In the Alexandria Gazette’s newsroom is a wall filled with archives of the news organization dating back to the early 19th century.
It’s an invaluable resource and a chance to look back at Alexandrians describing the city in their era in their own words, from local advertisements to gossip at the port. As more news is reported exclusively online, the Alexandria Library is hoping to recapture that sort of archive for the digital age.
In April 1979, the City of Alexandria listed 114 N. Payne Street in Old Town as a historic building due to its unique architectural roofline.
One month later, the city approved a permit to destroy that roofline.
Audrey Davis, executive director of the Alexandria Black History Museum (902 Wythe Street), has been tapped to lead the city’s new African American History division of the Office of Historic Alexandria (OHA).
Davis has been a leader in the city’s efforts to preserve Black history in Alexandria, starting as a part-time curator with the city in 1993. The city has made significant strides in recent years to better present the city’s Black history, from the opening of the Freedom House Museum to guided tours of the Parker-Gray neighborhood.
While Alexandria is known for its history, an upcoming free tour later this month will take locals into the underexplored stories of the city’s Parker-Gray neighborhood.
Parker-Gray native Michael Johnson, who recently won the Alexandria Historical Society’s T. Michael Miller award for his work raising awareness of issues with the Douglass Memorial Cemetery, is hosting a tour of the neighborhood on Saturday, May 20, from 10-11 a.m. Johnson will be accompanied by an 80-year-old Parker-Gray resident who can help tell some stories from the neighborhood’s history.
Work has started on a new waterfront destination: the permanent home for the Tall Ship Providence.
A release from Maurisa Potts, founder and CEO of Spotted MP Marketing and Public Relations, said construction is starting this month along the waterfront on infrastructure to support the Senator John Warner Maritime Heritage Center, a floating maritime center being built in Baltimore.
It’s a beautiful spring morning in Alexandria!
Today’s weather: Mostly sunny with a high of 72 degrees during the day, and cloudy with a low of 56 degrees tonight.
As Alexandria moves forward with renaming streets Confederate leaders, the City Council is starting to take a look at some of the practical concerns that brings.
Alexandria City Council member John Chapman went on FOX 5’s DMV Zone yesterday to talk about options the city is looking at for street renaming, though solutions could vary by individual streets.
For some Alexandrians, the question of renaming streets that currently honor Confederate leaders isn’t “should it change” but “what happens to my address?”
As Alexandria moves through a new renaming process, City Council member Sarah Bagley said the City Council Naming Committee heard from residents at a recent meeting who have practical concerns about how renaming will impact everything from paying bills to getting friends to their house. At a City Council meeting last night, Bagley and other members of the Council provided an update on the street renaming discussion.
Fights over historic preservation are nothing new in Alexandria, and a recent edition of the city’s This Week in Historic Alexandria offered a look back at one of the controversial projects from the 1960s that shaped Old Town as it’s known today.
This year marks 60 years since Alexandria’s City Council approved the “Gadsby Commercial Urban Renewal Plan” in 1963 — a project that saw the large-scale demolition of much of King Street’s older buildings once construction began in 1965.
The Alexandria Black History Museum (902 Wythe Street) is reopening this weekend with a new exhibit dedicated to Alexandria’s response to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.
The new exhibit is called “The Legacy of George Floyd: the Black Lives Remembered Collection.” The formerly virtual exhibit is set to premiere at a reception on Sunday, Feb. 26, from 2-5 p.m.
The long and tangled history of the Appomattox statue that once stood at the intersection of S. Washington Street and Prince Street took another turn this week as ALXnow learned the base had been installed in a Carlyle-area cemetery.
The statue had been removed in 2020 after years of debate over its presence. While some neighbors have expressed misgivings at the base’s new home above Confederate graves in the Bethel Cemetery not far from historic Black cemeteries, the new location is on private property and the cemetery’s owner said he’d like to see the statue reinstalled there.
