Alexandria’s history with racially restrictive covenants was a major topic during the Zoning for Housing/Housing for All debate last year, and a new interactive map shows the location of those covenants around Alexandria and surrounding localities.
ARLnow reported that the new interactive map comes from researchers at Marymount University. Many of the covenants listed on the map exclude “any person not of the Caucasian race.”
The Office of Historic Alexandria will celebrate Marquis de Lafayette, the acclaimed Hero of Two Worlds, with a concert and lecture marking 200 years since the city first threw its arms open to a hero of both the American and French revolutions.
Lafayette, a French nobleman and military officer, served under George Washington throughout the war and commanded Continental Army troops at the siege of Yorktown. Lafayette was also a prominent voice early in the French revolution, though he was later driven out of the country by more radical factions.
A new tour will bring locals on a tour around the ‘Lost Buildings’ around the historic Black neighborhoods of the Berg and Parker-Gray.
The Berg is a neighborhood around North Pitt, North Royal and North Fairfax Streets. The neighborhood was founded by liberated Black families who moved to the neighborhood and sought the protection of the Union Army. Many were from Petersburg — thus “the Berg”. Many of the new Alexandria residents worked on the wharves and railroads during the Union occupation of the city.
Alexandria Civil Rights leader Ira Robinson, the first Black man elected to the City Council after Reconstruction, died last Friday at his home in Temecula, California.
Robinson was 85 years old.
The historic cemetery tour: it’s the one locals are dying to get into.
A tour coming up this Saturday (April 27) will reacquaint Alexandrians with some of their post-mortem neighbors and hear buried histories of duels, cavalry battles and more in the Wilkes Street Cemetery Complex (1475-1501 Wilkes Street).
A new advocacy group has formed in hopes of returning Alexandria to a district/wards election system.
The Communities for Accountable City Council (CACC) describes itself as a non-partisan group of Alexandria residents “exasperated with the intransigent Alexandria City Council that is unaccountable to communities and neighborhoods because of Alexandria’s At-Large election system.”
Here’s a roundup of all the events, live music, and entertainment happening around Alexandria this weekend; enjoy!
Are you organizing an event? Submit events to ALXnow.
Dorcas Allen faced an impossible choice.
In 1837, Allen was sold, along with her four children, to a slave trader and sent to a pen on Duke Street — where the Freedom Museum stands today.
Alexandria is going all out this year for its sweet 275, and it doesn’t look a day over 200.
The anniversary is in July, marking 275 since the city was founded in 1749, but the party starts in April.
Fans of Apple’s new show Manhunt about the search for Abraham Lincoln’s assassin may be interested to learn that four Alexandria firemen who died during the 12-day search for John Wilkes Booth are buried in Alexandria National Cemetery.
The federal government initiated a massive search for Booth after Lincoln’s assassination on April 14, 1865. The search included usage of the Black Diamond, a ship made up of more than a dozen employees of the Alexandria Fire Department working with the Army Quartermaster Corps, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
(Updated 11:15 a.m.) A new ‘windowfront exhibit’ about the Buried Ships of Robinson Landing is coming to Old Town early next month.
The exhibit features scale models of four 18th and 19th-century ships discovered during excavations of the Robinson Landing Site.
