Take Me to the River

The kids may still be in school for another week, and we haven’t yet reached the solstice, but we’ve already started measuring humidity in soup units so we’re officially calling it. This is our first issue of the summer!! And summer in Alexandria can only mean one thing: chafing. Also, spending $75 on kohlrabi at the farmers market. Also, trying to pick your kid up from camp at 3pm without getting fired. Okay, apparently it can mean a lot of things. But another one of those things is: getting out on the water! 

Did you know that the book and movie “A River Runs Through It” are actually about Alexandria? While this assertion is not technically accurate, it feels true because as a riverfront city we sure do love to take advantage of our prime location along the Potomac. Alexandrians are out there kayaking. We’re SUPing SUPping supping stand-up paddleboarding. We’re taking the water taxi to Nats games. We’re getting tipsy on party boats, and we don’t just mean sunset wine cruises on the Tall Ship Providence. We’re sailing. Our kids are sailing. We’re listening to “Sailing” by Christopher Cross. All of this is increasingly important to our local economy as well as to our general quality of life.

But how safe are our local waterways? Is it okay to touch them? This is a question you may be asking if you’re a recreational watersports enthusiast, or even if you’re just the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services trying to cool off on a hot day. The answer is that, at least when it comes to the Potomac, the water is probably cleaner than you think. But assessing whether it’s a good idea to let it come into contact with your body on any given day is kind of complicated.

There are unfortunately many different substances polluting the river, but the main issue when it comes to swim/boat/SUP safety is bacteria, like E. coli. This stuff can cause skin rashes, tummy troubles, respiratory infections, and other unfortunate maladies—you really don’t want to cross paths with it. Around here, E. coli gets into the water via sewage overflows from our outdated sewer system as well as rainwater that picks up germs from trash, pet waste, and goose droppings as it runs off of hard surfaces like streets and rooftops. Since both of these sources are what those in the biz call “wet weather pollution,” the safety of the water largely depends on whether it’s rained recently. As a result, a good rule of thumb is to stay away from the river after storms.

Other times, it might actually be okay to get splashed 💦 [Editor’s note: I… don’t think that’s the emoji you want here]. Potomac Riverkeeper’s 2024 water quality report card found that the sites the group monitors along the river passed public-health standards 71% of the time. (There’s an app called Swim Guide you can check for information on specific locations.) So, admittedly… not amazing? But admit it, that number is probably higher than you were expecting. It’s also so, so much better than it used to be. During the 1950s, the only organism that could survive at the bottom of the river was sewage worms. When rowers dropped their oars, they just let them float away because it wasn’t safe to reach for them. In the 1960s, Lady Bird Johnson put a floating fountain next to Hains Point that shot river water up into the air; when the wind started blowing it had to be shut off because people were scared it would spray National Airport with cholera. Thanks to the Clean Water Act, things have improved to a degree people back then didn’t think was possible. It’s important to recognize that accomplishment even while acknowledging that we have a long way to go. Can we hold both of these thoughts in our head at the same time? Hell yes we can. We’re very smart!

The thing about the Potomac watershed is that it drains a large area, of which Alexandria makes up only a tiny sliver. That means there’s a lot of pollution entering the river that we don’t control. Septic tanks are leaking in rural areas. Loudoun County is paving over forests so billionaires can build 12-bedroom wine fridges visible from space. Tens of thousands of cows, and a quarter-million Arlingtonians, are taking a shit upstream from us. It’s all very distressing. But we’re contributing to the problem too, so we have to do our part to try and fix it.

And we are! You may have heard (in this publication, many times–we’re kind of obsessed) about the tunnel underneath Old Town that’ll prevent most sewage overflows when it goes into operation next year. The city is also taking steps to reduce stormwater runoff pollution, but that’s a tougher nut to crack, since you can’t just build one big infrastructure project to catch it all and building a lot of little ones is expensive. For now the city is focused more on changing behavior as a strategy for reducing bacteria, like improving trash management and getting people to pick up after their pets. Unfortunately they are not focused on changing the behavior of the wild animals that are pooping all over the place, as the city’s bacteria action plan concludes: “Reductions from wildlife sources are not realistic.” Come on guys, that’s loser talk!! This is no time to be defeatist. Get out there and tell those ducks and muskrats to clean up after themselves!!!

