Living Dangerously

The world can feel like a scary place these days, and not in a fun “let’s watch a classic horror movie and then frolic through a haunted house while dressed in costume as a limited edition Stanley cup and Slutty Mr. Potato Head” kind of way. There are wars going on. Natural disasters are fucking shit up in manners and locations heretofore unexperienced. In one month we may have to face the distressing prospect of JD Vance–a man who should not be put in charge of anything more important than writing books that are later adapted into movies with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 24%—possibly being one Big Mac-crusted heartbeat away from the presidency of these United States. It’s a lot. But if you ever find yourself getting overwhelmed thinking about all the danger we’re facing from national and international crises, just take a deep breath and remember: there’s plenty of danger right here in Alexandria that you should also be worrying about.

We’re not talking about the obvious threats you can see with the naked eye, like Maryland drivers or the belligerent geese that seem to derive some sort of deranged pleasure from skirmishing with joggers on the Mount Vernon Trail. No, today we’re talking about the dangers you can’t see—the stuff that’s all around us that’s hazardous to our health. 

We know! This is an incredibly cheerful topic to discuss! But listen, it’s officially spooky season and the mind does wander toward the macabre as the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead grows thin. Well and also that whole lead paint at Naomi Brooks Elementary thing. You probably heard about this! A contractor replacing windows decided to sprinkle lead paint dust around the classrooms like they were Tinkerbell preparing to fly the children to Brain Damage Neverland and the whole school had to be shut down for over a week while it got cleaned up. It was an upsetting incident! It was also a good reminder that even though most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about environmental contaminants, they can still throw a wrench into our lives at unexpected moments, whether that’s through a health scare or an unexpected TEN-DAY break from school [Editor’s note: 😭😵💀].

The thing about toxic substances like lead paint is that they don’t just appear in our environment on their own. They don’t check self-help books out of the library and then manifest themselves into being through the power of positive thinking. Somebody puts them there and causes us to be exposed to them—actual people making actual decisions. 

In some cases, those decisions were made a long time ago and like many questionable choices made by previous generations (racism, cable news, disco) we’re still dealing with the consequences of them today. Lead paint and asbestos are likely present in any Alexandria building constructed before the late 1970s when those materials were phased out. Lead drinking water pipes—oh yeah, did we mention in addition to the scary shit around us there’s scary shit below us too?—were commonly used before 1940 and can still be found lurking in the older parts of the city. Virginia American Water says there are about 2,000 utility-owned lead service lines in ALX, a total which doesn’t include lead pipes in private homes. Building materials like lead paint and asbestos don’t typically need to be removed because they don’t cause unsafe exposure unless they flake off or become airborne (or get sprinkled around school windows as part of the world’s most disruptive Peter Pan cosplay). But lead water pipes do need to be replaced, and that process is underway in Alexandria thanks to funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021.

In other cases it’s still very much a live question whether we should continue putting ourselves in contact with potentially harmful substances. In recent years the city has faced scrutiny for replacing some grass athletic fields—oh yeah, did we mention the scary shit OUTDOORS too???—with types of synthetic turf about which public health experts have raised concerns because they contain materials like arsenic, PFAS, and microplastics. There’s also been some debate over city contractors using a process called “cured in place pipe lining” (CIPP) to fix broken sewer pipes, which is cheaper than digging them up and replacing them but emits fumes that can make people feel sick. Ask us how we know [Editor’s note: Becky stares directly into the camera like Jim from The Office while thinking about the CIPP project on her block that lasted until 3am on Tuesday night].

And last but not least, there’s the city’s ongoing attempt to figure out whether it has legal authority to round up all the gas-powered leaf blowers and dump them into the nearest volcano so they can stop turning our city’s air into a soup of carcinogens and particulate matter. This saga has dragged out for years, but Alexandrians recently got a glimmer of hope when the Virginia attorney general issued an advisory opinion saying we can ban them under our pre-existing authority to regulate noise. Hell yeah Jason Miyares (a sequence of words we have never typed before), let’s fucking go!

Here at ALXtra we often voice our appreciation for the fact that Alexandria is a city that makes decisions thoughtfully. When leaders prioritize cost concerns over public health risks when carrying out projects, it’s because that’s the input they’re getting from the community. If we want them to make decisions differently, then we need to speak up. We also need to demand accountability when city contractors create unnecessary hazards.

