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There’s a new mural at 901 King Street in Old Town

A new mural by El Mac at the corner of 901 King Street in Old Town (staff photo by James Cullum)

There’s a new mural in Old Town.

Last week, Los Angeles-based muralist El Mac put the finishing touches on his new mural outside 901 King Street. The piece depicts a bespectacled woman looking south.

The artist did not provide a title or themes behind the mural with his client, building owner Windmill Hill Design Build. Still, Windmill Hill founder Mike Dameron said he was thrilled with the result.

“”I think the striking pose and scale really compliment the corner and we had an amazing experience getting to know El Mac and his family,” Dameron told ALXnow. “He works mostly at night and it was amazing to see the progression each morning. He brought museum quality public art to Alexandria and we are super excited about it.”

El Mac, the professional name for Miles MacGregor, is known for creating large photorealistic murals. He did not respond to multiple calls for comment.

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Muralist El Mac is creating a new piece in Old Town

Artist El Mac will paint a mural at 901 King Street (via Google Maps)

El Mac is painting a mural in Alexandria.

The Los Angeles-based muralist will paint a new piece at the corner of 901 King Street over the course of the next two weeks. The design is still under wraps, and building owner Mike Dameron of Windmill Hill Design Build is trying to stay out of his way.

“I’m not going to disrupt the artist’s vision,” Dameron told ALXnow. “I’m stoked that this world famous muralist took the contract and is coming to Alexandria. I’m really thrilled by it.”

El Mac, the professional name for Miles MacGregor, is known for creating large photorealistic murals in the U.S., Mexico and Europe.

El Mac is still designing the piece, which will be created with spray paint. The ground level of the building is home to White House Black Market and the upper levels are in the process of being converted into apartments.

“His artistic style is unique,” Dameron said. “I got a sneak peak into what he’s working on and it’s going to be amazing.”

“Shared Roots (Unity Threatens Inequity),” a mural in Los Angeles by El Mac (via Facebook)

Image via Google Maps

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Village Brauhaus in Old Town is being rebranded

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Big changes are coming to Village Brauhaus at 710 King Street in Old Town.

The new owners will close the doors of the restaurant for three weeks starting Tuesday, June 20, and will hold a grand reopening on Thursday, July 13, in a newly renovated and renamed Alexandria Bier Garden, managing partner Fito Garcia tells ALXnow.

“It’s painting, new tile, new decor,” Garcia said. “We’re pretty much transforming the inside into an indoor garden. We’re adding trees, plants everywhere. The Instagram-able moments in this place are going to be ridiculous. You’ll have lots of cool areas that you can just hang out with with your friends and grab a beer and take a picture. It’ll be a lot cleaner, a lot prettier, with a better vibe.”

Garcia and partners James Van Eperen, Gusto Campo and chef Michael Ciuffardi make up the newly formed The Inca Group, and bought the restaurant last October from Bill Gross, who opened it in 2019. Together they also own two Inca Social Peruvian chicken restaurants in Arlington and Vienna, and Garcia is also a co-owner of Courthaus Social beer garden in Arlington.

The owners are now building a rooftop expansion for Alexandria Bier Garden, which Garcia says will open in September. The rooftop is approved to hold up to 49 patrons at a time.

“The rooftop bar was a no-brainer,” Garcia said. “Outside the waterfront, our block has the most restaurants of any other block on King Street. We will become an icon in an Old Town. We’re the biggest rooftop, the only one with a bar and the only one with live music. We almost have a monopoly on the rooftop experience. That investment will pay off for a long time as long as we have a good quality, have a great service and keep on marketing ourselves.”

The menu at the Old Town restaurant will mostly stay the same, with some items added from Courthaus Social and Inca Social.

“I’m big on schnitzel, sausages, big pretzels,” Garcia said. “This is gonna still be German, but you’ll have some German-American fusion and even a little bit of Latin fusion in there, too.”

As for the aspirations of The Inca Group, Garcia says they want to open 10 Inca Social locations throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland and D.C.

“We want at least three chicken places under our belt before we franchise,” he said. “The goal is to franchise that concept. Then we want to take our management group and use our buying power, if you will, to help out other restaurants.”

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Carjacking suspect arrested after midnight pursuit on King Street

 

Police car lights (file photo)

Just after midnight this morning, the Arlington Police Department arrested a wanted suspect with some help from Alexandria and Fairfax police.

