Good morning, RVA! It's 76 °F, and today looks a little hotter than yesterday, with highs in the upper 80s and another chance for storms this afternoon.
Water cooler
Y’all, I think I’ve done given up on Richmond’s bike share system. Mark Robinson at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that there “is no target date for completing the system’s expansion.” Well that’s grim. Right now, we’ve got 15 operational stations instead of 40. This is even five fewer than the original 20 promised as part of Phase 1—we’re moving backwards! With so few stations, the coverage area is small and has large gaps around important destinations like the Main Library, Carytown, most of the East End, and the entirety of the Southside. I don’t know what we need to do to move this project forward, but, as a person who loves getting around by bike, this is incredibly frustrating. I guess we just wait for dockless bikes and scooters to show up and provide the coverage we need to make a useful system? I dunno. What a missed opportunity.
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense has the news that the Intermediate Terminal Warehouse (aka the proposed site of Stone’s East End Bistro) is not eligible for historic preservation. This, I imagine, will lead to the demolition of the building to make way for something new and—in my opinion—probably better designed than the existing warehouse. I do wonder if Council will be tempted to rework some of the minor details of the City’s agreement with Stone (nothing to do with the bonds) since the original needs amending now anyway?
In the midst of Obama T-shirts (3,367 sold and counting) and SOL cheating scandals, Richmond Public Schools has been diligently working on a new strategic plan. They’ve held over 160 meetings and touched 2,500 people in the process, and now they’d like some feedback on the draft version of the plan (scroll down on that page for a PDF). I haven’t had a chance to dig in yet, but I thought you may want to before I get around to it!
This is not the tenant I expected to replace Southern Seasons at Libbie Mill! J. Elias O’Neal in Richmond BizSense reports that Lumber Liquidators will replace the grocery store with their headquarters and 200 employees. Also on the Libbie Mill tip, Gregory J. Gilligan at the RTD says the Libbie Mill developers have bought the old, nearby Wells Fargo bank building. You know what I’m going to say next, right? With all this new office space and new development potential, there needs to safe and efficient ways to get to Libbie Mill via bike and public transportation. Currently, there’s neither. Let’s get a frequent bus up Staples Mill to the train station and a separated multi-use path at least to Libbie Mill from the Pulse on Broad Street. Sound good?
This pro-cicada and pro-copperhead editorial by the RTD Editorial Board is...unexpected?
Stephanie Ganz, writing for Richmond Magazine, has taught me about harissa, which I will now dutifully add to my shopping list.
Sports!
- Squirrels fell to New Hampshire, 5-11, and will try again today at 12:05 PM.
- Kickers take on the Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC tonight at 7:00 PM, and you can watch on CBS 6.3.
- Nats beat the Mets, 25-4? I didn’t know baseball scoreboards even went that high. I mean, turns out that’s kind of true: The Nats are just the 10th team since 1900 to score 25 or more runs in a home game. The Nats and Mets rematch today at 12:05 PM.
This morning's longread
Who Goes Nazi?
This piece from Dorothy Thompson in August of 1941 about who would and wouldn’t go Nazi is so incredibly interesting. 1941! That’s before Pearl Harbor! Honestly, I don’t know what to think or how to feel about some of this. Fascinating though.
Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.
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