The good news is that if the responsibility for past and present contamination falls locally, that means it’s also within our power to clean it up. Unlike global threats like climate change—which we should still also do our part to address—we can actually tackle the issues mentioned above on our own. We don’t have to wait for the G7 heads of state to get together at Camp David and decide on a course of action. And thank goodness for that because we’ve heard that Olaf Scholz is a real pain in the ass [Editor’s note: we have not heard this and in fact had to google “who is the chancellor of Germany and when did it stop being Angela Merkel”]. More importantly, solving local problems is… literally what local government is for! If our local tax dollars are used for anything at all, it should be for parades pickleball courts dog parks keeping us healthy and safe. We know the city can do this well when it chooses to–for example, ACPS has made huge strides on remediating asbestos in schools over the last five years. So as we start to look ahead to a new City Council term let’s ask our leaders to prioritize what really matters: annexing Shirlington our health.

Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life 

• ALXnow continues to ask the hard questions that need to be asked, with a recent poll gauging reader opinion on whether our fair metropolis has too many goddamn banks, pizza places, or coffee shops. Naturally the top vote getter was pizza places BANKS?! It was BANKS?! The hell is wrong with you people!!
• The Washington Post reviewed local bagel places to determine the best in the DMV, and two Alexandria joints (Del Ray’s Bagel Uprising and Old Town’s Chewish Deli) made the cut of finalists reviewed by judges, on their way to finishing 9th and 4th respectively (out of 9 in the group). Call Your Mother checked in at 7th place, and given their Old Town location we guess this means 33% of the best bagels in the region can be found in Alexandria! Mazel tov! Anyway click through to read the reviews, as well as see a video of someone squeezing and tugging a bagel in a way that Gov. Youngkin has most definitely banned from watching on the internet in the commonwealth. 
• The Lee-Fendall House Museum is having a Civil War hospital themed event called “Screams and Disease” later this month, shamelessly stealing our nickname for city council public hearings during cold and flu season.
• Move over pygmy hippos and linebacker-sized penguin chicks, we have a new animal celebrity in town and it’s Barnabas, the rescue basset hound that was just named the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria’s animal of the year. Has he gone viral on TikTok yet? No, but he also hasn’t bitten anyone in the knee, so that’s Barnabas 1, Moo Deng 0 as far as we’re concerned. (Pesto is perfect in every way and thus will not be included in this comparison.)

