It’s been a tough scene for local businesses on the western end of Jefferson Avenue for the past couple years, but hope for walkable commerce springs eternal. Just last month, news broke that the owner of Baltik’s Bagels had purchased the orange stucco building that had previously housed Alamo BBQ, while across the avenue, Field Trip Bikes celebrated its grand opening in the now-turquoise storefront that was once home to Wheel Simple.

“I thought that might be a good spot to give it a shot, to try a new thing,” said Field Trip’s owner, Joel Alford, in a recent phone interview with The Lookout.

To be clear, operating a bike shop is not a new thing for Alford, who is also the owner of Re-Cycles in The Fan.¹ But visitors to Field Trip will notice a key difference: its inventory is composed entirely of new cycles from Bianchi, Higbee, Kona, and Linus, with nary a refurbished steed in sight.

Dave Infante

“This is just a regular old bike shop,” said a chuckling Alford, a Charlottesville native who rolled into Richmond after years of “playing in a bunch of punk bands that nobody's ever heard of” and working in shops from New York to Oakland. (He’s a former Church Hill resident, too, though he now resides south of the river.) Focusing on new bikes at Field Trip, he added, is “a way to have the two shops kind of coexist” by offering different pricepoints and inventory while complementing one another with parts-swapping, cross-promotion, and more.

Field Trip has been open for much of the summer, but finally got around to feting its grand opening at the beginning of this month. Visually, the shop is a stunner, boasting bold blue and orange paint scheme throughout, a sunny seating area up front, and beautiful branding by Richmond firm Night Swim. “They were a huge help to helping me to kind of take my rambling thoughts about what I wanted to do with the shop and consolidate it” into a workable concept, said Alford. Smart touches abound. When you purchase a bike, the mechanic on duty tags it with a little brass medallion imprinted with your name (“every shop puts a sticker on your bike,” says the owner) and snaps a Polaroid for the wall—the actual wall, not the one on Facebook.

Dave Infante

Dave Infante

Dave Infante

The fancy form aside, Field Trip is a full-function shop, with three repair stands and a smart selection of clothing and accessories. And it’s no “clubhouse,” either: Alford is determined to make sure it stays a welcoming space for everybody regardless of skill level. “It's not supposed to be a place where a bunch of cool bike dudes are hanging out and talking about people's bikes when they come in,” he said. “That's sort of the opposite of what we are.”

To wit: Alford himself owns only one bike these days. “It's kind of a do-anything bicycle,” he said. “I have plans to get myself a Kona, but I need to make a few more sales here at Field Trip before I can purchase anything for myself.” Hope springs eternal.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted at E. Broad and N. 32nd Sts. | Penelope Poubelle

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🚧 After nearly a decade, DPW’s Shockoe Valley redesign elicits disappointment, pragmatism

Shockoe Valley Streets Improvement Project

As any neighborhood cyclist or pedestrian can tell you, by virtually any measure — safety, aesthetics, flooding, etc. — doing something to rework Oliver Hill Way and the other streets of the Shockoe Valley corridor would be better than doing nothing. The Department of Public Works’ vision for the project, which finally received approval from the city’s Planning Commission this past week after almost a decade gestating in the bowels of City Hall, is certainly better than nothing. But having cleared that low bar, critics of the boondoggle-y project—which was rejected by the Urban Design Commission and the city’s own Planning Department just a couple weeks ago—last week lamented the missed opportunity to make more ambitious adjustments to a dicey East End stretch of Richmond’s deadly grid.

“It’s not the same project. It’s not the same budget. It’s not the same anything,” said Planning Commission member Rebecca Rowe, according to a report from The Richmonder’s Sarah Vogelsong from the body’s meeting this past Tuesday. Commissioners and community groups objected to what they perceived as car-centric features, inefficient land use, and the seven-year stretch between opportunities to review the plan even as they praised aspects of the scheme. “I will support this project, but I feel held hostage in a lot of ways, and I resent that,” said Rowe. Including her, every commissioner but one eventually voted to approve the plan.

The sheer length of time DPW has taken to produce its Shockoe Valley Streets Improvement Plan created the approval-at-gunpoint dynamic by jeopardizing outside funding for the project. Per Vogelsong (emphasis added):

The protracted timeline recalls another DPW slog in the neighborhood: the Jefferson Avenue redesign, which remains incomplete over a decade after the Environmental Protection Agency first produced an improvement plan in 2015.

DPW officials have defended their plan for Shockoe Valley, insisting it’s “a pedestrian and bike multimodal-oriented project” despite its inclusion of extra turn lanes for cars at Mosby and Leigh Sts. and Oliver Hill Way and E. Broad St. that detractors say will endanger pedestrians and bike-riders. Vogelsong reported that the project’s backers, which include Bike Walk RVA and RVA Rapid Transit, repeatedly invoked the old “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” adage at Tuesday’s meeting, positioning approval as a matter of savvy pragmatism while conceding DPW’s proposal left some street-safety improvements to be desired. (In “Richmond’s Year of The Pedestrian,” no less!) Either way, Shockoe Valley Streets Improvement Plan finally got its green-light last week.

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Shop now

Shop now

Shop now

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

💰 DPR to spend up to 55% of budget for neighborhood parks citywide on Chimbo Playground

City of Richmond Adopted FY 2027 Budget

Following The Lookout’s special report on the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities’ (DPR) latest neighborhood meeting, several readers reached out to ask about the source of the “half a million dollars” earmarked for updating, renovating, and/or reversing construction at Chimborazo Playground after the resolution of l’affair pétanque.

The department “received $900,000 in the FY 27 budget for Neighborhood Parks,” said DPR capital projects manager Ryan Rinn earlier this week, in response to an emailed inquiry. “Improvements made during FY27 to Chimborazo Playground will come from this line item.”

If my math is right, that means that over half ($500,000/$900,000 = 55.5555555555556%) of DPR’s annual budget for neighborhood parks across the city for the entire year may wind up spent at Chimborazo Playground this year. Depending on the results of the department’s online survey regarding the future of the park, a chunk of those funds may well be spent on reversing its own controversial, currently paused pétanque-court expansion.

After publication, Tamara Jenkins, acting deputy director, public affairs in the Office of Strategic Communications & Civic Engagement, provided the following information to The Lookout regarding the allocation to Chimborazo Playground (emphasis added, all sic):

The city’s own website declares “There are more than 40 parks and playgrounds in the City's park system.”² According to Jenkins, the only “major” park in the East End is Chimborazo Park.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Tune in: The George Cruz Trio will play Reed Square tomorrow (8/9) at 7:30pm, weather permitting. Info here.

• Meet your a maker: Kind Hearted Goods is hosting Natalie Lynn Ceramics from 12-4pm next Saturday (8/14) at the shop. Flyer here.

• Dine out(side): Tickets are now available for the next dinner party at Celeste Farm, which goes down next Friday (8/14) from 6-9pm. Details here, backstory here.

• I scream, you scream: St. John’s Church has rescheduled its free, National Night Out-aligned ice-cream social for Monday (8/10) from 6-8pm. Info here.

• Lineup announced: The RVA East End Festival released the full slate of performers scheduled to play the annual event, which takes place next month at 17th Street Market. Peep it here.

• Cast your vote: DPR’s poll on the future of Chimborazo Playground closes on August 21st at 11:59pm. Vote now if you haven’t yet.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Hanging a moon. | Daniel Bowler, Sony A7iv & Sony 200-600 G

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Submit it via this form with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

By submitting, you agree that your photo may be entered into the Creative Commons under a CC-BY license, which assists archivists in creating free, open-source visual records of the neighborhood over time. You will always retain credit as the photographer. Learn more about Creative Commons.

Editor’s note: Sorry for the delayed edition. I’m still catching up after some work travel last week. Don’t forget to follow The Lookout on Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram, where you’ll find a new video report about the latest in l’affair pétanque.—Dave.

As l’affair pétanque has ably demonstrated, what we have here in the East End is a failure to communicate. But while city officials could certainly improve their outreach to the neighborhood’s residents, a recent Lookout investigation suggests that Church Hill’s longtime city councilmember could, too.

A Lookout review of public updates published by the office of City Council President Cynthia Newbille, who has represented the 7th District at City Hall for over a decade and a half, shows that she provides significantly less mass communication with her constituents than her political peers.

Most members of Richmond’s City Council publish email newsletters and social-media posts to keep their voters abreast of the latest developments at 900 East Broad Street regarding their districts. Of the nine elected officials on the body, only one publishes no email newsletter at all. “A lot of my people don't have the emails, or they don't have the smartphones, they have a lot of the flip phones,” Reva Trammell, the longtime rep of Richmond’s 8th District, told The Lookout in a recent phone interview. Instead, she relies on a three-pronged communication strategy with a whole lot of phone calls at its center. “I would say I've already had about 40 calls today,” she said, laughing.

A recent 1st District newsletter.

A recent 2nd District newsletter.

A recent 9th District newsletter.

Trammell said she also taps City Council’s staff to print flyers and handbills out about her district meeting schedule for the whole year, and to post it to the city’s website. And she’s a Facebook power user: in the past week alone she posted 59 updates, averaging over eight per day. (With few exceptions, these posts are about goings-on in Richmond.) Rather than “Politician,” her Facebook account is labeled “Digital Creator.”

With the exception of Newbille, every other member operates an email newsletter through Constant Contact or MailChimp, two popular service providers. Frequency and quality of these communiques varies. In two weeks of reporting, for example, The Lookout did not receive any blasts from Councilmember Ellen Robertson (6th District), whose office did not respond to inquiries about how often it publishes “The Gateway,” the newsletter linked beneath her profile on City Council’s website.

Other members seem to send their newsletters more regularly. “The office publishes an e-newsletter 2-3 times a month,” said Amy Robins, council liaison to 5th District representative Stephanie Lynch, in response to an emailed inquiry. (The link to Lynch’s newsletter had not been published on City Council’s website; Robins said this was an error, and shortly after our exchange, the link appeared.) But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Lynch’s outreach. Robins continued:

By contrast, Newbille’s communication acumen looks especially sparse. In response to an inquiry sent to the politician and her liaison, Samuel Patterson, City Council’s senior public information manager Steven Skinner told The Lookout that the 7th District rep “holds district meetings, emails updates/information” and “communicates out through [sic] facebook.”

A Lookout review of Newbille’s official 7th District Facebook page reveals a dearth of information about the 7th District. Compared to Trammell, she’s essentially mute on the platform. (This still puts her ahead of Robertson, who has not posted since June 2025.) Newbille’s most recent entries are four pictures published on May 29th of this year by the official City Council Facebook page and reposted by Newbille’s own. They contain no information about City Hall legislation, upcoming meetings, or other details that might be relevant to district constituents.

Since the beginning of 2026, Newbille’s page has posted just seven items total, an average of one post per month. All of those were reposts from other pages and contained no original information from her office. One is a repost from "Coach M.- Go Be Great Sis - Inspo Page,” which boasts an archive of AI-generated motivational posters and no apparent connection to Richmond City Council business, or the city generally. Skinner did not respond to a follow-up request for insight on Newbille’s social-media strategy.

Newbille’s email dispatches are similarly spotty. Unlike nearly all her fellow councilmembers, her office does not collect email addresses through a web form or publish a district newsletter on a dedicated platform. Instead, Skinner explained, constituents can email Patterson directly and request to be included on future dispatches of the politician’s “East End updates.” A link beneath Newbille’s profile on City Council’s site opens a [mailto:] prompt to Patterson’s email. It is not clear when this public-facing link was added; it does not appear in an archived version of the page from June of this year accessed via the Wayback Machine.

Email marketers, publishers, and political operatives have long favored platforms for collecting addresses and publishing newsletters to reduce potential for errors, ensure consistent deliverability, and grow their lists effectively. Constant Contact costs ~$10/month after a free trial; MailChimp is free up to 250 addresses. Other email platforms, like Richmond-based Buttondown, offer similarly cost-effective plans; Substack, another popular platform, is entirely free to use, and takes only a cut of revenue generated if publishers offer paid subscriptions.

The February 2026 email from Patterson in its entirety.

The June 2026 email from Patterson in its entirety.

In response to a request for examples of recent editions of Newbille’s email updates, Skinner provided a PDF of two brief messages that were apparently sent manually by Patterson in February and June of this year. (You can review that document in The Lookout’s share drive.) Patterson himself provided a Word document entitled “July 2026 7th District Announcement.” “Here’ [sic] the announcement that Councilwoman Newbille read last night during Council meeting of 7th District Events,” he said via email. It is not clear whether this document was also distributed via email, nor whether he has sent any other 7th District email updates this year.

Neither Patterson nor Skinner responded to repeated requests for more information about how frequently Newbille’s office emails these updates, and to how many people. The addresses are redacted in the PDF Skinner sent, in accordance with Virginia privacy law. However, a copy of the June email provided by a tipster indicates that Patterson does not use the blind carbon-copy function, so anybody who gets these dispatches can see everybody else who’s getting them. Most of the addresses appear to belong to individuals (Newbille herself is on the list), with at least two East End civic associations’ addresses mixed in as well.

All in, there were 118 addresses on the June email from Patterson reviewed by The Lookout. According to district population estimates published by City Council, as of 2022, the 7th District had approximately 26,000 residents.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted on N. 32nd St. at Leigh St. | Penelope Poubelle

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🗳️ The future of Chimborazo Playground is going to a vote

At a meeting at Powhatan Community Center this past Wednesday evening, the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) presented three paths forward for Chimborazo Playground based on feedback it had retroactively gathered from the neighborhood following the pause in pétanque-court construction in mid-May. You can read about all the options in the DPR deck in The Lookout’s share drive, and/or my special report from the meeting:

DPR offers "half a million dollars," three ways to spend it on Chimbo Playground

City will fix park's bathrooms, water fountain regardless, but asks residents to decide incomplete pétanque courts' fate

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

DPR has published an online poll for residents to vote on their preference for Chimborazo Playground’s future; it closes Friday, August 21st at 11:59pm.

