Havana Mañana

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Dear President Rao,

I read with interest in today’s Richmond Times Dispatch that VCU has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with a Cuban university. As your neighboring Oregon Hill representative on VCU’s Community Advisory Board, I congratulate you on this effort but I question why VCU is able to work out a Memorandum of Understanding with a Cuban university but unable to work on a MOU with your neighbors in Oregon Hill.

Your neighbors in Oregon Hill have repeatedly requested a written agreement approved by the VCU Board of Visitors stating that VCU will honor West Cary Street as the border between the Oregon Hill Historic District and VCU. We need a MOU that VCU or its foundations will not purchase property south of Cary Street within the Oregon Hill Historic District. This is of particular importance now that VCU is purchasing property outside the boundaries of its Master Plan, without consulting with the community.

Please let us know when you would agree to meet with representatives of the Oregon Hill neighborhood in order to produce such a Memorandum of Understanding. I believe that your neighbors deserve the same regard as a university in Cuba.

Sincerely,
Scott Burger

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Trash/Recycling Pickup Tomorrow

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This Wednesday is a red Wednesday, which means trash and recycling pickup.

Ideally, rolling recycling containers are stored and deployed in the back alleys along with trash cans. Please make sure you pick up containers after pickup tomorrow night.

If you have not done so already, don’t forget to sign up for your Recycling Perks.

In order to take your recycling to the next level, read this: 10 ways to improve your recycling. There was a recent Richmond.com column on local recycling.

Don’t forget about Richmond’s Clean City Commission Recycle Event this Saturday. Christmas trees, shredding, electronics, the small recycling bins that were in use before the carts….

Richmond CoHousing: Building a Gingerbread Community

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Laurel Street neighbor Caroline Cox has written a column in support of the Richmond CoHousing group for their website. It describes a family-oriented promotional program at the Richmond Public Library.

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Caroline is a long time resident of Oregon Hill, vegan cheesemaker, and gingerbread planner extraordinaire. She is also one of the founding members of Richmond Cohousing – if you’d like to hear about how our group came to be, she’s a great one to ask!

“What Doesn’t Burn.”

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Harry Kollatz Jr’s most recent column informs of new attention to Grace Arents’ legacy from local librarian and writer Wendy DeGroat. A New Jersey transplant, DeGroat was inspired by a previous 2009 Kollatz feature on Grace Arents called The Invisible Philanthropist.

Kollatz excerpt:

Segue to 2015, and DeGroat is composing a group of 20 to 30 “documentary poems” under the title “What Doesn’t Burn.” The title is imbued with meanings: DeGroat like researchers before her, is left with scant material about Arents who, like her wealthy uncle Lewis Ginter and others of their time, ordered the destruction of her personal papers. What somehow didn’t burn were a commonplace book and two travel journals. In constructing the poems, to give herself Arents’ voice, DeGroat charted the frequency and choice of words and broke them into their proper categories, whether noun, verb and so forth. To frame the poems, she created letters that Grace could have written to her younger sister, Minnie, in New York City.

But, DeGroat points out, what also doesn’t burn is what one gives away, whether energy or material. It is a particular poignant observation, giving that the William Byrd Community House, a direct portion of Arents’ legacy – which withstood economic depressions and many variations of the monetary climate – closed this year.

She’s found in Arents not a schoolteacher spinster, as she’s perceived, but an independent woman who at age 49, through inheritance of the Ginter fortune, became a person of means, too. Arents chose to exercise her will by making her part of the world a better place and doing so in a way that didn’t attract undue attention to herself. Arents’ humble nature seems to have come through either example or genetics of her Uncle Lewis. The tobacco magnate who bankrolled the construction of the Jefferson Hotel ordered that his name not be seen anywhere in the building. This kind modesty isn’t exemplified by latter-day tycoons.