Chase Bank cut the ribbon on its new location in the heart of Old Town this morning.

Chase Bank bought 628 King Street for $11 million in December 2022, more than double its assessed value ($5.2 million last year), according to Alexandria property records. The building was previously a Banana Republic for decades, and closed along with The Gap at 622 King Street in January 2022.

“It is an honor for us to be a part of the Old Town community,” said branch manager Wendy Turner at the ribbon cutting. “It is such a privilege to be a part of this charming and historic community of Old Town residents and business owners, and we;’re so excited to be here.”

Chase Bank first moved to Alexandria in 2019, across the street at 106 N. Washington Street. The New York-based company has 114 locations in the D.C. metro area and plans on having 140 locations by the end of 2025.

A permanent sign will be erected within the next several weeks, staff told ALXnow.

“When we look at our locations we really want to make sure they’re visible and accessible,” said Chase Bank regional manager Alfonzo Guzman. “We’re going to be here in Old Town for a long time.”

The building at 628 and 622 King Street was constructed as a 600-seat theatre in 1854. During the Civil War, the building was named Washington Hall General Hospital, and contained 100 beds for Union soldiers. The building was later a laundromat and an insurance firm before it burned down and was rebuilt.

A new yoga franchise just had a ribbon cutting in Alexandria’s Carlyle neighborhood.

Mayor Justin Wilson and City Council Member John Taylor Chapman attended the event for YogaSix at 2465 Mandeville Lane over the weekend. The franchise offers six types of yoga classes, and a location is being developed for Potomac Yard.

YogaSix is part of Xponential Fitness and was founded in 2017.

“We believe that everyone deserves the mind-body experience of yoga,” YogaSix said on its website. “By connecting you to a  practice that is energizing, empowering, and fun. We deliver life-enhancing benefits through our six core classes: Y6 101, Y6 Restore, Y6 Slow Flow, Y6 Hot, Y6 Power, and Y6 Sculpt & Flow.”

A description of the six core classes is below.

• Slow Flow: This yoga class flows at a slowed-down pace so there’s time to explore individual postures and transitions in a warm practice room. Newer students find this class builds confidence and familiarity, while more experienced students refine the fundamentals of alignment and dive into a deeper practice. You will gently engage, open, and strengthen the body by tapping into accessible yoga poses, fluid movement, and breath.
• Restore: Whether you’re training for a half-marathon, pushing weights, or stuck behind a desk all day, Y6 Restore yoga classes are for you. These yoga classes emphasize floor postures to stretch, open and release the major muscle groups of the entire body in lightly warm full sensory room. Students who take this yoga class regularly report better recovery, mobility, fewer injuries, improved sleep, as well as reduced aches and pains.
• Hot: This YogaSix signature set sequence, Y6 Hot combines yoga postures synched with your breath, a fun and challenging balancing series, and dynamic core work designed to add energizing fire to your life in a heated practice room. This yoga sequence will leave you feeling perfectly balanced inside and out, from bottom to top.
• Power: Y6 Power classes are strength-building, full-body blasts designed to build focus, endurance, and flexibility in a heated practice room. These Vinyasa yoga classes move at a steady pace to keep your practice fluid, creative and energizing. This workout will take your body and mind through a challenging yoga journey. Y6 Power yoga classes facilitate breakthroughs in your body and mind, so count on leaving with a sense of energy and empowerment.
• Sculpt & Flow: Strengthen Yourself. Y6 Sculpt & Flow classes are the perfect blend of yoga and weight training in a heated practice room. A dynamic warm-up will get your heart-rate up and muscles warm, before you dive into an intense, cross training workout that uses dumbbells, bands and body weight exercises to challenge muscular strength, endurance, and cardiovascular thresholds. Then cool down with some juicy yoga stretches to leave you in a puddle on the mat. Y6 Sculpt & Flow is the best of both worlds —a total body workout plus a killer yoga vibe. Expect a fun playlist and loud, high energy music throughout.
• TRX: Y6 TRX is offered only at select locations incorporating our 6 core classes utilizing a full TRX wall mount system. Strengthen Yourself by experiencing a yoga practice allowing you to engage muscles that weren’t previously activated in a typical yoga practice. This is a great class to do if you’re used to TRX and you want to try out yoga. It’s also a great class if you’ve been doing yoga for a while and want to ramp up what you’ve been able to do on your mat. Y6 TRX is a little bit of everything, increasing range of motion, noticing asymmetries in your body that you can then work on. Let’s Hang Out!

via Facebook

Talk about a good pairing: An Ethiopian honey wine-tasting room just opened on Vine Street in Alexandria’s West End.

