Good morning, RVA! It's 78 °F, and it's another smoking-hot day with temperatures near triple digits. Expect things to cool down marginally over the weekend.
Water cooler
Remember: The Maggie Walker statue unveiling is tomorrow at 10:00 AM in the new pedestrian plaza at the intersection of Adams and Broad. I walked through the plaza yesterday, and it's pretty wonderful. Here's Michael Paul Williams talking to some folks about the impact Maggie Walker and her statue had/will have on the city. Jackie Kruszewski at Style talks with Melvin Jones Jr., who has worked for decades towards tomorrow's unveiling. I bet that's a wild feeling—to have something with years and years of work behind it suddenly wrap up.
Mark Robinson at Richmond Magazine asks the question I'm kind of dying to know the answer to: Will Interim Superintendent Tommy Kranz apply for the job?
Speak of the City Auditor and articles about the City Auditor doth appear! Ned Oliver has some of the details on a confidential report that may (or may not) end City Auditor Dalal's career with the City. I dunno: The description of the working environment in his office sounds super suboptimal, but he seems kind of like an invincible cat with infinity lives. Stay tuned as Council has a special meeting on Monday to talk further.
I have a fear of the sun and of heat exhaustion—which is why I always talk about wearing sunscreen and staying hydrated. So you can bet I'm into this story from WTVR about post office workers in town walking off the job yesterday because of a lack of air conditioning. It's like a 100 dang degrees out there! You can't shove people into a steaming hot back room and expect them not to melt. Looks like the walk out worked though: Portable AC units are expected to arrive today.
Here's the picture of Beyoncé and her twins from her Instagram that everyone's going to be talking about so you should just tap on the link already.
Sports!
- Squirrels fell to Harrisburg, 6-8. That series continues tonight at 7:05 PM and through the weekend.
- Kickers also travel to Harrisburg this Saturday. You can watch at 7:00 PM on CBS 6.3.
- Nats are back in action with a series against Cincinnati that starts tonight at 7:10 PM.
This morning's longread
Bed-Stuy Is Going From Low Ridership to Bike-Share Boom
Bike share can help increase transportation equity if you put in the hard work!
But the stations didn’t reach the neighborhood’s east and north areas, where five large and several smaller public housing complexes are located. They didn’t extend south to Crown Heights, a predominantly black neighborhood experiencing rising rents and rapid displacement, or southeast to Brownsville or East New York, neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty and public housing. So while New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) public housing residents were entitled to discounted memberships from bike-share’s launch in NYC, and while the neighborhood has high rates of diet- and activity-related diseases, and while the city’s DOT had worked with community development organization Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration on choosing sites for the first stations, ridership in Bed-Stuy remained well below the citywide average. To many in the neighborhood, the bikes, and all the health and transportation benefits they represented, were harbingers of gentrification, and not intended for the long-standing communities of color where they were placed. Four years later, bike-share is seeing growth in Bed-Stuy.