Local Discourse Power Rankings

1. Heart on the Avenue (Last week: NR). This past Saturday was another wildly successful installment of the Best Day in Del Ray™ aka Art on the Avenue. Our annual bacchanalia of candles, maps, spices, jewelry, [squints] sheet metal crabs?, and yes, art, was in particularly fine form this year with near-perfect weather and a great crowd. There are so many things that make AoA great: the spectacle of watching 50,000 people from across the region trying to parallel park on Del Ray’s narrow streets; letting your kids wander freely down the middle of Mount Vernon Ave; chatting with friends and neighbors while surreptitiously glancing at what they’ve bought and wondering where they’re going to hang that stained glass reproduction of a historic manhole cover. And speaking of near-perfect weather, this past week has reminded us that Alexandria really shows out in the fall. There is something about that crisp edge of air that makes all of the great qualities of this town pop a little bit more. We don’t know if cities can have a seasonal vibe, but Alexandria feels like a fall town to us—the strolling and vibing that you can do in so many neighborhoods across the city just feels more right this time of year.
2. Is Our Children Learning Lead-ing (Last week: NR). We touched on this above, but it’s worth saying a little bit more about the failed This Old House LARPing exercise that went awry at Brooks last week. This was like “The Aristocrats” joke version of public works and public communication, as every subsequent thing absurdly escalated on the last. First the window replacement that was supposed to be completed over the summer ran behind schedule, which added insult to injury because this project was the reason the neighborhood lost its final chance to dunk Mayor Wilson in the dunk tank at the Rosemont Fourth of July party. Then parents were surprised by a ParentSquare alert that school would be closed for one day, followed by a second alert that school would be closed for one week, an ominous trend in the wrong direction. Communication improved happened again a few days into the closure when parents were invited to an informational webinar that felt like watching a hostage video where the only captives were useful facts. “Where is the lead exactly?” “How much of it has been cleaned up?” Parents had to extract this information like a SWAT team forced to operate inside the Zoom Q&A chat function while ACPS administrators answered questions as vaguely as possible in front of a banner reading “We’re Definitely Handling This.” Fortunately the school has reopened and it seems like all the kids and staff are okay. The ordeal also had a silver lining in that a few Brooks parents had their first experience creating online petitions, a critical life skill for all ACPS families.
3. Off the Veep End (Last week: 1). It’s been a fairly routine couple of weeks for Alexandria’s favorite Maybelline spokesmodel, with no major new developments on the chalk terrorism front and what have you—but we did want to take a moment and talk about the motorcade. It’s, uh, a whole lot of motorcade? If you’ve had the distinct pleasure of witnessing that thing wind its way around town like some eldritch serpent made of Chevy Suburbans, you no doubt noticed that it seems to be 30% longer than seems strictly necessary. First you’ve got the CHiPs guys, and then the marked cars, and then so so so (honest to god, so) many black SUVs. It kind of makes us wonder if the Secret Service heard how much our city likes parades and in some misguided effort to do us a solid they were like “spontaneous daily parades!!!” and if that’s the case, guys… we’re good.
4. You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (Last week: NR). This week City Council approved a project to redesign the King Street service road in front of Bradlee Shopping Center, turning it one-way westbound with a bus lane and bike trail. This inspired a lot of the same old online chatter about how bike lanes are a waste of money because cyclists don’t exist and also simultaneously are evil. We sure love to play the hits in this town, don’t we! Bless our hearts. Anyway, we also learned during the Council debate that another reason not to do this is the long line of cars that appears at McDonald’s every night at 9:05pm, which must be accommodated within the service lane at all costs. Look, we’re no strangers to late night McFlurry cravings ourselves so we can sympathize to some extent, but surely this extremely specific concern could be addressed through another mechanism than killing the entire project? For example, Council could appropriate funds for a T-shirt cannon that shoots Happy Meals into the windows of waiting cars to speed the process along. Just spitballing! After all, local policymaking is fundamentally about sending out mailers protecting our health thinking creatively to ensure Alexandrians can acquire McNuggets at any hour of the goddamn day.

Overheard in ALX

From Alexandria Living, City Manager Jim Parajon talking about the upcoming redesign and remodel of City Hall:

“City Hall and Market Square should reflect this great city, our history, and the commitment to equitable services that our community expects.”

So you agree then… it should be an enormous George Washington-themed dog park.

We Get Letters

From a local parent, a long but extremely important letter about ACPS enrollment:

I want to talk about the genuine (but solvable!) capacity crisis unfolding in plain view in our West End schools, most especially Patrick Henry. The K-8 enrollment at Patrick Henry is over 1,040 students, in a building that was built with an educational capacity for 840 students. That’s a 124% utilization rate, far exceeding ACPS's “ideal utilization” of 90%-110%. As you can imagine, when a school is bursting at the seams it leads to:

•  The largest average elementary class sizes in the city, which means our teachers have less time and attention to spend with each student in their class.
• A crowded cafeteria with long lines, leaving many students with not enough time to eat their lunch. At a school in which 85% of the student body is economically disadvantaged and food insecurity is an acute concern for a significant number of students, those meals at school may be the only meals a lot of our students have in a day. So it’s a real problem if there are so many kids in line that they don’t have time to actually eat their meal.
•  Long waits for the bathroom, and listen, you haven’t truly lived until you’ve tried to tell dozens of 6 year olds that they have to wait because there’s only one bathroom for 25-27 kids.
• A crowded playground, and other active or transition spaces, which lead to greater chances for injury and illness. This is to say nothing of the excess wear that results—the playground fence has been broken (literally falling over) multiple times over the last year. The one climbing structure had broken support brackets for months.
•  School events in the evening must be limited to those who register, or events must be split over multiple nights, which means fewer families can participate. Patrick Henry used to have Heritage Night (long before many other schools) which is important in a school as richly diverse as Patrick Henry, but we haven’t been able to have it in years because a schoolwide event would violate the fire code.
• Things like “cart classes” (art on a cart, Spanish on a cart, you get the idea—it’d be cute if it didn’t want to make you cry) and losing teacher workrooms, Special Ed classrooms, and other spaces from their intended purpose to find places to put more kids.
• Most distressingly, a situation in which the fourth largest school in the division after only ACHS, Hammond, and GWMS, has exactly: one (1) school social worker; one (1) school nurse; one (1) school psychologist; and one (1) advanced academic services specialist.