The last thing we want to mention when it comes to local water pollution is the Chesapeake Bay of it all. The Bay is a primary legal driver for cleaning up Alexandria’s waterways, since it has a federal clean-up plan in place that requires all the jurisdictions in the mid-Atlantic region to take action. We would understand if your reaction to this was: Why should we care about cleaning up the Bay? Isn’t that, like gerrymandering and attempting to turn left from the right lane, a Maryland Problem? This is a valid point. But blue crab populations in the Bay are down 25% from last year because we keep trashing their home, so we have to turn things around if we want to keep cracking those crustaceans. Also, we benefit locally from cleaner water, so… win-win.

Chesapeake Bay Awareness Week actually starts tomorrow [Editor’s note: that’s right bitches, this essay is TIMELY] and there will be a stream cleanup event in Oronoco Bay Park at 9am. You should go. It’s fun to use the grabbers! But there are other important things you can do to contribute if you have a garbage phobia but still want to channel your inner Helpy McHelperson. Reduce storm runoff from your home (you’ll get a fee reduction!). Pick up after your dog–—yes, including at the dog park, you lazy asshole. Figure out how to get muskrats to stop pooping. Most critically, it’s important to support the bigger policy actions that we need to undertake in order to tackle this problem for real, whether those are big infrastructure projects or stronger regulations, because our current efforts aren’t likely to get us all the way to the finish line and we need to collectively invest in real solutions. Whatever else you do, get out on the river this summer! Enjoy the cholera-free mist of the water from your kayak. You can even pick up your oar if you drop it.

Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life

• In something of a dry run for hosting a training site during next summer’s World Cup, Episcopal High School will host Al Ain FC for this summer’s FIFA Club World Cup. This is important because it’s the only way we’ll know if we need to add another 20 or 30 feet of height to the new stadium light poles.
• The Virginia Tech Innovation Campus in Potomac Yard has been renamed the “Institute for Advanced Computing.” Now if you want to innovate you’ve gotta go all the way downtown to the Booz Allen Center for Innovation, it’s a longer commute and you have to make it past one of those military robot dogs just to get inside the lobby. So annoying.
• Alexandria will host a ceremony honoring Vietnam veterans next weekend because the event is being displaced from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Trump’s big boy parade. Honestly, not only is this a win for Alexandria, it’s a win for the veterans, the Mall doesn’t really seem like a place you want to be when the president is participating in an online slap-fight that could very well escalate into Elon Musk “accidentally” exploding one of his defective rockets over Constitution Avenue.
• This story—which is about a month and half old but it made the rounds on social media again last week—suggests that em dashes are now being interpreted as a sign of AI writing. If you’ve noticed how much our house style leans on that particular punctuation mark—and we’re sure you have—we guess the secret is out regarding how we manage to churn out the raw tonnage of words we do. That’s right! You caught us—we’re robots, babyyyyyyyy.

