Good morning, RVA! It's 67 °F, and today you can expect typically sweaty highs around 90 °F. I think we’ve got another clear-skies day ahead of us before tomorrow, when we might see some rain in the afternoon.
Water cooler
Charlotte Matherly at Richmond BizSense reports on those Richmond Connects Top Recommendations surveys I linked to a while back. These surveys, 17 in total, give folks all across the city an opportunity to weigh in on how best to prioritize new infrastructure projects in specific neighborhoods. For example, here’s the one for Broad Rock / Walmsley, which has some really great potential projects, like providing multiple pedestrian crossings over the CSX tracks around Hull Street and Southside Plaza, redeveloping Southside Plaza as a “walkable, mixed-used development with a more connected street grid,” and improving pedestrian safety near George Wythe High School. You can take surveys for any of the 17 areas in which you live, work, travel through, or spend time in—it’s pretty rad. However, Matherly reports that 70% of all current survey responses are for the area that includes Carytown—mostly because one of the projects is a proposal to make Carytown car-free. This is both good and bad! Of course banning cars in Carytown would be amazing, but also many, many other neighborhoods need public feedback on new infrastructure to slow drivers down and make walking, rolling, or riding around much safer. We need to balance things out! So now I’m assigning some homework: If you haven’t filled out any of the Richmond Connects surveys—and especially if you’ve only filled out the one for Carytown—go submit one or two more for the places in Richmond where you spend the most time! It’ll take you less than ten minutes this morning.
Charming small-town stories strike again in the Richmond Times-Dispatch! Colleen Curran reports that the owners of Grisette will open a new restaurant in the former Commercial Taphouse spot, which hasn’t truly been Commercial Taphouse since way back in 2014. That’s a decidedly small-town observation I just made, but, listen, as an official old person, I reserve the right to fondly remember local bars as they were at least two iterations ago. That said, I am interested in the new place (which is named Beacoup), and how they’ll attempt to combine “neighborhood vibes” with “oyster bar”—a “Parisian dive” in their own words. But will it be as dirty and dark as the original Commercial Taphouse? Will they have a weird upstairs? And, importantly, will they serve two different cask beers year round?? Resident old man wants to know!
OK, I can’t stop noticing this sort of thing! In today’s Axios Richmond email, Karri Peifer reports that a new restaurant, Sprezza, will move into “the former Balliceaux space”—that’s 203 N. Lombardy which hasn’t been Balliceaux for five years and four iterations. Also, scroll right past the complaints about parking for like 600 different reasons, but primarily: You don’t need to park on the same block as your final destination! Also, also, shoutout to fellow resident old-person Karri, for mentioning Bogart’s, the pre-Balliceaux (five iterations ago) tenant of 203 N. Lombardy and a place I spent plenty of time in my youth.
Via VPM, WMRA reports that Republican delegate Nick Freitas may not actually live in Virginia’s House District 62 near Culpeper, where he’s currently running against Democrat Sara Ratcliffe. That home in the 62nd may belong to his mother, and he might, instead, actually live in the 61st where he’d have run against a Republican incumbent. This guy! Remember back in 2019 when Freitas had to run a write-in campaign for his House of Delegates race because he failed to turn his paperwork in on time? Anyway, this is your regular reminder that every General Assembly seat is up for grabs this November, and, with the Governor’s eyes set on eliminating Virginians’ access to abortion and other critical medical care, it is incredibly important to get out there and vote (for Democrats).
This morning's longread
Interstate 35-W and the Murder of George Floyd
The story of redlining and highway building in Minneapolis is hardly unique, and we saw the same racist policies and infrastructure raze thriving Black neighborhoods in Richmond to the ground. There’s a lot of primary source material in this piece, which I found fascinating, plus a mention of the University of Richmond’s work on mapping redlined neighborhood across the country. Worth a read—even if you think you’ve heard this story a thousand times before!
The full story of 35-W in Minneapolis is a story of both. But only one of those stories is largely unknown. We certainly didn’t learn about it in school. The origin of the interstate is a cautionary tale of the haunting historical legacies of grotesquely effective urban planning that sought to kill two birds with one colossal stone: developing a core trunk of automotive infrastructure while bisecting a city to divide white from black and rich from poor. The march of progress waits for no man, it was said, and, in 1950s America, there would certainly be no waiting for a Black man. I love Minnesota—and Minneapolis is one of the nicest cities in America. But its history, like with so many American cities, is partly defined by racist discrimination.
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Picture of the Day
Sometimes you find wild animals in the forest, and sometimes you find a plate with a chunk of wood on it that looks a lot like a sandwich.
