Author: Anna Merod

Barley Mac to Host Second Annual Oyster Festival

By Anna Merod

Barley Mac will be holding its second annual oyster festival on Saturday (April 21) from 1-5 p.m. on its patio, weather permitting.

Festival attendees can dig into unlimited oysters alongside a cigar rolling station, an oyster shucking instructional station, an oyster eating contest, and a live musical performance.

Tickets, ranging in price from $49 online to $59 at the door, will also include two drink tickets and a stemless wine glass.

Barley Mac will be serving raw oysters, oysters Rockefeller, grilled oysters, fried po-boys, oyster stew, fried buffalo batter oysters and oyster ceviche.

The oyster and wine festival will be open for all ages, though those 21 and older will receive a wristband to drink.

Photo courtesy Barley Mac

New Ballston Bike Store Replaces Freshbikes

By Anna Merod
1/6

Less than three months after Freshbikes closed its Ballston location, another bike store has opened its doors in the space.

After 11 years in business, Freshbikes closed its Ballston location  “due to circumstances outside our control,” according to a message on the store’s website.

The bike store closed its two other regional locations as well.

In its place, Spokes Etc. opened this week.

Tyler Flowers, Spokes Etc.’s manager, said he isn’t worried about a lack of demand for bikes in Ballston and thinks Spokes Etc. will do just fine along the Metro corridor. The store faces competition from nearby Conte’s Bike Shop.

Though Freshbikes is gone, its sign is still there due to permitting issues, Flowers said. Once Spokes Etc. puts up its own sign in several weeks, it will hold a grand opening, he added.

Spokes Etc. already has five other locations in Northern Virginia including Alexandria, Belle View, Fairfax, Leesburg and Vienna.

Expect a Yarn Bomb to Hit Clarendon This Week

By Anna Merod

A yarn bomb will be hitting the Clarendon Metro Plaza this week to raise awareness about metastatic breast cancer.

More than 30 trees in the plaza will be covered in colorful yarn from April 20-30, according to Arlington native Ann McLean, the project’s organizer. McLean has been collecting both knitted pieces and monetary donations through her organization called Stitch 4 Stage IV, which was created in November.

More than 200 knitted pieces were donated for the yarn bomb.

“I was really worried that we weren’t going to get enough and it turned out we got more than enough,” she said. “We actually may turn out doing more trees than we thought we were going to do.”

McLean is also using the yarn bomb as a way to celebrate the six-year anniversary of her own diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer. This type of cancer has no cure and the survival rates are grim — around 70 percent of people with it don’t live past 3 years, she said.

“I’m considering this quite an anniversary,” McLean added.

It also sends cancer cells to other parts of the body, and in McLean’s case, it’s in her liver. The cancer is treatable, but not curable, she noted. The yarn bomb is symbolic of the cancer, she said.

“Metastatic breast cancer is like a bomb going off, sending breast cancer debris to other parts of your body — bones, lungs, liver and brain,” McLean wrote in an email.

McLean also got 40 people to sponsor a tree for $100 each and also received other donations, totaling $10,000 raised for the Karen Ribeiro Drug Discovery Research fund at the Inova Schar Cancer Institute.

Knitting was a hobby for McLean when she was a child and she picked it back up when she got her diagnosis. She said it helps her feel “zen,” keeps her busy, and calms any anxiety.

She also got the idea for a yarn bomb when she took a trip to New Zealand and thought the knitting community would support a similar project in Arlington. But the donations have come from all over, including Encinitas, Calif., Palm Harbor, Fla., Rehoboth Beach, Del. and even the United Kingdom.

This will not be Arlington’s first yarn bombing — a group called the Guerrilla Stitch brigade covered Rosslyn in yarn back in 2013.

Rosslyn-Based Startup Makes Data Easier to Handle

By Anna Merod

Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

The most difficult part of starting up Lovelytics was coming up with a name, according to its founder, Scott Love.

“You can’t do anything until you come up with a name. You can’t file for an LLC, you can’t create a website, you can’t buy a domain. That honestly took forever, it sounds silly,” Love said.

Luckily, his girlfriend came up with the name “Lovelytics,” and Love was able to begin building his Rosslyn-based business intelligence service after two years working in the industry.

Lovelytics crafts data visualizations for companies to help them to better understand their metrics, and thus make smarter business decisions.

Its customers range from Fortune 100 companies to local D.C. startups and non-profits.

“We can work with anyone who collects data and has a desire to better understand it,” said Love, who serves as CEO.

With a wide range of clientele comes a range of data-driven projects, including a donor and donation tracking service generated for a Virginia non-profit.

The non-profit was then able to reduce the time needed to manage its donations and more quickly gain insights about donation data.

Other Lovelytics projects include an interactive map created with D.C. Open Data that shows which intersections have the most traffic crashes. An example of the map is also pictured below.

Lovelytics will be one of several Arlington startups attending the Collision 2018 Tech Conference in New Orleans.

