As Fairfax County’s budget season was beginning, Virginia’s budget season was ending, or so everyone thought.  The Virginia General Assembly adjourned on February 25 without adopting a complete state budget, pledging instead to come back in April to finish the job.  That lack of action on a final budget places […]

Ah, the arts! The focus of this edition of the News-Press is on the arts in and around the Little City, and we are pleased that, with everything else going on in our world these days, people are veritably breaking down our door to get the word of their work […]

As the county board revs up for a March 18 final vote on Missing Middle housing rezoning, an array of recent developments have drawn notice from backers and opponents. Arlington’s NAACP protested the board’s removal of the option of allowing seven-eight-plex structures countywide from the Request to Advertise approved Jan. […]

When children leave home, their “stuff” often stays, sometimes in their childhood bedrooms, sometimes in the basement and, sometimes, both! Exploring our adult daughter’s bookshelves recently, I discovered her favorite authors, like Judy Blume, E.B. White, Beverly Cleary, Lois Lowry, Roald Dahl, and sadly realized that some classic authors have […]

 As it has done often throughout history, Arlington is resisting edicts from Richmond, this time on the pending controversial standards for how K-12 schools should teach history. The ideological changeover from the Northam to the Youngkin administration last summer turned the once-every-seven-years standards-writing process into a political fracas. The standards […]

Fairfax County’s Urban Search and Rescue Team (USAR), also known as VA-Task Force 1 or USA-01, depending on the location of the search and rescue mission, was deployed to assist in the search for victims of the earthquake that occurred on the Turkey/Syria border last week.  The USAR team consists […]

Announcing another landmark soon to vanish:  Essy’s Carriage House, the American cuisine steakhouse that’s been a fixture in Cherrydale for 48 years, will close its doors at the end of March.    No other Arlington full-service restaurant has been open longer, according to founder-owner Essy Saedi, an Iranian immigrant who came […]

 The human condition is always changing.  Scholars and philosophers have observed that simple but significant fact for centuries.  Local land use provides a good example of how some of the human condition has changed over time.  The large estates and farms of early Fairfax County were succeeded by the pre-and-post-World […]

At this week’s Falls Church City Council work session, the Council mulled two moves that promise to shape a significant change in the City’s self image and presentation to the big outside world. It may not have seemed as such in the context of another dreary overly long session, but […]

Most Arlingtonians recall their whereabouts on July 8, 2019, when the flash floods came. (I was walking in the rain along Fairfax Drive toward Central Library when I was astonished to see a manhole cover bobbing up and down from water pressure.) Among the hardest hit was Westover, where an […]