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Shop now

Shop now

Shop now

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

🏡 Modular housing stacks up on Mosby St.

Rendering of the completing building. | Module

Neighbors questioning the purpose of the mysterious hulking boxes that appeared on Leigh St. at O St. in late July saw an answer take shape this past week. The units were pieces of modular housing being built on the formerly vacant lot at 815-819 Mosby St., and crews spent much of last week stacking them up into the three-story structure you see above. The project, a joint effort between Richmond nonprofits project:HOMES and Urban Hope, is being implemented by Module, a Pittsburgh-based firm that sells—you guessed it—modular-housing systems.

Project staging on Leigh St. | Provided to The Lookout

Assembly on Mosby St. | Provided to The Lookout

Construction progress by midday Saturday. | Dave Infante

“This project shows what modular can do when it's rooted in local partnerships and focused on real housing needs,” reads a statement about the project on Module’s website. “We're using off-site construction to bring more affordable, sustainable housing to Virginia, and proving that our model can work city by city.”

On Friday, Urban Hope posted a brief Instagram video celebrating the construction, which was funded in part by a grant from Virginia Housing and was supposed to “wrap up by October 2025,” according to the development authority’s September 2024 press release announcing the award.¹ project:HOMES did not respond to a request for comment.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Around we go: The city’s Urban Design Committee is calling for revisions to the Shockoe Valley Streets schematic over concerns for pedestrian safety and aesthetics at various roundabouts. Read more at The Richmonder.

• Tune in: If the rain holds off, cellist Schuyler Slack will be playing string music at Reed Square this evening (8/2) starting at 7:30pm. Details here.

• Clean up: The Friends of Jefferson Park and Befriend are holding a work day at the park on Wednesday (8/5) from 6-8pm. Peep the flyer.

• Turn out: Giorno Market is hosting a gaggle of local vendors at “Minisculo Mercado” this coming Friday (8/7) from 5-8pm. Flyer here.

• Send off: Top Stitch Mending is decamping the neighborhood for new digs in Manchester, so swing by to say farewell at its final Open Studio event this coming Saturday (8/8) from 11am-3pm. Info right this way.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

On tilt. | John Pole, iPhone 14

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Submit it via this form with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

Editor’s note: Below find a special report about Church Hill’s ongoing l’affair pétanque. If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to keep independent journalism about your neighborhood free for all to read. Here’s how to submit tips, documents, correspondence, etc. with The Lookout for editorial consideration. Check the liveblog for reporting odds-and-ends about this controversy.—Dave.

DPR outlined Chimbo Playground’s possible futures at Powhatan Community Center on July 29th. | Dave Infante

The future of Chimborazo Playground will go to a vote, and the fate of the controversial, partly constructed pétanque courts hangs in the balance.

On Wednesday evening, some 30 people once again trekked up Fulton Hill to attend a meeting hosted by the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) regarding its new plans for Church Hill’s ~3.5-acre park. The old plans—adding additional courts for pétanque, a lesser-known French bowling game favored by a local club—stoked confusion and outrage from the neighborhood earlier this summer. That project was paused in mid-May in the face of pushback from the community and a missing stormwater permit that DPR never obtained from the state. Now, officials want the neighborhood to vote on what should happen when the work resumes.

“We have half a million dollars committed to this process,” said Ryan Rinn, a capital projects planner for DPR, who spearheaded the retroactive process of soliciting and analyzing community feedback on improvements to the park. He presented a slide deck Wednesday evening outlining three options for how to put that money to work; the options reflect comments from two June meetings and a corresponding online survey about l’affair pétanque. The deck, with detailed descriptions and costs estimates of those options, can be found in The Lookout’s share drive.

With DPR director Christopher Frelke and Richmond City Council President and 7th District Councilmember Cynthia Newbille looking on, Rinn and Nissa Richardson (DPR deputy director of capital projects) walked through the trio of potential paths for the park.

Each option includes renovations to the park’s bathroom facilities and water fountain, which have been out of service for years. “Getting the bathrooms open and usable to the public […] as well as the water fountain, which was already long-term a priority, we know we can do that,” said Richardson.

Beyond the new plumbing, though, paths diverge, and DPR’s Frelke said it’s up to “the majority” to decide which one to follow in Chimborazo Playground. “We're just trying to see after everything we've heard, how can we get the community to say, ‘We want to go with this’ or ‘We want to go with that,’” he said. To that end, DPR published an online survey that will remain open until Friday, August 21st at 11:59pm to gather votes.¹  

Richmond DPR

Richmond DPR

The options presented for the first time at Wednesday evening’s meeting—which featured featured a more subdued tone and thinner attendance than the June gatherings—are as follows:

1. Finish the pétanque court expansion and make upgrades to the existing playground.

   1. Estimated cost: $323,900 - $592,200

   2. Estimated completion: Summer 2027

2. Reverse the pétanque court expansion, make upgrades to the existing playground, and make upgrades to the existing pétanque courts.

   1. Estimated cost: $370,100 - $653,000

   2. Estimated completion: Summer 2027

3. Reverse the pétanque court expansion and contract out a comprehensive planning and design process to holistically reimagine the park.

   1. Estimated cost: $220,100 - $268,000

   2. Estimated completion: Fall/Winter 2028

Some attendees expressed concern that the third option has the lowest cost estimate, arguing that because it does not factor in any of the currently unknown prices of future upgrades recommended by the planners, a voter intent on limiting spending on the park could choose it erroneously.

“People might vote money without understanding,” an attendee warned. Rinn agreed to clarify the nature of this estimate to the extent possible. “I think we can make it clear that that cost is for the planning process, and the budget that's going to come out of that is going to be something that we don't know,” he said.

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

DPR officials encouraged attendees at the meeting to vote by affixing dots to paper posters on the wall labeled with their preferred option. Those not in attendance can register their selection via an online survey that will remain open until Friday, August 21st at 11:59pm.

Perhaps recalling an (apparently innocuous) instance of duplicate voting at one of DPR’s June meetings, attendees grilled Rinn and Richardson on election integrity. “You said that you were going to move forward with whatever the majority of people vote,” said one person. “Who votes? We've had people speak up who don't live in our neighborhood. I represent a family of four plus two grandparents who live in the neighborhood. Do all six of us vote?”

“All of our parks are open to everybody, so it doesn’t matter where you live when you want to vote on this,” responded Rinn. “I think that if your kids want to inform your vote, that's great. I don't think, unless they're able to get up and vote for themselves, that that we can have multiple extra votes because you have… If they all have their own email addresses…”

He paused, considering the conundrum. “I guess, I’m not gonna… I don't run a registrar,” he says, eliciting some tense laughter from the crowd. “This is a public engagement process. Use your best judgement.”

🕰️ Get caught up

Check The Lookout’s L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog for the latest reportage.

Chimbo Playground project swamping already flood-prone alley, residents say

Plus: Anti-code refresh sign on E. Broad gets tagged “NIMBY”!

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

"We own" Chimbo Playground "missteps," city officials say

Parks Dept. shares $68,000 pétanque-court pricetag, next steps in belated community meeting Thursday

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Newbille, DPR's Frelke say city slipped up on Chimbo Playground snafu

At packed meeting, 7th District pol, Parks staff promise more public engagement on paused pétanque project

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground pétanque courts cost $36,000, purchase order shows

City documents, correspondence obtained by The Lookout shed more light on the now-paused construction

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Polarizing Chimbo Playground project lacks proper permit, Parks confirms

City is now seeking state signoff for potential pétanque-induced erosion

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground pétanque project paused, Newbille's office says

CHA president, Parks email confirm City Halt halt on controversial Chimbo Playground buildout

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

At Sunday pétanque parley, neighbors debate, vent about officials' absence

Newbille, Avula admin not present at tense talk about controversial Chimbo Playground construction

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground patrons piqued by perplexing pétanque proliferation

A Lookout special report on the controversial park construction confounding Church Hill

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

This has been a Lookout special report. Please submit tips, photos, etc. about the East End for editorial consideration. Consider upgrading your subscription and/or buying merch to support independent journalism about your neighborhood.

Editor’s note: The Lookout is now on social media! Don’t forget to follow on Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. Rest assured, the newsletter/website will always be the “flagship” publication; we’re not making a pivot to #influencers any time soon.—Dave.

There’s a zombie stalking Church Hill. Well, sort of. Let me explain.

Long before there was The Church Hill Lookout, or even Facebook’s News Feed, there was The Church Hill People’s News. The blog, launched in 2004 by then-resident John Murden, was a vital record of everything happening in the East End. To some extent, it still is: in the course of my reporting, I often find myself digging through its still-online archives for details on who did what when in the neighborhood. After an astonishing 13 years at the helm, Murden hung up the blogging cleats, handing off the publication and its social-media channels to a local trio to steward into its third decade.

A few years later, CHPN had languished, with the volume of posts to its site slowing to a trickle and stopping entirely in July of 2021. (By then, control of the blog may have changed hands again.) At the time it stopped publishing, its Instagram account hadn’t posted a new photo in five months. Someone manning the CHPN Facebook page, which today boasts some 6,300 followers, continued to promote Richmond news stories from other outlets through December 2023. Then that channel went silent, too.

As remarkable as CHPN was, the arc of its rise and fall was all too common. The explosion of independent blogs in the early Aughts was eventually supplanted by corporate social-media platforms in the 2010s that consolidated audiences with more powerful features, more intuitive interfaces, and speedier load times, starving the publications of advertising revenue and attention alike. Sad as it may be (and bad for democracy, too) this is no internet for old blogs.

To this day, CHPN’s site remains defunct. But on January 4th, 2026, a new post appeared on the blog’s Facebook page, an homage to longtime resident Bill Martin, who had been killed by a driver crossing East Broad Street near City Hall in late December 2025. Commenters, perhaps distracted by the tragedy, didn’t even seem to notice that the page had been idled for more than two years. CHPN’s Facebook page went silent again until May 10th of this year, when it posted a link to The Lookout’s coverage about the surprise construction in Chimborazo Playground. “CHIMBO PLAYGROUND AMENITIES DISMEMBERED,” read an editorialized header.

Commenters have begun to wonder who’s posting to CHPN’s Facebook page. | CHPN/Facebook

This is when I first began fielding questions from folks in the neighborhood about CHPN’s undead Facebook page. Was I running it? I was not. Was Murden? He was not, he confirmed to The Lookout in mid-May; he handed off the logins for the blog’s social media when he handed off the keys to the blog itself nearly nine years ago. Makes sense. But somebody was once again posting to the CHPN Facebook page.

The frequency has only increased over the summer. After 24 months with zero posts, the page has made 15 posts since January 4th 2026, with 14 of those coming since May 10th. Three have been links to The Lookout’s coverage; three more were amplifying neighborhood announcements regarding l’affair pétanque. To the extent that there’s a common denominator to the rest, it’s the city’s zoning code refresh. “Mayor Danny Avula's view on the development expansions of our neighborhoods,” the anonymous administrator wrote on June 14th, posting an excerpt of a Style Weekly article about the contentious update process. “If the city is not leading, nor the developers, then who is? CHPN is curious.”

(The city’s Department of Planning and Development Review is leading the code refresh process.)

By then, neighborhood Facebook users had begun to grow curious about who was behind the CHPN posts that were cropping up again on their feeds. Unlike the Church Hill Neighborhood group hosted on the platform, the CHPN page lists no administrator or moderator, only an email address. The Lookout contacted the address three times over the course of this month in hopes of learning who was running the page and whether they had plans to resurrect the blog itself. Earlier this week, I also messaged the page via Facebook Messenger with the same questions. At publication I’ve received no response. Inquiries from Murden and neighborhood residents made in the comments beneath the page’s posts have likewise gone unanswered.

The radio silence vexes CHPN’s founder. “I think it's yucky and dangerous to have anonymous news sites for communities like the Church Hill and the neighborhoods around it,” Murden told The Lookout via text earlier this week. “Things will come up to which neighbors will respond passionately, and you need know who is shaping how the story is being framed. Can we trust them to be neutral? If they're going to have more of a platform, who are are they and where are they coming from?”

Transparency about authorship is a fundamental tenet of journalism. The Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics says journalists must “avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived” and “be accountable and transparent,” mandates that can only be fulfilled when writers identify themselves. The New York Times’ “Ethical Journalism” handbook dictates that its staffers “should not use false names, identities or credentials when they are working as journalists.” The Lookout’s own ethics code promises to publish “every story with a real name on the byline.”

But a defunct neighborhood blog’s Facebook page exists in a long-running gray area. When Murden launched CHPN in the mid-Aughts, there was wide-ranging debate in media circles where “blogging” ended and “reporting” began, and whether the latter’s more stringent professional code ought to—or even could—apply to the former’s freewheeling, conversational format. Two decades later, the blogosphere has mostly collapsed, but the debate continues, with “influencers” and “creators” supplanting bloggers as the reactive media operatives unburdened by journalists’ professional ethics obligations.

Whether the person behind CHPN’s Facebook page considers themselves a journalist, blogger, influencer, or none of the above, the publication’s legacy and still-significant neighborhood audience deserve a proprietor who will put their name to their posts. With power comes responsibility, and with transparency comes opportunity. “I'd love to see whoever this is step into the light and really do the thing,” said Murden. “A curated super-local news feed can be a great resource. Facebook groups are really useful, but can lack context or a through-line a lot of the time.”

Will the person behind CHPN’s undead Facebook page come off incognito mode? Here’s hoping. After all, the neighborhood would like to meet them.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted in Patrick Henry Park. | Submitted by Emily Routman

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🎳 DPR to present findings, next steps in l’affair pétanque

It’s been over a month and a half since the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) concluded a belated first round of meetings about its currently paused pétanque construction project in Chimborazo Playground. As The Lookout previously reported, the department will hold another community meeting on the evening of Wednesday, July 29th, to discuss its findings from the early June gatherings and corresponding online survey. The meeting is scheduled to take place from 6-8pm at the Powhatan Community Center and will also feature a presentation on what DPR capital projects planner Ryan Rinn described in an email as “three potential paths forward for the playground.”