The suspect was located in the area of King Street and S. Wakefield Street. Scanner traffic indicated the incident may have been related to an armed carjacking around three days before.

Alexandria Police Department spokesman Marcel Bassett said Ky-Jai Banks-Ross, 18, of Alexandria was arrested — though a tweet from the Alexandria Police Department last night noted “all suspects have been located and apprehended” and scanner traffic indicated three suspects fled from a car.

A Fairfax County helicopter was also involved in the search.

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VRE trains delayed last night over another crash at troubled King Street bridge

A VRE train crosses a bridge over King Street (Staff photo by Jay Westcott)

(Updated 12:35 p.m.) Virginia Railway Express (VRE) trains were stopped last night after a vehicle struck the bridge over King Street — again.

The delay is the latest in a string of incidents that have led authorities to recommend full replacement of the bridge.

Train service was closed for roughly two hours, from 4:50-7 p.m. with train traffic backed up and delayed as a result.

According to an alert from VRE:

Train traffic was stopped in both directions this evening at Alexandria due to a vehicle striking the railroad bridge over King Street. The bridge needed to be checked by a CSX bridge inspector before traffic was released. This created a lengthy delay for passengers on both VRE lines. Northbound train 338 which turns at Union Station to be the final southbound Manassas Line train was unable to go past Alexandria, so we turned it at Alexandria to head back to Broad Run. The railroad was reopened just before 7 pm with 6 VRE trains and 3 Amtrak trains stacked between Crystal City and Union Station.

We apologize to everyone inconvenienced by this delay.

As a result of both its age and repeated battery by stuck vehicles, the bridge has shown troubling signs of decay in recent years, prompting emergency road closures to make repairs.

Authorities have said the 120-year-old bridge does not meet current height requirements and a full replacement is the only permanent solution. Once a design is chosen, construction is scheduled to start in the second quarter of 2024 and continue until midway through 2026.

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Old Town Business Improvement District finishing March with 2/3 of the support it needs

Lower King Street, closed to traffic (staff photo by Jay Westcott)

The team behind the proposed Old Town Business Improvement District (BID) is giving itself a few more months to get the project the support it needs.

Per new guidelines approved by the City Council last year, the BID proposal will need support from 60% of the properties within the district’s boundaries, which mostly runs along King Street.

Back in February, a city-hired lawyer working with the BID proponents said they would need to have those votes of support in the bag by mid-March to get the proposal on this year’s budget. That March deadline would have allowed the city to include the budget in public hearings in April before budget approval on May 3.

But as of Wednesday, March 29, the proposal doesn’t have quite the amount of support it needs.

“The timeline is now the end of May (May 31),” said Maurisa Potts, founder and CEO of Spotted MP Marketing and Public Relations. “We are 2/3 of the way to getting the 60% of the votes. We are extending our public meetings over the next few weeks.”

While that end-of-May timeline misses the cut-off for the FY 2024 budget, the potential for an Old Town BID has come up multiple times in City Hall meetings, from budget workshops to yesterday’s City Council meeting.

At a budget work session last week, City Council members expressed concerns about empty storefronts in Old Town. Alexandria Economic Development Partnership President and CEO Stephanie Landrum said those concerns are an issue that would be best addressed by a BID.

According to Landrum:

What you see on King Street is not what the stats would tell you. While we see vacancies, many of those vacancies are already leased. There’s a long period of time between when somebody closes  and when the new place opens, but it’s technically only vacant for a short period of time. Someone comes in and they have go through the permitting process, they have to do their marketing,  hiring etc. Most of the vacancies around City Hall are spoken for, they’re not vacant…

Many years ago we proposed a program where we would put a sign in the window like ‘coming soon’. What we found was that the money spent and the effort spent to get a permit in place to put up a temporary sign didn’t really support that effort. We have talked through this before.

This work is a lot of what a Business Improvement Districts do and they’re better equipped to move at the kind of speed in real time and they would coordinate things like that. When you go to other parts of this region and you likely see this sort of stuff, usually it’s done by a BID.

Landrum was backed up by City Manager Jim Parajon, who said successful BIDs can create a tangible sales tax increase.

“In my experience with BIDs, you’ll see a relatively strong sales tax rate increase and you’ll also see an appreciation in the values of the property,” Parajon said. “Those are two things I’ve seen consistently in a well-put-together BID.”

At a City Council meeting last night, it was noted that the Waterfront Commission had previously endorsed the proposed BID.

