What a challenging week in Alexandria. Here’s the rundown.
Alexandria track star Noah Lyles won the bronze medal in the 200 meters at the Tokyo Olympics, garnering congratulations from around the country, including locally by Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and Mayor Justin Wilson. Also this week, Lyles’ mom and brother held a watch party at his alma mater, Alexandria City High School.
The embattled Heritage project came within a hair’s breadth of being denied at the Board of Architectural Review‘s design review last week, and survived only on a last-minute deferral.
Many of the recurring public criticisms of the project, a series of three new apartment buildings along S. Patrick and Washington Streets in Old Town, resurfaced during the public comment period and from members of the BAR during discussions. BAR members have described the project as putting “lipstick on a pig” when the project first came forward for permitting last fall.
The Heritage stirred up significant community uproar in the lead up to its approval in February, and now the project is coming back to public review for its design phase.
The project, once described by some on the Board of Architectural Review (BAR) as “Lipstick on a Pig“, is comprised of three new apartment buildings in southeast Old Town along S Patrick and Washington Streets. Each of the buildings scale from three and four stories up to seven stories in parts.
The Basilica of Saint Mary in Old Town is looking for city permission to make some expansions to the church grounds and make parts of the property more accessible.
The designs for a new bridge are headed to review at the Board of Architectural Review on Wednesday, July 21, as part of a broader process of adding to the Basilica School of Saint Mary. The church is hoping to add a new new library and media center to the campus, and install a connecting bridge that will help make the different parts of the facility more connected.
Within the rather obscure confines of the Board and Architectural Review staff report this week resurfaced a long-simmering discussion: what is the cultural identity of the Parker-Gray neighborhood in 2021.
For years a historically Black neighborhood, Parker-Gray draws its name from the the Parker-Gray School that educated the city’s Black children when the the city’s school system was still divided by segregation.
(Updated 5/20) A stretch of vacant land and parking lots in the Parker-Gray could soon become a five-story, multi-family residential development with a redesign meant to evoke the neighborhood’s unique heritage.
The development is headed to its second Board of Architectural Review (BAR) meeting tomorrow (Wednesday). The building underwent a slight redesign after a February meeting when the board scolded the architect for trying to make an industrial waterfront-style building in lieu of respecting the historically Black neighborhood’s own unique — and distinctly not Old Town — aesthetics and style.
It was quite a week in Alexandria.
Our top story this week was on a man who allegedly crashed his car headfirst into the Verizon store near Potomac Yard. The suspect was later arrested in North Carolina.
Move over Meghan Markle, there’s a Princess scandal in town.
The long back-and-forth saga over a new trio of new homes is scheduled to continue later this month when the applicant returns to the Board of Architectural Review on Wednesday, March 17.
A Parker-Gray business could have to un-paint their property after an unauthorized paint-job over a building’s historically significant architecture.
A commercial building at 1000 Queen Street may have looked significantly whiter late last year after the applicant, Anchor Property Services, painted over the existing yellow-brick exterior with a white coat of paint.
Density is forcing some Alexandrians to get closer to their neighbors than they might want: creating some tension as a new townhouse on a vacant lot returns to the Board of Architectural Review tomorrow (Thursday).
The BAR is scheduled to review an application to turn lots 1413 and 1415 Princess Street — which have sat undeveloped since 1893 — into a pair of townhouses. Staff reviewed the application and endorsed much of it, but the project still generated concern over its proximity and scale compared to some surrounding buildings.
(Updated 1/6/21) A brick parking garage at 101 Duke Street, planted squarely in the heart of Old Town, could be redeveloped into six new townhouses.
At a Board of Architectural Review meeting scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 21, a development proposal by Cummings Investment Associates Inc. is docketed for a concept review.