(The Lookout obtained a copy of the email, which was sent to select community members midday Friday. Read it in full at the L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog.)

Cost breakout of the project presented at the June meetings. | Richmond DPR

“We're finalizing cost estimates for each option so participants can make informed decisions based on the best information available,” Rinn wrote in his email. “While those estimates are still being completed, they will be ready and presented at the July 29 meeting.”

In June, DPR estimated the cost of its bungled expansion of the courts at nearly $68,000, with around 40% of that previously unknown budget earmarked for “Construction plans and engineering services associated with [the] permitting process.” The Lookout first reported in mid-May that the city had flouted the state’s stormwater permitting rules on the project. Residents whose houses abut the alley on the park’s northern edge say flooding in the area has always been bad and appears to have gotten worse since DPR turned ~4,400 square feet lawn in the park into impervious compacted-gravel pads for more pétanque courts.

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Shop now

Shop now

Shop now

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

🐩 Meet this “double doodle”

Courtesy of Lookout reader Amanda Kelsheimer, the latest edition of East End Animal Friend is live now, and cute as hell:

Introducing Zucco

It's another East End Animal Friend!

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

As a reminder, East End Animal Friends is a recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Salute the Stitch: After more than half a decade, Top Stitch Mending is sadly leaving the neighborhood for sweet new digs in Manchester. Details on the departure.

• Tune in: Bellwether Garage is hosting another free BYOB concert on E. Clay St. tonight starting at 7pm. Backstory here, lineup here.

• Shop it up: Dead People’s Stuff is hosting another big ol’ vintage market tomorrow (7/26) from 12-5pm at Triple Crossing Fulton. Flyer here.

• Show out: No Label is hosting another Black Queer Park Day at Libby Hill Park tomorrow from 4-8pm. Info here.

• Roll out: Field Trip Bikes and Second Arrow are leading a group yoga session and bike ride starting at Jefferson Park at 9am on Friday (7/31.) Info here.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Prey for us. | Christine Tranchina, iPhone 16 Pro

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to dave@dinfontay.com with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

Tony Zucco Baxter Hörst | Amanda Kelsheimer

Where and when did you get your pet? The Richmond SPCA in August 2024. He was in rough shape when we first got him but now is happy and healthy!

What's your pet's favorite thing to eat? Street pizza (pizza laying on the street.)

Does your pet have a neighborhood animal friend they like to play with? Murphy and Nina (of Sydney & Ryan), and Llew (of Madaline & John). He loves playing with his doggy pals (maybe a little too loudly!)

What is your pet's favorite thing about living in the East End? Chicken bones and squirrel carcasses!

Got anything else Lookout readers should know about your pet? Zucco is 5-years-old (we think). He loves walking around at Chimborazo and Jefferson Parks and spending time with his older brother Mason, the Amazon parrot. If you see Zucco walking around Church Hill, come say hi!

🐈‍⬛ Previously: Twiggy

This has been East End Animal Friend, a new recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Entries are lightly edited for length and clarity. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

Editor’s note: The Lookout is now on social media! Don’t forget to follow on Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. Rest assured, the newsletter/website will always be the “flagship” publication; we’re not making a pivot to #influencers any time soon.—Dave.

Countless millennials have dreamed of quitting their laptop jobs to pursue their true passion of playing with puppies. Anna Wittel is giving it a shot.

“On my business card, it says ‘Happy Dog, Happy Life’ because I feel like that’s really true,” she told The Lookout in a recent phone interview. “I think dogs can just add so much to your life.”

Wittel, who arrived in Richmond in 2008 to pursue a master’s degree in literature at Virginia Commonwealth University and has lived in Church Hill for the past decade, hopes this sentiment is widely shared enough in Richmond that she’ll be able to add dogs to her work life. Currently, she runs Mutti, a content services agency here in Richmond. As holder of a German passport, she borrowed that language’s word for “mommy” when launching her business shortly after giving birth to her daughter. But as a longtime dog owner (Jenny, a 1.5-year-old beagle mix is her current companion) who has been been drawn to work with man’s best friend for years, the near-homonym for “mutt” has proven serendipitous.

Having successfully co-founded Church Hill’s popular monthly HoundTown meet-ups, she’s now taking steps to expand Mutti’s remit to include both copywriting and canine services. She’s currently completing coursework with Tarheel Canine Training to become certified as a dog trainer, and envisions an entire suite of mutt-y offerings under the Mutti banner.

Some of the less complex components of Mutti Dog Services are already in play. Wittel already offers walking and sitting services, and has collaborated with all-breed Richmond rescue Beagles and Bentleys and Fairmount’s Second Arrow Yoga & Physical Therapy on an event they call Puppy Therapy. It’s exactly what it sounds like: you buy tickets to go cuddle with puppies, all of which are up for adoption. As you might have expected, the inaugural run sold out in June.

Lookout canine correspondent Ernie Infante at June’s HoundTown. | Katie Amrhein

Lookout canine correspondent Ernie Infante at May’s HoundTown. | Katie Amrhein

“People were thrilled, it was just so nice,” said Wittel. “Puppies are happy, people are happy. Simple.” A second Puppy Therapy event is scheduled for Saturday, August 15th; tickets are $20.

Her transition from pixels to pups won’t happen all at once, but maintaining progress on that path is both a personal goal and a professional hedge. “I know that I'll be doing the content” work for awhile, she said. “I'm good at it, I've like build up a lot of expertise in this area, and it can be lucrative. Although I will say, with [artificial intelligence], I don't know where the industry is going.” She anticipates juggling both businesses under the Mutti “creative umbrella” until the business’s dog-centered division is ready to stand on its own paws. The Lookout’s canine correspondent Ernie Infante was relieved to learn that the free HoundTown gatherings, which Wittel and a friend first organized in July 2024, will continue apace.

HoundTown’s “mayor” is looking forward to to more tail-wagging to come. “I am so ready,” Wittel said, laughing. “I have so many ideas of collaborations and different events. We've got the ‘book a puppy’ thing, where we'll bring adoptable puppies to your team event […] think about people who work in high-stress jobs like healthcare or the restaurant industry, we bring puppies to you.” Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s training and dog-walking, maybe it’s something else entirely, she said, waxing abstractly about her Fido-focused future. “A year from now, it would be great to have enough dog-walking, pet-sitting, and training clients that I can hire people and create jobs for people in Church Hill specifically, because as much as I love Richmond, I'm like all about Church Hill.”

Mutti’s next per-mutt-ation (sorry) may still be coming together, but Wittel’s vision for the next phase of her career is crystal-clear. “I just want to do things that help people and help dogs,” she said. If there’s such a thing as a dream job, that just might fit the description.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted on the western edge of Chimborazo Park. | Penelope Poubelle

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🐝 Chimbo Playground pollinator plantings soon come

Chimbo Playground is getting new pollinator gardens. | Dave Infante

The construction on the new pétanque courts at Chimborazo Playground is still on pause, but you may have noticed representatives from the Richmond Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities and the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation doing some work in the park’s northeastern corner on Friday.

“We're putting in a brand-new pollinator habitat,” explained Raven Larcom, a pollinator conservation specialist & administrator with the nonprofit, which focuses on protecting bees, ladybugs, and other pollen-peddling insects. The project, funded through a grant via the United States Department of Agriculture’s People's Garden initiative, will bring native perennials to the northern fenceline of the tennis court and the western edge of the Chimborazo Community Garden. Planting is slated for September, but on Friday, the crew had dug up crabgrass sod strips and circles where the plants will go, then laid down black plastic sheeting to solarize those areas and get them ready for the new arrivals.

“All selected specifically to benefit bees, butterflies, beetles, anything that's beneficial and an invertebrate,” said Larcom, who noted the project is aligned with the goals of Bee City Richmond and Richmond Grows Gardens, and guessed it may even help a bit with flooding issues in the park. “They need to eat just like us.”

🏗️ New plans for the old auto shop on East Marshall Street

Renderings for 2720 E. Marshall St. | Thalhimer

In May, a local developer bought Pritchard Brothers’ low-slung white-brick building at 2720 E. Marshall St. for $1.2 million. Richmond BizSense first reported the deal in late June, identifying the buyer as Chris Farag:

On reddit’s active r/rva board, some users fretted about the new owner’s “bro-coded” pedigree, while others mulled over the accompanying flyer BizSense surfaced from Richmond commercial mega-realtor Thalhimer showing plans for renovating the building, which previously housed an auto-auction business. (Your humble Lookout editor has only lived here a few years, but in that time it did not seem to keep regular hours/days of business.)

Floorplan for 2720 E. Marshall St. | Thalhimer

Profile view at 2720 E. Marshall St. | Thalhimer

“From the renderings it looks like they are just putting in two or so storefronts,” wrote one redditor, in a comment likely to stir up agita among the anti-code-refresh contingent. “It would be great if they tore down the eye sore and built a small apartment building with storefronts on the bottom. Something similar to the building where Soul and Vinegar is.”

Check out the document in full on The Lookout’s share drive.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Tomato, tomato: Fat Rabbit said no Duke’s, no problem, and is participating in the non-sponsored version of Hot Tomato Summer, running all next week. Flyer here.

• Meet up: The Church Hill Association is hosting its monthly membership meeting on Tuesday (7/21) from 6:30-8pm. Calendar here.

• Night moves: Gold Star Vintage is popping up at Pizza Bones next Friday (7/24) from 5-9pm. Details here.

• Shell out: Tickets are now available for Metzger’s three-course summer pairing dinner with Fantasma Wines on Thursday (7/30) at 6:30pm. Info here.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

🎶 Iiiiiit’s the cliiiiiiiimb. 🎶 | Drew Olsen, Galaxy S10e

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Submit it via this form your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

On July 11th, The Lookout published an article entitled “Chimbo Playground project swamping already flood-prone alley, residents say.” It details longstanding concerns over flooding in the backstreet directly north of the park, which cost a couple whose house abuts the area some $70,000 in damage as recently as December 2023.

As I reported (emphasis mine):

This post will be updated if/when she does.

This has been The Cynthia Newbille “No Comment” Corner, a new recurring feature highlighting the press availability—or lack thereof—of the 7th District’s longtime councilmember. If you come across a “no response” or a “no comment” from Newbille or her office in a media report, please submit it for consideration to The Lookout. All submissions anonymous!

Editor’s note: The Lookout is now on social media! Don’t forget to follow on Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram. Rest assured, the newsletter/website will always be the “flagship” publication; we’re not making a pivot to #influencers any time soon.—Dave.

Windsor Bisbee and Sarah Sahlaney would have preferred that Santa just stuck to coal for Christmas 2023. Instead, the Church Hill residents returned home from holiday travel out of state that year to find their East Broad Street home in partial ruin.

“We hadn't been in town,” recalled Sahlaney in a recent phone interview. “We were driving back on I-95 and we were like, It’s not even really raining that hard. I think we both thought, Oh, it's not going to be that bad.”

No such luck. Following a hard rain, stormwater had flooded the alley just north of Chimborazo Playground, onto which the couple’s house backs up, destroying their ground-floor apartment and totaling two of their vehicles parked in their carport. The cost of the damage reached north of $70,000; insurance, they told The Lookout, only covered roughly a third of that sum.

Flooding in late December 2023 on the northern edge of Chimborazo Playground. | Brie Jordan-Cooley

[Disclosure: As nearby neighbors I often socialize with the couple. They did not request this coverage and have no influence over it.] 

Less than three years later, Bisbee and Sahlaney are wondering how much worse it’s going to get. Since May 2026, when the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) began unannounced construction on new pétanque courts in the small park behind their house, they’ve observed an uptick in the frequency and severity of flooding in the alley, which behind their house sits more than 10 feet below its eastern terminus at N. 31st St.

“Whether it's like an increased frequency of storms, or the construction has caused a lot more runoff […] every time it rains, it's a situation back there,” Bisbee said. During a storm in mid-June, I encountered him in the alley while filming the flooding, trying to keep the single storm drain at its lowest point clear of debris. “At a certain point, it’s not about keeping the [grate of the] drain clear on top, it’s just about the fact that the volume of water is too much.”

It’s possible that the construction, which The Lookout was first to report DPR had started without obtaining the stormwater permit required by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), has exacerbated this dynamic. “It’s however many thousands of square feet of new, impervious surface, and in reality, that does generate runoff that's going to enter into that adjacent stormwater drain,” said Evan Branosky, a Church Hill resident who served as DEQ’s chief stormwater policy advisor until 2025. The incomplete project—which is currently under review after the DPR, facing neighborhood uproar and without permission to continue the job, retroactively sought public comment on it—converted a swath of the park’s grass into hard-packed, crushed-stone pads that do not appear to drain quickly. During multiple rainstorms in June, water could be seen cascading over the retaining wall from the park into the alley.

Bisbee and Sahlaney had never seen that before. “The alley was bad before; it is extra bad now,” Sahlaney said.

DPU cleared the channel on July 10th. | Dave Infante

DPU cleared the alley on July 10th. | Dave Infante

Richmond’s Department of Public Utilities (DPU) is responsible for administering DEQ’s stormwater permitting for projects within the city, and is currently reviewing DPR’s belated application for one regarding the suspended construction. It is also responsible for maintaining the alley’s inlet. In an emailed response to The Lookout’s inquiry, spokesperson Rhonda Johnson on Friday said (emphasis added):

In other words, DPU believes the flooding is just a matter of too much debris jamming up the drain during storms.

Make no mistake: there’s a lot of debris. On the morning of July 10th, just hours before DPU’s extended deadline to issue a statement to The Lookout about the flooding, a crew from the department arrived at the alley and began clearing the dirt and detritus that has accumulated for years along the wall, curbs, and adjacent concrete channel. Bisbee Sahlaney could not recall another time in the last half decade when DPU conducted this type of maintenance in the alley.