Old Town Business, which has been spearheading the BID effort, announced a series of virtual public meetings this week and throughout April.

According to the website, those meetings are scheduled for:

  • Thursday, March 30: 6:30-7:30 p.m.
  • Thursday, April 6: 6:30-7:30 p.m.
  • Thursday, April 13: 6:30-7:30 p.m.
  • Thursday, April 20: 6:30-7:30 p.m.
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Walgreens redevelopment in Old Town headed to city review

The proposed redevelopment of a pair of blue and white buildings, a former Burke & Herbert Bank and a former Walgreens, is heading back to city review next month.

The plan is to combine the two buildings into a single mixed-use development called The Mansley with ground-floor retail and three stories of residential space above.

The applicant, The Silverman Group, said the exterior will mostly resemble the buildings as they exist today, with the additional 24 multi-family units of residential development kept mostly away from the King Street frontage. According to the application:

The project includes the adaptive reuse and rehabilitation of two early 20th-century buildings. 615 and 621 King Street will be combined into a single building with ground-floor retail space and three stories of residential space above, as well as one level below grade to be utilized as commercial support space. The two distinct building typologies will be retained along the King Street frontage, and the building will step back by 12 feet on the upper two levels so that the buildings read as commercial with traditional window proportions.

The Silverman Group is heading to the Board of Architectural Review on Wednesday, April 19, for a concept review and a permit to demolish. The project won City Council approval for rezoning and development at a meeting in September last year.

615-621 King Street development proposal (image via City of Alexandria)
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Changes in the works for King Street Trolley, including new Eisenhower destination

A proposed extension of the King Street Trolley has reappeared in a new DASH transit plan.

The bus network’s FY 2023-2028 Transit Development Plan includes a look behind the curtain at what’s ahead for the bus network, including a plan to take the King Street Trolley down to the Eisenhower Avenue Metro station.

It’s not the first time the idea has come up. The idea was first raised back in 2020 as a longer-term goal, with hopes of implementation by 2030. Now, the Transit Development Plan says the hope is to get that extension going by FY 2026.

According to the plan:

For FY 2026, DASH proposes to extend the King Street Trolley from the King Street Metro to the Eisenhower Metro. This route extension will require up to three additional Trolley vehicles, which will be 100% electric as part of the larger effort to transition the Trolley fleet to electric buses. DASH will also seek to expand morning service hours for the Trolley and to find ways to integrate it more fully with the Old Town Circulator service. These trolley changes and any further changes to Trolley service will require additional funding, further coordination with city leadership, and approval by City Council.

The plan also includes the proposed replacement of the current hybrid trolleys with five fully electric ones, part of broader fleet electrification the bus network is struggling to find funding for.

The plan also notes that the King Street Trolley remains the most used route in the system.

Despite its post-pandemic ridership decreases, the King Street Trolley remains the most productive route with more than 20 boardings per revenue hour on weekdays and Sundays and more than 30 boardings per revenue hour on Saturdays.

https://twitter.com/DASHBus/status/1638589618407841854

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Large residential overhaul in Old Town clears bureaucratic hurdle

Tycon Building redesign plans (image via City of Alexandria)

Alexandria’s Board of Architectural Review can be infamously picky about urban design, but the board unanimously voted to approve a large new project in Old Town with significant enthusiasm.

Applicant City House Old Town, LLC is applying to have the office building at 1101 King Street — currently a mostly vacant office space called the Tycon Building — changed into a residential development with 210 units.

The current office building was built in 1983, predating new regulations for density in the area set in 1992. The new plans won’t add any density to the building, but still require a special use permit because they aren’t compliant with current limits.

While the interior is undergoing significant changes, the exterior changes are relatively minor. The developer is proposing new railings and balconies, along with some cosmetic changes to the coloring of the building’s exterior.

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PHOTOS: The 2023 St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Old Town

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Old Town was packed on Saturday morning for Alexandria’s 40th annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Thousands of visitors lined King Street to watch a procession of more than 2,000 participants, including Irish dancers, historic reenactors and the City of Alexandria Pipes and Drums. The festivities also included a car show and a dog show at Market Square outside City Hall.

This year’s Grand Marshal was Charlotte Hall, managing director of Old Town Business. The parade was sponsored by the Ballyshaners, a nonprofit dedicated to Irish heritage. Ballyshaners is Gaelic for “Old Towners.”

Enjoy the photos!

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