Good morning, RVA! It's 43 °F, and today you can expect highs in the mid 60s—chilly, really, when compared to tomorrow’s potentially record-breaking temperatures. But that’s tomorrow! For today, enjoy warmer-than-average temperatures that don’t induce existential dread.
Water cooler
She did it! With a landslide 74% of the vote, Jennifer McClellan will be the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress! NBCNews’s Ryan Nobles says (Twitter) she joins the Jennifers Wexton and Kiggans as part of the Commonwealth’s Jennifer Delegation—the only Jennifers in the country to represent a state in the House. Exciting stuff—both for McClellan and for us, who now continue to have excellent elected representation at the federal level. You can read McClellan’s victory speech here.
City Council’s Governmental Operations committee meets today (full agenda here) and will consider one paper of note: RES. 2023-R011. This resolution asks the City and its attorney to start figuring out how to acquire Evergreen and East End Cemetery from the now defunct EnRichmond Foundation. Years ago, the City gifted these two historically Black cemeteries to the Foundation. Ostensibly they did so for maintenance and upkeep reasons, but the relationship between EnRichmond and the long-operating Friends of East End group (who’d been maintenancing and upkeeping on their own for quite a while) has, from the beginning, been fraught to say the least. Returning the properties to City ownership seems like the right first step, and formalizing some agreement with and support for the Friends of East End to continue their work seems like a solid next step.
Pulitzer Prize Winner Michael Paul Williams has an interesting column today about train stations. I got defensive after reading the headline, “At any speed, we don’t need a train station in Shockoe Bottom,” because Richmond certainly does need a high-quality train station that people can get to without a car—and the Staples Mill Station isn’t it. MPW advocates for moving the station away from the historic resources of Shockoe and up to the Diamond District, one of the original options presented to the community when the whole DC2RVA project kicked off six years ago. I’m not strictly against it, but I’d guess the land up that way is far too valuable at this point to build a giant surface-level parking lot for holding the cars of suburban commuters on their way to D.C. Also, trains still need to make their way to points east and south, and that may mean moving through Shockoe regardless of whether they stop at Main Street Station or not. It’s complicated stuff, and I don’t know what the right answer is. What I do know is that train projects take decades to figure out, and, like a train, once they get moving they’re hard to stop.
Corey Byers at VCU News reports that VCU Police have stepped up speeding enforcement on campus following the death of a student who was hit and killed by a driver on Main Street. While this response is about 1,000 times better than the cutesy referee skit from earlier this month, nothing slows drivers like more and better infrastructure (even temporary infrastructure!). Just look a single block north from Main Street to Floyd Avenue which is: two-way, narrowed with bump outs, and has an interesting sort of naked-street intersection where it crosses Linden. Any or all of these proven ways of slowing traffic could be implemented on Main Street...if we wanted to prioritize people’s safety over the convenience of drivers.
For some reason, I’m emotionally invested in the story about the right whale which washed up in Virginia Beach earlier this month. WHRO reports that the NOAA performed an autopsy and found that the whale was hit by a boat. From the piece: “They said the whale died shortly after a collision. The impact caused what NOAA called ‘catastrophic’ blunt force trauma.”
This morning's longread
John H. White’s Photographs of Black Chicago for DOCUMERICA (1973–74)
This set of street photography from 1970s Black Chicago is 100% worth your time this morning. It’s inspired me to pick up my camera/phone more and document Richmond in its current state.
It is notable that even White’s snapshots of joy and play are often paired with captions (composed by the photographer himself) that frame the scene within larger economic realities: elevated unemployment rates, wage discrimination, and the difficulties Black business owners faced opening and keeping afloat their stores amid racial prejudice from white clientele. In several of his photographs, children in the foreground are dwarfed by the looming husks of abandoned housing blocks behind them — largely salvageable buildings that White notes “have been systematically vacated as a result of fires, vandalism or failure by the owners to provide basic tenant services” before being “razed and replaced with highrise apartments which appeal to few members of the Black community”. By placing these subjects within the framing of an EPA-funded project, White and the directors of DOCUMERICA drew an implicit connection between suburbanization and divestment from cities, on the one hand, and environmental racism on the other — analysis that rings with enduring resonance today.
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Picture of the Day
One day this will be rad.