Whether this remediation solves the flooding remains to be seen. Ditto, whether DPU keeps up with the upkeep. “Sure, do the easy thing first, see if it helps,” Bisbee said. “But I don't have confidence that they'll come back out again, like in a timely fashion” next time it floods. Still, it’s some relief, especially given DPR’s purgatoried pétanque project seems to have exacerbated the runoff.

After pausing the construction, the department eventually erected silt fencing around the site to bring it into compliance with DEQ’s official Stormwater Management Handbook. But the black-mesh fence failed at the northeastern corner of the site during a storm in mid-June, and it was not repaired until June 26th, as The Lookout reported at the time. On June 29th, DPU issued a formal warning letter to DPR about the delayed repairs, noting that “Failure to correct these conditions may result in additional enforcement action if future inspections reveal continued noncompliance.”

As the permitting process winds on, the couple is concerned that the city is not taking seriously the potential for another major flood in the alley, and the costly damage that would bring. “I have sent DPU and [7th District City Councilmember] Cynthia Newbille emails to this point [saying] this was a problem space before, it was not a trivial problem space, it has caused a lot of damage, and the pétanque courts are making it much, much worse,” said Sahlaney. “I feel really vulnerable, because we’re a young family, and we don’t have thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in savings.”

On July 7th, Newbille forwarded one of Sahlaney’s emails to Scott Morris, the director of DPU. “Please review and advise at your earliest convenience re: strategies to address the flooding issue,” the longtime East End politician wrote. DPU’s Morris responded to Sahlaney on July 10th with the same statement the department had issued The Lookout. Newbille did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted on N. 32nd St. | Penelope Poubelle

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🤬 Anti-code refresh sign on E. Broad gets tagged “NIMBY”

The interminable debate over Richmond’s first zoning code refresh in half a century is finally over. Haha just kidding, it continues to be an absolute quagmire with no end in sight. In late June, local attorney and “political figure”—as The Richmonder’s Michael Phillips put it—Paul Goldman filed in Richmond Circuit Court in an attempt to block the move. The gambit faces long odds that start with collecting 16,000 signatures from opponents to the code refresh for a formal petition. But a formal petition isn’t the only way Richmonders are making their voices heard about the housing reform.

The graffiti’d sign in late June. | Provided to The Lookout

In Shockoe Bottom, one vandal recently resorted to a more rudimentary method of public discourse, scrawling “FUCK THIS NIMBY SHIT” on the anti-code refresh sign erected earlier this year on the vacant lot at E. Broad St. near N. 19th St. (“NIMBY” is an acronym for “Not In My Backyard.”) The property owner, Ginter Park resident Bill Laffoon, did not respond to a request for comment on the graffiti that now adorns his sign.

🌳 New trees slated for Chimbo Playground this fall

Proposed tree layout. | Friends of Chimborazo Playground/Chesapeake Bay Foundation

In more positive news related to the hotly contested 3.5-acre plot, the Church Hill Association and Friends of Chimborazo Playground recently announced a partnership with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to plant a whole bunch of trees in the park. Hell yeah, trees! Per the groups’ literature, the goals are:

• “To provide more shade throughout the playground, with emphasis on the area bordering N 29th St.

• To add more picnic tables for gatherings.

• To expand pollinator habitat in the playground and better support its ongoing maintenance by focusing expansion in the east side of the park.”

By my count, the schematic proposes 28 new trees total across 16 different cultivars. (Some of them are more bushes than trees, I guess. Sorry to any exacting arborists reading this.) The actually planting day won’t take place until October 31st—sPoOkY!—but in a commendable gesture at public inclusion, the orgs are already soliciting neighborhood input on the project. Fill out the survey here.

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Shop now

Shop now

Shop now

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• All clear: Richmond Fire Department said nobody was injured in the blaze that engulfed the old Good Shepard Baptist Church building in Church Hill North last Sunday. More details here.

• Hop to it: Last week Fat Rabbit put out a call to customers to help them get through the slow summer months. Here’s the deal.

• Stormin’: Celebrate Bastille Day tomorrow (7/12) with a reenactment performance featuring the Marquis de Lafayette from 2:45-3:30pm at St. John’s Church. Info here.

• Tune in: The Blue Guitar will be playing at Triple Crossing Fulton next Friday (7/19). Flyer here.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Verdant view. | Windsor Bisbee, iPhone 16 Pro

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to dave@dinfontay.com with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

Editor’s note: This Lookout special report was most recently updated 7/6/26 at 7:15am ET. If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to keep independent journalism about your neighborhood free for all to read. Here’s how to submit tips, documents, correspondence, etc. with The Lookout for editorial consideration.—Dave.

On Sunday evening, a fire broke out in Church Hill North at a boarded-up building listed by city officials as vacant.

Smoke could be seen billowing from a two-story structured previously owned by the Good Shepard Baptist Church at North 28th and R Streets. According to a sign out, the building was slated for redevelopment into “15 New 1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments” by a company called Cava Capital LLC.

The firm, which lists a mailing address in The Malvern Building just west of Scott’s Addition, owns two other properties also listed by the Richmond Department of Planning & Review’s Property Maintenance Division as vacant in its official citywide inventory, last updated April 2026. Shortly after publication, chief executive Frank Cava responded to The Lookout’s request for comment to confirm that the company owned the building.

Cava was recently profiled by The Richmonder for his prodigious use of the city’s laws governing additional dwelling units to build 100 “backyard cottages.” His portfolio, Ned Oliver reported for the outlet, “caters to Housing Choice Voucher holders (formerly known as Section 8)”. Cava declined to respond to The Lookout’s inquiry about the status of development at 1200 N. 28th, which Cava Capital LLC acquired in 2017 from Good Shepard Baptist Church of Richmond.

“With this being an active fire, we have no further details or comment at this time,” Cava said via email.

City records show Cava acquired the building in 2017. | Richmond Assessor’s Office

The fire, which based on Richmond emergency-services calls appears to have begun sometime around 6pm Sunday evening, sent billows of dark smoke over the East End that were visible from across the city. The Lookout observed the smoke driving north on the Manchester Bridge around 6:20pm.

Smoke over the East End was visible from other parts of the city. | Katie Amrhein

Per active-call logs, the Richmond Fire Department responded to a call placed around 6:15pm. When The Lookout arrived on the scene around 6:30pm, dozens of firefighters and emergency responders had set up on R St. between N. 27th and 28th Sts. to battle the blaze and conduct crowd control.

In a social-media post mid-morning Monday, RFD announced that “there were no civilian or firefighter injuries” as a result of the fire, the cause of which is currently unknown. Bystanders speculated whether lightning from a thunderstorm that moved through the city shortly before RFD received the first call about the fire may have touched it off. On reddit’s active /r/rva forum, several users posting videos and photos of the blaze claimed to have observed lightning strike the building.

"The rain started. We heard an extremely loud snap of lightning essentially," a neighbor, Coleman Lucado, told WTVR. "All of a sudden we saw a little bit of smoke building and then all of a sudden from our house we just saw flames erupting from behind our buildings."

Firefighters extinguished the blaze Sunday night, with only minimal damage to the adjacent properties, according to the WTVR staff report. On Monday morning, RFD crews milled around the block as city officials and representatives from Cava Capital took stock of the damage.

1200 N. 28th St. on Monday morning. | Dave Infante

1200 N. 28th St. on Monday morning. | Dave Infante

1200 N. 28th St. on Monday morning. | Dave Infante

1200 N. 28th St. on Monday morning. | Dave Infante

1200 N. 28th St. on Monday morning. | Dave Infante

This is a Lookout special report. It will be updated with more information as it becomes available. If you know more, please get in touch.

Holy smokes. Did you guys catch the terrifying photos from Dock Street yesterday? A CSX train derailed on the trestle near N. 20th St., sending three boxcars into the canal. Miraculously, the cargo wasn’t toxic (it appears to be corn or some kind of grain), and no injuries have been reported. The Richmonder has more. Per a city release this morning, both Dock St. and the Capital Trail are closed.

Anyway. Today is Independence Day, and while it may feel like America herself has gone off the rails, it is a Saturday, and I hope you’re able to take some time to relax and recuperate. Ideally somewhere with powerful air-conditioning, and/or an ice-cold mountain stream.

As has become holiday tradition here at HQ, your humble Lookout editor is taking a break from regular publishing. Instead, below you’ll find updates on the state of the newsletter (good!), more footage of flooding at Chimborazo Playground (bad!), and some other editorial bonuses.

Regular programming resumes next week. Let’s hope the Avula administration’s decision to cancel the city’s official fireworks display at Dogwood Dell does not inspire additional local dipshits to fire their guns in the air this evening. See you on the other side.—Dave.

📲 The Lookout is now on social media!

After more than 18 months as “just” a newsletter/website, The Lookout can now also be found on:

• Bluesky

• Facebook

• Instagram

Please follow them all!

Because I spend entirely too much time on The Platforms™️ for my real job, I’ve hired a reader to help me manage The Lookout’s social-media channels. Maybe I’ll introduce them at some point, if they’re cool with it. For the time being, our strategy is very much just to maintain a low-effort presence on these platforms so that people looking for The Lookout there can find it.

In other words, don’t expect original reporting and commentary native to social media. The best way to keep abreast of The Lookout’s coverage will always be to read the newsletter and website. Same goes for submitting tips, photos, etc.; please do not send them via social media, because we don’t plan to closely monitor The Lookout’s inboxes there. Please continue to get in touch via email or Signal using these instructions. But now, you’ll be able to more easily send East End memes to your Instagram groupchats. If you’re into that sort of thing, that is.

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Shop now

Shop now

Shop now

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

🎥 The Lookout dabbles in local video reporting

Speaking of social media! As you may have noticed, I’ve published a few video reports on the flooding at Chimborazo Playground to L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog. They’re pretty rudimentary, because I am not a very competent video editor. But I think/hope they add some dimension to the coverage. All the videos can be found in the Lookout playlist on my YouTube channel.

The footage is a mix of stuff I’ve shot, and submissions from tipsters. If you have video footage—of Chimborazo Playground, or anything else—that you’d like to share with The Lookout for possible publication, please do.

👀 A look at The Lookout’s growth

As you can see, The Lookout has experienced an enormous amount of growth over the past three months. Welcome to all the new readers, and thanks to everybody who’s been here from the jump. The Lookout does not have a marketing budget, and relies entirely on word-of-mouth to reach new audiences in Church Hill and the surrounding neighborhoods. Tell your friends, neighbors, and low-stakes East End enemies:

Some other topline stats, for those interested:

• Pieces published (all-time): 135

• Open rate (last 3 months): 75.14%, -1.6% from the prior frame

• Click-through rate (L3M): 17.44%, +27.1%

Shifting to Saturday sends has smoothed out my workflow a bit, and it does not seem to have affected open rates in any meaningful way. That massive uptick in click-through rate appears to have been driven by the increase in web-only pieces. Publishing directly to web has been a good way for me to cover more timely items and, conversely, to bank “evergreen” items to fill out newsletters on a slow news week, so I’m glad to see readers have been engaging with them.

The steep upwards growth you see in the chart above seems to be coming largely from The Lookout’s ongoing coverage of the snafu at Chimborazo Playground. Which, great, a core function of this publication is informing the neighborhood about what’s going on in the neighborhood.

🤦🏻‍♂️ Notes on RTD’s abetment of City Hall slopaganda

Filed a bonus item to the web earlier this week:

As RTD sells out newsroom to City Hall, ignore top editor's crocodile tears

Peddling powerful subjects a workaround "instead of interviews" is bad, but pretending it's "nothing new" is worse

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

As a reminder, Mad Enough to Blog It™️ is local media criticism by The Lookout's founding editor, Dave Infante. Read more, and/or submit terrible local media to be considered for future critiques.

😼 Meet this “grumpy mouth” torbie

Courtesy of Lookout reader Sarah Mason, the latest edition of East End Animal Friend is live now, and cute as hell:

Introducing Twiggy

It's another East End Animal Friend!

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

As a reminder, East End Animal Friends is a recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

I had been rolling these out once a month, but because there are so many readers with adorable pets to share, that cadence has produced quite a backlog. Moving forward, I’ll try to include EEAFs a little more regularly. If you’ve been anxiously awaiting your pet’s feature, thanks for your patience!

📸 New submission form for Very CHill Photos

Moonin’. | Windsor Bisbee, iPhone 16 Pro

Each week, The Lookout publishes a different photo of the East End shot by one of your very talented neighbors, like the ones above and below. In the past, I accepted those submissions via email, but that got kind of chaotic. So I just set up a Google Form to make it easier for you to submit your pictures, and for me keep track of them. (If you don’t have a Gmail account, you can continue to submit them directly to me via email.)

Hold that thought. | Drew Olsen, Galaxy S10e

Splish splash. | Jean Westcott, Google Pixel 10 Pro

This also marks an exciting new dimension for this feature. Starting now, every Very CHill Photo will be entered into the public domain, which assists archivists like Yesterdays in creating free, open-source visual records of the neighborhood over time. (You will always retain credit as the photographer.) This is the same license I apply to all the photos I’ve taken and published at The Lookout. Learn more at Creative Commons, and/or submit your Very CHill Photos now.

✂️ And now, to the clips!

Here are the top three most-read editions of The Lookout since Memorial Day (not including l’affair pétanque and other special coverage.) In reverse chronological order:

Behind Chimbo Elementary's feel-good story, dismal dots worth connecting

Plus: Here’s the Government Rd. project schematic!

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Father-son duo launch photo-hunt for East End historical markers

Plus: Newbille, DPR officials talk ‘tanque with peeved public!

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Jefferson Ave. redesign finally fully funded, city says

Plus: Follow-up meetings on paused pétanque project announced; flyers flagged for AI content!

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Twiggy. | Sarah Mason

Where and when did you get your pet? We got her from Richmond SPCA two years ago. They didn't know why she was missing four of her top teeth. She sometimes has a grumpy little mouth that we can't get enough of.

