Year in Rear View

Well folks, we made it through this year. Dare we say… not one of our best? We’re not going to rehash all the ways 2025 force-fed us endless misery like we were foie gras geese trapped in Dante’s third circle of hell—you were there, you remember what happened. Needless to say the last twelve months did not have a rich, buttery texture but very much did feel like an unethical, inhumane, and sadistic form of torture that resulted in permanent damage to our livers.

But it’s not all Auld Lang Whine around here. There were some good things that happened in 2025! Yes, really! Before we put this year behind us once and for all, walking away from it without looking back like it’s an exploding gas station and we’re John Malkovich in Con Air, let’s take just a couple of minutes to acknowledge the genuinely positive events that buoyed our spirits and left their marks on our city. Looking back on them allows us to recognize not just what we accomplished but also how much resilience we showed along the way. So without further emotional processing, let’s hand out some awards to the highlights that made this year slightly less cursed: our 2025 ALX superlatives.

Best Conversion of Lemons into Lemonade: our local economy. Listen, we’re not saying Alexandria’s economy is doing amazing, sit down Jim Parajon. But despite the DOGEing and the tariffing and the government-shutdowning, we’ve managed to score some impressive economic victories, from bringing in $1 billion of tourism revenue to keeping the National Science Foundation here in the city to attracting some new businesses to the West End. We may be hanging onto the side of the fiscal cliff by our fingernails, but our economic development team recently got a manicure and those keratin strengthening treatments are really effective.

Best Legislating Under Pressure: city council. It was a year of non-splashy but legitimately important policy wins here in Alexandria despite our local legislators operating in a challenging political environment (translation: they got yelled at a lot for things that weren’t their fault). They approved a ton of housing—640 new units in Potomac Yard, plus a number of smaller projects—and updated various planning documents to ensure future growth continues to be thoughtful and intentional. They tackled flooding (moving forward on Waterfront Park solutions), pedestrian safety (closing another block of King Street to cars), and quality of life (giving gas-powered leaf blowers 18 months to hightail it out of town before they get rounded up and ritualistically crushed by a fleet of heavy vehicles at next year’s Tons of Trucks). The world around us may feel like an increasingly chaotic dystopian nightmare but at least within city limits our elected leaders have got their heads down, doing their jobs, trying their damnedest to make Alexandria a safer, drier, more acoustically pleasant place to live.

Biggest Reduction in Neighbor-on-Neighbor Aggression: all of us. Have you noticed that Alexandria residents didn’t try to incite any intramunicipal civil wars this year? No massive local controversies, no flame wars. Maybe you’re someone who thrives on conflict and don’t think this is a positive. If this describes you, please seek professional help immediately. The rest of us will be enjoying this rare period of peace and goodwill amongst neighbors. Honestly, the only real losers here are the businesses that make yard signs. Hang in there, guys.

Coolest National and/or Statewide Recognition (tie): DASH bus, human rights equality score, sewer tunnel, student journalists, Inova hospital, library director, AlexWest small area plan, stormwater program. Alexandria punches way above our weight for a city of our size and we should never, ever stop congratulating ourselves for being so fucking awesome.

Donald Trump’s Worst Nightmare: our community. This is a city of people who enjoy making themselves a huge pain in someone else’s ass, and we put that predilection to good use this year when it came to the federal government. Alexandrians turned out in massive numbers at protests against the regime, and our city government took every possible opportunity to tell the feds to go suck an egg (ripping DHS a new one when they put on their “sanctuary cities” list, joining the lawsuit challenging the Department of Education’s Title IX funding cuts, and blasting the administration’s “tactics of fear” in the council statement about the sheriff and ICE). Last month’s statewide election results sent a pretty stark message rebuking the way things are going. And throughout all of it, members of the community have found ways to help each other stay afloat by reporting ICE sightings and donating to NeighborShare ALX and other mutual aid networks. Remember our bake sale that raised a ton of money for immigration legal aid?? All of this has us feeling a lot better about our fellow humans than we did at this time a year ago.