Local Discourse Power Rankings

1. Is Our Children Learning (Last week: NR). The ACPS redistricting process is rounding the final turn and heading into the home stretch, with last night seeing the final public hearing before one more steering committee meeting on June 11 and the full School Board meeting on June 12 yet to go. You can catch up on the most recent details with the latest summary blog from the steering committee members here, in addition to this link that puts all the final maps under consideration in one place (and includes one of those fun slide-y things!). It’s clear that everyone is working really hard at this stage: School Board is working hard to share comprehensive information and clear up misunderstandings; parents are working hard to advocate their perspectives and share analysis that seems to be missing; ACPS comms staff are working hard to confuse everyone as much as possible (ok this last bit is a joke, but only sort of). Despite all this effort though, it’s impossible to ignore that the vibes remain not great. It doesn’t feel like different groups working hard to come together, but rather different groups working hard to avoid pulling even further apart. Part of it is this sense that district leadership and the consultants heading up the process seem to be putting much of their effort into managing the School Board rather than being managed by the School Board. Part of it is just the awareness that the stakes for getting this right are really high. Ultimately—vibes are just vibes, and there’s still time to get a lot of this right. And in the meantime, manage your nerves by playing with the slide-y thing on the maps: it’s really cathartic, we promise.
2. Sanctuary Scaries (Last week: NR). Last week the Department of Homeland Security put us on a list of “sanctuary cities defying federal immigration law.” The fantastic statement the mayor released in response—affirming our shared commitment to compassion, civil rights, and the well-being of all residents—had everybody arguing about whether we actually are a “sanctuary city” (not a real thing), and whether it’s good or bad that we are or are not a sanctuary city (you can probably guess our opinion on this), and whether the inventory of sanctuary cities was written by ChatGPT (it definitely was), and whether DHS later deleted it because it was inaccurate or because they got yelled at by a bunch of sheriffs (who knows what mysteries lie in the hearts of men?). Meanwhile, we’re just over here feeling excited that Alexandria finally made it onto a list other than “Virginia Towns With the Most Fuckable Cobblestones” or “Top 10 Places Where Even the Local Dogs Are on LinkedIn.”
3. Glory Days, They’ll Pass You By (Last week: NR). The Glory Days Grill on Duke Street announced that it was closing its doors, and the outcry on various online platforms was… how can we put this… surprising? We had no idea this restaurant had such a devoted following. How many people were eating there regularly? It couldn’t have been that many if it went out of business. Were you eating at Glory Days? Why didn’t you invite us??? Based on our visits there, the culinary experience at Glory Days consisted of eating a burger that was fine and fries that were slightly more than fine, and walking out the door while thinking, “Well, that happened.” We’re glad to know that others were enjoying their time there and we extend our condolences to everyone in this category who received this news as a loss. Farewell, Glory Days. You were just okay, and apparently that was exactly what people needed.
4. Unnecessarily Aggressive Weather Phenomena (Last week: 2). May was an exceedingly wet month, with Alexandria receiving almost eight full inches of rain [Editor’s note: they wrote with zero sexual connotations whatsoever. Please clap!]. This included a soaker last Friday night that dumped so much water onto the fields that all the soccer games the next morning were obviously going to be cancelled, except that ASA didn’t cancel them until everybody actually showed up after dragging their kids to the middle school at 8:30 on a Saturday morning, and everybody was mad, and the parents wanted to go back to bed or at least go home and drink a coffee, but the kids wanted to go in the bounce houses because oh yeah did we mention there were bounce houses there because Soccer Fest was happening, which maybe was why ASA waited so long to cancel the games, because they wanted everyone to go to Soccer Fest, we’re not saying that’s definitely what happened but we’re also not not saying it, and no we’re not still annoyed about it why do you ask. But yeah anyway the good news is that we’re no longer in a drought.
5. Pride (In the Name of Bus) (Last week: NR). In an extremely Xzibit “we heard you like rainbows so we put a rainbow on your rainbow” move, our Pride crosswalks in Old Town are being joined this month by the latest DASH Pride Bus. Unveiled in late May in advance of participating in tomorrow’s WorldPride parade, this marks the second consecutive year that DASH has done a special wrap on a bus for Pride. The design this year—a rainbow winds through a cartoon representation of the Old Town waterfront complete with an image of City Hall and a trolley, as well as the Masonic Memorial and West End apartment buildings on the other side—is really great! Do we still have a few notes? Of course we do. The whole DASH trolley on a DASH bus thing feels pretty pretty self-congratulatory (we get it guys, some of your buses are delightfully whimsical) and we don’t see a single brick anywhere in the entire cartoon. The BAR would never!! We look forward to DASH making it up to us next year when the Pride Bus is wrapped to look like a Subaru with a Coexist bumper sticker.

Alexandria’s Hottest Club Is… Simpson Field

This past Monday night at Simpson Field, Old Town defeated Del Ray 24-23 in the seventh annual softball battle between the business associations for the two neighborhoods. It was a great back-and-forth game in which the offenses were helped mightily by the 200-foot outfield fence meant for 10-year-olds and not grown-ass men and women [Editor’s note: Jesse wants us to write that he went 2-for-2 with 2 runs scored while taking away a hit from Vice Mayor Sarah Bagley on defense, but what we’re actually going to write is that his second “hit” was little squib roller that didn’t make it past the pitcher’s mound and would have embarrassed a tee-baller]. For a couple hours though, it really was Alexandria’s hottest club! Mayor Gaskins threw out the opening pitch and made a great speech about supporting youth sports. The vice mayor played for the winning team. Sheriff Sean Casey was an umpire, and retired sheriff Dana Lawhorne complained that he wasn’t allowed to be an umpire anymore was an announcer and color commentator. The national anthem was performed by students from a local music school, there were food trucks and mascot races, and bleachers full of families enjoying a perfect early summer evening. 