What's your pet's favorite thing to eat? Grass, man.

Does your pet have a neighborhood animal friend they like to play with? TKTKT

What is your pet's favorite thing about living in the East End? We don't let her out except in the backyard, so she has no friends. I suspect she likes it that way though.

What is your pet's favorite thing about living in the East End? She loves to look out the window on Sundays and watch everyone dressed up and going to church.

Got anything else Lookout readers should know about your pet? If you need more Twiggyface, her Instagram is @kittykittyofchurchhill. It's just for fun!

🐶 Previously: Pickles

This has been East End Animal Friend, a new recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Entries are lightly edited for length and clarity. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

An official Richmond account recently promoted RTD sponcon on X (Twitter.) | @RVA_DOT via X (Twitter)

On June 28th, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published this editorial from executive editor Encarnacion Pyle:

Why the walls still matter: The line between news and advertising

A strict, transparent divide between news and advertising is essential to protecting independent reporting and maintaining the trust readers place in our journalism — a hallmark of how we operate

Richmond Times-Dispatch • ENCARNACION PYLE Richmond Times-Dispatch

The item was an obvious, if indirect, response to The Richmonder’s scoop on June 21st that the paper had entered into an advertising deal with City Hall to produce a series of sponsored-content products that are designed to look like news coverage without requiring officials to answer to actual news reporters. Citing records obtained by public-records request, journalist Graham Moomaw reported the package may cost as much as $22,000:

City Hall is making its own news, and paying the RTD to distribute it

The city is paying the RTD for the opportunity to reach the paper’s audience directly, without being filtered through news reporters.

The Richmonder

On July 1st, I submitted the following letter to the editor:

If “budgets are moral documents,” as the old saw holds, then the story of Chimborazo Elementary School’s privately funded playground is as much a case study in right vs. wrong as it is a heartwarming tale of neighborhood generosity.

The Richmond Public Schools’ (RPS) low-slung branch on East Marshall Street has for years offered its 3rd-5th graders little more than a boring, oft-broiling blacktop for recreation. Thanks to yeomanly fundraising efforts from the school’s parent-teacher association (PTA), assistance from the Richmond Ed Fund, and volunteers from CarMax and neighbors across the East End—plus a spotlight from the local news—Jaguars recess will now center around a brand-spankin’-new playground, replete with all the bells and whistles. The total fundraising haul topped out around $250,000.

“The sheer amount of resources it takes to bring kids solid play structures is unfathomable, and I had zero idea of what it would take when we got started,” Denise Hicks, a Chimbo Elementary parent and PTA member, told The Richmonder’s intrepid education reporter Victoria Ifatusin at the ribbon-cutting for the new playground Thursday. “And now we know.”

It’s fitting Ifatusin was on hand to report on the celebration. Just a day prior, she won a lawsuit against the Richmond School Board, which a Richmond Circuit Court judge ruled had improperly redacted public documents related to alleged embezzlement by a former senior employee of Richmond Public Schools. In 2022, that now-separated RPS head of facilities scored a $30,000 raise on his already-six-figure salary after Fox Elementary School was destroyed in a fire—something CBS 6 uncovered only after obtaining public records showing “dozens of instances of school staff throughout RPS submitting work orders for fire alarm panel issues,” including at Fox.

Volunteers erected the playground on Thursday. | Dave Infante

The playground was fully constructed by Friday, but still settling. | Dave Infante

These dismal dots connect. “The Church Hill neighborhood school requested that the Richmond Public Schools division include $250,000 in the budget for the playground, but was rejected in consecutive years,” Ifatusin reported. Providing more than a parking lot for Chimbo Elementary’s kids to play simply wasn’t in the budget. But when RPS forced The Richmonder to lawyer up and go to court to obtain records that belong to the taxpayer, it chose to waste the public’s time and money in an effort to obstruct the details of its richly paid former employee’s alleged waste of the public’s time and money. Now, the school board will likely be on the hook for the nonprofit newsroom’s attorney’s fees, too. (Rightly so.) That would mean more misspent dough that could’ve helped fund a playground instead.

Zoom out further and you’ll only find more dots to connect between the city’s sloppy, shady, or senseless top-down stewardship of public dollars, and the inspiring efforts of rank-and-file East Enders to improve Chimbo Elementary from the ground up.

Sorry Jaguars, a quarter-million-dollar playground just isn’t in the cards; the Avula administration needed to spend more than twice that sum on getting pantsed in court defending the bizarre bungling of former mayor/failed lieutenant governor candidate Levar Stoney’s flack instead.

Don’t forget the Jefferson Avenue street redesign! Here’s a pop quiz, kids: do you think dragging that project out for over a decade increased or decreased its overall cost?

Oh, you thought maybe it would be cool to have recess on something other than asphalt? Yes, that would be cool, but I think you’ll agree it’d be much cooler if the city dug an unpermitted gravel pit at Chimborazo Playground and tossed $68,000 into it instead. Right?

Examples abound. There’s the ~$3 million worth of alleged fraud finagled out of the Richmond Fire Department over the course of eight years without detection; the feds just filed charges last week. Then again, corruption is a matter of bad actors and bad oversight, while bad budgeting is a matter of moral bankruptcy. On the latter front, some recent Richmond line items jump out.

Since 2024, Richmond has spent more than a million bucks on its Flock surveillance network, an always-on, artificial intelligence-enabled digital dragnet that tracks you wherever you drive and is ripe for abuse by the police department and the Trump administration alike. In 2023, Stoney et al. negotiated a ~$30-million give-away to the multibillion-dollar operator of Allianz Amphitheater. That same year, City Council greenlit $130 million in general obligation bonds for the baseball-stadium boondoggle, which just this month saw the city draw down $25 million from its “emergency” fund to purchase Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sports Backers Stadium.

I could go on, and I bet you could, too. But for the sake of our collective sanity, let’s return our focus to Chimborazo Elementary’s dazzling new playground. Bravo to the school’s PTA, and all the donors, and to CarMax employees and other volunteers who showed up over the course of three days to build the damn thing for free in the heat. It’s a spectacular achievement that will benefit the East End’s children—and by extension, all of us—for years to come. But two things can be true, and often are. This grassroots effort was commendable and transformative, and the city must do better to serve its citizens so such efforts become less necessary. That requires our city’s leaders treating budgets more like moral documents, prioritizing community investment over corporate giveaways and flashy fiascos.

When there’s no money in the banana stand at 900 E. Broad St. for a public-school playground, but plenty to pay for police equipment and grease the wheels on private development, it may not technically be wrong. But it certainly isn’t right.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted in Chimborazo Park. | Penelope Poubelle

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🚧 Here’s the Government Rd. project schematic

Richmond DPW

After two and a half years, the Department of Public Works finally awarded a contract for the $10-million reconstruction project on Government Road. As The Lookout reported in mid-June, contractor Posillico, Inc. is slated to begin work in earnest next month, with a projected completion date in spring of next year.

The Lookout obtained the 44-page schematic for the job from Ross Catrow, the director of the city’s Office of Strategic Communication. Review it in full on The Lookout’s share drive

🛍️ New stickers just dropped at The Lookout Shop!

Shop now

Shop now

Score sweet merch and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

🐩 Meet a local mutt that “identifies as human”

Courtesy of Lookout reader Diane Olearnick, the latest edition of East End Animal Friend is live now, and cute as hell:

Introducing Pickles

It's another East End Animal Friend!

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

As a reminder, East End Animal Friend is a new recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Birthday party, pt. 1: Kind Hearted Goods is celebrating a year on E. Broad St. tonight (basically now, sorry!) with mocktails, giveaways, and more. Flyer here, backstory here.

• Birthday party, pt. 2: Pizza Bones is celebrating a year on Jefferson Ave. tonight (again, basically now, lol) with music, a TBT El Gallo pop-up, and karaoke. Flyer here.

• Fix it: Repair Cafe RVA is back at Robinson Theater tomorrow (6/28) from 1:30-4:30pm. Flyer here, backstory here.  

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Splish splash. | Jean Westcott, Google Pixel 10 Pro

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to dave@dinfontay.com with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

Pickles. | Diane Olearnick

Where and when did you get your pet? An animal shelter in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 17th, 2014.

What's your pet's favorite thing to eat? Mostly anything, but especially cheese and peanut butter.

Does your pet have a neighborhood animal friend they like to play with? Miss. Frizzle, aka Frizz. A neighborhood rescue mutt from Puerto Rico. Frizz will come to the door on her walks and they interact together and sometimes they'll have playdates and even sleepovers.

What is your pet's favorite thing about living in the East End? All the smells and the pets she gets from all the sweet folks in the neighborhood.

Got anything else Lookout readers should know about your pet? I'm her emotional support human.

🐈🐈‍⬛ Previously: Mabel and Mikey

This has been East End Animal Friend, a new recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Entries are lightly edited for length and clarity. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

From the dodgy spending, to the improper land dealings, to the nationally recognized culture of anti-transparency, there’s no shortage of fishy business in Richmond. But the East End has been short on business that sell fish. Now tipping those (wait for it) scales: East End Fish Co.

Tucked within The Market on 25th Street, this seafood slinger opened quietly earlier this year with a mission to hook the area’s home cooks. “I just want to do mid-Atlantic fish,” said Forrest Spaits, the fishmonger-entrepreneur literally and figuratively behind the counter, in a recent phone interview. “I'm still a middle man, but I’m trying to cut out some of those links in the supply chain.”

A recent visit to East End Fish Co., which hermit-crabbed into the independent supermarket’s existing seafood counter at the beginning of spring, revealed a case teeming with swordfish, tuna, salmon, and shrimp. Spaits, a former accountant whose forays into fishmongering began with a tumble down the “rabbit hole” of tinned offerings before shifting his focus to fresh catch, said the inventory at the counter is “whatever is currently available” from both regional distributors, as well as the small but growing network of watermen that sell directly to East End Fish Co.

The goal is eventually to source entire from the latter cohort, a higher-touch trade practice that can pay dividends in the high-demand world of specialty seafood. “This morning I drove to White Stone, VA to get some softshell crabs because the larger suppliers all ran out,” he texted The Lookout on Friday. East End Fish Co. also recently announced a partnership with Waveland Oysters, the new bivalve-based venture from Grant Mathews of Church Hill’s Bellwether Garage. Developing direct contacts is rarely so easy as finding an oysterman in the neighborhood, though. “I had to get over that embarrassment of networking,” he said, laughing. “I just DM people, send them an email, give them a cold call, and a lot of times they’ll say ‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ or ‘Hey, not me, but I know other guys who might be interested.’ It’s just one call at a time.”

Spaits behind the counter. | Dave Infante

Fish being monged. | Dave Infante

East End Fish Co.’s station inside The Market at 25th Street has been a boon for the fledgling business, which is the only dedicated seafood purveyor in the East End besides Montrose Heights’ Ocean World Seafood Market. The arrangement is unusual: Spaits is technically an employee of the independent grocer, contributing his accounting and data expertise and drawing a modest salary while retooling its seafood program under the East End Fish Co. brand.

“It’s a pretty unique partnership, because there's just not a lot of commercial kitchen space in Richmond,” he said. East End Fish Co. only found its berth at The Market at 25th Street after Spaits serendipitously found himself chatting with one of the store’s executives at an unrelated hospitality-industry event in Richmond. Fellow food-and-beverage bootstrappers on the farmers market/pop-up/Hatch Kitchen grind have advised him to hang onto such a sweet set-up. He plans to: “I just really lucked out.”

Spaits is making the most of his good fortune. East End Fish Co. will soon hire its first assistant fishmonger, which should allow him to keep the counter open six days a week. It is currently closed Tuesdays, when he pops up at Birdhouse Farmers Market in Randolph, and Thursdays, his day off; expect this schedule to change once the team is set.

He considers it his mission to find ways to maintain quality across a variety of pricepoints, serving customers who can stomach West End prices but are “excited not to have to drive all the way to Yellow Umbrella” on one hand and others who may be more price-sensitive but deserve fresh seafood all the same. (Most of East End Fish Co.’s offerings can be purchased with an EBT card, though prepared items, like crab legs when steamed, are ineligible.) From whole fish at $5-8 a pound, to premium filets and shellfish at more premium prices, the aim is “something for everyone,” Spaits said. Nothing fishy about that.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted behind Chimborazo Playground. | Submitted by Bob Schulz

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

💧 Chimbo Playground floods as DPR seeks missing stormwater permit on paused project

That big cloudburst storm that hit Sunday evening dumped 1.2 inches of rain in Richmond, and fast, per metrics recorded by the National Weather Service’s forecast office in Wakefield. The deluge appeared even bigger in Chimborazo Playground, where stormwater cascaded over the retaining wall on the northern edge of the park and overwhelmed the drain in the alley that runs parallel with E. Broad St. between N. 29th and 31st Sts. Resident Sarah Sahlaney captured video of the impromptu waterfall and the flooding that it caused, which she was kind enough to share with The Lookout. I posted this rough string-out to the L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog on Monday:

Sahlaney said Sunday evening was the first time she’d seen water run over the top of that portion of the wall, which is directly north of the park’s new, unfinished pétanque courts.

As The Lookout first reported in mid-May, Richmond’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Communities Services (DPR) failed to obtain the proper stormwater permit for its construction of the additional courts in Chimborazo Park. That project, which has stirred much aggravation in Church Hill over City Hall’s poor communication, lack of transparency, and unpermitted construction—as well as spirited debate over whether the ~$68,000 now earmarked for expanding the niche French bowling game’s footprint in the 3.5-acre park might be better used on improvements with broader appeal—is currently paused.

The downed silt fencing on the site’s northeast. | Dave Infante

Gravel run-off from the unfinished courts. | Dave Infante

Debris, silt mesh blocks the drain directly south of the site. | Dave Infante

As I’ve previously reported, DPR is retroactively pursuing the appropriate permit from Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), which delegates evaluations of sites within Richmond to the city’s Department of Public Utilities.

