Arlington is noted for being home to many male aficionados of brown flip flops.
On Sunday, one observer of local culture might have found the female equivalent of “dudes in brown flip flops” — women in tall brown boots.
At the first annual Arts and Craft Beer Festival in Courthouse over the weekend, Twitter user @SeenInClarendon saw — and photographed — many such pairs of boots, which might seem more appropriate on someone riding a horse than on someone downing a lager and a lobster roll.
Is this a trend that’s especially prevalent in Arlington — a la brown flip flops? Or is it not Arlington-specific? We’ll let you decide.
What’s in a name? Apparently a lot, if you ask County Board member John Vihstadt. He would like people to stop using the term “trolley” when referencing Arlington’s streetcar project.
As InsideNova reported, although Vihstadt doesn’t support the streetcar, he thinks the word trolley is derogatory and makes people think of the old Rice-a-Roni commercials.
Do you agree that trolley is a derogatory “loaded word” in the debate over Arlington’s streetcar project?
Within eight hours of our article’s first publication, Gillibrand apologized for the remark (which was buried in the pages of her new book, “Off The Sidelines.”) But that didn’t stop the debate over whether Gillibrand was off-base or on-target in her assessment of Arlington.
Among those weighing in: Ben Adler, a former New Yorker and a writer at the environmental news website Grist.org. Penning a piece for the Washington Post’s online PostEverything op-ed section, Adler said Gillibrand shouldn’t apologize.
Some excerpts from that article:
For one year I worked at an office in Arlington, Virginia. There were virtually no restaurants that were not chains. Everything was crowded at peak lunch hour but completely empty by 3 p.m. and closed by the time I left work.
Kirsten Gillibrand… correctly identified Arlington in her new memoir as a “soulless suburb.” That’s exactly what most of my friends who have lived in D.C. would call it. In fact, when I was recently trying to describe the cultural vacuity of the “Williamsburg Edge,” a new apartment tower in Brooklyn, I called it, “Arlington on the East River.” My friend who lived in Washington laughed knowingly. He required no further explanation.
Arlington… lacks a physical center, a public space like Dupont Circle, where buskers can play music and activists can make speeches. A centrally located, and well-designed park — with facilities for both active and passive recreation such as basketball courts, chess tables, and benches — would go a long way towards giving Arlington a soul. Most important, unlike all of Arlington’s misbegotten little plazas, it has to be designed to draw passersby in and to engage with the streets around it.
That prompted at least one notable D.C. resident to call foul.
“At the risk of defending Arlington (!), isn’t this @badler piece just about Rosslyn, not all of Arlington?” asked Washington City Paper editor Mike Madden, via Twitter.
Perhaps the best judges of whether Arlington County does or does not lack a soul are those who actually live here. So what do you think?
It should be a comfortable weather week, with high temperatures in the mid-to-lower 80s through Friday.
With July, usually the hottest month of the year, coming to close this week, it appears that the D.C. region has dodged the usual 100+ degree heat waves of summers past.
In fact, the area seems to have had an inordinate number of relatively mild days this summer.
How do you feel about the weather so far this summer?
Metro’s Silver Line is set to officially open on Saturday, with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, and other notable officials on hand to watch the first train depart the Wiehle-Reston East station.
The launch of the Silver Line has economic ramifications for Arlington, though there’s some debate over whether those ramifications will be mostly good or mostly bad.
On the pessimistic side, rail transit in Reston and Tysons could enhance the desirability of those areas and present Arlington with stiff competition, especially in the commercial office market.
On the optimistic side, the fact that the Silver Line will run through Arlington on the way to D.C. could actually make the county’s Orange/Silver corridor even more desirable as an economic hub. The video above makes the case that Ballston in particular is well-positioned to benefit from the Silver Line.
Publicly and privately, officials with Arlington Economic Development say they expect Tysons to take many years to develop as a truly desirable urban area, with walkable and active streets and ample housing. Even then, they believe Arlington’s multi-decade head start on transit-oriented development, and its proximity to D.C., will give the county the competitive edge over Tysons.
On balance, do you think the Silver Line will help or hurt Arlington County?
Arlington County’s PR campaign to inform residents of the benefit of the streetcar continues.
This week we reported — followed by other local TV, print and online outlets — that the county had produced more television spots that try to explain “why streetcar.”
Among the expected benefits along Columbia Pike are more development, increased county tax revenue, increased transit ridership, and the preservation of affordable housing.
If you could look into a crystal ball to 2030, and see a revitalized Columbia Pike where all of those things came true thanks to streetcar, would you support the project now?
The controversy over the name of Washington’s professional football team shows no signs of dying down.
Earlier this week, Democratic blogger and former Arlington resident Ben Tribbett made national news when he resigned from the Redskins. The team hired him two weeks prior to support the public relations battle against sentiment that “Redskins” as a racial slur against Native Americans.
Tribbett, a supporter of the name, said he resigned because the debate got too personal — “things got too hot to handle” and became a distraction to the team.
Tribbett’s hiring came as pressure mounts on the Redskins and owner Dan Snyder to change the name. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last month revoked the trademark on “Redskins,” saying it is “disparaging of Native Americans.” For that same reason, media organizations from the Washington City Paper to the Seattle Times to a student newspaper in Pennsylvania have been banning the use of the team’s name in news coverage.
Tribbett, who now lives in Lorton, says he continues to support the Redskins and thinks news outlets should report, not moralize when it comes to the name.
“The reason I support the Redskins name is, I don’t think it’s a slur first of all,” Tribbett told ARLnow.com this morning. “Having grown up in this area, nothing brought the entire D.C. area together more than the Redskins, and the idea that it’s now a divisive issue really bothers me.”
“I don’t see why anyone would not publish the name, the name of the football team is the Washington Redskins,” Tribbett continued. “Until Dan Snyder or someone else says otherwise, i think journalists should report the news and not make it.”
What do you think? Should news outlets — including ARLnow.com — ban the name or keep using it?
ARLnow.com is about to embark on a minor redesign of our website and we would like your opinion on one aspect of this process.
Currently, our site is not optimized for smartphone readers. Instead, those who visit us on iPhones, Droids and other mobile phones simply see our desktop website rendered by their smartphone’s browser.
Many news websites, however, are designed to display in a more “native” fashion on smartphone screens — in a way that doesn’t require the user to zoom in to read text. One criticism of such mobile-optimized sites is that they can sometimes hide certain features and make navigation more difficult.
ARLnow.com is considering three approaches to our redesign:
Develop a mobile-optimized site, from scratch, for smartphone users
Optimize the existing site to simply display with larger text for smartphone users, to make articles more readable
Tomorrow is Friday, June 13 — the only Friday the 13th in 2014.
Fueling the fears of the superstitious, there will be a full moon tomorrow night. Such an event — a full moon on Friday the 13th — won’t happen again util 2049.
Arlington is a famously civically-active community. It’s the “Arlington Way.” But do residents sometimes take their expectations for responsive governance and residential serenity too far?
There are many reasons cited for Arlington County Board member John Vihstadt’s historic electoral victory last week.