Gize Negussie has a steadily growing list of about 40 Ethiopian shops and restaurants that he sells wine to, and late in the fall opened Negus Winery and Meadery Tasting Room in a renovated space in an industrial area at 5509 Vine Street.

The new tasting room is next door to his production room where giant vats of a half dozen wines ferment over the course of six months. He’s currently making this summer’s batches.

“I’m introducing 3,000-year-old wine recipes that have existed since the Queen of Sheba,” Negussie told ALXnow. “There are no sulfites, which means no headaches. It’s 100% natural with 100% pure honey.”

Negussie emigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia with his family in 2011, and first got into the alcohol business in 2015 when he launched Negus as an Ethiopian brewery, making beer with teff, a multipurpose starchy crop that is a staple of the Ethiopian diet. He said that the pandemic forced him to shutter his operation, which was in Manassas at the time, and that he and his two partners went their separate ways, but he kept the name of the business alive, as well as his equipment, and in 2021 he reopened the winery in Alexandria.

Negussie uses wildflower honey from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which he says is close to Ethiopian honey. He said his mom helped him develop the red, white, rosé, semi-sweet and semi-dry wines.

“I grew up drinking traditional Ethiopian honey wine, and knew the way I wanted it to taste,” he said.

A flight of six small glasses of wine costs $35, and bottles of wine cost between $20 and $25.

Negussie dreams of expanding by opening a vineyard within the next decade.

“I want to have a destination where we can grow our own grapes and have big honey hives,” he said. “I want to see people coming to our vineyard. That’s my big picture.”

The tasting room is closed Monday, but open Tuesday from 2 to 8 p.m., on Wednesday and Thursday from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., on Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and on Sunday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

The Linder Academy, a private school that opened at 607 S. Washington Street in 2021, has applied to open a new location at Ross Dress for Less at 112 N. Washington Street.

The school, which currently has around 105 students at the existing location, is applying to have a maximum of 160 middle and high school students at the new location.

“Linder Academy is a private school in Alexandria and is looking to expand its footprint in Old Town with this location,” the application said. “The proposed floor plan shows 13 classrooms, as well as other associated learning, counseling and administrative spaces, including a multi-purpose room, a teaching kitchen, cafeteria, teachers’ lounge and library.”

The application said the new location will have small class sizes, with 12 students per teacher, and a focus on hands-on learning.

The application said the new school has three parking spaces on the property in a small alley, but they will lease 10 spaces in a parking garage at 515 King Street.

Jafaar Ouardi says his shave ice is like eating fluffy snow.

After launching Le Petit Ananas Hawaiian Shaved Ice two years ago in Fairfax County, Ouardi recently got City Council approval to set up shop in the alleyway outside Bagel Uprising at 2307 A Mount Vernon Avenue. He’s planning on reopening at the new location in March and staying open until November.

“This is like the shaved ice you find in New Orleans,” Ouardi said. “It’s really slushy and fluffy, like snow. It’s so good.”

There’s 14 flavors, including root beer, cherry, cotton candy, mango and pineapple, and the product uses 100% cane sugar from a Hawaiian distributor. Toppings include condensed milk, mochi and fruit purees.

The 12-foot-by-six-foot shave ice trailer will replace the existing tables that were previously used for outdoor dining, according to a city staff report.

A native of Fes, Morocco, Ouardi is also a DJ and IT consultant. He says that if the business is a success that he wants to be open year-round. He was first introduced to Del Ray when he sold shave ice from his trailer at last summer’s Band’s & Brews Bar Crawl.

“It’s going to be good,” Ouardi said. “If I get support from the community, I’ll think about adding things to the menu, like Moroccan hot tea, baklava and Acai bowls.”

Image via Instagram

Tatte Bakery & Cafe is opening on Jan. 24 at 515 King Street, staff tell ALXnow.

A sign that the restaurant will open in winter 2024 was recently posted outside a main window. Staff inside the confirmed that it will open on Wednesday, Jan. 24.

By the time the bakery opens, it will have been more than a year since the company filed permits with the city.

There are 24 Tatte Bakery & Cafe locations in Massachusetts and the D.C. Metro area. This is the first Alexandria location.

The cafe will be open from 7 a.m.-8 p.m. and serve approximately 400 customers per day.

Get your ballet slippers ready, because a new dance school is soon opening in Del Ray.

Dance Academy of Virginia recently erected a temporary sign and started advertising ballet, point, contemporary, jazz, lyrical, hip-hop, tap and musical theater classes in advance of their January 6 opening at 2402 Mount Vernon Avenue, the former home of Yoga In Daily Life.