The flooding from last Sunday’s storm appears to have dislodged the silt fence that the department installed after The Lookout’s report on the missing permit, rendering the site out of compliance for the entire workweek following the storm. The ongoing disrepair runs contrary to DEQ’s Stormwater Management Handbook. “Inspect silt fences immediately after each rainfall and at least daily during prolonged rainfall,” it reads. “Make any repairs immediately.”

🛍️ New stickers just dropped at The Lookout Shop!

Shop now

Shop now

Score sweet merch and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

🚋 New paving reveals old streetcar rails in Church Hill North

Streetcar rails exposed in front of Robinson Theater. | Drew Olsen

Richmond’s Department of Public Works has been paving streets throughout Church Hill North this month. The process turned up a glimpse of local infrastructural history at N. 29th and Q Sts., where Church Hill photog Drew Olsen snapped some shots of what appear to be old streetcar rails embedded in brick pavers.

I’ve written previously about Richmond’s pioneering electric streetcar system, which was the world’s first when it began operating in 1888; it was sadly shut down in 1949 to cede the city’s public streets to private automobiles. Various maps surfaced on reddit’s prodigious /r/mapporn forum suggest the rails Olsen spotted would have belonged to a line operated by long-defunct Richmond Passenger & Power Co.

Finnegan Photography Collection via Yesterdays

Finnegan Photography Collection via Yesterdays

At The Lookout’s request, Yesterdays power user/cartographic visual archivist/area man John Pole dug through the MapRVA-built platform’s vast reserve of historical Richmond photos and managed to dig up a couple that show a car crash on the street in 1954. Though the pictures—sourced from a private portfolio now held by The Valentine that contains photos “related to the activities of the Richmond Fire Department”—were taken half a decade after the system was decommissioned, they show rails and bricks that appear to match the ones Olsen saw uncovered by DPW’s prep work on contemporary Q St.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Stop and shop: Dear Neighbor is hosting a vintage menswear market full of last-minute Father’s Day gifts today (6/20) from 11am-4pm. Details here.

• Tune in: Triple Crossing Fulton has live music today starting at 1pm for Fledge Fest, its peregrine falcon-oriented partnership with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources. More here.

• Tune in, x2: The Bellwether Sessions has live local music tonight starting at 7pm on E. Clay St. Flyer here, backstory here.

• Weigh in: The city’s official survey about how to move forward on the currently paused Chimborazo Playground pétanque project is live through 11:59pm on Monday (6/22). Survey here, backstory here.

• Help out: Chimborazo Elementary PTA is still looking for a few more volunteers to assist on the first prep day (Tuesday, 6/23) for the construction of its new playground. Sign up here.

• Get skilled: Art 4 All RVA is teaching a beginners’ linocut workshop at Pizza Bones next Wednesday (6/24) from 5:30-7:00pm. Flyer here.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Hold that thought. | Drew Olsen, Galaxy S10e

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to dave@dinfontay.com with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

One of the reason public libraries reliably poll well with rank-and-file Americans is because they’re free for everybody to use. Another reason? They have a lot more to offer than “just” books, though it is The Lookout’s considered opinion that, as a rule, books rule. The Richmond Public Library’s (RPL) offerings, for example, include everything from musicals, to archival British television, to lineage-tracing programs, all free of charge. And this summer, the city’s network of biblio bases—including the East End Branch—is once again running its summer reading program, stacked with activities and challenges designed to keep kids of all ages reading while school is out. Guess how much it costs?

“It’s all free,” said Adam Zimmerli, the library/community services manager at RPL’s North 25th Street location, in a phone interview earlier this week about “Unearth a Story,” the dinosaur-themed summer campaign that kicked off in earnest at branches all over the city this month and runs through August. “If you're an adult who's got small children, this is a great opportunity to help socialize them” while school is out, Zimmerli said, adding that the library’s air-conditioned spaces and restrooms are always open to all.

Keeping kids—and yourself—cool during the sweltering months is one thing. But RPL’s programming is also designed to prevent neighborhood students’ hard-won reading and writing progress from cooling over the break. “If you don't take the time to read in the summer—you know, you’re a kid, you're outside, you're running around, you're playing on the swings, doing all those kind of kid things—but if you're not reading, you're going to lose some of that comprehension,” said Zimmerli, describing a learning-loss dynamic known to libraries and educators colloquially as the “summer slide.” While the exact amount of proficiency loss is difficult to quantify thanks to the vagaries of standardized testing and student demography, these declines tend to be more severe in low-income communities like Richmond’s East End, where schools have been chronically underfunded and working parents have less time to assist their children in extracurricular learning.

The “summer slide” is often more pronounced among low-income students. | Monographs of the Society for Research and Child Development via SummerMatters

The good news is, the summer slide isn’t inevitable. “Studies have shown that if [children] even read as little as 15 minutes a day, that can counteract it,” said Zimmerli. “When the school year starts up again, you haven't lost anything, you're ready to go, you're still warm, and ready to hit the ground running.”

This is where RPL’s programming comes in. Created by the American Library Association, the country’s largest library advocacy (libradvocacy?) group, “Unearth A Story” features events designed to keep kids entertained and educated over the summer months. In June, the East End Branch will host:

• Dino Fuse Beads (6/17) a teen-oriented STEAM (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) workshop that highlights how heat affects and alters atoms;

• Digging for Dinosaurs for Preschoolers (6/18), a hands-on mock excavation to teach differences between meat-eaters and plant-eaters;

• Dino Yoga (6/20), a low-intensity, no-experience-necessary stretching session replete with “dino-themed asanas that promote breath and body awareness;”

And so on. In addition to these Jurassic-style special events, the library is also promoting a summer-long reading challenge, in which kids pick up a log at any RPL branch (or download one online), log their reading at home (with adult sign-off to counter any temptation to exaggerate), then present it at a branch for prizes throughout the summer. The challenge is available in both English and Spanish. “Couldn’t be easier,” Zimmerli said.

Download RPL’s 2026 summer reading log for kids. | RPL

Download RPL’s 2026 summer reading log for teens. | RPL

Parents who don’t dig dinos will be glad to know the branch’s calendar is also bursting with non-themed weekly events to target learning loss, too, like “Toddler Time” (Mondays 11am-12pm) and “Book Babies” (Tuesdays 10-11am.) Ensuring the branch has different programs to appeal to different ages—from what Zimmerli calls the “read to me” cohort, all the way to tweens and teens—is crucial to cover as many gaps as possible, especially towards the upper end of that range.

“As cool as the library is, sometimes we can struggle to win over” older school-aged children, Zimmerli chuckled. But that doesn’t mean the East End Branch isn’t trying. “Our teen librarian is out of this world,” he said. “She's gotten us a [Nintendo] Switch and a subscription, so we've got a ton of different games, and then we've also got a really good anime and manga program as well.”

If you’re an adult and you’re feeling left out, well… I mean first of all, that’s a little weird, honestly. But less judgmentally: RPL has got you covered, too, with an adult summer reading log and more grown-up workshops and events scattered across the next couple months. “We're doing a ‘mend your own clothing’ session in July,” said Zimmerli. “We've got sewing a decorative patch in August.”

Again, this is all for the price of “on the house,” and all in addition to RPL’s vast trove of year-round resources, which includes everything from ebooks and streaming services to light technology troubleshooting. “There are only two things that we’ll ever charge you for,” Zimmerli said—a book or DVD that you check out and straight-up lose, and printing services. (Having run off a bunch of flyers for The Lookout at the East End Branch over the past 18 months, I can attest to the convenience and low cost.) Keeping things free means keeping the library accessible to all, and that’s an integral element of this venerable civic institution no matter the season.

“Where else in the country is there that you can you go, and you don't have to buy anything, you can just come and be?” said Zimmerli.

I don’t know the answer. But if one exists, I bet the East End Branch’s librarians will be able to help you dig it up.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted on N. 32nd St between E. Marshall & E. Clay Sts. | Penelope Poubelle

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🚧 Work on Government Rd. actually starts this summer, costs $10 million

Crews are scheduled to soon begin working on neighborhood’s crumbling southeasterly egress. | Dave Infante

Last week, I reported that the long-delayed construction project to shore up and repave Government Rd. would take place in the spring of 2027. That was wrong: work will begin as soon as next week, with the Department of Public Works (DPW) planning to issue a formal notice-to-proceed on June 15th to the contractor on the job, Posillico, Inc. A city spokesperson, Paige Hairston, confirmed this timeline to The Lookout on Friday in response to emailed questions.

(The error occurred because I misinterpreted a previous email from Hairston. in keeping with The Lookout’s ethics code, I’ve appended a correction to my original report.)

Per a memo from DPW’s principal engineer on the project, Tim Lewis, relayed on June 6th to select Church Hill groups and individuals by 7th District City Council liaison Sam Patterson and reviewed by The Lookout, the project is budgeted at $10 million. Hairston also confirmed this figure.

Lewis’ message outlined six improvements DPW plans to make with the construction, which is still scheduled to end in the spring of 2027, as previously reported. They are (quoting directly from the note):

1. Slope Stabilization

2. Roadway reconstruction/pavement/markings and curb and gutter

3. Park entrance reconstruction

4. Improved pedestrian ADA access (sidewalk)

5. Safety guardrail

6. Water utility upgrade

In response to a question about traffic-calming measures included with the project, Hairston noted that “the plans include a double yellow marking around the curve.”

🛍️ New stickers just dropped at The Lookout Shop!

Shop now

Shop now

Score sweet merch and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

🍆 Street squash returns to Church Hill

The first street squash your Lookout editor has spotted this summer. | Dave Infante

Temperatures are in the low 90s, humidity is hovering around 50%, and I’ve caught myself daydreaming about drinking cold Legend brown lager in The Hill Cafe’s exuberantly conditioned air no less than thrice this afternoon alone. It may not technically be summer on the calendar, but it is very much summer in practice out on the streets of Church Hill. A case in point: street squash!

Longtime Lookout readers will recall a certain editorial fixation last summer with the thriving ground-cover produce that sprung up from certain tree wells, grass easements, even cracked sidewalks around the neighborhood. As I reported a year ago (almost to the day) on June 6th, 2025:

Having just today clocked several of these plants returning to multiple tree wells along E. Broad St. this summer, I’ll reiterate: would you eat the forbidden street squash?

And of course, if you have any idea how these plants got there, I’m all ears.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Reflect: The Elegba Folklore Society is hosting a walk of Richmond’s slave trail tonight (6/13) at 5:30pm in advance of Juneteenth. Tickets are free, but required.

• Get social: The Church Hill Association’s meeting this month will actually be more of a happy hour, taking place at Triple Crossing Fulton on Tuesday (6/16) from 6:30-8pm. Mark your calendar.

• Turn up: Machine Mook will be playing Triple Crossing Fulton this Friday (6/19) from 6-8pm. More info.

• Solarize: The James River Park System Invasive Plant Task Force needs volunteers to help cover and kill Johnsongrass down at Dock St. Park next Saturday (6/20) from 9am-12pm. Get involved.

• Cuddle time: Mutti Dog Services and Beagles and Bentleys are teaming up with Second Arrow for Puppy Therapy sessions next Saturday (6/20) at 12pm and 1:15pm. Grab your tickets.

• Weigh in: The city’s official survey about how to move forward on the currently paused Chimborazo Playground pétanque project is live through 11:59pm on Monday (6/22). Survey here, backstory here.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Orange you glad? | Jean Westcott, Google Pixel 10 Pro

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to dave@dinfontay.com with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

Church Hill’s resident cartographic lunatic (laudatory) is at it again, folks.

John Pole, the Chimborazo Boulevard-based power-user of MapRVA’s tremendously fun geospatial history tool/game Yesterdays, recently struck out in pursuit of a new hyperlocal mapping obsession: the locations of the neighborhood’s many historic plaques. The Lookout spotted him last weekend with his six year-old son, Theodore, scouring the streets of the East End to take photos of the Historic Richmond Foundation’s (HRF) black placards on public buildings and private residence.

Those photos, Pole will then upload to a new MapRVA display developed by his geospatial confreres, Jacob Hall and Mike O’Brien, helping to create another visual digital network of the neighborhood’s rich history.

“As a Church Hill resident and owner of a contributing structure to the Oakwood-Chimborazo Historic District myself, I have loved the ability to learn more about Richmond and Church Hill history through this effort,” he said via email.

An HRF plaque on E. Marshall St. geolocated on MapRVA’s new tool. | MapRVA / OpenStreetMap

HRF plaques photographed by Pole and others in an open-source folder. | Wikimedia Commons

Tracking down Church Hill’s plethora of plaques is painstaking shoe-leather work in part because it’s not clear whether Historic Richmond has a master list of their locations on file. (In this, the MapRVA footman’s remit recalls that of Steven Keener, Ph.D., the Church Hill-based criminal-justice professor who is working to validate all the locations of Richmond Police Department’s Flock automated license-plate readers.) Pole has asked, and hopes one turns up. In the meantime, he’s hunting plaques the old-fashioned way—and making progress.

Theodore Pole snapping a photo of Chimborazo Elementary School. | John Pole

“I’ve conservatively taken at least 65” pictures of plaques in the East End, Pole estimated in a follow-up text exchange. To render them on MapRVA’s slick new tool, he has been uploading them to this designated folder on Wikimedia Commons, which currently features nearly 110 images of the plaques. Fellow MapRVA operative O’Brien (who led the group’s Flock-spotting seminar in Shockoe Bottom in May) has snapped a few as well; an unaffiliated photographer from northern Virginia had also previously uploaded about 25 pictures to the open-source repository.

The upshot: accounting for a few duplicates, Pole and company have either personally taken or sourced photographs of 95 of the 121 HRF plaques they know to exist in Church Hill. In the tradition of 21st-century grassroots researchers all over the country, they’re tracking the work in this shared spreadsheet. Most of the quarries Pole has captured for posterity are located in and around the St. John’s Church Historic District, but MapRVA’s tool also features a few in Union Hill, Church Hill North, and Oakwood-Chimborazo. Plaques marked in yellow on the map have been photographed; those in red still need to be.

