hard to successfully trench and repave a street in a somewhat timely fashion?? It feels like Ting has been digging in some neighborhoods since the invention of Al Gore’s internet, while temporary No Parking signs continue to appear and disappear like T&ES brigadoon. Please make it stop.
- Is a Rabbit a Chicken (Last week: NR). If we’d published our first issue a few weeks ago this would have been #1 with a bullet, but we still want to include it here to remember the heady few days when we all became experts in avian physiology and livestock regulations while grappling with the weighty epistemological question: what even is a rabbit, man?
- Duke Street in Motion (Last week: NR). Ah yes, our favorite current example of local policy object permanence: I do not ride the bus, therefore the bus does not exist. It’s remarkable, really, to see people caping-up for preserving the current state of a genuinely grim stretch of roadway over improvements that will make it better for drivers, bus-riders, and pedestrians alike.
- Pole Holes (Last week: NR). For a city that takes a lot of undeserved flak over relatively unremarkable and routine things, you’ve got to give them credit for going the extra mile to also generate totally unnecessary and truly weird things for people to get mad about. Did we expect a city contractor to have the profound lack of common sense to dig a big-ass hole in lane two of a running track? No, no we did not (but maybe we should have). Did we laugh when this immediately became a massive conspiracy about who ordered the code red on joggers living in Seminary Hill? Yes, yes we did.
The Alexandria Times Quote of the Week
“Like an aromatic soup, good policy shouldn’t be rushed - or overloaded with unnecessary ingredients.”
Listen, it’s been awhile since we read Stone Soup but I’m pretty sure this was not the lesson.
Alexandria’s Hottest Club Is… School
As of last week, it’s officially back-to-school season in Alexandria, which means it’s time to re-up your PTA membership and attempt to remember your children’s classmates’ parents’ names. Hot tip: word on the street is that the Potomac Yard Target still has an ample supply of calendars and other organizational aids to make sure you never miss soccer practice, Girl Scout meetings, or the 57 other extracurricular activities no one remembers signing up for. Luckily ACPS uses several dozen different applications to communicate with you and your children, so once you finally manage by sometime in November to login into (any) of them, you’ll be totally caught up on everything important happening.
If you don’t have kids and you’re sitting there thinking, “wow, I’m so glad none of this is my problem!” think again! We’ve got school zone speed cameras this year, baby, so slow the hell down during school hours or the city will send you a $100 ticket that it has the questionable authority to enforce if you don’t pay. Maryland drivers will, of course, continue to speed through our neighborhoods with reckless abandon, so be safe out there, everybody.
We Get Letters
One of the things we’re excited to do with this newsletter is make space for other people to share their thoughts and opinions (offer not valid if your thoughts and opinions are dumb). Seriously though - the Alexandria Times publishes like three letters a week (two letters once you subtract out Dino), and they’re mostly of the Newsmaxian “why can’t I drown the local government in my bathtub” variety. On the other hand, no one wants to have to wade through the cesspool of Facebook in search of someone saying something smart and thoughtful. So let’s see what we can do to help get some longer-than-a-xeet/skeet/whatever perspectives in front of an appreciative audience - email us at alxtranewsletter@gmail.com and we’ll share some of those letters in future editions.
One Awesome Thing in ALX
We’re going to close each edition of the newsletter with something happening around town that we think is pretty great. There’s a tendency for public engagement to mostly focus on things that are upsetting and controversial (and listen, we get it, that’s human nature). But that means that we’re often not making time to point out and talk about things that are genuinely cool and exciting! And that means we might get less of those things in the future, because no one has noticed or cared.
So this week, one awesome thing in ALX is that we’re the hometown of the world’s fastest man, three-time world champion Noah Lyles. If you missed his races at last week’s track and field world championships, you can watch the replays online (and you really should - unless you mean to tell us that you don’t have 19.52 spare seconds in your day to watch someone test the bounds of human physical achievement).
Lyles caused a little contretemps after his winning run by (correctly) pointing out that track has a true global championship, whereas the team left standing at the end of the American professional basketball (and baseball) season claims the mantle of world champion by supposition and fiat. In doing this, he caused a bunch of grown-ass men much wealthier than him to come across like whiny babies, while also ensuring that track got some of its best-ever earned media attention (non-BALCO edition) while reminding people about the sport’s most appealing quality: its meritocratic universality.
Lyles is a product of our public high school. He did not need to come up through some exclusive academy, or move away to a finishing school for future professionals. He built himself here, one straightaway at a time, on tartan rubber speckled by sweat and shared with tired dads grinding after weekend 5k dreams. Among high school sports, track and field is the most participated in by girls and second-most for boys. At a moment when our city—our country, really—is struggling with youth engagement, it is deeply meaningful for Lyles to share his champion spirit with us and inspire it in countless other young athletes. Yes, Noah Lyles now belongs to the world and the history books alike - but he will always also belong to us here in Alexandria too, as a reminder of how and where greatness can start.
This concludes an earnestly sappy tribute to running that was obviously written by Jesse. [Editor’s note: leave me alone, Becky!]
That’s all we’ve got for this week. If you’ve read this far a) what’s wrong with you but also b) thank you. We hope to see you back again - mash that subscribe button.
You can follow Becky @beckyhammer.bsky.social and Jesse @oconnell.bsky.social on Bluesky, or you can also find them begrudgingly continuing to xeet (no, stop that, ew) on Elmo’s website @beckyhammer and @jesseocnl.