More positive things happened this year than you thought, huh?! But we’re running short on space, so let’s move on to a superlatives lightning round:

• Most Remembered Sports Team: the 1971 Titans
• Funniest Map: backyard chicken legality
• Most Success Not Getting Sued by Taylor Swift: the Eras bar
• Fanciest Wildlife: Sir Alex aka Gregory aka Pickles
• Hardest-Working Wildlife: Ben Brenman Park beaver
• Best Picture of Wildlife in the Alexandria Times: Squirrel eating a Twizzlers
• Greatest Quantity of Spice Packets Sent to Our Homes: Penzeys “Resist”
• Most Thorough Public Engagement: Ewald Park
• Best Deployment of Guerrilla Street Art: Shirlington annexation poster war
• Signage That Will Live on the Longest in Our Hearts: Yates Pizza Palace Opening Soon
• Most Unintentionally Funny Sentence Written in a Local Newsletter: The big beautiful bill is a hat trick
• Most Enjoyable and Abundant Reader Engagement on an Issue of ALXtra: pronunciation of “ParkMobile”

Hopefully all of this reminiscing has reminded you that 2025 was not utterly devoid of accomplishments and joy. We’ll close this essay out by looking ahead to the new year, which with any luck will provide Alexandrians even more reasons to celebrate. The state legislative session that starts next month should provide an opportunity to enact some of our city’s priorities (can we get some fucking tap water at the Birchmere already???), and we have high expectations for some impending local projects to provide our neighborhoods with safer road infrastructure. Most importantly, in 2026 we are finally going to ACTIVATE THE GIANT SEWER TUNNEL! YES!!! YESSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!

In all seriousness, after the presidential election last year when it looked like democracy was going tits up, we wrote about how this community would be the thing that got us through the next four years in one piece. One year in, we’re happy to say that we were right [Editor’s note: it’s true, but could we try to sound less smug about it?]. We’re pretty sure we’ll continue to be right next year [Editor’s note: sigh]. That’s the hope, anyway. What are your hopes for Alexandria in 2026? Tell us—and in the meantime, have a wonderful holiday season!

Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life 

• The city has rolled out an “upgraded” and “enhanced” 311 web portal and app. The city is calling it a “fresh, mobile-responsive design” and we can confirm that it is now in fact “faster and easier” to narc on your neighbors for minor code infractions. 
• In the wake of the December 4th passing of community leader and notable local historian McArthur Myers, there has been a tremendous number of recognitions and commemorations of his life cataloguing the impact he had on Alexandria. Recognized as a Living Legend in 2020, the city is marking this week (December 15-21) as a week of remembrance, and is encouraging residents to leave small bouquets at any of the numerous historic markers that exist because of Mr. Myers’ advocacy.
• The city has announced we’re renewing our rugby rivalry with sister-city Dundee, Scotland and will host the Mayor’s Cup for the first time in 17 years (and only the third time ever). Is “rivalry” a generous way to describe the Scots drubbing us twice previously? Yes. Are we confident that this time around the Alexandria team is going to try its best? Also yes. Was that a horrible rugby pun in the last sentence? Absolutely yes. Do we mostly care about this in the hopes that the city will sell badass City of Alexandria rugby shirt merch for us to buy? Yes, most definitely yes.
• NOVA magazine has named the five best restaurants in Alexandria, two of which are Italian restaurants in Fairfax County. Honestly… nailed it. No notes. Additionally, a third place on the list is a pizza place which we would otherwise feel contractually obligated to joke about—but the pizza place in question is Stracci and both of us would fight to the death in defense of Stracci’s honor, so let s/he who has not stood in line at Stracci at 4:47pm on a Friday cast the first stone, etc.