Pole’s enthusiasm for documenting the neighborhood is evident in even casual conversation. It may also be contagious—or perhaps Theodore is just genetically predisposed to follow in his father’s photo-cartographic footprints. “Literally any time he sees a plaque [he says] ‘Daddy, do you have a picture of that one yet?’” Pole told me. “It’s been really fun to do with him, and I think a lot of fun for him. It’s such an easy thing to look for, and it gives us a reason to get out and around the neighborhood.”

If you, like Theodore, are picking up what Pole is putting down, you can get in on the action in two different ways. If you know of HRF plaques in the East End that aren’t yet logged on MapRVA’s master spreadsheet, get in touch with him at pole.johnj@gmail.com and he’ll put it on the list. Or, if you’re feeling snappy, get out there and photograph some of the ones on the spreadsheet yourself, then upload the photos to the Wikimedia Commons folder using MapRVA’s tagging guidelines. Pole said he welcomes any help hunting Church Hill’s HRF markers. Who wouldn’t? It’s a big neighborhood, and those plaques ain’t gonna photograph themselves.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted on N. 31st St. in Chimborazo Park. | Penelope Poubelle

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🎳 Newbille, DPR officials talk ‘tanque with peeved public at Powhatan Community Center

The Lookout was in attendance Thursday evening for the first of two public-listening events put on by the city regarding its now-paused pétanque court expansion at Chimborazo Playground. My report from the two-hour confab:

"We own" Chimbo Playground "missteps," city officials say

Parks Dept. shares $68,000 pétanque-court pricetag, next steps in belated community meeting Thursday

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

The second meeting is underway today at Lucks Field from 11am-1pm. The Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) is also soliciting feedback via online survey.

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Shop now

Shop now

Shop now

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

 🚧 DPW shares Church Hill North paving schedule, plus a Government Rd. update

Richmond DPW

As you may have noticed this week, there’s paving underway throughout Church Hill proper. Did it catch you off guard? Yeah, me too. I’ve followed up with the Department of Public Works (DPW) to get a sense for the scope of the work. In the meantime, DPW did provide a breakout of paving projects scheduled this summer in Church Hill North. From a mid-May press release:

In other roadwork news around the neighborhood, I checked in with DPW last month about the status of Government Rd. which has been closed for two and a half years. Via email, spokesperson Paige Hairston told me on May 7th that a contract had finally been awarded for the project. The department tapped Posillico, Inc. for job—which includes upgrading underground utilities, stabilizing the hill, and repaving the currently cracked street—and expects the work to be completed in the spring of 2027.¹ The project is, ah, projected to cost ~$10 million.

“Additionally, the contractor will reconstruct the [Church Hill] Dog Park entrance,” Hairston added.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Freeze, please: Spotty Dog has strawberry-matcha twist creemees on special this weekend while supplies last. Gaze upon it.

• Tune in: Jazz on The Hill is back at Good Shepherd Baptist Church today (6/6) from 12-5pm. Flyer here.

• Shop on: Fairyhaus Vintage is popping up at Pizza Bones/FriendBar tomorrow (6/7) from 12-5pm. More info here.

• Tune in, pt. 2: Vibes at Sunset returns to Libby Hill Park on Thursday (6/11) from 5-9pm. Here’s the info.

• Tune in, pt. 3: Jeffrey Alan Jones is playing Triple Crossing Fulton on Friday (6/12) from 6-8pm. Check the deets.

• Party down: The Robinson Theater’s free summer block party is Friday (6/12) from 5:30-7:30pm. Get those details.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Room to bloom. | Drew Olsen, Galaxy S10e

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to dave@dinfontay.com with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

Editor’s note: Below find a special report about Church Hill’s ongoing l’affair pétanque. If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to keep independent journalism about your neighborhood free for all to read. Here’s how to submit tips, documents, correspondence, etc. with The Lookout for editorial consideration. Check the liveblog for reporting odds-and-ends about this controversy.—Dave.

Pétanque enthusiasts submit entries in a DPR vision-boarding exercise. | Dave Infante

After a month of neighborhood confusion and anger over the city of Richmond’s surprise construction at Chimborazo Playground, community members climbed Fulton Hill Thursday evening for a public meeting about the now-paused work. Over the course of the two-hour confab, there was little consensus over what to do about the park’s mostly completed pétanque courts, the estimated cost for which has skyrocketed to nearly $68,000.

But once again, everybody agreed the city had bungled the job—including the city itself.

“We own that the process was not correct,” said Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) Director, Chris Frelke, addressing around 35 attendees at the first of two city meetings about l’affair pétanque, which was hosted by the department as well as City Council President/7th District Councilmember Cynthia Newbille at Powhatan Community Center, (The second takes place Saturday, June 6th, at Lucks Field Community Center from 11am-1pm. Here’s the flyer.) Frelke said construction of the courts stands at approximately 85% complete.

“We acknowledge that […] a larger scale outreach effort should have been done, so we own that,” said Nissa Richardson, DPR’s deputy director of capital projects, noting that after over a year of dialogue with the members of Les Boulefrogs Pétanque Club of Virginia (some of whom are longtime Church Hill residents), the pace of construction moved unusually fast on expanding Chimborazo Playground’s facilities for the relatively niche French bowling game.

Richmond DPR

Midday Thursday, in advance of the meeting, DPR’s capital improvements manager Ryan Rinn distributed a PowerPoint deck with information about the project. (Review it in full on The Lookout’s share drive.) It contained the first official cost breakdown of the project, which at $67,911 is dramatically higher than any total previously known to the public.

As I reported at The Lookout’s L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog yesterday, DPR’s “current (and anticipated)” total for the project is more than eight times the $8,000 sum tossed out by Frelke at the Church Hill Association (CHA) meeting on May 19th; $50,000 more than the estimate in the layout document circulated by Les Boulefrogs Pétanque Club of Virginia that a city official later described to me as “final”; and nearly double the total in the city purchase order I obtained in mid-May. Thanks to a back-of-the-napkin estimate on permitting costs from Church Hill resident Evan Branosky, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) former chief of stormwater policy, The Lookout was able to ballpark the cost within $7,000 of the official total the day before the meeting.

The language of ownership and accountability that DPR officials spoke Thursday echoed Newbille’s comments at the CHA meeting, where she conceded to a room of ~70 that “there wasn’t the notification that we would expect [about the project] and so we own that.” It also recalls the contrite tone DPR tried to strike some 14 years ago, when city officials last drew the neighborhood’s ire over the park’s pétanque courts. “We know and recognize we failed you all as fellow [c]itizens,” read a comment on the widely read, now-defunct Church Hill People’s News blog in 2012.

Richmond DPR

But on Thursday evening, Newbille tried to enforce “a reset” on the conversation. “It's important that set of ‘missteps’—is that how we framed it?—I don't want to revisit that,” she said, speaking to Rinn, who was then presenting a slide titled “Missteps and Lessons Learned.” The longtime 7th District politician wanted instead to hear from the community on how to move forward with the project.

The community assembled for the meeting did not seem agree with Newbille’s water-under-the-bridge perspective, much less with one another. After DPR’s presentation, and “workshops” in which attendees provided feedback to DPR on the project via forms and Post-Its stuck to posters bearing different questions (e.g., “What 3 Words Come To Mind When Thinking of Chimborazo [sic] Playgrnd?”), residents got to speak their minds about the controversial construction.

Many directed their ire at DPR for its poor communication and prioritization, arguing that the park’s bathrooms and water fountain should have been repaired before the city even considered more than doubling the number of pétanque courts.

“That playground for children is something for a third-world place,” said Cheryl Burke, the 7th District’s representative on the Richmond Public School Board, who attended the meeting as a Church Hill resident. “It's despicable.”

DPR’s Director Frelke spoke with a community member. | Dave Infante

DPR’s Rinn presented on the Chimborazo Playground project. | Dave Infante

Other speakers directed their ire at one another.

“Do you want your tax dollars to go to ripping it out?” a pro-pétanque speaker asked the room, referencing DPR’s 85%-complete estimate as a form of fait accompli. “Is that a good use of your tax dollars?”

“Yes!” roughly half a dozen attendees (some of whom had just spoken about how their families had enjoyed using the portion of the field now covered in crushed stone) yelled back.

It was just one of the instances Thursday evening when the tensions animating Church Hill’s hottest public land-use debate boiled over into heated cross-talk.

“When the Boulefrogs say that they want the park to be for everybody, it kind of makes me upset,” said a 16 year-old girl. “The courts only serve the pétanque players—”

A Boulefrog interjected. “So do the basketball players, only serve [one group.]”

“—a group of 60 white people,” continued the teenager, who presented as nonwhite, raising her voice to be heard above the interruption.

“That is not true,” someone countered from the back of the room. With discord rising, Newbille had to intervene to keep the meeting on track. “A group of 60 majority white players,” the girl revised, picking up where she had left off.

During their own comments, the Boulefrogs and their fellow travelers sought to portray the new courts as an amenity for the entire neighborhood, and pétanque itself as a game on the make. (The Federation of Pétanque USA, the sport’s stateside sanctioning body, estimates there are roughly 30,000 players in the whole country. By contrast, bocce’s global authority, Collegium Cosmicum Ad Buxeas, ballparks the game’s American playership at 25,000,000.) Speakers touted the inclusiveness of the Boulefrogs, who play on the existing courts Thursdays, Sundays, and holidays; their years of volunteer work on Chimborazo Playground; and the suitability of pétanque for players of all ages.

“We have a number of members who say this is their face-to-face connection, this is social contact for them, and would otherwise experience isolation if they didn't have the bullfrogs,” one club member said. “They’ve actually said that the Boulefrogs have saved their life.”

Some of the attendees who do not support the expansion of the pétanque courts nevertheless clapped and snapped at various points to show acknowledgement of the Boulefrogs’ contributions to the park.

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

On May 11th, DPR stopped work on the courts (“an authentic pause,” Frelke said.) But work to bring the site into compliance with DEQ permitting requirements will continue regardless of whether the courts ultimately get built. The city has budgeted that process at nearly $32,000—a price that includes having an actual civil engineer draft an actual construction plan for the site. Projects that disturb over 4,000 square feet of land require sign-offs on stormwater and erosion management.

DPR’s Richardson on Thursday evening said once they learned the project was “just over that threshold,” they halted it, characterizing it as a surprise. But as The Lookout has previously reported, the footprint of the city’s lo-fi “final” layout document put the footprint of the project at 4,400sqft from the jump. DPR has not responded to a request for comment on why it moved forward without a permit, given the dimensions in that document. Tamara Jenkins, acting deputy director, public affairs in the Office of Strategic Communications & Civic Engagement (OSC), told The Lookout Thursday morning that the Department of Public Works (which administers the DEQ’s stormwater rules in the city) had received relevant applications for the project on May 28th and 29th. The maximum permitting time possible, from the submitting the application to receiving a yes/no from DPU, is 135 days.

While the city navigates through the permit process, it will also retroactively assemble a report on neighborhood sentiment about the project to determine how to proceed at Chimborazo Playground. Thursday’s meeting was the opening move in that belated public-listening campaign. In addition to the duplicate meeting Saturday, it is also hosting an online survey that it has sent to various neighborhood groups via email; Frelke said the department would also explore posting flyers with QR codes in the park.

“I would hope that we'd be able to get back to you all by mid-July” with a report from the campaign and revised plans for the project.

Until that point, and likely for some time after it, Chimborazo Playground’s controversial new gravel patches will remain in pétanque purgatory.

🕰️ Get caught up

Check The Lookout’s L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog for the latest reportage.

Chimbo Playground permit could run another $25,000, expert says

Fmr. DEQ stormwater policy chief, a Church Hill resident, says compliance could take "months"

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Newbille, DPR's Frelke say city slipped up on Chimbo Playground snafu

At packed meeting, 7th District pol, Parks staff promise more public engagement on paused pétanque project

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground pétanque courts cost $36,000, purchase order shows

City documents, correspondence obtained by The Lookout shed more light on the now-paused construction

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Polarizing Chimbo Playground project lacks proper permit, Parks confirms

City is now seeking state signoff for potential pétanque-induced erosion

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground pétanque project paused, Newbille's office says

CHA president, Parks email confirm City Halt halt on controversial Chimbo Playground buildout

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

At Sunday pétanque parley, neighbors debate, vent about officials' absence

Newbille, Avula admin not present at tense talk about controversial Chimbo Playground construction

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground patrons piqued by perplexing pétanque proliferation

A Lookout special report on the controversial park construction confounding Church Hill

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

This has been a Lookout special report. Please submit tips, photos, etc. about the East End for editorial consideration. Consider upgrading your subscription and/or buying merch to support independent journalism about your neighborhood.

Editor’s note: Below find a special report about Church Hill’s ongoing l’affair pétanque. If you haven’t yet, please consider upgrading to keep independent journalism about your neighborhood free for all to read. Here’s how to submit tips, documents, correspondence, etc. with The Lookout for editorial consideration. Check the liveblog for reporting odds-and-ends about this controversy.—Dave.

Stormwater has been a persistent issue since the original pétanque courts were installed. | Mary Stafford

At Chimborazo Playground, a pair of graded gravel patches have stood half-finished since mid-May, when construction crews halted work in the face of community consternation and a missing state stormwater permit. But while the city has made some efforts to address the former, it’s not clear when it will be able to secure the latter.

Now, a local expert tells The Lookout that obtaining official sign-off on the currently paused expansion of the park’s pétanque courts could take months and cost tens of thousands of additional dollars.

“Based on my experience with stormwater permitting, similar small land-disturbing projects can involve real additional costs for permit application materials and erosion and sediment control work,” Evan Branosky, who served as Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) chief stormwater policy advisor until 2025, told The Lookout via email. “For this project, those additional costs could be roughly $15,000 to $25,000.”