The business was founded in McLean during the height of the pandemic in mid-2020, and owner Katherine Horrigan just bought the 4,900-square-foot building in Del Ray. The details of the purchase are not yet publicly available on the city website, but the building was for sale for $2 million.

“This is now our home now,” Horrigan said. “Getting an opportunity to buy this facility and say that we now have dance here and any art programming that may we may pursue in the future is an honor.”

While all ages are welcome, the school focuses on teaching kids.

“Dance is a tool to learn how to learn a lot of things in life,” Horrigan said. “It’s going to be uncomfortable, it’s going to be hard. You’re not always going to want to do it. You’re going to put in literal sweat and a time commitment, but it’s putting in those reps that you actually start to build off of and build a skill. When you have that skill, you can do so much with it.”

Horrigan, who is also an adjunct professor of dance at George Mason University, has a bachelor’s degree in dance from Fordham University and a master’s degree in arts management from George Mason University. After graduating from Fordham, she embarked on a decade-long dance career with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Knee injuries prompted her retirement, after which she started teaching at GMU and became the director of the Adagio Ballet School of Dance in Arlington.

The pandemic upended the dancing business, providing Horrigan an opportunity to create her own school.

“Covid was an opportunity for me to open my own school because students were displaced,” she said. “I was able to bring dance teachers together and administrators and immediately bring the team together to build the company and we’ve just been growing ever since. We’re in our fourth year now and ready to expand into Del Ray.”

Horrigan said that the school acts as a second home for many of her students.

“Kids have their birthday parties together and they becomes friends,” she said. “They’ll have their school friends, but then they also have their dance friends.”

Dance Academy of Virginia dancers can be next seen at the Del Ray Christmas Tree and menorah lightings this Sunday at 6 p.m.

Dance photo via Facebook

French and Italian tableware and home goods boutique Crème de la Crème will open at 907 King Street in March.

The Middleburg-based retailer recently signed a five-year lease with building owner EastBanc for the 2,200-square-foot property formerly home to Mackie’s Bar and Grill. The Old Town store will join the company’s two locations in Virginia — in Middleburg and Richmond — and one store in Frederick, Maryland.

Crème de la Crème was founded in 2000 by Tara and Ben Wegdam. The couple also own three other retail shops in Middleburg — Loulou, Zest and Brick and Mortar.

“We have been looking for years at expanding our presence into Alexandria and finally found a place that will work for our format,” said Tara Wegdam. “We have so many customers from the D.C. and Alexandria area that have been asking us for a retail location closer by, so we are extremely excited to open our doors at 907 King Street next Spring.”

For-profit Washington University of Science and Technology could be moving into a vacant office on Eisenhower Avenue that was formerly a Stratford University campus.

Washington University of Science and Technology is a for-profit university based out of Tysons. The school is applying to a new location in a 4-story commercial office building at 2900 Eisenhower Avenue. The building was previously approved for special use as a private academic school in 2013, but the location closed in October 2022 when the Stratford shut down.

“The building has the capability for 494 classroom seats with an auditorium and space for an educational restaurant,” the application said. “The SUP notes Stratford had a maximum enrollment of 900 with 160 students per session (3 sessions per day), an average of 55 staff members per session, and hours of operation 8:30 a.m.-11 p.m.”

The application says Washington University of Science and Technology plans to use the space basically the same way, with a few modifications.

“We have a similar active student population comparable to the 900 students quoted by Stratford University, and with almost half of the classes being offered online, we do not expect to come close to exceeding the quoted 160 students/session,” the school said.

Washington University of Science and Technology said the school doesn’t offer a culinary program, so conditions regarding the accessory restaurants won’t be applicable.

“We look forward to working with and serving the Alexandria community,” the school said.

Photo via Google Maps

Department store chain T.J. Maxx announced the new Potomac Yard Center location (3875 Richmond Highway) will open tomorrow (Thursday).

The new location is opening in part of the old Shoppers Food Warehouse in Potomac Yard, relocating from the nearby 3451 Richmond Highway.

Shoppers closed in 2020 and the location was expected to transform into an Amazon Fresh, but when those plans were scrapped, T.J. Maxx swooped in.

The regular store hours will be 9 a.m.-10 p.m., though it will open an hour earlier at 8 a.m. tomorrow. The new location is approximately 30,300 square feet.

“Our newest store in Alexandria will offer an ever-changing selection of high-quality, on-trend and brand-name merchandise at the amazing prices T.J.Maxx is known for,” T.J. Maxx President Peter Benjamin said in a release. “With a constant flow of new arrivals, we offer an exciting one-stop-shop that makes it easy for consumers to stay on-trend with styles they love and save big every single day.”