Good morning, RVA! It's 32 °F, and today’s highs will just barely hit 50 °F. Expect plenty of sun as we prepare for a week of cool temperatures.
Water cooler
Richmond Police are reporting two murders that both occurred over the last couple of days. Late Thursday night, officers were called to the 3500 block of Clydewood Drive and found Jaleel S. Yates, 18, shot to death. And then, just hours later, on Friday at 10:50 AM, officers arrived to the 1100 block of St. Paul Street and found Winfred W. Stewart, 25, shot to death. According to the Richmond Police Department, these were the sixth and seventh murders in the City, the first since January 18th.
Who’s ready to have about a billion more conversations about a new baseball stadium? Is it you?? I hope so, because this news from Ned Oliver in the Richmond Times-Dispatch about the ABC warehouse is likely to kick off the latest round of ballpark blabber. Will the mayor include any cash for this project in his budget—which he introduces at 3:00 PM tomorrow? Will VCU continue in their partnership with the City and the Squirrels to build a new stadium? Will former VCU President Eugene Trani resurface with more plans to put a train station in Scott’s Addition? I imagine we’ll find out soon!
Also in the RTD, Gregory J. Gilligan has a long article about the transformation of the former GRTC depot at Cary and Robinson into fancy new apartments and retail space. It sounds like all of the spaces, both commercial and residential, are well on their way to being leased and the project’s almost wrapped up.
Hey this is really neat: Folks from Bike Walk RVA organized a pop up bike lane in front of the Downtown YMCA to celebrate the impending construction of the Franklin Street bike lane. David Streever from RVA Mag has the details. This quote, from former city planner Jim Hill, is excellent: “We need a new model, one that’s more equitable, with functioning alternatives to single-occupancy motor vehicles.” That’s much nicer than how I would have put it.
Reminder: The Richmond Black Restaurant Experience is in full swing, and they’ve even got a handy checklist for you to use as you eat your way across the city.
I wanted to link to this piece about Nashville’s new affordable housing coalition, because as we continue our discussion in Richmond about affordable housing, I keep seeing good ideas we should steal from other places. From Nashville, lets take this idea: “getting the city to issue a quarterly scorecard tallying the number of affordable units lost, gained, and saved.”
Wikipedia has the entire list of nominees and winners from last night’s 90th Academy Awards. The Shape of Water won Best Picture, Guillermo del Toro won Best Director, and Jordan Peele won Best Original Screen Play for Get Out. Additionally, the WaPo explains what an “inclusion rider” is.
Sports!
It’s tournament season, y’all! The Atlantic 10 Tournament begins on Wednesday—#8 VCU faces #9 Dayton on Thursday at 12:00 PM and #7 Richmond matches up with #10 Duquesne at 6:00 PM. The ACC Tournament starts tomorrow—#7 Virginia Tech faces the winner of #10 Notre Dame/#15 Pittsburgh on Wednesday at 2:00 PM and #1 Virginia meets the winner of #8 FSU/#9 Louisville on Thursday at 12:00 PM. Get your brackets ready!
- Rams fractured Fordham, 83-58 in their final regular-season game.
- Spiders got by George Mason, 93-79.
- Hokies missed at Miami, 68-69.
- Wahoos knocked down Notre Dame, 62-57.
This morning's longread
Always a fan of the marvelous: The hidden history of Anna Adolph
Here’s a charming bio about a woman from the 1800s who you’ll probably never read or think about again.
I began to wonder why this obscure self-published novel is known, and what kind of person would compose it. Scholars typically mention Arqtiq only in passing, as just one of many kooky hollow earth books notable mostly for being written by a woman. Not a single one gave any biographical detail about Mrs. Anna Adolph at all. I did not know her age, her full name, where she lived, when she died, or even if her name was just a pseudonym. So I started digging—through my local library, Google Books, the Internet Archive, newspaper archives, census records, eBay, the Library of Congress, and gravesite archives. I would come upon a lead—a variant spelling! a new address! — and start all over again, one search cascading into dozens or hundreds. What started out as a casual way to pad out a Medium post on some interesting old books turned into weeks of obsessive genealogical research. As far as I know, this is the only history of this author to have been written.
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