A list of requirements on Richmond DPU’s stormwater review checklist. | Richmond DPU

As The Lookout has previously reported, the project is subject to a permitting process because its footprint exceeds the maximum the city allows without a Richmond Erosion & Stormwater Management Program (RESMP) permit. A DEQ spokesperson, Sarah Pentecost, told me on May 15th that it had determined the complaint it had received about the construction fell under Virginia Stormwater Management Program (VSMP) authority and referred the investigation to Richmond’s Department of Public Utilities (DPU.) Tamara Jenkins, acting deputy director, public affairs in the Office of Strategic Communications & Civic Engagement (OSC), confirmed that day that DPR needed the permit to continue, but did not address a follow-up question about why it had not applied for one in advance. DPU did not respond to an inquiry sent May 15th; Ross Catrow, OSC’s director, acknowledged receipt of a follow-up email sent June 2nd, but could not provide more information before deadline.

Update (6/4/26): After publication, OSC’s Jenkins responded to follow-up questions put to DPU, confirming the department had received a site plan and application for this project on May 28th and May 29th, respectively. “DPU currently is in the process of reviewing both the submitted plans and the RESMP Permit Application for compliance with the City Code and the VESM Regulation,” Jenkins told The Lookout. “At this time, no additional requests have been made to the applicant.”

Branosky, a Church Hill resident, previously led the development of DEQ’s Stormwater Management Handbook. He reached out to The Lookout to share his expertise because he wants East Enders to have as much information as possible headed into the city’s public meetings about l’affair pétanque. (The first is Thursday, June 4th from 6-8pm at the Powhatan Community Center; the second is Saturday, June 6th from 11am-1pm art Lucks Field Community Center. See flyers—one of which DPR generated using AI—below.)

“I think the broader public issue is transparency around the full cost of building the courts, including the original construction cost and any additional cost needed to bring the project into compliance with stormwater permitting requirements,” he said.

A flyer announcing the upcoming meetings. The Lookout confirmed that it was generated using AI. | DPR

A flyer announcing the upcoming meetings. The Lookout confirmed that it was created by a human designer based on the AI-generated design. | DPR

An all-in price for project, which began on May 5th and was officially halted by the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities (DPR) on May 11th, has been hard to come by. An informal document that OSC’s Jenkins described to me as the project’s “final” layout, circulated by the local group Les Boulefrogs Pétanque Club of Virginia, estimated the total at $17,000, while the DPR’s director, Christopher Frelke said at a Church Hill Association meeting in mid-May that the cost was $8,000, without citing the source of that figure. Neither sum aligns with the vendor contract or city purchase order obtained by The Lookout via public-records request, which priced the work at $36,004.

On May 21st, OSC’s Jenkins reiterated the accuracy of that $36,004 figure in response to a follow-up from The Lookout about comments from DPR’s director, Frelke, and deputy director of capital improvement projects, Nissa Richardson, disputing it. “The attached purchase order is correct—it’s for the installation of two new courts,” she wrote, referring to this document.

RESMP timeline and process. | Richmond DPU

Whatever the project was supposed to cost, it could get much more expensive due to the requirements of the permitting process. “Stormwater requirements usually apply in two phases: construction-phase erosion and sediment control, and post-construction stormwater management,” Branosky explained. A project like this, he added, could require site work like:

• a silt fence or other perimeter controls;

• measures to keep #10 screenings from washing off site;

• a stabilized construction entrance or other track-out control if vehicles will continue accessing the site;

• inlet protection if runoff reaches a nearby storm drain;

• stabilization with seed, mulch, matting, or similar measures;

• and maintenance until the site is stabilized and the permit can be closed out.

On May 15th, a crew returned to Chimborazo Playground to install silt fencing. I also noticed what appears to be some sort of mesh silt guard beneath the drain grate at the southern edge of the construction site, though I don’t know if that’s a new addition.

It’s not clear what other steps the city may have taken to get the site into compliance since then, or who is responsible for taking them. Language in the vendor’s contract (which is not countersigned by a city official) places the responsibility for permitting on the client, in this case DPR. Language in the city’s purchase order does not explicitly delegate this responsibility, but states the contractor must comply with “all laws, regulations, and rules applicable to the performance of the contract represented by this Purchase Order.” It’s possible that permitting/compliance costs were baked into the project’s original price, but they are itemized in neither the contract nor the purchase order.

Silt fencing added May 15th. | Windsor Bisbee

Silt fencing added May 15th. | Windsor Bisbee

Branosky arrived at his $15,000-25,000 estimated range with back-of-the-napkin math that “assum[es] no permanent stormwater controls are required and no penalties are assessed,” he said. Compliance expenses could also rise from that estimate “if DPU requires more detailed survey work, plan revisions, corrective work, or longer-term site stabilization,” added Branosky, noting that this would in turn inflate the project’s bottom line.

Of course, this all gets more complicated as more friction arises during the permitting process. As Branosky notes, DPU’s guidance allows 15 calendar days to determine whether an application is complete, and another 60 to approve or disapprove the plan. “If comments are issued, the applicant may need to revise and resubmit, which can add more time,” he said. “If the applicant is starting from the beginning, the full process could take several months.” From start to finish, the city’s RESMP guidance document outlines a total period of up to 135 days.

The scale of that timeline differs dramatically with the one Jenkins provided to The Lookout via email in mid-May. “We are coordinating closely with DPU’s Water Resources team and expect to have coverage obtained within a couple of weeks,” she wrote.

The current status of DPR’s application is unknown. At the CHA meeting on May 19th, Frelke, responding to a question about the permitting situation, said simply, “We're working on that piece.”

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

🕰️ Get caught up

Check The Lookout’s L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog for the latest reportage.

Newbille, DPR's Frelke say city slipped up on Chimbo Playground snafu

At packed meeting, 7th District pol, Parks staff promise more public engagement on paused pétanque project

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground pétanque courts cost $36,000, purchase order shows

City documents, correspondence obtained by The Lookout shed more light on the now-paused construction

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Polarizing Chimbo Playground project lacks proper permit, Parks confirms

City is now seeking state signoff for potential pétanque-induced erosion

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground pétanque project paused, Newbille's office says

CHA president, Parks email confirm City Halt halt on controversial Chimbo Playground buildout

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

At Sunday pétanque parley, neighbors debate, vent about officials' absence

Newbille, Avula admin not present at tense talk about controversial Chimbo Playground construction

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

Chimbo Playground patrons piqued by perplexing pétanque proliferation

A Lookout special report on the controversial park construction confounding Church Hill

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

This has been a Lookout special report. Please submit tips, photos, etc. about the East End for editorial consideration. Consider upgrading your subscription and/or buying merch to support independent journalism about your neighborhood.

Jefferson Avenue is not a particularly long road. But it’s been a very long road to get it redesigned for pedestrian safety.

As The Lookout has previously reported, the Coalition for A Safer Jefferson Avenue (CFSJA) and other concerned community members have been pushing Richmond’s Department of Public Works (DPW) to improve the east-west artery for over a decade. Ed Fendley, a lead for the group, can’t believe where the time has gone since 2014, when the Environmental Protection Agency selected Richmond as one of the cities for its “Greening America’s Capitals” program. The federal agency produced a plan to improve Jefferson Ave. the following year.

“Like a lot of community advocates, I've learned over the years, [I] got into this saying ‘I'll see if I can help out, y’know, devote a few months and try to lend a hand here, and then I'm gonna dip out,” he told me in a phone interview last June, when DPW finally released the initial round of blueprints for the second half of the four-phase project. The first chunk of the street-safety makeover was completed on the eastern end of Jefferson Ave. in 2020; the second was completed last summer, bringing bump-outs, speed humps, and shorter crosswalks to the stretch by Pizza Bones, as well as back-in parking in front of Spotty Dog and across from Union Market.

Roughly 12 months later, Fendley still hasn’t gotten the chance to dip out. (Frankly, his evident passion for safer streets makes me suspect he’ll be constitutionally incapable of abandoning the cause even once the Jefferson Ave. redesign is complete.) But this past week, the CFSJA received word from DPW that funding has been lined up for the final two phases of the seemingly interminable multi-million-dollar redesign. The end, while not quite “nigh,” is very much in sight.

The crosswalk at N. 23rd St. & Jefferson Ave. will be dramatically shortened. | City of Richmond

Email correspondence between city officials and community members last week reviewed by The Lookout indicates that Phase 3 of the project—from E. Leigh to E. Clay Sts.—is fully funded, and scheduled to begin this fall. Phase 4, which runs from E. Clay to E. Marshall Sts., is also a go for the FY29-30 budget, with the state kicking in some funding. As it stands, that final segment of work will take place in 2028, some 14 years after the EPA first flagged Richmond’s deadly streets for improvement. It’s not happening on the timeline Fendley, fellow CFSJA organizers Mary Field and Elaine Odell, and East Enders seeking safer streets may have hoped for all those years ago, but folks, it is happening.

The Lookout will have more reporting to come on how a road redesign project spanning half a dozen blocks wound up taking almost a decade and a half. (If you have tips on that front, get in touch. Anonymity available.) But for now, some highlights from the so-called 90% plan for Phases 3 & 4:

• As Fendley pointed out in an email to CFSJA members and media, the Jefferson Ave. crossing on the eastern edge of N. 23rd St. (right by the southwestern corner of Union Market’s patio) “will decrease from a harrowing 80 feet to become 22 feet.”

• A similarly massive adjustment is also slated on the southern edge of E. Clay St., where a new “median refuge” will form a midway point on a 29-foot crossing that used to be a terrifying 70-foot span.

• The chaotic, off-camber four-way intersection at the westernmost end of Jefferson Ave., includes an ambitious reconfiguration of the chaotic, off-camber four-way intersection that some Lookout readers say is the scariest in the neighborhood to cross on foot.

The full plan can be viewed in The Lookout’s share drive.

Fendley is pleased with the progress, but he’s not stopping there. “Let's make sure this much-appreciated progress toward a safer and greener neighborhood is just a first step,” he exhorted his safe-streets confreres.

The work can’t wait. After all, as a major national traffic study published in the journal Traffic Findings in February 2026 indicates, Richmond’s per-capita traffic fatalities from 2018-2022 were more than double those of Washington, D.C., the region’s largest city. Richmonders have become painfully familiar with pedestrians being slaughtered by reckless drivers in the streets, and the rarity of commensurate criminal penalties for the same. The driver responsible for killing beloved director of The Valentine Museum and longtime Church Hill resident Bill Martin, for example, was charged in early May with just three Class 1 misdemeanors.

Completing Jefferson Ave. is another step in the right direction on the road to actual street safety in our city. But 2028 is another two years off, and there are many more steps to take. Mayor Danny Avula and 7th District Councilmember and City Council President Cynthia Newbille, two of Richmond’s most powerful elected officials, must find the political will to pick up the pace.

📜 Possum Poetry

Spotted on Jefferson Ave. by Union Market. | Submitted by Alex Fisher

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to dave@dinfontay.com. All submissions anonymous!

🐈‍⬛ Meet a pair of Church Hill “Street Cat Specials”

Courtesy of Lookout reader Elizabeth Klaczynski, the latest edition of East End Animal Friend is live now, and cute as hell:

Introducing Mabel and Mikey

It's another East End Animal Friend!

The Church Hill Lookout • Dave Infante

As a reminder, East End Animal Friend is a new recurring feature spotlighting the many creature companions of Church Hill and its surrounds. Fill out this form to introduce your beloved animal(s) to the neighborhood in a future edition of The Lookout!

🛍️ The Lookout Shop is now open!

Shop now

Shop now

Shop now

Score a sweet Lookout hat and support independent media about your neighborhood! Shop now.

📢 Follow-up meetings on paused pétanque project announced; flyers flagged for AI content

A city flyer posted by Community for Chimborazo Playground. | Dave Infante

On Thursday morning, Sam Patterson, the full-time council liaison for 7th District Cm. Newbille emailed various individuals and groups in the neighborhood with two city flyers announcing follow-up meetings about the now-paused pétanque project in Chimborazo Park. The flyers can be found in The Lookout’s share drive. The meetings are:

• Thursday, June 4th from 6-8pm at Powhatan Community Center

• Saturday, June 6th from 11am-1pm at Lucks Field Community Center

As I noted on the L’Affair Pétanque Liveblog, a couple tipsters reached out with word that Facebook’s app warned that the flyers “may have been created” with an artificial intelligence program. For example:

Facebook’s mobile app appended an AI warning to a post containing the city’s flyers. | Provided to The Lookout

Mayor Danny Avula has been an outspoken fan of the controversial and wildly unpopular technology, and has advised his administration that it may be used in compliance with five “ethical principles” that took effect in June 2025. One of those principles is “transparency,” stipulating that “Citizens shall be advised when they are interacting with AI.” The flyers—which appear to have been produced by the Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Facilities—do not include disclosures that they contain AI-generated content. The Lookout has contacted the city’s Office of Strategic Communications & Civic Engagement for more information on who produced the flyers, and whether AI tools were used in their creation.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Speak up: Some folks from the neighborhood are gauging interest for a Friends of Bill Robinson Park group. Respond here.

• Tune in: Pizza Bones’ monthly late-night vinyl party is tonight (5/30) from 9pm-12am, with two DJ sets and food from TBT El Gallo. Flyer here.

• Tune in, times two: Høly River is playing a concert at Blue Atlas on Sunday (5/31) from 4-6pm. Details here.

• Sip it: Tuesday (6/2) at Pizza Bones, hit a pop-up with natural wine and Cambodian food from 5:30-10pm. Peep the lineup here.

• Speak out: Mark your calendar for that first community meeting on the now-paused pétanque project, which is Thursday (6/4) from 6-8pm at the Powhatan Community Center. Flyer here.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to dave@dinfontay.com for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Sound on. | Jean Westcott, Google Pixel 10 Pro

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to dave@dinfontay.com with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.