I guess what I want to know is—instead of the genuinely harrowing educational environment described above, couldn’t we just… balance enrollments across all the schools in the district? There are currently elementary schools under capacity, some as low as an under 80% utilization rate. Take the beautiful new Douglas MacArthur Elementary School for example, a building that was built for 840 students, exactly the same number of students Patrick Henry is built for. And yet Patrick Henry has 1,043 students and Douglas MacArthur has 666 students.

Parents and staff have been advocating for years now to adjust enrollment clusters and find other solutions to balance out enrollments when necessary in between redistricting years (the next of which won’t be completed and take effect until Fall 2026).

The refusal by ACPS leadership to take any action is deeply frustrating, and sends the message that schools like Patrick Henry that are significantly overutilized just have to tough it out and figure out how to keep making miracles for a few more years, despite there being space in other buildings to more equitably distribute students across this 15 square mile city. It is absolutely true that transportation is a real challenge… but at some point we have to decide what’s worth the struggle. We can make those hard but worthy choices to actually do something, or we can continue to send the message to West End families—and Patrick Henry in particular—that a two-tier educational system in Alexandria is OK, because it’s just too hard to figure out how to stop new enrollment at a school bursting at the seams and simply send new enrollees to another school that has capacity. This ongoing choice to take the easy way out makes a mockery of ACPS’s motto “Equity for All.”

We love Patrick Henry, but just because we’re somehow making magic out of the shit sandwich being served by ACPS doesn’t mean our kids and families—our predominantly black and brown and immigrant and working class families—don’t deserve better, and don’t deserve, at minimum, what other schools in town get: a right-sized student population, appropriate staff-to-student ratios, and safe and functional outdoor facilities.

This fixable problem won’t get fixed without us all standing up and saying enough is enough. If you’re ready to add your voice urging action, please sign up to speak or provide written comments at the next school board meeting. 

Not much we can add to that fantastic letter, other than to thank the writer for her ongoing advocacy on this issue and to encourage our readers to think about clicking that link and adding their voices on this critical topic.

One Awesome Thing in ALX

If you’re reading this newsletter we’re willing to wager that you know quite a few things about the Pork City [Editor’s note: come on man]. But even if you only knew one thing about Alexandria, it’s probably that we still have a town crier. We’ve featured him plenty in these pages pixels, and he’s a steadfast fixture of other local media coverage as well as a reliable presence at significant city events. We want to be clear—it is unquestionably cool that we have a town crier! For a city that draws a great deal of its identity from the past, this role and the performance of it is a tangible link to that history. It puts a smile on your face even as it reminds you of what we once were and still are now.

Our current town crier Ben Fiore-Walker recently traveled to Provincetown, MA to compete in an international town crier competition and ended up being featured in the WBUR piece about the cry-off cry-athon cry-abration crier contest. In it he talks about his role leading parades (naturally) but also how he’s an important ambassador for the city, and how the town crier captures the imagination of children. 

So the next time you’re at a city event and you see the town crier, take a moment to appreciate how neat it is that we’ve maintained this tradition. In an era when the word passes more commonly through a bleating New York Times alert in your pocket, and news is fragmented across competing and increasingly untrustworthy sources, it feels important to appreciate an “Oyez!” or two and remember a time when shared truth was delivered from under a tricorn hat.

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.

ALXtra is a free-to-read newsletter about current events in Alexandria, Virginia. Subscribe to get it delivered directly to your inbox. Paid subscriptions give you access to the comments. Revenue from subscriptions gets used in the following ways: 1) a third goes into a charity fund, and every time that fund hits $500 we’ll make a donation to a local charity in the name of ALXtra’s readers and we’ll feature and write about that organization; 2) another third of the money will go toward investments in the newsletter; and 3) the final third of the money goes toward self-care for your two intrepid authors.