“It’s a great conference for us because we can be in front of both investors [and] a lot of prospective clients,” Love said.

At the conference, Lovelytics intends to present an interactive map to show conference attendees how far they traveled to arrive at the event, with a scoreboard showing who traveled the furthest.

In the future, Love said he hopes he can work with more government clients and continue building new products and solutions with tools like Mapbox and Tableau.

Here are the Roads that Will Be Closed for Races This Weekend

By Anna Merod

Two 5K races will be prompting road closures in parts of Arlington on Saturday morning.

The 2018 Bishop O’Connell 5K race will take place between 7:30-10:30 a.m. The following roads will be closed for the race, according to the Arlington County Police Department.

  • Williamsburg Blvd. will be closed to eastbound traffic from N. Underwood St. to N. Sycamore St.
  • Little Falls Rd. will be closed from Sycamore St. to Washington Blvd.
  • 26th St. will be closed from N. Sycamore St. to Washington Blvd.
  • Underwood St. will be closed from N. 24th St. to Williamsburg Blvd.

The 2018 Bunny Hop 5K race will take place from 7-10 a.m. For that race, ACPD said the following roads will be closed.

  • Pershing Drive, from N. Highland Street to N. Oakland Street
  • Irving Street, from N. 9th Road to N. 2nd Road
  • Jackson Street, from Rt. 50 to N. 2nd Road
  • Highland Street, from N. 9th Street to N. 9th Road
  • 5th Street, from N. Irving Street to N. Oakland Street
  • 9th Road, between N. Irving Street and N. Highland Street
  • 9th Street, Between N. Irving Street and N. Highland Street
  • 2nd Road, between N. Irving Street and N. Jackson Street

Part of the Bunny Hop 5K will run through the Columbia Gardens Cemetery. Visitors will be able to walk through the cemetery, but car traffic will be directed by race personnel. There will also be parking restrictions along N. Irving Street between 6th Street N. and 9th Road N..

For both races, residents will be escorted through traffic closures and are encouraged to park their cars in driveways to reduce road congestion.

Photos courtesy Arlington County

Arlington Ranked Best Place for Successful Women in the U.S.

By Anna Merod

The most successful women in the U.S. live in Arlington, according to a new study by the website SmartAsset.

The study looked at 100 cities in the U.S. and ranked them based on six factors: the percentage of women with a bachelor’s degree, full-time working women’s median earnings, the percent of female business owners, the female unemployment rate, full-time, working women’s housing-income ratio, and the percentage of working women with an income of at least $75,000.

Here’s what SmartAsset wrote about Arlington:

Arlington, Virginia takes the top spot. This city has the highest paid women in the study, according to Census Bureau data. The median full-time working woman in Arlington earns over $80,200 per year. In total nearly 57% of women here earn at least $75,000 per year. And Arlington women do more than earn large paychecks.

For one, they also make up 38.6% of people working in their own private businesses and just under 35% of women here have a bachelor’s degree. In fact, the only metric this city does not score in the top 10 for is housing cost as a percent of income. According to our data, if the average full-time working woman paid for the average home they would spend just around 30% of their income

Arlington’s neighbors, D.C. and Alexandria, also broke into the top ten, with Alexandria in a tie with San Francisco for fourth place and D.C. ranked No. 8.

SmartAsset also recently ranked Arlington as the number one “city” for runners.

The Simple Greek Sets Anticipated Opening in Rosslyn

By Anna Merod

The Simple Greek is hoping to open its new restaurant location at the Colonial Village Shopping Center in early May, according to a company representative.

Signs for the restaurant are currently up at the shopping plaza, between the Rosslyn and Courthouse Metro stations. Workers were installing equipment as of Wednesday morning.

The Simple Greek representatives had previously told ARLnow that they were hoping for a late April opening.

Located at 1731 Wilson Boulevard, the restaurant will serve personalized Greek pitas and bowls. Greek wine and beer are available at select locations, but it doesn’t appear that this location has a pending or active Virginia ABC license.

Ballston-Based Drug Rehab Program Expands with Leeway-Overlee House

By Anna Merod

(Updated at 6:35 p.m.) Encore Recovery Solutions, a rehabilitation center for young adults trying to overcome “substance use and co-occurring behavioral health disorders,” is expanding.

The drug rehab center has been in business for just over a year and recently moved to larger offices in Ballston. The Ballston facility hosts an outpatient treatment program, according to Tom Walker, Encore’s director of community relations.

In February, Encore announced via Facebook that it had also purchased a residential property at 5805 26th Street N. in the Leeway-Overlee neighborhood, for use as a “sober living environment for young adults.” The house has been approved as “legally non-conforming use by Arlington County,” Walker said.

Some people who live near the home have expressed concerns about its new use.

“We have communicated with several of the neighborhood residents individually, and attended the Open Door Monday meeting yesterday evening where we discussed our plans with other neighborhood residents,” Walker said via email. Some residents are “very much in opposition,” he acknowledged, while others are either “openly supportive of Encore’s efforts” or “willing to engage in discussing best practices.”

