(Updated 10/13) Chris Harvey is retiring and hopes to sell his hardware store in Del Ray as-is before the end of the year. If that doesn’t happen, he plans on selling all his merchandise at deeply discounted rates.

Chris and his brother Gary Harvey opened Executive Lock & Key Service at 2003 Mount Vernon Avenue in the mid 1990s. Chris runs the business now and Gary says he’s been trying to get his brother to retire for years.


Del Ray’s BBQ scene could be getting a little bigger soon.

A plan to boost the size of outdoor smokehouse Hi/Fi Tex-Mex BBQ (2000 Mount Vernon Avenue) in Del Ray, in the backyard of Evening Star Cafe, is heading to the City Council at a meeting on Saturday, Oct. 14.


The City of Alexandria spent $1.8 million on its Taylor Run and Strawberry Run restoration projects and, at a meeting earlier this week, Mayor Justin Wilson said the city has virtually nothing to show for it.

That $1.8 million went into the project before shovels ever hit the dirt. The plan was to combat erosion and improve the flow of the waterway, but the city’s design attracted considerable pushback from some local environmental activists and city watchdogs who said the plans could do more harm than good to the stream. Critics also noted that pollution levels in the stream were being calculated based on modeling rather than testing in the actual waterways.


Good Thursday morning, Alexandria!

☀️ Today’s weather: The weather forecast predicts a mostly sunny day with a high temperature near 74 degrees and a calm wind shifting south at approximately 5 mph in the afternoon. Thursday night will be partly cloudy with a low temperature of about 53 degrees accompanied by a light north breeze.


Alexandria’s City Council is taking its anti-panhandling ordinance off the books, but city leaders said at a meeting last night the actual impact of the change should be minimal.

City Attorney Joanna Anderson noted that the panhandling change is part of an update to bring obsolete sections of the city code in line with evolving case law.


Alexandria parents are up in arms over a staffing crisis within Alexandria City Public Schools.

Kelly Organek says that her ninth-grade son at Alexandria City High School’s Minnie Howard campus hasn’t had a geometry teacher since school started in August and that he only recently got a new biology teacher.


(Updated at 1:45 p.m. on Oct. 12) Alexandria City Public Schools has aligned with Virginia law in its stance against marijuana.

Students who possess, use or distribute marijuana within 1,000 feet of an ACPS school, bus stop or bus can now be expelled, according to policy revisions reviewed last week by the School Board. Marijuana was not previously listed as a banned substance.


The City of Alexandria is working on renaming streets honoring Confederate leaders, and now there’s a full list of new potential names to replace them.

The Historic Alexandria Resources Commission compiled a list of roughly 63 names that could replace streets honoring Confederates.


A set of dinners next month will help raise funding for local scholarships named after the victims of lynching in Alexandria.

The Alexandria Community Remembrance Project runs the scholarships in the names of Joseph McCoy and Benjamin Thomas, Black Alexandrians who were lynched in 1897 and 1899.


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