Local Discourse Power Rankings

1. Listswerves (Previously: 2). Our neighborhood listservs are where we go to put our finger on the pulse of Alexandria’s communities. In Rosemont, that pulse has become as erratic as the heartbeat of a person hopped up on multiple contraindicated controlled substances as a new defector listserv recently splintered off from the original list, causing consternation and confusion. It’s unclear exactly why this schism occurred. Maybe it was because a certain segment of regular posters got tired of “heavy-handed moderation” on the original listserv aka people gently suggesting that duplexes aren’t a sign of the Antichrist. Maybe it was because the civic association president got himself banned from that list, leaving the association unable to communicate basic information to residents. Who can say! Either way, trying to solve these problems by setting up a second listserv with identical membership and functions to the first one has logic holes more obvious than Karoline Leavitt’s pores in a Vanity Fair photoshoot. What is it for? Who’s supposed to use it? Where are we supposed to post our requests for plumber recommendations and screeds about bike lanes destroying our property values. Is this how Catholics felt during the Avignon Papacy? It’s chaos!!! And frankly, this is too much drama for a neighborhood small enough to traverse on foot in 12 minutes. It’s not even big enough for Visit Alexandria to recognize that it exists! What’s next, a third listserv with even less moderation where the only posts are so toxic your phone explodes if you attempt to read them? Actually the way things are going that might be for the best, where do we sign up.
2. Is Our Children Learning (Last week: 5). Last week the state released the inaugural results from a new K-12 education accountability framework, and let’s just say they had a real stink of fleece vest about them. A pet project of the administration in Richmond that still thinks they were elected on the backs of dissatisfied public school parents (they weren’t), the new school ratings scheme seeks to provide a weighted measure of mastery, growth, readiness, and graduation (along with standards of quality that look at non-academic factors) to group schools as Distinguished, On Track, Off Track, or Needs Intensive Support, in addition to an accreditation status. A superficial glance at the topline ACPS results quickly led to a lot of handwringing about the quality of our local schools, yet it was also hard to engage with these findings in full good faith knowing the skepticism of public schools that underpinned their design (it was particularly hard to look past the fact that the rank-ordered list of each school in Alexandria by performance was basically just a list of neighborhoods rank-ordered by wealth… which is not a K-12 research finding anyone was unaware of!!). Better was the dialogue that focused on our relative areas of strength: the overall performance of our high school, for example, or the over-performance of certain federally-designated categories of students at many of our elementary schools. The discussion of school performance also led to a very thoughtful and personal essay from Alexandria Brief publisher Ryan Belmore that dug into the importance of how we talk about all this, and why that matters too. At the end of the day, our take on all this falls somewhere along these lines: any form of additional data and analysis of our schools has value; snap judgements and broad classifications do not; we already knew ACPS has work to do across a variety of fronts; state labels don’t change the dedication and commitment that so many of us in the city have to our schools and school communities.
3. Don’t Zone Me Bro (Last week: 2). In an all-time classic Dril tweet he details his family budget as: Food $200, Data $150, Rent $800, Candles $3,600, Utility $150 and he implores someone who is good at the economy to please help him budget this because his family is dying. Why are we bringing this up? Well we’re bringing this up because the Coalition for a Livable* Alexandria (*offer only valid if you do your holiday shopping in the Williams-Sonoma catalog) announced that they have raised enough money to file an appeal in their Zoning for Housing lawsuit, so our city budget is about to look something like: Food $200, Data $150, Rent $800, Defending Against CLA Lawsuits $500,000, Utility $150 SOMEONE WHO IS GOOD AT THE ECONOMY PLEASE HELP US BUDGET THIS, OUR CITY IS DYING.
4. City State (Last week: NR). Earlier this week, Gretchen Bulova won the Democratic primary for HD-11 almost certainly assuring that she will get elected to the Virginia House of Delegates on January 13th. Bulova is the director of the Office of Historic Alexandria, and if elected it would make her the third City of Alexandria employee currently serving in the House of Delegates, joining Jeremy McPike (Department of General Services) and Elizabeth Guzman (Department of Adult Services). This is weird right? To be clear, it’s also extremely cool—we obviously give flowers to Alexandria in all of the ways that we kick ass, and this certainly kicks ass. But it’s also weird! Is there any other municipality in the commonwealth that has multiple employees serving as legislators? Is three delegates enough for an official City of Alexandria caucus? Do they carpool to Richmond together? Do they have a Jets/Sharks style rivalry with the delegates that represent the City of Alexandria but don’t work for the City of Alexandria? This is officially our favorite subplot of this year’s legislative session.
5. Isaac Asimov, Eat Your Heart Out (Last week: NR). In a move that we can only assume has come at great dismay to Commander William Adama, autonomous food delivery robots are out and about on the streets of Alexandria. We’re genuinely excited to see how a city that hated dockless mobility devices scooters lying all over the sidewalk is going to respond to goddamn car-hop WALL-Es zipping all around Old Town and Del Ray. For our part, we expect to be utterly delighted every time we see one, while simultaneously fighting the urge to run up and push it over and/or try to ride on it. We’re also desperate to understand the use case for this technology. Currently, if we order food from Uber Eats a very nice human individual who is despicably exploited by Silicon Valley vampires will bring an order of food all the way up to our door and leave it there. But if we get food delivered by C-3POpenTable over here we have to… walk down to the sidewalk and take the food out of a motorized Yeti cooler with googly eyes on it?? That feels like a lot of extra work on our part. Not to mention, look at that thing! Would you eat anything that’s been inside this smug motherfucker?? No, absolutely not! Not to mention the press release notes that the robots “begin deployment in Alexandria immediately” which—as people who have seen at least two Terminator movies—absolutely feels like a threat. Deployment? Immediately?? We can’t believe we’re all going to die at the hands of a Roomba carrying a bunch of Doritos Locos Crunchwrap Supremes. Live Más our ass.

