Good morning, RVA! It's 72 °F, and you should expect temperatures to stay cool and constant for almost the entire day. If you're headed out to school or work this morning, keep an eye on the sky as there's a pretty good chance for rain until later this afternoon.
Water cooler
After yesterday's removal of the Robert E. Lee statue from Monument Avenue, Ned Oliver at the Virginia Mercury has the same question I do: What's next? Turns out, not much for a while. A spokeswoman for the VMFA, which has been tasked with coming up with a plan for the entirety of Monument Avenue, "said the museum is still hiring staff" to run the planning process. Oliver reports that they've got all the way until September 2022 to come up with a plan. That's...an entire year from now. I think there's a good chance people will retake, reimagine, and rebuild that space all on their own over the course of the next 12 months. If it were me, I'd start meeting with community members and the general public tomorrow to come up some temporary improvements that can be transitioned into parts of the larger, more permanent plan. Things I would love to see: shade, seating, and a return of the basketball hoop.
Actually, if you really want to know what's next, you can read this piece by Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams. Halting evictions, replacing George Wythe High School, defunding the police, building affordable housing, and curbing gun violence—that's what's next.
Lastly in monuments to racism, via /r/rva, here's an anticlimactic timelapse of the whole process, and here's a video of how ridiculous this thing looked headed down the street on the back of a truck.
The City closed the trail and beaches from Brown's Island down to and around the Pipeline a while back, as they look to start repairs on a sewer leak in the actual pipe itself. Here's an interesting thread from @rvah2o about the process for repairs and the timeline for reopening one of our coolest public access points to the river. Because everything dealing with trains and train tracks and CSX takes forever, they just got access to the site this week and had a repair kick off meeting this past Tuesday. If the weather and river cooperate, repairs could wrap up in a week or two!
The City's Urban Design Committee will meet today at 10:00 AM and will discuss West Broad Street Green, a new triangle park formed by partially closing off a weird section of Cutshaw Avenue near W. Broad Street and N. Sheppard Street. I'm really, really excited about this project as it takes a scrap of underused land and turns it into something really beautiful with a focus on people instead of cars. I'm not sure we've done anything like this before, but it's definitely the sort of thing we should be doing all over the city—plus, I think it's impressive and smart to drop an early example of how to return public space to people in such a high-traffic, transit-accessible place. You should scroll through the planning document to check out the landscape/hardscape rendering (p. 8) and the delightfully charming plant palette (p. 10).
Mike Platania at Richmond BizSense reports on a new three-story mix-used building that could replace one of the single-story strip malls on Forest Hill Avenue. Sounds great, although I wish they'd move the building up to front the street and put the parking around back. Regardless, with the Veil and Blanchards right across the street, this section of Forest Hill is kind of turning into a spot.
Whoa! Look at this photo of damage to a runway at the airport cause by LIGHTNING! When weatherpeople are all "If you hear thunder, go inside!" you should probably listen to them—better than getting a huge chunk of your head vaporized by a lightning bolt, I think.
This morning's longread
From Burnout to Radicalization
Anne Helen Petersen! Have y'all just gone and subscribed to her newsletter yet or what? Here's an issue from last week digging into the burnout alllll of us are feeling right about now.
One worldview calls for radical rebuilding. The other calls for radical preservation, even if that means rebuilding a structure that was torn down years before. Both visions can be incredibly magnetic — and, I’d argue, are only becoming more so. They’re picking up energy, gaining fodder, becoming more polarized, as they have at various other points in our history (leading up to and after the Civil War, for example, or the 1960s) when the fragility of the status quo became undeniable. And it makes sense, of course, that this is happening now, against the backdrop of quotidian climate catastrophe — as well as the global ravages of the Delta variant, the slowing of the supply chain, the mass demoralization of our educational and healthcare workforce, the overburdened hospitals, the ever-growing housing crisis, rapidly accelerating income inequality, and the millions of families without reliable access to childcare or eldercare assistance. These are the signs of a civilization not just in decline, but on the precipice of collapse.
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