Between 2015-2017, Arlington saw a 245 percent increase in patients seeking treatment for opioid addiction and related disorders.  The number of patients went up from 100 in 2015 to 345 in 2017, according to the county.

Photo via Encore Recovery Solutions/Facebook

DC United Players to Flip Chickens at Rosslyn Nando’s for Charity

By Anna Merod
1/2

Six D.C. United soccer players will be taking over the grills in the Rosslyn new Nando’s Peri-Peri on Thursday (April 12) to benefit the team’s charity partner, D.C. Scores.

All of the proceeds earned that day at Nando’s will go towards D.C. Scores, a non-profit that offers free after school soccer and literacy programs to at-risk D.C. youth.

The players will be using Nando’s grills from 2-8 p.m. The team and Nando’s will also be raffling off a signed team item and a pair of tickets to the D.C. United v. Columbus Crew SC match on April 14.

The location at 1800 N. Lynn Street opened almost a month ago and is one of the chain’s now 41 U.S. locations.

Crystal City-Based Financial Planning App Lets Average Investors Build Portfolios Like Millionaires

By Anna Merod

Sponsored by Monday Properties and written by ARLnow.com, Startup Monday is a weekly column that profiles Arlington-based startups and their founders, plus other local technology happenings. The Ground Floor, Monday’s office space for young companies in Rosslyn, is now open. The Metro-accessible space features a 5,000-square-foot common area that includes a kitchen, lounge area, collaborative meeting spaces, and a stage for formal presentations.

“A robust end-to-end technology platform for financial planning and investments” is being built in Crystal City.

The app, 1787fp, is mobile software that lets the everyday investor manage their finances and work toward financial independence.

The app contains three components. The first is a free financial planning and budgeting tool. The second, a premium feature, helps users manage and create a financial portfolio. The third is a free service for users to check their credit score.

The premium investment feature will cost users less than what they would pay at a big brokerage firm such as Wells Fargo or Goldman Sachs, but will be more expensive than the lowest cost providers in the financial advisory space.

“We really want to position ourselves as a premium player in helping people plan and work toward financial independence,” said 1787fp founder and CEO Jean Jacques Borno.

Borno said that he hopes his customers are able to build up enough wealth through the app that they only work because they want to, not because they have to.

After collecting research on the average user of financial planning services, Borno found that people were going to seven to eight different websites for their financial planning needs. He hopes 1787fp will become an app that streamlines all those services.

The idea for 1787fp grew out of Borno’s 15 years of working as a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. At each of the firms, Borno normally worked with clients with at least $1 million in assets. But on the weekends, he began working with clients that were coming out of law school or were engineers — people who had a steady income but definitely not $1 million in assets. Over time he was able to help them build their portfolios.

“I really thought the large companies were really missing a boat,” he said. 

With 1787fp, users will be able diversify their portfolio like a millionaire, Borno said.

“The thing that’s really cool is that the way that we set up the proposals,” he said. “In the traditional world a person would need a million dollars in order to properly diversify but we can give them the same portfolio that the so called ‘billionaire’ would have for their first $5,000 or $10,000.”

Borno got his certified financial planner license and went to the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, where he created 1787fp in February 2016.

The name for the app came in two parts. 1787 was inspired by the year the constitution was created, Borno said. And “fp” stands for financial planner.

“I just wanted to get something that kind of paid tribute to the world’s greatest startup — the United States,” Borno said.

The app is not out yet, but a beta version should be released shortly. Then once Borno reviews feedback from the beta version he will make adjustments and then release final version in the summer.

Arlington National Cemetery Launches Second Survey About Its Future

By Anna Merod

As remaining burial plots become more scarce, Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) has released a second public survey regarding its future.

If current burial eligibility policies remain in place, the cemetery will reach full capacity in 23 years, according to cemetery officials. In the first survey, conducted July of 2017, 93 percent of respondents said keeping that keeping ANC’s hallowed grounds open to burials long into the future was important to them.

The second survey specifically asks which veterans or active military members should be qualified for a burial, including questions relating to the eligibility of those with Purple Hearts, prisoners of war, elected officials once on active duty, and World War II veterans.

Results from the first survey showed that many respondents felt that eligibility should be given to those killed in action or on operational missions, Medal of Honor and other high award recipients, and former prisoners of war.

Current eligibility is currently more flexible, including prisoners of war and retired veterans who had served at least one day of active duty.

The survey notes that another cemetery expansion is expected to add additional burial plots, but it is not a long-term solution.

“The next possible expansion, into the area south of the cemetery (the Southern Expansion; around 40 acres) will add about 10-15 years of life to the cemetery – closing the cemetery to new burials by the mid-2050’s,” the survey says. “This does not achieve the objective or the desire of previous survey respondents to keep ANC open for new burials well into the future.”

In 2014, ANC began its $82 million “Millennium Project” to expand into an undeveloped land parcel adjacent to Fort Myer.

File photo

View More Stories