Alexandria’s Hottest Club Is… Holiday Card Lane

One of our absolute favorite traditions this time of year is the couple dozen homes on East Luray Ave in Del Ray that display massive plywood greeting cards in their yards throughout the holiday season. Each year we look forward to touring these couple of blocks and seeing the fun, funny, and festive designs that these neighbors bust out. The effort has been covered in years past everywhere from the Washington Post, to the Zebra, to Alexandria Living and this year we thought we’d get in on the fun too—that’s right folks, we went and did some Real Journalism™! 

Actually Becky just went and took some pictures for you to look at and enjoy, but still, that’s so much more Real Journalism™ than we usually do. Like, easily twice as much! Maybe even three times. We forget how multiplying by zero works and this eggnog is starting to kick in hard but the point is, enjoy this snapshot of one of the best holiday streets in the city and maybe it’ll inspire you to get out there and see it yourself.

Overheard in ALX

From the ALXnow article about the holiday condom tree in the Alexandria Health Department offices at the Del Pepper Center:

“Staff did not pierce the condoms while making the decorations—just the foil wrappers.” 

On the one hand, we applaud the thorough and rigorous journalism that led to this line of inquiry. But on the other hand, NO ONE WAS THINKING THAT! This is the Alexandria Health Department, not a key party at Elon Musk’s house! Condom performance questions aside, the whole notion of a condom tree certainly gives fresh meaning to the term “gift wrap” [waggles eyebrows suggestively]. We’ve also managed to get through this entire bit without making a “come get condoms from Del Pepper” joke for the third time in this publication’s history and that feels like encouraging personal gro– ah shit we did it, didn’t we. We made the joke after all. Dammit! We were doing so well too!

One Awesome Thing in ALX

Longtime readers know that we take a third of the revenue from paid subscriptions and put it aside in its own fund. Each time that fund hits $500, we make a charitable donation to a local organization in the name of ALXtra readers, and we take the opportunity to feature and write about that organization as we’ve done previously with Carpenter's Shelter, Casa Chirilagua, NOVA Raft, and Cornerstone Craftsman. We’re pleased to share that we’ve now made our fifth such donation (bringing the total that our reader community has contributed to local non-profits up to $2,500!) to Alexandria Tutoring Consortium.

This choice was partially inspired by something we covered further up in this issue—the recent dialogue about academic achievement in the city, and Ryan Belmore’s essay urging people to think about what they personally can do to help our students and our schools succeed. Alexandria Tutoring Consortium is working to help students in kindergarten, first, and second grades learn to read, with the goal of all students reading on or above grade level by third grade. Over the past year their 334 volunteers tutored 279 kids, 97% of which made significant gains in reading ability and 90% of which met the grade level benchmark this year. About half the kids they help are English learners and three-quarters qualify for free school meals.

They do all of this with a small budget and staff, but they’re clearly making a big difference. If you’re interested in making an additional contribution yourself, you can do so here, but no matter what, we hope each of you—all of us—continue to find ways to give back and positively impact the lives of those around us.

That’s a wrap on 2025 here at ALXtra. We so appreciate you taking the time to read our dumb jokes and half-baked takes, but even more than that, we appreciate you taking the time to think and care about this place we all call home. 

We’ll see you next year!

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.