As incredible as Monday night was (and it really was a phenomenal community event, one of those genuine moments where you realize and appreciate what a cool-ass place we live in) it was far from the only night this week when you couldn’t throw a rock at Simpson Field [Editor’s note: please don’t throw rocks at Simpson Field] without hitting someone you knew. Other nights of the week saw Little League playoff games at both Little Simpson and Big Simpson baseball fields. ASA filled the soccer pitches with practices most nights. The dog park was hopping, the pickleball courts were filled to capacity, and we haven’t even mentioned the line at the Flavor of Mexico food truck in the parking lot. At pretty much any point in the day, any day of the week, Simpson Park is one of our best examples of why outdoor recreation space is not a civic nice to have, but a need to have.

And we’re about to lose it for more than a year.

Starting next week, the baseball fields and the area surrounding them will close for a planned renovation and improvement. While this project won’t disrupt the entire complex (the dog park, soccer fields, playground, and pickleball courts will remain open) it will close the diamonds and make access and flow throughout the entire complex more challenging. To be clear, these improvements to the baseball fields are much needed and long overdue. But it’s also serving to highlight how generally under-invested the city is in our supply of fields of all sorts, not just baseball and softball diamonds. This is no great revelation to be sure—we are 15 square miles locked in on all sides and land is the one thing we’re not making more of—but it does make moments when we lose some of our already limited supply that much harder to bear.

We have some big opportunities coming up in the years ahead to make progress in this area. It starts with thinking creatively about Cameron Run or Chinquapin Park and getting the most out of those public resources. It will certainly involve working closely with ACPS on their slate of school rebuilds to maximize the public fields and recreation spaces adjoining those new buildings. If there is still a federal government after the president stops fighting with the guy that paid for the president, we should get back to talking with the National Park Service about how to do more together on Jones Point and under the Wilson Bridge.

Along with any new opportunities, the shortage of fields means that we also have to get better at doing our existing projects faster, so that these vital resources aren’t offline for longer than necessary. It’s one thing to lose Simpson for a year, but it’s another thing entirely to lose it for two years because of contracting delays and lax oversight. Just look at the recent Hensley Park renovation—the work on the fields has been done for months, but they’re sitting empty and unused because of delays in final punch-list items and an unpaved parking lot. At the end of the day we want our fields to be our hottest clubs because they are fun, great places to be, not because everyone is showing up at the same time to the only one or two we’ve managed to keep open and sufficiently drained—so let’s use every tool at our disposal to make it happen.

Overheard in ALX

From Virginia Living’s recent roundup of things to do in Old Town:

“Fresh vegetables, waterfront paintings, and everything in between cover Montgomery Park as children blow bubbles and couples hold hands—the scene is like a modern-day version of Georges Seurat’s ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.’”

Oh is that why everything looks like tiny dots? That’s a relief, we were about to make an appointment with the eye doctor.

One Awesome Thing in ALX

ACHS graduation was last week, but before the 984 graduates in the class of 2025 walked across the stage they first engaged in one of the more awesome traditions in our community: March of the Titans. This is when graduates of the high school go back and visit their elementary schools in their caps and gowns to see their old teachers and administrators, reflect on their academic journeys, and inspire the generation of students following in their footsteps.

It’s easy to focus on the downsides and challenges of having one single enormous public high school in the city (and we certainly have in these pages in the past) but it’s also important to point out the moments in which this model shines. The sense of togetherness that comes from every elementary school in the city ultimately feeding up into the same school, and for those students to return all together to the schools that got them started—it’s a demonstration of our public schools at their best, and reminder of why parents, school leaders, and local electeds all fight so hard for them. Moments like this—like March of the Titans—show us why all this is worth it, and how we all have a stake in preserving it for the future. Congrats to the class of 2025 in whatever you do next (unless it’s writing an overly-lengthy newsletter about local issues, please for the love of god don’t do that, we want so so much more for you than that).

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, like we did here, here, here, and here; 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.